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Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

I

The thought on the Greeks in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger has been the inspiration for much original and penetrating philosophic scholarship in the twentieth century. Assuming that Heidegger is the foremost rethinker of Nietzsche's legacy (an assumption that needs to be tested), Nietzsche's writing and Heidegger's teaching and writing began a movement that now includes numbers too great to count. Certainly not all who might be named are philosophically Nietzschean or Heideggerian; they are, however, variously indebted to the new questioning of the tradition. The readings by Nietzsche and Heidegger of the early philosophers have not usually been at the center of this reengagement with the Greeks, despite the fact that for these two thinkers the early philosophers and poets are the source of primordial wisdom from which the modern West must draw for self-renewal. But if one is to understand the roots of some leading recent approaches to the Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, one must examine these readings. My aim is to consider in broad terms what these thinkers claim to find in the early philosophers and what philosophically motivates their quest. Due to limitations of space, I will not discuss the interpretations of particular ancient figures in detail, and I will also set aside all questions about the scholarly accuracy of their interpretations. To consider the turn to the early philosophers in these two great thinkers is to uncover something fundamental about their philosophies, and thus about philosophy in the most recent period of modernity. Some light will be shed as well, necessarily, on the nature of modernity itself.

II

Among the notes collected after Nietzsche's death and published under the title The Will to Power, there is the following reflection on German philosophy, dated 1885 in the Musarion edition:

German philosophy as a whole—Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to name the greatest—is the most fundamental form of romanticism and homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that has ever existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home: the Greek world! But it is precisely in that direction that all bridges are broken—except the rainbow-bridges of concepts!

Nietzsche surmises that perhaps in a few centuries the real dignity of German philosophy will be recognized for its "gradual reclamation of the soil of antiquity" and for its renewal of the bond with the Greeks, "the hitherto highest type of man." He then concludes:

Today we are getting close to all those fundamental forms of world-interpretation devised by the Greek spirit through Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras—we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were: but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies! Herein lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German character!

Nietzsche here describes German philosophy as a rebellion against modernity, against the Reformation in particular, and as a second Renaissance of antiquity. The recovery Nietzsche seeks is ambiguous, however, for the Greeks are only "the hitherto highest type of man." The hope he places in the German character, whereby he implies he seeks another bridge beyond merely conceptual bridges, is to renew Greekness in mind and body, and thus to rectify a flaw in antiquity, an injustice that antiquity inflicted on itself. This was the wound inflicted on Greek culture by Socrates and his new kind of philosophizing. "The real philosophers of Greece are those before Socrates (—with Socrates something changes)." The early tragic culture of the Greeks succumbed to that wound, but a renewed tragic culture, based on a consciousness of all that had happened since the Greeks, and on a deeper understanding of the sources of mind and body in will, might endure, as incorporating the wound. Nietzsche's German predecessors did not follow this path, as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer were all avowed admirers of Socrates, and Nietzsche's Hellenism rejects the Hellenism of classical German culture. Yet as efforts to address the soul's homesickness, all German philosophic striving is concerned with the problem of evil. He points to this feature in another note: "The significance of German philosophy (Hegel): to evolve a pantheism through which evil, error and suffering are not felt as arguments against divinity." The note contains this sentence: "I myself have attempted an aesthetic justification: how is the ugliness of the world possible?"

The shared project of the German philosophers, including Nietzsche (and Heidegger, as I will argue) could be summed up this way: Burdened with homesickness in modernity, or a sense of loss, they diagnose the ground of that loss and thereby transform the loss, so that it (the illness, wound, or ugliness) is preserved somehow, or justified, in the transformation. And yet, as justified, it is not simply overcome. The renewal of antiquity includes somehow the gulf, the abyss, that separates modernity from antiquity. Nietzsche says that he is the first to justify existence through a critique of morality: "I saw no one who had ventured a critique of moral value feelings." He shows that ugliness, evil, and pain are inseparable from beauty, nobility, and health. Herein he opposes the whole post-Socratic tradition, including Kant and Hegel, who in different ways attempt to "prove the dominion of morality by means of history." But "we no longer believe in morality, as they did, and consequently we have no need to found a philosophy with the aim of justifying morality." Still, there is a sense in which those modern justifications of morality are built upon the undermining of older notions of the nature and supports of morality, such that they opened up an abyss (or exploited an already existing abyss) in freedom, in order to force reason or spirit to discover (or create) a new order in that abyss. In modernity before Kant and Hegel, ideas of freedom with abysmal potentials (such as Rousseau disclosed) emerged, pointing to the need for a synthesis of the ancient and the modern. Nietzsche rejects the classical German Idealist syntheses, so that he does not start with the acceptance of freedom in its modern Enlightenment, democratic meaning, and he does not seek to reconcile it with post-Socratic rational morality. All the same, he offers another synthesis and another justification, in which the most extreme form of modern skepticism is one component and the turn to the early Greeks is another.

Nietzsche rejects the late antiquity of Socrates and Plato—thinkers who employed logic and dialectics as they "took up the cause of virtue and justice." "Since Plato philosophy has been dominated by morality" owing to his portrayal of Socrates, "who was a monomaniac with regard to morality," tyrannizing over the instincts and the senses with his logic, producing the formula "reason = virtue = happiness," but thereby showing only that "the Socratic disposition is a phenomenon of decadence." "Philosophers are prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the corporeal, the senses, fate and bondage, the aimless." Nietzsche seems to include the early Greeks, but Heraclitus does not wholly fit the charge. With the Socratics, philosophy is put on the path of finding a rational moral teleology of the whole, the search for "morality-in-itself" and the "good-in-itself." The ancient sophistic culture, whose predecessors were Heraclitus and Democritus and whose highest expression is Thucydides, was in accord with "the Greek instincts" in rejecting this quest. It was a "remarkable moment" verging on the first critique of morality. At the core of Nietzsche's appreciation of the Greeks is his revival of non-Socratic moral pessimism: the absence (in the early philosophers and poets) or the rejection (in the sophists and Thucydides) of rational moral teleology. Of course this does not mean that for Nietzsche these thinkers lacked either nobility or reason. To the true nobility and the higher reason he gives the name "Dionysian wisdom."

III

In one of his last writings, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, that it put forth two decisive innovations: the account of the Dionysian phenomenon as a root of Greek art, and the understanding of Socrates as "an instrument of Greek disintegration," the figure who embodies "'rationality' at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life." The Dionysian is "the ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life," based on the insight that "nothing in existence may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable." To clarify this he quotes his own Twilight of the Idols: "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life rejoicing over its inexhaustibility even in the sacrifice of the very highest types—that is what I called Dionysian. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity ... but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that joy that includes even joy in destroying." This points toward the "aesthetic justification" of existence: "I took the will to beauty, to persist in like forms, for a temporary means of preservation and recuperation: fundamentally, however, the eternally-creative appeared to me to be, as the eternal compulsion to destroy, associated with pain." The will is realized not in created form itself (the Apollonian moment of art) but in the act of creating, for which form is but a vehicle. The creative will to life celebrated by the poets is its own telos. But in Nietzsche's judgment Socrates and Plato as moral teleologists seek a world in which life will be possible without change, destruction, and pain, and so they necessarily oppose the poets. There exists no truly Dionysian philosopher among the Greeks. "Before me this transposition of the Dionysian into a philosophic pathos did not exist; tragic wisdom was lacking." Among philosophers the thought of Heraclitus comes nearest to it: "The affirmation of passing away and destroying; saying Yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with the radical repudiation of the very concept of being." The doctrine of eternal recurrence as taught by Zarathustra might have been taught already by Heraclitus, but surely in a different mode and for different ends. In a brief passage of The Birth of Tragedy, Heraclitus is described as the one philosopher having the aesthetic vision of the whole. Dionysian art "reveals to us the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of a primordial delight. Thus the dark Heraclitus compares the world-building force to a playing child that places stones here and there and builds sand hills only to overthrow them again." Heraclitus transposes the Dionysian-poetic vision into philosophic concepts, but does so incompletely. One can surmise that Heraclitus lacks a concept of will to ground the cosmic activity of "world-building." But no ancient thinker could have had that concept, nor the historical consciousness resulting from insight into the will's powers of self-transformation.

Nietzsche remarks that he had to abandon hopes for the recovery of tragic culture by the Germans of his time through the inspiration of Wagner's art, and that he "advanced further down the road of disintegration—where I found new sources of strength for individuals. We have to be destroyers!" In the state of general disintegration "individuals can perfect themselves as never before." The decay of the old values has to be advanced, not held back, so that new values can replace them. Humanity is confronted with the greatest danger, the loss of all ability for higher willing with the collapse of the old values, but this danger affords rare higher human beings the opportunity to create new values and a new humanity. Such human beings do not yet exist: "I wish for a species of man that does not yet exist: for the 'masters of the earth.'" That the human species has such power for willing a new species into being is a thought surely lacking in the Greeks. It has to be added that Nietzsche's prophetic stance and his hopes for such transformation would not be possible without the examples of biblical revelation, which he in general opposes for their moral teachings. In paradoxical fashion, Dionysian wisdom combines affirmation of the world as it is—the rejection of any telos beyond the Now—with the hope of radical transformation of man. This apparent contradiction between affirming and transcending is present in the willing of the eternal recurrence, not as theoretical doctrine but as means for the will's self-transformation. "To the paralyzing sense of general disintegration and incompleteness I opposed the eternal recurrence." I restate that Nietzsche synthesizes the most extreme form of modern skepticism with the recovery of early Greek wisdom, and that this constitutes in his view not a mere fusing of doctrines but the deepest understanding of the beneficence of evil.

I turn now to the incomplete and unpublished book written soon after The Birth of Tragedy, entitled Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Two primary concerns of this writing are the individuality of philosophers and the relation of philosophers to their culture. Nietzsche says he is less concerned with the truth of the systems of the philosophers than with their individuality, the "incontrovertible and non-debatable" foundation of their thought in their unique personalities. The inquiry has a higher than merely scholarly aim: to bring to light great human beings whom we must love and honor. But of course we cannot love and honor something unless we can see what is lovable and honorable in it, and the question must be asked whether what is lovable and honorable in the philosophers does not have some relation to the truth or at least nobility of what they sought. Nietzsche speaks of their capacity for wonderment at mundane life, which appears to them as a problem worthy of contemplation. Philosophy is a human possibility that transcends these particular individuals. But Nietzsche himself wonders not only at their wonderment, he wonders also at the Greek culture that was able to produce these great individuals without envy, with admiration for their qualities. Why did Greece have philosophers at the high point of its political and artistic flourishing? Most cultures have no inherent need of philosophy, and the philosopher arises as a mere accident in them. The early Greeks attained somehow a harmony between philosophy and the general culture; this marvel is what Nietzsche puts before the culture of his time, in hopes that it will be emulated. But there is a difficulty in this. Philosophy alone can never initiate a healthy culture, it can only be in accord with an already healthy culture by warding off dangers to its health. In this way early Greek philosophy was in accord with the tragic poetic culture. But this unique harmony must be rooted in something that is uniquely Greek and that neither philosophy nor poetry could create. The theme of the individuality of the early philosophers, who establish various archetypes of philosophy, is mirrored in the individuality of Greek culture as a whole. How can radically unique beings serve as archetypes for others, when even they themselves do not grasp the conditions of their existence? This is a basic problem lurking in this essay.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy by Richard L. Velkley Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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