CHAPTER 5

Heidegger on Nietzsche and the Higher Freedom

I

In his 1946 essay “The Saying of Anaximander,” Martin Heidegger writes: “To hunt after dependencies and influences between thinkers is a misunderstanding of thinking. Every thinker is dependent, namely on the address of Being [vom Zuspruch des Seins]. The extent of this dependency determines the freedom from distracting influences. The broader the dependency, the more capacious is the freedom of thinking, and therefore more powerful the danger that it will wander past what was once thought, only perhaps to think the same [das Selbe].”¹ In referring to the dependency of the thinker on history—and for Heidegger “history” is the history of Being, of course—Heidegger speaks of a realm of freedom that is also a realm of danger. For Heidegger, genuine freedom exists only in the response to an address, or challenge, from somewhere beyond the individual’s will. The address can be overpowering, even to the point of obliterating insight into crucial differences. Indeed this result is inherent in the address of Being, in that Being must suffer oblivion that is “by no means the result of forgetfulness of thinking, but belongs to that essence of Being which it itself conceals.” Insofar as Being (Sein) tends to be hidden by the very beings (Seienden) that it makes available, and this self-hiding belongs even to the most essential thinking, Heidegger surely does not exempt his own thinking from the dangers of distortion and failure. Danger belongs to the freedom of thinking. Heidegger also avows the power exerted by certain earlier thinkers within his own thinking, and Nietzsche is not least among these. In being addressed by Being with or through Nietzsche, Heidegger is exposed to the danger of uncovering only “the same” in Nietzsche and missing what was “once thought.”

In a 1936 comment on Hegel’s relation to Schelling, Heidegger writes: “The greatest thinkers can fundamentally never understand each other, precisely because they desire the same [dasselbe] in the shape of their own greatness. If they desired what is different, then mutual understanding, that is, indulging another [das Gewähren lassen] would not be so difficult.”² The greatest thinkers are addressed by the greatest question, the question of Being, in which their thought is taken up in a radical dependence on the matter to be thought. This is very unlike ordinary thinking, in which the thinker maintains a safe distance between himself and the object of his thought. The philosopher can lose sight of the individual standpoint from which he thinks the greatest questions, and also lose sight of the standpoint from which another thinker approaches them, as well. If there is some inevitable misunderstanding of Nietzsche from Heidegger’s side, it takes place through the freedom of the thinker, a freedom that is based on radical dependence. Nietzsche and Heidegger, the thinkers, share the gift and the danger of this radical freedom. Is it possible that they share the question of freedom itself, of the freedom of thinking? If the freedom of thinking claims and addresses both thinkers, perhaps they share in that thinking similar questions about dependency and freedom, and about freedom and danger. Perhaps this configuration belongs to the same, das Selbe, that they think.

Again the 1936 Schelling lectures offer illumination: “The treatise of Schelling [on the essence of human freedom] has nothing to do with the question of freedom of the will, which in the end is posed perversely, and therefore is no question. For here freedom means not an attribute of the human, but the opposite: the human is above all the property [Eigentum] of freedom. Freedom is the encompassing and pervasive essence in which the human is embedded, and first becomes human. This is to say, the essence of the human is freedom.”³ Here Heidegger speaks for himself and not only for Schelling, it can be said. Of course it is risky to take the language of Heidegger’s reading of another philosopher and to regard it as adequate to Heidegger’s own thinking. But what is undoubtedly Heidegger’s own language (if it can be said that language ever unquestionably belongs to the speaker) is from the essay “On the Essence of Truth,” first published in 1943. “The essence of truth is freedom,” Heidegger writes. “Resistance to this statement loses itself in prejudices, which in their most stubborn form declare that freedom is an attribute of the human. The essence of freedom needs and endures no further inquiry.”⁴ And further, “Freedom for the disclosure of the open [Offenbaren eines Offen] allows each of the beings to be what it is. Freedom reveals itself as the letting-be of the beings.”⁵ Freedom therefore is not something over which the human has power. “The human ‘possesses’ freedom not as an attribute, but rather the opposite is above all the case: freedom, the existing disclosing Da-Sein, possesses the human, and this in such an original way that only freedom provides to a given form of the human a relation to beings as a whole that first grounds and makes out history.”⁶ Insofar as freedom grounds the historical existence of the human in which beings are disclosed, freedom as the essence of truth is inseparable from the truth of Being.

II

Where in Nietzsche could Heidegger find traces of this thought on freedom? Is not the language of freedom the language of German Idealism, which Heidegger appropriates from Kant, Schelling, and Hegel to uncover what is unthought in it with respect to the relation of freedom to truth? Yet surely Nietzsche, too, has an account of freedom, in which he also distinguishes the true meaning of freedom from freedom of the will, while stressing his opposition to the “intelligible world” of Kantian freedom. Indeed in the lectures of 1951–52, What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger gives a central place to Nietzsche’s thought on freedom in his presentation of the problematic of what thinking is. At the beginning of lecture 6, Heidegger states: “With greater clarity than any man before him Nietzsche saw the necessity of a change in the realm of essential thinking.” He was “the first man to recognize clearly, and the only man so far to think through metaphysically and in all its implications, the moment when man is about to assume dominion of the earth as a whole.”⁷ Heidegger says that Nietzsche saw that the man of today is faced with hitherto unknown decisions. The assumption of dominion over the earth poses the question of worldwide government. Has the man of today given thought to the conditions for such government? Is modern man prepared to manage the powers of technology and ready to address the unfamiliar decisions of world rule? “Nietzsche’s answer to these questions is No.” Heidegger continues: “There is the danger that the thought of man today will fall short of the decisions that are coming, decisions of whose specific historical shape we can know nothing.”⁸

Let us pause for a moment. Heidegger’s language lets us see that the historical moment, or Being in its present historical disclosure, calls for attentive listening and receptive thinking, but also for decision. And herein lies a danger, since the needed decision may be neglected, or the wrong decision may be taken. Here within the response to the historical we have a glimpse of freedom, the freedom to decide and act in response to the disclosure of Being. Nietzsche was the first to see clearly the challenge of the historical moment, and the danger of failure it poses, and thus he was the first to grasp clearly the demands made by freedom in this moment. Heidegger proceeds to find authority in Nietzsche’s writing for this view of the present. But first he notes that the Second World War “decided nothing,” that is, it contributed nothing to deciding “man’s essential fate on this earth.”⁹ European culture has not yet risen to the challenge that Nietzsche addressed to it. The weakness was manifest in the crucial decade following World War I, when Europe was unable to come to terms with what was looming on the horizon. But Nietzsche foresaw this weakness in the summer of 1888, in his diagnosis of the modern situation entitled “Critique of Modernity,” an aphorism of Twilight of the Idols. Heidegger quotes a substantial part of the aphorism, and I here reproduce that portion:

Our institutions are good for nothing anymore; on this point all agree. However, it is not their fault but ours. Now that we have mislaid all the instincts from which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for them. Democracy has always been the form of decline of organizing power: in Human, All Too Human I, 349 (1878) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its mongrel forms such as the “German Reich,” as the form of decline of the state. If there are to be institutions there must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, antiliberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations forward and backward ad infinitum. When that will is present, something like the Imperium Romanum is founded: or something like Russia, the only power today that has endurance in its bones, that can wait, that still can have promise—Russia the counterconcept to that miserable European particularism and nervousness which has entered a critical condition with the formation of the German Reich. . . . The whole West no longer possesses those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows; nothing else, perhaps, goes so much against the grain of its “modern spirit.” Men live for the day, men live very fast—men live very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom.” The thing that makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, rejected: men fear they are in danger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even mentioned.¹⁰

Heidegger follows the quotation with five observations: (1) Nietzsche in these remarks not only comments on current politics but indicates that human nature is not yet “fully developed and secured,” and is thus unprepared for the great decisions ahead; (2) The human is not yet secured because, on the basis of Western thinking, it lacks unity and is divided into separate and clashing elements, the rational and the animal. “This rupture prevents man from possessing unity of nature and thus being free for what we normally call the real”; (3) Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman (Übermensch) is the account of how we must go beyond man as he is, into a complete determination of man, a determination that leaves behind our “boundless, purely quantitative, nonstop progress”: (4) The supermen will appear in small numbers, after a new “rank order has been carried out” that rejects the doctrine that all men are equal; (5) Hölderlin’s words on Christ as brother of Hercules and Dionysus announce “a still unspoken gathering of the whole of Western fate,” from which the West “can go forth to meet the coming decisions—to become, perhaps and in a wholly other mode, a land of dawn, the Orient.”¹¹

Central to Nietzsche’s analysis and Heidegger’s sympathetic reading of it is the critique of the democratic account of freedom, as a mere freedom from, not a freedom for—a freedom that flies from the great responsibility of building an enduring civilization, a task that calls for the rejection of equality and for the revering of rank and authority. Freedom in the higher sense is the acceptance of a historical task and the readiness to make difficult decisions for it. But this requires that the dispersed elements of human nature be drawn together in a new unity, overcoming traditional distinctions of body and spirit, faith and reason. This new ordering of life cannot rely on common conceptions and demands a way of thinking remote from that found in “the public figures who in the course of current history emerge in the limelight.”¹²

Heidegger does not comment on the aphorism of Nietzsche just preceding the “critique of modernity,” but it bears very much on the questions at stake and has the heading “My conception of freedom.”¹³ I will quote a few lines. “The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one obtains with it, but in what one pays for it, what it costs us.” Liberal institutions are valuable only as long as we are fighting for them; then they promote freedom. War is a training in freedom. “For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. . . . How is freedom measured, in individuals and in nations? By the resistance that has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft.” Great danger is what makes nations and individuals great. “First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it.” Closely related is another aphorism entitled “Freedom as I do not mean it . . .”¹⁴ The modern ideas of freedom—“the claim to independence, to free development, to laisser aller”—are symptoms of decadence, of degeneration of instinct. “Today the only way of making the individual possible would be by pruning him: possible, that is to say complete.”

It is not hard to find the spiritual affinity between these remarks and Heidegger’s thoughts on the essence of freedom as the affirmation of historical dependence, or fate, and the call to higher decisions, the exposure to danger, that such freedom brings. Freedom is not the arbitrary exercise of individual will but the gathering of forces into a true unity—a higher completion of the human that overcomes age-old distinctions and divisions. But freedom in this sense entails the transcending of the human as it has been known. It is the surpassing of metaphysical thinking, the forgetfulness of Being, which is not a movement toward a determinate goal, since we face decisions “of whose specific historical shape we can know nothing.” “What is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” The “still not,” Heidegger notes, does not mean that we are not thinking at all, and it does not mean that we can simply put behind us, at will, a certain failure in thinking. It implies that we are already on the way to a thinking that eludes the forms of representation to which Western man is accustomed. The prospect cannot, therefore, be described in terms of palpable outcomes—pessimistically or optimistically—such as representational thought expects and demands. “The thought-provoking thing turns away from us, in fact has long since turned away from man.” The withdrawing of the thought-provoking, of Being, is what properly gives food for thought. In this way it develops its nearness, and whoever is drawn into this withdrawing is drawn “into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal.”¹⁵ “And what is most thought-provoking—especially when it is man’s highest concern—may well be also what is most dangerous. Or do we imagine that a man could even in small ways encounter the essence of truth, the essence of beauty, the essence of grace—without danger?”¹⁶ Nietzsche saw our time as the time of the growing wasteland and of the approaching reign of the nihilism of the “last man.” The response to this possible event cannot be an appeal to “common sense,” the fruit of Enlightenment thinking about human improvement. The response involves a higher freedom, the freedom of the opening to a thinking beyond the representational. And it is to such thinking that Nietzsche’s highest thoughts—the will to power, the superman, and the eternal recurrence of the same—point us.

But Nietzsche is only a pointer. His “thinking gives voice and language to what now is—but in a language in which the two-thousand-year-old thinking of Western metaphysics speaks, a language that we all speak, that Europe speaks.”¹⁷ Nietzsche begins a profound analysis of the account of reason, of ratio, as culminating in the last man’s forming of ideas to reckon with things. “Nietzsche calls it blinking, without relating blinking explicitly to the nature of representing or idea-forming, without inquiring into the essential sphere, and above all the essential origin, of representational ideas.”¹⁸ Nietzsche still thinks in metaphysical terms of a deliverance from nihilistic thinking, the thinking that is the revenge against time. In particular, he thinks in the terms of the metaphysics of the modern era, which determines the Being of beings as will. Once again Heidegger calls on the authority of Schelling: “In the final and highest instance, there is no being other than willing. Willing is primal being, and to it alone belong all predicates: being unconditioned, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. All philosophy strives only to find this highest expression.”¹⁹ Heidegger remarks that Nietzsche thinks the same thing as Schelling when he defines the primal nature of Being as will to power. Schelling and Nietzsche share the distinction of being thinkers who, while still thinking metaphysically, all the same point toward postmetaphysical thinking—and this is for both a thinking centrally about freedom. It is the freedom that appropriates man, that is not a property of man. What these philosophers still did not see or say is that such freedom appropriates man not as will but as the opening of Being in history, the opening that is more primordial than willing and the representational thinking grounded in willing. But both thinkers had the sense of a fundamental crisis in Western life, the sense that man is faced with unprecedented catastrophe. Heidegger takes up this theme. The opening to Being as historical is inseparable from danger and destruction—it calls for the destruction that occurs through and then ultimately to the representational thinking grounded in willing. The summons of fate is the exposure to death, to the nothingness of the “sound common sense” of modern life. “Nietzsche sees clearly that in the history of Western man something is coming to an end; what until now and long since has remained uncompleted, Nietzsche sees the necessity to carry to a completion.”²⁰

III

Nihilism, or the oblivion of Being, must be carried toward and through the end point, in order to arrive at another beginning. That Heidegger held something akin to this view as early as 1929, while commenting on Kant, and before his close engagement with Nietzsche, can be gathered from his disputation with Cassirer at Davos. Once again the language of the argument is the language of freedom. “Freedom is not an object of theoretical apprehending” but “the setting free,” or the “self-freeing of freedom in man.” “The setting free of the Dasein in man must be the sole and central thing that philosophy as philosophizing can perform.”²¹ Such freedom is evident in Kant’s “radical bursting open” of the traditional concept of ontology, through which he found himself pressed toward the grounding of ontology in an abyss (Abgrund). Thus Kant grasped that “the freeing of the inner transcendence of Dasein is the fundamental character of philosophy itself,” a “becoming free for the finitude of Dasein. . . . Just to come into the thrownness of Dasein is to come into the conflict that lies within the essence of freedom.”²² Philosophy has the task of “throwing man back into the hardness of his fate,” so as to make manifest to him “the nothingness of his Da-sein.” “This nothingness is the occasion not for pessimism . . . but for understanding that authentic activity takes place only where there is opposition.”²³ In this period of fruitful appropriation of Kant, Heidegger seeks to show that “the question of the possibility of metaphysics demands a metaphysics of Da-sein,” which moves beyond anthropological thinking about man. Therefore Heidegger still speaks the language of metaphysics. Freedom and the setting free of Dasein are bound up with the conception of the transcendental horizon of the thrown project, with its obvious Kantian roots.

According to Heidegger’s 1945 thoughts expressed in “The Rectorate 1933/34,” Nietzsche’s thought as mediated by Ernst Jünger had a decisive role in changing this orientation. Heidegger (participating in the early 1930s in a Jünger reading circle) found that Jünger clarified the historical situation of the West on the basis of an “essential understanding of the metaphysics of Nietzsche” within whose horizon the “history and the present of the West were seen and foreseen.”²⁴ “What Ernst Jünger thinks in the thoughts of the dominion and shape of the worker, and what he sees in light of this thought, is the universal dominion of the will to power, viewed within planetary history. . . . From this reality of the will to power I then saw already what is. The reality of the will to power lets itself be announced, as Nietzsche means it, in the sentence ‘God is dead.’” Heidegger then asks: “Did this not offer sufficient ground and essential urgency to think ahead in original reflection toward the overcoming of the metaphysics of the will to power, that is, to begin a conversation with Western thought by a return to its beginning?”²⁵ In light of the planetary situation of nihilism, there can be no freeing of the inner transcendence of Dasein without first an uprooting of the metaphysics that dominates the present, which in turn requires a recovery of the entire history of Being in the West. Nietzsche is at once guide and obstacle to such recovery and uprooting. But Nietzsche saw the necessity for the true thinkers to assume responsibility for the destiny of Western man, which means, in the first place, to carry the metaphysics of the will to its radical completion.

There is clearly no radical break in Heidegger’s thought, no specific date at which a turn begins, and die Kehre has too many aspects to be subsumable under a formula. But one could speak of a shift in the meaning of freedom as central to the development of Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s, insofar as freedom, in the highest sense, assumes the task of the appropriation of history for the overcoming of nihilism. This is at the heart of the turn to Seinsgeschichte and to the effort to recover the historical opening of Being in Parmenides and Heraclitus at the start of Western thinking. In the early 1930s Heidegger sees this task as falling not just to himself and thinkers who shared his way but to the German people as a whole. The fate of philosophy is directly linked to the fate of particular peoples. As Heidegger writes in the Rectoral Address, “For the Greeks science [Wissenschaft] is not a ‘cultural value’ but the innermost determining center of the whole popular-national Dasein.”²⁶ The 1935 lectures Introduction to Metaphysics continue this theme: “Philosophy opens up the paths and perspectives for the knowing that establishes measure and rank, in which and out of which a Volk grasps its Dasein in the historical-spiritual world, and brings to completion the knowing that inspires, threatens, and necessitates all questioning and judging.”²⁷ Philosophy both discloses the essence of a people and fulfills its destiny. Surely with the emphasis on Western metaphysics as destiny Heidegger at this time moves closer to Schelling and Hegel, as well as Nietzsche. It is Hegel who writes, “a cultivated people without a metaphysics is like a richly decorated temple without a Holy of Holies,” a maxim that Heidegger quotes in his lectures on Parmenides.²⁸ In the mid-1930s, even after the disenchantment of the rectoral year, Heidegger has hopes that the renewal of the West will arise out of Europe and particularly out of das Land in der Mitte. But in 1945 Heidegger writes that less possibility exists “now” than before the war “of opening blinded eyes to a vision of the essential.”²⁹ And we have read the endorsement in What Is Called Thinking? of Nietzsche’s judgment on the “miserable particularism” of Europe. After 1945 Heidegger does not entertain hopes of the renewal of Europe through political movements or political actions of any kind.

IV

I wish to dwell for a while on the account of historical destiny in Introduction to Metaphysics for the light it sheds on the higher freedom as Heidegger conceives it in the 1930s, and the place of Nietzsche’s thought in that conception. One has to bear in mind that this writing belongs to the era of Heidegger’s engagement, albeit wavering, in contemporary politics. The Germans, being singled out for a philosophical destiny, are as such exposed to great hardship. Philosophy fulfills the destiny of a people not by lightening burdens, or by securing the ground of culture, but through the knowing embrace of struggles that bring forth qualities of greatness.³⁰ The Germans have been granted the gift of struggle by being placed in a pincers between America and Russia. These powers embody the technological nihilism of modernity and its extreme egalitarian ethos: “The same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.”³¹ Heidegger echoes Nietzsche’s aperçu on the spiritually flattening preoccupation with speed and efficiency. “Time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity; time as history has vanished from the Dasein of all peoples.” This is a time of decision, above all for the Germans who, as das metaphysische Volk, have the calling to overcome the modern manifestation of spirit (Geist) as cleverness, technical skill, and cultural value.³² “The people will acquire a fate from its vocation only when it creates in itself a resonance . . . and grasps its tradition creatively.” This, then, is the highest freedom, whereby a people moves itself and the history of the West into the originary realm of the powers of Being. Such freedom is the response to Being, in raising anew the question “How does it stand with Being?” The question is raised “not in order to compose an ontology in the traditional style,” but rather “the point is to restore the historical Dasein of human beings.”³³

But the notion of a metaphysical people contains an inherent problem, and it poses a special danger to the philosopher who speaks for the metaphysical spirit. Those who actually philosophize are few. Which few? They are “the creative transformers, the converters.” They arouse the people to gather its forces, to assert its spiritual leadership. All the same, philosophic thought works mostly in indirect ways, on imperceptible pathways and detours, and in the end, the thought that gets wide currency is no longer philosophy but thought that has sunk down into the self-evidence of daily existence.³⁴ The summons to move thought beyond representational thinking, beyond the formulaic, becomes itself the accepted rule of life and another form of sound common sense. Therefore the genuinely creative thinker must be the destroyer not only of accustomed ways but of his own ways, once they harden into the familiar. The thinker who attempts to make a new beginning finds his thought unable to hold the beginning as original and sees it pass before his eyes into an established way. There can be no definitive surpassing of merely representational thinking; genuine thinking is perpetual war, polemos. The originating thinkers of the tradition, Sophocles, Parmenides, and Heraclitus, were fully aware of this paradox. In the exegesis of the first choral ode of Antigone, the account of man as the most uncanny (das Unheimlichste, to deinataton) of beings, Heidegger writes that “those who rise high in historical Being as creators, as doers,” are necessarily “violence doers” who become “apolis, without city and site, lonesome, uncanny, with no way out amidst beings as a whole, and at the same time without ordinance and limit, without structure and fittingness [Fug], because they as creators must first ground all of this in each case.”³⁵ Their difficulty belongs to the structure of Being itself, since the overwhelming power of Being as dike must be disclosed through the gathering force of human techne, with the polis as the site of this encounter. The gathering of techne and logos, which brings Being into disclosure, also must conceal what it gathers. “The uncanniest (the human being) is what it is because from the ground up it deals with and conceives the familiar only in order to break out of it and let what overwhelms it break in.” Heidegger observes that this authentic poetic-philosophic thinking of the early Greeks is fundamentally at odds with later thinking in terms of “moral appraisal.”³⁶

V

In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger avows his debt to Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Greeks. “Nietzsche did reconceive the great age of the inception of Greek Dasein in its entirety in a way that is surpassed only by Hölderlin.”³⁷ Specifically, in the account of Dasein as the self-transcending of the familiar toward Being as the overpowering, and the struggle of techne with dike, one sees a kinship with Nietzsche’s encounter between Apollonian limits and the overwhelming force of the Dionysian. Heidegger already points to this connection in the 1929–30 lectures, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, where he notes that Nietzsche offers the deepest account of our contemporary situation through his analysis of the Greek world and especially in certain passages from The Will to Power.

I was fundamentally concerned with nothing other than surmising why precisely the Greek Apollonian had to grow out of a Dionysian understanding: the Dionysian Greek needed to become Apollonian: that is, to shatter his will for the immense, for the multiple, the uncertain, the horrifying, upon a will for measure, for simplicity, for classification in rules and concepts. . . . Beauty is not bestowed on the Greek, just as little as logic, or as naturalness of morals,—it is captured, willed, fought for—it is his conquest.³⁸

Let us restate this in Heidegger’s terms. The Dionysian, overpowering force of Being cannot be disclosed, brought into the open, without gathering into limits, which is the work of logos and techne. The freedom in human Dasein of the letting-be of beings is the freedom of a violent, dangerous act, which ventures into the groundless and unfathomable, for it acts on behalf of the overpowering force even as it gives it measure and form. The higher destiny of the Greeks is to confront the power of Being and to preserve that power in the great works of poetry and philosophy, and also in the state, the temples, and the gods, which express not simple repose but the striving to disclose the force of phusis, the emerging of Being into presence, without reducing it to the familiar, the calculable, and the common.

The noble form of freedom in both thinkers is avowedly paradoxical. The higher power, the Dionysian or phusis, appropriates the human, and the human is thus moved toward a new completion, a transformation in a higher unity, a new gathering of forces. At the same time, every determination, every gathering is inherently partial, mutable, tentative. Logos, even or especially as great poetry and philosophy, cannot uncover an authoritative law for humanity as a whole. Indeed the establishment of stable, permanent laws runs contrary to the ground of human excellence, which lies in being tested by struggle and conflict. Philosophy, indeed, is the highest awareness of the provisionality of all articulations of Being. Heidegger thus writes of philosophic interpretation:

There is no universal schema that could be applied mechanically to the interpretation of writings of thinkers, or even to a single work of a single thinker. A dialogue of Plato, for example the Phaedrus, the conversation on the beautiful, can be interpreted in totally different spheres and respects, according to totally different implications and problematics. This multiplicity of possible interpretations does not discredit the strictness of thought content. . . . Rather, multiplicity of meanings is the element in which all thought must move in order to be strict thought.³⁹

Furthermore, the purest thinker, who remains drawn into that which withdraws, is like Socrates a thinker who does not commit thinking to writing. “For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps the secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives.”⁴⁰

Can this highest philosophic freedom, this resistance to simplification and reduction, this rigorous openness to the elusive complexity of the whole of Being—can this be the completion of humanity for which the thinker after Nietzsche is hoping and waiting? Is it conceivable as a general condition for humanity? Is it thinkable that philosophy or some other postphilosophical thinking would ever overcome the human tendencies to rely on the familiar stabilities of the calculable, the easily recognized, and the average—on unreflective nomoi? If the highest truths cannot even be faithfully preserved in writing, how can the highest freedom be realized in the human world as a whole—in a “new beginning”? In both Nietzsche and Heidegger the involvement of philosophy in legislative projects is ambiguous and tentative—or it becomes so for Heidegger after the 1930s. The new dispensation of the sway of phusis eludes the control of the human philosopher-legislator or philosopher-poet, who finds that his meditation on the higher freedom takes him down solitary paths far from the prevailing nomoi, to say nothing of the centers of political authority. This does not affect, however, the persisting tone of expectation or call for extraordinary changes in the political world whose means of actualization are left unexplained. Heidegger rejects the Greek classical account of the philosophic life as radically detached from hopes and expectations concerning the fate of the nomos, beyond the prudential regard for nontyrannical rule as providing necessary conditions for that life. Such conceiving of philosophy is not sufficiently tragic.

I close with passages that reveal Nietzsche’s awareness of the paradox of his own project. Again they are taken from Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche announces his “great liberation,” in which “the innocence of becoming is restored.”

We invented the concept ‘purpose’; in reality purpose is lacking: one is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole—there exists nothing that could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole. . . . But nothing exists apart from the whole.⁴¹

Nietzsche later speaks of Goethe as the last German before whom he feels reverence, for Goethe attained the liberation Nietzsche teaches:

A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies. . . . But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name Dionysos.⁴²

But who are, who can be, the adherents of this faith? In the next aphorism Nietzsche tells the reader that in a sense the nineteenth century’s striving was the same as Goethe’s, and yet the result was “a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, a not knowing which way to turn,” and he asks whether it is not possible that Goethe was “not only for Germany, but for all Europe, merely an episode, a beautiful ‘in vain’?” He concludes with a remark that could be put next to Heidegger’s description of Socrates:

But one misunderstands great human beings, if one views them from the paltry perspective of public utility. That one does not know how to make use of it perhaps even pertains to greatness.⁴³