Even the fact that in the Republic philosophers are destined to be basileis, the highest rulers, is already an essential demotion of philosophy.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy.
It is not until the mid-1930s that Nietzsche began to come under the scope and scrutiny of Heidegger’s deconstructive project of the philosophical tradition. This, however, does not suggest that Heidegger had not read Nietzsche. We know that as early as the beginning of the 1910s, Heidegger had encountered the newly expanded edition of unpublished notes by Nietzsche issued under the title The Will to Power. Yet between those years and 1936, there is no trace of any lecture course nor any essay on Nietzsche, even though Heidegger sometimes refers to Nietzsche and occasionally even praises him, as in his Habilitationsschrift on Duns Scotus1 or in Being and Time.2 Did Heidegger at the time perceive Nietzsche as an exception to the deconstructive task? When one knows the range of thinkers with whom Heidegger felt compelled to engage philosophically (from the Presocratics to Husserl, from Plato to Jaspers), one can only wonder as to why Nietzsche did not fall under the scope of such a philosophical confrontation. Along with Spinoza and a few other notable figures of the tradition, Nietzsche seems for a while to have escaped the battle of giants Heidegger thought philosophy to be. Yet for a while only, since for approximately twelve years, from 1936 to 1948, Heidegger’s thought will have developed by way of a long and difficult Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche, a confrontation which extended well into the 1950s. In the end, Nietzsche remains the figure to whom Heidegger will have devoted the largest number of pages, the figure over whom he will have poured the largest amount of sweat, with results that often raise suspicion and controversy amongst interpreters. In this extended battle, something essential was obviously at stake. It is not my intention to unravel here the variety of stakes underlying Heidegger’s repeated and uncertain readings of the Nietzschean corpus. Rather, I wish to focus on the political aspect of this confrontation, one which Heidegger himself expressed in 1945, and which has become the focus of attention since commentators have started to pay attention to Heidegger’s political itinerary. Heidegger’s statement, written in the form of a letter to the Rector of Freiburg University dated 4 November 1945, reads as follows:
Beginning in 1936 I embarked on a series of courses and lectures on Nietzsche, which lasted until 1945 and which represented in even clearer fashion a declaration of spiritual resistance [to the Nazi regime]. In truth, it is unjust to assimilate Nietzsche to National Socialism, an assimilation which — apart from what is essential [and it is of course this ‘essential’ aspect that requires rigorous examination, as opposed to the alleged political or biological aspects of Nietzsche’s thought] — ignores his hostility to anti-Semitism and his positive attitude with respect to Russia [and, one might want to add, his virulent attacks on German Nationalism]. But on a higher plane, the debate with Nietzsche’s metaphysics is a debate with nihilism as it manifests itself with increased clarity under the political form of fascism.3
Although one needs to remain cautious with respect to Heidegger’s retrospective evaluation of the nihilistic nature of National Socialism per se, since the liberal democracies of the West as well as the Workers’ State of the Soviet Union are for Heidegger as, if not more, nihilistic than National Socialism itself,4 which, after all, contained an “inner truth and greatness,” a privilege Heidegger never granted to any other form of political organization, one can only take seriously the political ramifications of Heidegger’s interpretation of nihilism.
Bearing the question of nihilism and of its political significance in mind, let us follow more closely what seems to be Nietzsche’s progressive entry into the horizon of Heidegger’s thinking. In the rectoral address of 1933, traces of Nietzsche’s vocabulary begin to surface in Heidegger’s own discourse. Thus, alongside the notions of“resoluteness,” “fate,” “beginning,” “essence” and “being,” one finds the Nietzschean motifs of“will” and “power” (even though the “will to power” as such is not mentioned). Whether this somewhat surprising semantic development corresponds to a controlled entry of Nietzsche in Heidegger’s thought, or simply to a concession made to the willful and steely rhetoric of National Socialism remains unclear at this stage. In any case, at stake here is a political as well as a philosophical responsibility toward Nietzsche: it is precisely in the context of a base political appropriation and a grotesque deformation of Nietzsche’s thought that references to the thinker of the will to power needed to be avoided altogether or, more appropriately perhaps, played against its ideological (nationalistic and biological) parody — which is precisely what Heidegger will end up doing, notably through a critique of Bauemler’s then fashionable Nietzsche, Philosopher and Politician.5 Still in the rectoral address, and more importantly perhaps, since this occurrence no longer seems to simply partake in the Zeitgeist, Heidegger refers to the “death of God” in an attempt to describe the abandonment of man today in the midst of what is.6 In 1936–7, looking back at his use of the proposition in 1933, and emphasizing its political dimension, Heidegger wrote the following:
Europe always wants to cling to“democracy” and does not want to see that this would be a fateful death for it. For, as Nietzsche clearly saw, democracy is only a variety of nihilism, i.e., the devaluing of the highest values, in such a way that they are only values and no longer form-giving forces & “God is dead” is thus not an atheistic doctrine, but instead the formula for the basic experience of an event of Western history. With full consciousness did I use this proposition in my Rektor’s address in 1933.
(GA 43, 193)
From 1933, and particularly in Introduction to Metaphysics, the references to Nietzsche begin to accumulate. In the 1935 lecture course, one finds no less than ten direct references to Nietzsche and the last section of the last chapter, entitled “Being and the Ought” (Sein und Sollen), constitutes at bottom a critique of the notion of value and of its overwhelming presence in philosophy since Kant and particularly Fichte.7 Nietzsche himself, by making the notion of value the focus of his enterprise, albeit in the form of a“revaluation of all values,” remains unequivocally caught within the horizon of his time, and therefore is never able to access the truth of it. It is also in the conclusion of that book that, to my knowledge, Heidegger for the first time personally assumes the term “nihilism,” yet in a gesture which from the start poses the entire complexity of his relation to Nietzsche:
From a metaphysical point of view, we are staggering. We move about in all directions amid beings, and no longer know how it stands with being. Least of all do we know that we no longer know. We stagger even when we assure one another that we are no longer staggering, even when, as in recent years, people do their best to show that this inquiry about being brings only confusion, that its effect is destructive, that it is nihilism. …
But where is nihilism really at work? Where men cling to familiar beings and suppose that it suffices to go on taking beings as beings, since after all that is what they are. But with this they reject the question of being and treat being like a nothing (nihil) which in a certain sense it “is”, insofar as it unfolds essentially [sofern es west]. To cultivate only beings in the forgetfulness of being — that is nihilism. Nihilism thus understood is the ground of the nihilism which Nietzsche exposed in the first book of The Will to Power.
By contrast, to press inquiry into being explicitly to the limits of the nothing and to draw the nothing into the question of being — this is the first and only fruitful step toward a true overcoming [Überwindung] of nihilism.
(EM 154–5/202–3)
In a way, as far as the question of nihilism goes, Heidegger will not say anything more that what is expressed in this passage from Introduction to Metaphysics. Yet it will take him some twenty years to unpack and fully thematize his brief opening statements. From the start,“nihilism” appears as a notion with multiple entries and almost contradictory meanings, which Heidegger will nonetheless try to hold together. Three such meanings are here emphasized. First, in the mouth of those who are absorbed in the thickness of beings to the point of philosophical blindness (and, no doubt, this blindness includes most of what is presented as“philosoph.”),“nihilism” serves to designate that which impedes their gesticulating busyness and upsets the secured world of their values, that which, in other words, leads “nowhere” (that is, leads to no secured ground or absolute certainties). From the perspective of such men, the question concerning being is the empty, pointless and nihilistic problem par excellence. The word “nihilism” is here worth a condemnation, and presupposes values on the basis of which something can be dismissed as nihilistic. Yet true nihilism consists precisely in acting and thinking in the way of such men, that is, as if being were nothing — or rather, since being is indeed no-thing (no particular being), to act as if it were not (as if it did not rule or unfold),8 and thus as if its questioning made no difference (when difference as such always dwells within its reign). In that respect, true nihilism is nothing but the forgetfulness of being. Third, there is also of course Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, which Heidegger only alludes to here, insisting that it can only be understood on the basis of the truer sense of nihilism. In addition to all three senses sketched out in this passage, Heidegger raises the difficult question concerning the overcoming of nihilism by suggesting that a “first and fruitful step” toward such overcoming lies precisely in thinking being with the nothing. This concern regarding the possibility of an overcoming of nihilism will remain at the very heart of Heidegger’s thought well into the 1950s, without ever reaching the point of an unequivocal opinion.
The relation to Nietzsche is now engaged. Starting in 1936, Heidegger devotes himself to it entirely, to the point of absolute consumption by the thinker who in the process had become Heidegger’s “most intimate adversary.” Never will a thinker have commented on the works of one of his predecessors in such an unrelenting and lengthy manner. The heart of Heidegger’s analyses on nihilism date from the 1940s,9 even though one finds preliminary analyses in the 1936/7 lecture course on The Will to Power as Art (section 20). I wish to organize my remarks around two major lines: the first has to do with the various types and meanings of nihilism Heidegger identifies; the second with the delicate question of the overcoming of nihilism.
Nowhere is this ultimate stage of nihilism described better than in Ernst Jünger’s “Total Mobilization”10 and The Worker11, which impressed Heidegger to the point that he read and discussed The Worker with a small circle of university teachers in the winter of 1939 to 1940. In his letter to Jünger of 1955,12 Heidegger pays homage to his friend’s 60th birthday and to his work in the following terms:
Much of what your descriptions brought into view and to language for the first time, everyone sees and says today. Besides, The Question Concerning Technology owes enduring advancement to the descriptions in The Worker. In regard to your “descriptions” it might be appropriate to remark that you do not merely depict something real that is already known [ein schon bekanntes Wirklichkeit] but make available a“new reality” [“eine neue Wirklichkeit”].
(Wm 219/45)
What exactly was this “new reality” in Heidegger’s view? The description of European nihilism in the phase that followed the First World War, and that is the revelation of nihilism, at first exclusively European, in its planetary tendency. In that respect, The Worker can be seen as the continuation of “Total Mobilization.” Originally experienced and revealed in the magnitude of the First World War, where every force and energy was concentrated on the war effort so that no domain of the economic and political life was to be spared, total mobilization quickly became for Jünger a planetary condition that encompassed the phenomenon of war but reached far beyond it. What the world was witnessing at the time of the First World War was the phenomenon of planetary domination revealed through the figure (Gestalt) of the Worker (Arbeiter). Every epoch is marked or stamped by a particular “figure” which shapes the world in a specific way. The epoch in which Jünger then believed the world was entering, the stamp with which time, space and men were being coined, all led to the sole figure of the Worker. The Worker is not the representative of a class, a new society or a new economy; it is a universal and original figure, one that shapes and informs the world according to a logic and a rhythm of its own. Thus, if our epoch witnessed the birth of the party of workers, the organization of workers and even the State of workers, it is only as the symptom of a more profound tendency attested in all the areas of our contemporary life: “Work” is here seen as the mark of the unconditional ruling of will to power, and not as a socio-economic condition. The Worker is the fundamental figure through which the will shapes, increases and releases its power over the whole of beings. The world as a whole — and that means the earth (nature), politics, economics, culture, men themselves — is mobilized in such a way that it is increasingly subjected to the total planning and global organization of the will to power. The world is now envisaged solely as matter and as a reserve of energy that can be exploited, manipulated and transformed according to the Worker’s will to global planning and domination. It is no coincidence, then, if the Worker also takes the more immediately destructive figure of the soldier, and if war appears simply as one form of mobilization and domination amongst others. In the summer of 1941, as the conflict was progressively and inevitably entering the stage of its globalization, Heidegger addressed his students in the following way:
“Workers” and“soldiers” open the gates to the actual. At the same time, they execute a transformation of human production in its basic structure; of what formerly was called “culture”. Culture only exists insofar as it is plugged into [eingeschaltet] the operations that secure a basis for a form of domination. That we use the term “plug in” [einschalten] to name this connection, an expression from machine technology and machine utilization, is like an automatic proof of the actuality that finds words here. “Workers” and “soldiers” remain obviously conventional names that nevertheless can signify, roughly and in outline, the humanity now arising upon the earth.
(GA 51 37–8/33)
From the perspective of the essential configuration of the modern age, the Second World War must be seen as the continuation and the confirmation of the total mobilization already operative in the First World War. Yet the planetary conflict from the heart of which Heidegger addressed his students eventually marked the last stage in the development of man’s power over the earth. For if that conflict was eventually brought to an end, it was only by way of an escalade in the means of mass destruction as well as by the threat of the complete annihilation of an entire nation, if not of the planet as a whole. Is it not a symptom of our epoch that only the actual possibility of a catastrophe of world magnitude could bring the most deadly of wars to its end? Yet the “peace” that followed from the death of hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not bring the fury of might to an end. That peace was and still is the confirmation of the total mobilization that characterizes our epoch. Brought to its knees by power, Japan has become the very emblem of power, of this kind of power consisting of a meticulous organization and a military discipline, of an optimization of its resources and of an exemplary treatment of planetary information. The distinction between war and peace has become increasingly difficult to draw. War seems to be carried out as much if not more on the economic terrain as it is on battlefields. The fiercest battles are now being fought on the “markets”: the labor market, the securities market, the real-estate market, the culture market. The whole of reality has become a market, saturated to the point of having to invent and simulate for itself an alternate space, the space of virtuality. The voices of technology — in this case of Capital — are impenetrable. Europe itself has become a Common Market, the market of the smallest common denominator of exchange. The “shares” of such markets are being fought for, much in the same way in which nations used to fight (and still do) for territories. One has become entitled to wonder whether the Führer are indeed those whom we continue to label as such, or whether they are now only left with the menial task of managing and orchestrating the ordering, the bringing to heel and the empowering of all the sectors of being. And let us not be fooled into thinking that such wars do not bring their share of victims — victims who do not necessarily die, but who find themselves condemned to survive on the periphery of these planetary phenomena, cast out into the sombre zones of para-techno-capitalism.
In identifying technology with the way in which the figure of the Worker mobilizes the world according to its inner necessity, Jünger’s analyses converge with those of Spengler, who had published his Man and Technology13 one year before Der Arbeiter. Toward the end of his book, in a chapter entitled “The Last Act,” Spengler provides the following description of our Faustian civilization:
The whole of the organic agonises in the all encompassing organisation. An artificial world penetrates and poisons the natural one. Civilisation has itself become a machine that does or wants to do everything mechanistically. One now only thinks in terms of “horsepower.” One no longer sees a waterfall without transforming it into the thought of electric power. One does not see land full of pasturing herds without thinking of the evaluation of their meat-stock, no beautiful handiwork of their native inhabitant without the wish to replace it by a modern technical procedure. Whether it makes sense or not, technical thinking wants realisations.14
Heidegger may have had this passage in mind when, many years after its publication, he gave the following description of the way in which nature is revealed to man in the age of technology:15
The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging forth [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit … even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set up to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. …
The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity…. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station. In order that we may even consider the monstrousness that reigns here …
(TK 14–15/296–7)
What monstrousness does Heidegger have in mind here? In what sense can technology be declared “monstrous”? And why associate technology with nihilism? At this stage, nihilism can only be envisaged in the most simple sense, and that is as a phenomenon linked to the effects produced by global technology. Following Jünger’s descriptions of the age of the Worker, Heidegger provides his most economic description of the actuality of nihilism in section XXVI of “Overcoming Metaphysics.”16 Technology defines the way in which the “world,” perceived solely as extended space, is mobilized, ordered, homogenized and used up so as to enhance man’s will to hegemony. The ordering takes the form of a total planning or an equipping (Rüstung), which consists in the division of the whole of being into sectors and areas, and then in the systematic organization and exploitation of such areas. Thus, each domain has its institute of research as well as its ministry, each area is controlled and evaluated with a view to assessing its potential and eventually calibrated for mass consumption. Resources are endlessly extracted, stocked, distributed and transformed, according to a logic which is not that of need, but that of inflated desires and consumption fantasies artificially created by the techniques of our post-industrial era. Beings as a whole have become this “stuff” awaiting consumption. Nothing falls outside of this technological organization: neither politics, which has become the way to organize and optimize the technological seizure of beings at the level of the nation; nor science which, infinitely divided into ultra-specialized sub-sciences, rules over the technical aspect of this seizure, nor the arts (which are now referred to as the “culture industr”); nor even man as such, who has become a commodity and an object of highly sophisticated technological manipulation (whether genetic, cosmetic or cybernetic). The hegemony of technology, which can take various forms according to the domains of being it rules over, seems to be limited only by the power of its own completion. It is, for technology, a question of organizing the conditions of its optimal performance and ultimate plan — whether these be the totalitarian or imperialistic politics of yesterday, the global economics and the new world order of today, or the uniformalized culture and ideology of tomorrow. Yet behind this seemingly ultra-rational organization rules the most nihilistic of all goals: the absence of goals. For why is such an ordering set up? What are all those plans for? For the sole sake of planning. For no other purpose than the artificial creation of needs and desires, which can be fulfilled only by way of an increase in production and further devastation of the earth. Under the sway of technology, man — the man of metaphysics, the rational animal — has become the working animal. For such a man, there is no other truth than the one that produces results, no other reality than that of use and profit. His will, this very will that constitutes his pride and that he erects as an instrument of his domination over the whole of the earth, is nothing but the expression of the will to will. Yet what this man does not realize is that his labor and his will spin in a vacuum, moving him ever more forcefully away from his provenance and his destination, from his position amidst beings and from the relation to being that governs it. Busy as he is at using up and producing, at manipulating and consuming, today’s man no longer has the eyes to see what is essential (namely presence in its epochal configuration) and can no longer greet the discrete echo of presencing which resounds in thinking and poeticizing alone. At best is he in a position to accumulate “experiences” (Erlebnisse), which he flaunts as his “truths.”
Both Jünger and Spengler saw technology as the culmination of the will to power in the subordination of the earth. Even though their texts do not explicitly engage with Nietzsche, his vocabulary is put to work and assimilated with the last phase of a historical process. Heidegger, who was first exposed to the discussions concerning technology through the reading of Jünger and Spengler, was de facto confronted with its Nietzschean background. Yet in the end he took this background more seriously than Jünger and Spengler ever did, so seriously, we might add, that his approach to technological nihilism in fact became a long confrontation with Nietzsche, as well as with the entire history of metaphysics that preceded him. Although Heidegger’s first readings of Nietzsche favored the perspective of the possibility of an overcoming of nihilism through art understood on the basis of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, he soon began to associate Nietzsche’s name with the completion of the metaphysical nihilism that rules in the age of technology. In other words, Heidegger was not so much interested in describing nihilism in its actuality as he was in revealing its metaphysical (that is, Nietzschean) background. This task took the form of a long and renewed interpretation of the will to power as will to will: if technology constitutes the last phase of nihilism, Nietzsche’s metaphysics, as the metaphysics of the will to power, constitutes its penultimate phase, insofar as it prefigures the will to will that underlies the calculation and the organization of beings as whole.
For Nietzsche, Heidegger insists, nihilism names an event in occidental history. What does this event consist in? In the devaluation of the uppermost values, in the annihilation of all goals.17 Because the “uppermost” or the transcendent has become null and void, those beings whose value and truth were measured in the light of this transcendence are now worthless and meaningless. The “death of God” is another name for this event. By the death of God we need to understand the death of transcendence as such: not only of the Judeo-Christian God, but also “ideals” and “norms,” “principles” and “rules,” “ends” and “values” which are set “above” beings so as to give beings a purpose, an order and meaning. Nihilism is the history of the death of God, a death which is slowly yet inexorably unfolding. It may be that this God will continue to be believed in and, as Nietzsche says, that his shadow will continue to cover the surface of the earth. Yet this death resembles that of stars, which continue to gleam long after they have died. As an event that determines the essence of our time, nihilism cannot be equated with a point of view or an attitude. Rather, it is to be understood as the fundamental trait that defines the whole of being in its manifestation or truth. And if the way in which the whole of being is revealed and made manifest to man in history is precisely what defines metaphysics, then we must conclude that nihilism marks the end or the death of metaphysics. The end of metaphysics does not mean its cessation or its interruption. On the contrary, metaphysics continues to rule, much in the same way in which the dead star continues to gleam. Yet the way in which it continues to rule is through the collapse of the realm of the transcendent and the ideal that sprang from it. As a result, all previous aims and values have become superfluous.
It is precisely at this point, at the point of the absolute collapse of all ruling values, that the historical possibility of a new valuation arises. It is precisely at the moment of the completion of nihilism that the counter-stroke to all preceding metaphysics can be carried out. This possibility, whereby nihilism will be overturned and overcome, and at the same time fulfilled, Nietzsche defines as “classical nihilism.” This nihilism loses the purely nihilistic sense in which it means a destruction and annihilation of previous values. “Nihilism” in this renewed sense calls for a “revaluation of all values hitherto.” This revaluation is not equivalent to a replacement of the old values by new values. Since the old values have become “old” or superfluous only as a result of the collapse of the realm within which they were contained and from which they originated — namely the space of the “beyond” or the “above”: transcendence — the new values cannot simply take the place of the old ones. Rather, a new principle for a new valuation must be established. A basis for defining beings as a whole must be secured. It is only on the basis of such a principle that a new light can be thrown on everything that is, and that thinking can be wrested from the nihilism that has invaded metaphysics. But if the interpretation of beings as a whole cannot originate from a transcendent that is posited over and above them, whence can the new values be drawn? From beings themselves. Beings themselves must be thought out in such a way that they can allow for the inscription of a new table of values and a new standard of measure for ranking such values. This new principle, which unites beings and defines them as what they are, without reference to a transcendent realm, Nietzsche calls the “will to power”. By will to power, we must not understand the mere yearning and quest for power by those who have no power. We must not understand this formulation teleologically, as if power were the goal that we would set out to achieve. Rather, we must understand power as the affirmation of power through which power struggles to increase its power. Power is essentially self-overpowering: a never-ending process of increase, overtaking and overcoming of power. As the basic trait of everything that is, the will to power is also the force that posits values, valuates and validates. Something can have or can be a value only on the basis and from the perspective of the will to power, of the type and the quantum of force or power it releases. Because “transcendence” in general has been abolished, only the “earth” remains. Thus — and here Heidegger introduces a major twist to the Nietzschean text, a coup de force that many wish to identify as a fundamental misreading — the new order that defines beings as a whole must be “the absolute dominance of pure power over the earth through man — not through any arbitrary kind of man, and certainly not through the humanity that has heretofore lived under the old values,”18 but through the “Overman.” And Heidegger immediately adds the following, thus taking the analysis in the direction of an essential complicity between Nietzschean nihilism and technological nihilism:
With nihilism … it becomes necessary to posit a new essence for man. But because “God is dead,” only man himself can grant man his measure and center, the “type”, the “model” of a certain kind of man who has assigned the task of a revaluation of all values to the individual power of his will to power and who is prepared to embark on the absolute domination of the globe.
(N II 39/N IV 9)
The overcoming of nihilism through the shaping of the overman is at bottom a humanism, indeed the last phase and the fulfillment of humanism, where “ma.”, albeit in the form of the overman, becomes the center of all things and the absolute value. Nihilism in its “classical form” prefigures technological nihilism, and the figure of the overman is simply the prefiguration of the figure of the Worker. Nietzsche’s conceptualization of nihilism is the general metaphysical background of the age of technology and the text underlying Jünger’s entire work. It is not my intention here to challenge Heidegger’s (mis)reading of Nietzsche on the question of nihilism and its connection with the Overman, on the various meanings of “earth” for Nietzsche and on the specific signification of the “will to power.” Rather, I wish simply to point to the moment at which Heidegger intervenes with the strongest hermeneutical violence so as to mark the relation of metaphysical subordination between Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism and the technological nihilism Jünger describes in The Worker. It is, paradoxically, one might think, only at the cost of an anthropological reading of the will to power as it manifests itself in the Overman, and that is, for Heidegger, as the unleashing of man’s power and the domination of his will over the earth, that Heidegger is able to take Nietzsche in the direction of a prefiguration of the fulfillment of nihilism in technology.
Yet, “the most pressing issue that still remains unclarified is why Nietzsche’s valuative thought has far and away dominated all ‘world view’ thinking since the end of the last century.”19 In other words, it remains to be understood why valuative thought has become so central and evident to contemporary thought, and what the consequences of such a type of thinking are. This very question also raises suspicion over Nietzsche’s own genealogical thought aimed at revealing the origin of values. For if the very notion of value is one that essentially belongs to the nineteenth century, does it not become a retrospective construction to talk about the “values” of Ancient Greece or Christianity? Does the task not then become that of a more originary genealogy, not that of the origin of values, nor even that of the value of values, but that of the origin of the value of values? Such a task points to the uncovering of the essence of valuative thought as such. In other words, the question is not to know how the question of values can throw some light on the history of thinking (as the history of the ascetic ideal or nihilism), but to see how the history of thinking (metaphysics) can itself account for the possibility of the emergence of valuative thought in the nineteenth century and how this specific type of thought marks the completion of nihilism. Thus Heidegger upsets the Nietzschean problematic by reversing its presuppositions, by showing how the origin of valuative thought is itself nothing valuative and how the essence of nihilism is itself metaphysical. Valuative thought, the first major articulation of which Heidegger saw as early as 1919 in the thought of Fichte, but which runs through the whole of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century (in the so-called Wertphilosophien Heidegger objected to so strongly in his early Freiburg years,20 as well as in the “phenomenology of value” of Scheler), find its most complete and rigorous articulation in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. The paradox is that the essence of nihilism comes to be completed in the thought of he who most rigorously revealed and deconstructed the inner logic of nihilism and yet who was able to do such a thing only by reaffirming the absolute valuative standpoint redefined as will to power.
The question is thus now: Where does valuative thinking have its metaphysical source? How does the whole of being come to be determined as will to power? What occurs and reigns in Western metaphysics, that it should finally come to be a metaphysics of will to power? Why is the latter something that inherently posits values? Why does the thought of will to power emerge along with valuative thought? With these questions, Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche begins:
If it should be shown to what extent the interpretation of the being as will to power first becomes possible on the basis of the fundamental positions of modern metaphysics, then as far as the question of the origin of valuative thought is concerned we would have achieved the important insight that Nietzsche has not and cannot have given an answer to the question of origins.
(N II 114 /N IV 73)
To be more specific, the will to power and the valuative thought attached to it carry out the final development of Cartesian subjectivity, and that means the positing of the human subject as the unshakable ground of all certainty. By transforming everything that is into the “property and product of man,” Nietzsche simply aggravates the central position of man within beings as a whole. As a metaphysics of the will to power and the Overman, Nietzsche’s thought marks the completion of philosophy as anthropology: it is only in the wake of an understanding of beings as a whole at the very centre of which man rules as the ultimate standpoint of evaluation and certainty, as the “master and possessor of nature” (Descartes) and over which he extends the power of his will, that Nietzsche’s metaphysics is made possible.
Consequently, must we not admit that technological nihilism, as the unleashing of the will to will over the whole of being and the domination of man over the earth, is at bottom a humanism? Must we not conclude that the essence of nihilism as we know it today is grounded in the history of metaphysics, if metaphysics indeed consists in the process whereby man comes to be determined as the ultimate and sole standard for the valuation and the truth of beings? And does it not then become urgent to change the perspective, dis-locate or dis-place the central position of man within the whole of being, so as to initiate an overcoming (Überwindung) of nihilism? And would this dislocation not amount to the possibility of another beginning and another relation to beings, to a silent and discrete, almost imperceptible event, yet one that would mark an inversion or a bending of history, or rather a “turning” (Wende) within history?
These questions find their most rigorous treatment in the Contributions to Philosophy. There, Heidegger envisages the essence of nihilism on the basis of the history of beyng (Seyn) as the history of “the abandonment of being”.21 This history is none other than that of “the first beginning,” the end of which unfolds as nihilism in the form of planetary technology. Yet the first beginning finds its origin in the very withdrawal or abandonment of beings by being, and its truth is the one expressed by the history of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the way in which the abandonment of being happens as the forgottenness of being. Seinsverlassenheit is Seinsvergessenheit. Yet this forgetting is not simply a form of absence or an effacement: it rules and reigns over the whole of being in such a way that the truth of being becomes unattainable. In its completed form, nihilism in the form of technology, it rules as will to power, as the most disastrous unleashing of power amidst beings as a whole. How does it come to rule in this way? What must be the essence of European nihilism if it is such that it comes to completion in the form of the will to will?
This essence, which Heidegger will eventually identify as “en-framing” (Ge-stell),22 is first thematized as “machination” (Machenschaft) in the Contributions to Philosophy.23 By “machination,” Heidegger understands the way in which the truth of beingness comes to be interpreted on the basis of the ever more radical abandonment of being, and which culminates in a metaphysics of “lived experiences” (Erlebnisse) and “worldviews” (Weltanschauungen), with man standing as the ultimate standpoint and center of all interpretation concerning beings in their beingness. Through the gradual forgottenness of his essence (his relation to the truth of being, or to presence in its presencing), which for the first time he is in danger of losing, man has become the grand manipulator of beings as a whole. Machination is the historical-metaphysical process whereby the whole of being becomes a domain for scientific investigation, technological manipulation and the proliferation of “ideas” “values,” and “views” about the “world.” But for the earth to become a region submitted to the scientific gaze and the willful power of man, the whole of being must first be revealed and envisaged in a certain way. In other words, if beings as a whole are envisaged today as that which can be interrogated with a view to an ever more precise and pressing process of manipulation, transformation and reproduction, such beings must first be posited as such. Beings as a whole have indeed become a positum, and “science” “positive” science.24 In that respect, it matters little whether science be understood in the sense of a “cultural value” (Kulturwert), as in most liberal democracies, of a “service to the people” (Dienst am Volke), as in a communist regime, or of a “national science” (völkische Wissenschaft), as in the biological ideology of Nazism. In other words, it makes no difference whether science be seen from the perspective of Capital and of its logic of accumulation, whether it be considered from the standpoint of the systematic and technical organization of the earth through five-year planning, or indeed from the viewpoint of the preservation and the perpetuation of the master race. In every case, the whole of being must be posited as standing reserve (Bestand), as that which can be endlessly manipulated, transformed, processed or disposed of according to the various needs and idiosyncracies of the many forms in which machination manifests itself. Not only the earth, but man himself — whether as the entrepreneur of Capital, the Worker of the Socialist State (Stakhanov) or the disposable non-Aryan — has become subjected to this process of machination: a commodity like any other commodity, an instrument of global planning, disposable waste (industrial, biological, political). In every case the earth and man himself have become this stuff under the yoke of the will to power. “Science” is nothing other than the “setting-up of the correctness for a domain of explanation.”25 The only relevant question, with respect to the relation between the various sciences and the kind of worldviews, ideologies and politics they serve is to know which one, amongst the latter, will be able to mobilize the greatest means and forces so as to provide science with its most extreme and final condition, a task which might indeed very well take several hundreds of years to be completed. After the collapse of the so-called totalitarian states, the advantage, in this struggle for power, seems to be on the side of Capital. But who can be sure that a more systematic, technical and global form of organization of the whole of being will not appear some day, thus rendering democracy as a form of technological organization redundant?
How science became “positive” science is something that can be grasped only by looking at the way in which, starting with Plato, beingness or truth came to be understood as idea, and how, as a result, the whole of being came to be interpreted as representedness (Vorgestelltheit) — how, in other words, the origin of technological nihilism coincides with the emergence of philosophy as metaphysics. It is a question, then, of thinking the interpretation of the truth of beings as idea with the essence of technology as technè. In other words, it is a question of thinking the essence of technology (Machenschaft, Gestell) in its co-emergence with the birth of metaphysics as idealism, which Heidegger often refers to as “Platonism.” By situating the origin of nihilism in Platonism, Heidegger is in fundamental agreement with Nietzsche, even though, unlike Nietzsche, he will insist on the fact that what is lost in the positing of the idea as the beingness of being is precisely the einai of ousia, the being of beings as a whole, or presence in its presencing. Rather, the einai of ousia becomes what is posited beyond being and yet allows being to be what it is, its essence. Above and beyond beings, essence can (must) consequently be interpreted as “the good.” Essence has become an ideal and a value, the very object of thought and its ultimate point of reference. Being as presencing is no longer in view: only presence remains, whether as the presence of what comes into presence and leaves presence, or, increasingly, as what is and never becomes: absolute presence in the form of essence. As that which stands beyond being, as that which makes being visible and meaningful, the idea soon starts to be interpreted as origin and cause, as well as “the good” and “the beautiful.” Ontology becomes onto-theology, the science of the most common and highest kind of being: Aristotle transforms Plato’s idea into a prime mover, into a substance that is essentially at rest in the form of thinking thinking itself. Such is the first end of the first beginning. The rise of Christianity only confirms the fundamentally Platonic structure of Western metaphysics: God comes to be equated with the idea, and serves as cause as well as the source of meaning in general. But something essential is added, since the cause is now causa efficiens: ex nihilo aliquid fit. Every being is now an ens creatum, a created being. God himself is a “caused” being, even though it is causa sui. Causality is introduced as the paradigm for the explanation of what is and for revealing the meaning of beingness. It is precisely at this point, at the point where the whole of being comes to be interpreted mechanically, as a world functioning like a machine, with a great clockmaker winding up its mechanisms, that machination starts to deploy its essence: not only God, but man himself becomes the one being who can machinate, and that means deploy his power of creation and transformation. For that purpose, to demonstrate the magnitude of his might,26 man needs will. Descartes is the one who will grant him with this will.27 With Descartes, the idea becomes perceptio and the whole of being becomes that which can be represented, an object of representation. No longer presentation (as presencing, or even as presence in the sense of eidos or “outward appearance”), but re-presentation, no longer pro-duction, as coming into presence (as poiesis), but re-production now constitute the essential relation to the truth of beings. Beings now stand as this sheer surface that can be re-presented and thus re-produced, as this object or this Gegen-stand that simply stands there before us. The subject as thinking subject (as cogito) is now the cause of the whole of being, not as efficient cause, but as the condition of possibility for its representation. Being is now equivalent to being true in the sense of being “clear and distinct,” a position that can be attained only because the subject has been posited as a thinking thing certain of itself. In short: esse=verum; esse=certum; esse=ego percipio=cogito me cogitare. The intellect or the understanding lays the foundations for the deployment of the will. The whole of being becomes the Gemacht of man, his product or his thing, insofar as now man defines the meaning and the purpose, the origin and the destination of that which comes into presence. It is not only transcendental philosophy that is announced in the rise of modernity, but also Hegel’s idealism, which raises the idea to the level of the absolute, and consciousness to the level of world-history. In the present age, all ideologies, worldviews and “philosophies” are at bottom effects of Platonism. To be more specific: philosophy itself has become nothing but Weltanschauung and ideology, nothing but Wertphilosophie. Even the so-called existential philosophies are at bottom disguised forms of Erlebnisse or “lived experiences.” Nihilism reigns in the form of the forgottenness of its essence, in the form of “ideas” and “ideals,” of “values” and “worldviews.” Whether Christian or non-Christian, whether anti-Christian or post-Christian, the fundamental philosophical positions at the end of this millennium remain a Platonism. With the emergence of all such views, machination is entering the completion of its essence, whether the mode of representation is mechanistic, pragmatic or biological.28
Yet Platonism as the metaphysical expression of Western nihilism is itself grounded in a phenomenon which Heidegger defines as “the most profound mystery of the current history of Western man.”29 This “phenomenon” is the most profound mystery insofar as it precisely does not manifest itself, insofar as its phenomenality is such that it can only manifest itself as what it is not. In other words, to this phenomenon, which Heidegger identifies with the very essence of the history of the West, belongs a peculiar self-effacement, a covering-up or a withdrawing of itself, through which something (beings as a whole) happens — through which “there is” (es gibt). In this peculiar phenomenon, then, it is a matter of acknowledging the presence of a certain nullity at work, a nullity or a withdrawal that never occurs or manifests itself as such, but only in the presencing of beings. This unique phenomenon, which governs the history of the West, and the essence of which remains covered up by the very unfolding of that history, Heidegger calls the abandonment of Being (die Seinsverlassenheit). The question arises, then, as to whether nihilism, far from finding its roots in some attraction toward the nothing, toward the nihil and its nihilation, does not actually stem from a certain blindness with respect to the essentially negative essence of being, from a certain forgottenness of the nothing inscribed within the very structure of being, in short, from a certain inability to take the question of the nothing and, as a consequence, the question of being itself, seriously. Or, as Heidegger himself puts it,
The question arises whether the innnermost essence of nihilism and the power of its dominion do not consist precisely in considering the nothing merely as a nullity, considering nihilism as an apotheosis of the merely vacuous, as a negation that can be set to rights at once by an energetic affirmation.
Perhaps the essence of nihilism consists in not taking the question of the nothing seriously.
(N II, 53/N IV, 21)
What, then, if nihilism were precisely the history of man’s inability to hold fast to being as the movement of the abandonment of beings? What if man’s doings and thinking were nothing but a way of holding on to beings by way of representations and reproductions, a history which would furthermore be on the verge of entering the stage of its completion in the form of the total absence of questioning with respect to presencing and the total domination and control over beings as whole? Heidegger writes:
Beings are, but the being of beings and the truth of being and consequently the being of truth are denied to beings. Beings are, yet they remain abandoned by being and left to themselves, so as to be mere objects of our contrivance. All goals beyond men and peoples are gone, and, above all, what is lacking is the creative power to create something beyond oneself. The epoch of the highest abandonment of beings by being is the age of the total questionlessness of being.
(GA 45, 185)
Nihilism, conceived and experienced in a more original and more essential way, would be that history of metaphysics which is heading toward a fundamental metaphysical position in which the essence of the nothing not only cannot be understood but also will no longer be understood. Nihilism would then be the essential nonthinking of the essence of the nothing.
(N II, 54/N IV, 22)
In a seemingly desperate and hopeless statement, Heidegger writes the following:
Being has so profoundly abandoned beings and has left beings so much to the discretion of the machination [Machenschaft] and the “lived experience” [Erleben] that every manifest attempt to save Western culture, every “cultural policy” [Kulturpolitik] must necessarily become the most insidious and also the highest form of nihilism.
(GA 65, 140)
If nihilism has advanced to the stage where politics and the realm of the vita activa in general can only reinforce it instead of overcoming or overturning it, the question concerning the possibility of an overcoming of nihilism becomes all the more, pressing. Since politics or action in general only serves to deepen the power of the will to will and the machination to which presence as a whole is subordinated, whence can a turning in history happen? If it can no longer be a question of calling upon the will as a power of transformation, where can the transformation come from and what shape can it take?
The question concerning the possibility of an overcoming of nihilism is one that is at the center of Nietzsche’s thought as well as Jünger’s. Yet if both Nietzsche and Jünger identified and thematized nihilism in one of its essential stages and aspects, both failed to think nihilism according to its essence.30 Because they failed to do so, their thinking always fell short of a genuine overcoming. The overcoming of nihilism is subordinated to the thinking of its essence. To be more specific, thinking is not viewed as a preliminary step toward the overcoming, but as the overcoming itself. As far as Nietzsche goes, overcoming means opposing a counter-movement to the devaluation of all values in the form of the revaluation of all previous values. Yet the standpoint to which Nietzsche remains riveted is that of valuation, without ever being in a position to think the origin and essence of valuation, which is essentially complicitous with and is a result of the abandonment of being. The putative overcoming of nihilism through the establishment of the will to power as absolute value only serves to confirm the most extreme omission of being in its default. If nihilism is essentially a default of being itself, that is, of its truth (as disclosedness and unconcealment), does it make any sense to want to overcome it? What kind of will would be powerful enough to bend the very course of being and bring it under its sway? Can the history of being be overcome through will-power? At this point, in the face of these very questions, the Nietzschean enterprise begins to shatter, since it offers to overcome nihilism only by willing against it, and so by reinscribing its very horizon (the will to will). In our destitute time, marked by the hegemony of the will to will over presence, any recourse to voluntarism merely confirms the epochal configuration of presence.
If nihilism does not allow itself to be overcome by way of will and decision, it is not because it is insuperable, but because “all wanting-to-overcome is inappropriate to its essence.”31 Since it cannot be a question of simply stepping beyond nihilism, of crossing the line so as to find oneself on the other side of the horizon, the question concerning the possibility of an overcoming of nihilism remains. Yet it remains not in the way of a moving beyond, but in the way of a stepping back — not as an Überwindung of nihilism, but as a Verwindung or an appropriation of the essence of nihilism. This step back into the essence of nihilism is the only genuine response to the historical unfolding of nihilism. Not will, but thinking itself is the way in which nihilism comes to be experienced on the basis of its essence. This is how, in a statement that anticipates the Stimmung of texts such as Gelassenheit and Was heisst Denken?, Heidegger describes the rhythm of thinking in the age of technological nihilism:
Instead of rushing precipitously into a hastily planned overcoming of nihilism, thinking, troubled by the essence of nihilism, lingers a while in the advent of the default, awaiting its advent in order to learn how to ponder the default of being in what it would be in itself.
(N II, 368/N IV, 225–6)
Thinking runs counter-stream. Its time is not that of the machine, not that of the Zeitgeist. Its time is not that of actual nihilism and of its threat of the total “an-nihil-ation [Ver-nicht-ung] of all beings, whose violence, encroaching from all sides, makes almost every act of resistance futile.”32 In this time of destruction, of misery and folly, thinking remains without effects. Its “power” cannot be measured in terms of effects. For thinking only experiences the essence. Yet in the experience of the essence (truth), thinking experiences the actual (presence) in a more originary way. Thus thinking is not entirely without effects: in experiencing the actual on the basis of its essence, thinking opens the whole of being to its truth and grounds it in the truth of being. This silent, almost imperceptible shift is nonetheless decisive. When brought back to its essence, the today opens itself onto another time, or rather onto another dimension of time: the time of deep history, the time of the essence of being, epochal time. In this deepening of time, man, hitherto riveted to the present of absolute presence, is now open to the possibility of an epochal constellation to come. From being a Heutige, man becomes a Zukünftige, a man of the future.
In the step back from metaphysical representing and from its completion in technology, thinking echoes the silent unfolding of presence. As a result, everything becomes more fragile and uncertain, more questionable and question-worthy. For to relate to presence as such is to relate to the default of being or to being in its withdrawal. Yet this relation is the relation to man’s own essence, since man comes to be and experiences presence only on the basis of the withdrawal of being. To be more specific: man is needed by being as the abode of being. To a large extent the turning within being can happen only if man has turned himself toward being: “The salvation must come from where there is a turn with mortals in their essence [wo es sich mit dem Sterblichen in ihrem Wesen wendet].”33 Being needs man in order to turn man to itself. Thinking is the way in which man comes to turn toward the truth of being. This happens by way of a letting-be and a letting-go, by way of a certain detachment which is essentially an attunement to the silent voice of being, a gathering around the gift of its presence. To think means: to open oneself to presence as to the gift of being.
Yet even thinking, understood in the most originary sense, or, for that matter, poetizing, to say nothing of all other human “activities,” cannot of themselves bring this mutation about. The overcoming of nihilism, which indeed calls for a conversion of man in his essence, can happen only in a “turning (Kehre) in the essence of being itself.”34 The possibility of another beginning and another epoch of being is just that: a possibility. The decision concerning such a mutation in the historical unfolding of being is not ours. What form might this transformation take? In “Overcoming Metaphysics,” Heidegger goes as far as to suggest that a new beginning might occur only on the ruins of the first one, only as another epoch following the collapse of the technological age:
Before being can occur in its primal truth, being as the will must be broken, the world must be forced to collapse and the earth must be driven to desolation, and man to mere labor. Only after this decline does the abrupt dwelling of the origin take place for a long span of time.
(VA 73/68)
Yet most often, and particularly in the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger suggests that the new beginning can run parallel to the first one, not as another epoch, not as the after of technological nihilism, but as the very confrontation with the essence of nihilism. For ours is perhaps the last epoch of being, if it indeed designates the epoch in which the historical possibilities of metaphysics have come to exhaust themselves. More than another epoch, then, a new beginning would perhaps mark the emergence of another domain of time altogether, and an experience of presence that would be simply otherwise than metaphysical.
Yet, at this point, everything happens as if our postmodern condition were nothing but the experience of the unlimited acceleration of time, an acceleration that results in the “spatialisation” of the planet (and of the universe as a whole), that is, in the absolute domination of space in the form of total and readily available presence. The need of being is no longer needed. The essential unfolding of presence has withdrawn, and we are left with beings in the form of standing-reserve. As a result, man is for the first time confronted with the greatest of all dangers, a danger far greater than that of the total and destructive unleashing of power over the earth, and that is the danger of the threat of the annihilation of his essence.35 The essence of man consists in being needed by being. So long as we do not envisage the destination of man according to his essence, so long as we do not think of man together with being, but solely with the unrelentless releasing of beings, nihilism will continue to prevail, both in essence and in actuality. In essence, as the most extreme manifestation of the Seinsvergessenheit; in actuality, as the politics of world domination, which our “democracies” seem to carry out with particular effectiveness. Thus, a politics that concerns itself only with “man,” and not with the essence of man is bound to nihilism as to its most intimate fate. Does this mean that Heidegger promotes something like a politics of being? No, insofar as politics is always and irreducibly ontic: it concerns man’s relation to man. Yet this relation is itself made subject to the way in which being claims man. There can be no politics of being, whether in the sense of a politics inspired by being or with being as its object, because being cannot be the stake of a political program or will. A politics of being is as meaningless as an ethics of being. Yet neither ethics nor politics can be without the prior disclosure of the epochal configuration within which they emerge. In this sense, ethics and politics are always of being. Both ethics as dwelling and politics as place point to man’s necessity to find an abode on this earth and to dwell amongst beings. And if Heidegger is so weary of ethics and politics, it is precisely insofar as these modes of dwelling no longer satisfy man’s essence, no longer provide man with an abode that is adequate to his essence, in other words, no longer constitute the space of his freedom understood as freedom for his essence (for his relation to the default of being), but are entirely summoned by the power of machination. Unless we come to think of ethics and of politics as the site of a conversion toward the essence of being, a site in which man would find his proper place.
The period of the rectorate will have marked the entry of Nietzsche onto the scene of Heidegger’s thinking in the form of a historical and political voluntarism. It took Heidegger no less than fifteen years to dismiss entirely this temptation and to denounce the will to power as the ultimate burst of European nihilism. Whereas in 1933–5, and even up to the end of his life, but only according to its essence, Heidegger viewed Nazism as an alternative to the planetary domination carried out by the politics of the two emblematic superpowers, the techno-social pragmatism of the United States and the Worker’s State of the Soviet Union, he eventually saw Nazism, particularly in its imperialistic and destructive phase, as the symptom of an identical historical destination. The confrontation with Nietzsche was a confrontation with National Socialism, not because Nietzsche would have been a precursor of Nazism (Heidegger is careful throughout to condemn any nationalist or biologistic reading of Nietzsche), but because Heidegger’s own political engagement was itself made possible by the weight of the will to power as will to will that reigns over the world in the twentieth century. The confrontation with Nietzsche is a confrontation with our epoch as the ultimate figuration of planetary domination and with the will underlying such domination. Nietzsche is unsurpassable, because the metaphysical essence of our age deposited itself in him. By way of a long meditation on the meaning and the essence of will, not as a psychological faculty, but as a metaphysical given, the origin of which goes back to the dawn of modernity, Heidegger was able to wrest his thought from the illusion of the possibility regarding the transformation of the world, of man’s relation to being and of men amongst themselves through the sheer assertion of an historical or otherwise political will. From that point on, and to the extent that politics can oppose politics only as counter-will, and thus as more will, the transformation, if it is at all possible, will not be political. Nor will it belong to the order of the will. Rather, it will be of the order of the wait and of preparation, it will indeed be passive in the eyes of the will to will, but of this passivity whose forces plunge deep into that which, in our history, is being held in reserve. The emphasis undergoes a certain shift, and the tonality is modified: from an exhortation to resoluteness and great decisions we move to a meditation on salvation, on the new beginning, on the return of the holy. Nihilism cannot simply be left behind, for this still suggests a resort to the will to power. Yet from the very heart of European nihilism, from the very depths of its planetary completion a certain reversal or inversion, a turning is awaiting its time. It is no longer this revolution that consists in overturning and overthrowing, in bringing change by way of a destructive frenzy. It is now simply this turning within history, whereby thinking comes to echo the origin. It is now this silent and singular mutation whose decisiveness is matched by no other event. It is the advent of Gelassenheit.
Now if we might be inclined to endorse Heidegger’s deconstruction of politics in modernity as being complicitous with a certain metaphysics of the will, a metaphysics which is ultimately hegemonic and destructive, we might also be willing to wonder whether the task of thinking that emerges from this diagnosis is not ultimately heading toward a philosophical dead end, one which, to be more specific, seems to rule out the very possibility of praxis. First of all, and as Heidegger himself seems to suggest, once the suspicion regarding the very possibility of change brought about by politics has been established, is there an alternative to historical transformation beside those of “salvation” (Rettung), of the coming into presence of a new historical-destinal constellation and of Gelassenheit as the proper response to the presencing of presence? To renounce the political and its metaphysics of the will to will so as to remit one’s historical destiny in the hands of “thinking” and of the “god to come,” is it not to ask at once too much and too little? Too much, in that thinking cannot come to be thought in the place of acting altogether, and too little, in that thinking cannot be spared from the task of critically analyzing and evaluating the content of the concrete. Could we not think of a concept of praxis, and of a power of historical transformation, that would not presuppose a metaphysics of the will to power? Second, the suspicion that is cast over modern politics as a whole amounts to a totalizing gesture that unables Heidegger to make significant differences between various regimes and ideologies, those very differences that alone can command and motivate specific choices and interventions. For is it not on the basis of a diagnosis encompassing the whole of Western history that Heidegger came to regard politics and ideologies as different as that of Soviet communism, liberal democracies and Christianity as symptoms of one identical calamity, and thus that he was never in a position to consider the specific differences between such ideologies as worthy of philosophical thinking and ethical-political preference?