Polemos

Heidegger’s Nietzsche (Farrell Krell ed., vol. 3, p. 201), is founded in Plato’s ‘ideas’ conceived as enduring, true ideals. These ideals nonetheless are implicitly values posited by will to power. Plato’s highest implicit value is ‘the good’ as ‘good for something’ and as making that thing possible. ‘Idea’ as ‘being’ makes possible the coming to presence of beings or things in general as present perceptions.

Kant renders this notion of being as objectivity. The transcendental concept of the objectness of things needs a subjective ego cogito and we have the ontological foundation of empirical science. Heidegger’s Nietzsche thinks ‘objectivity’ as a value defining what is real rather than an objective concept in itself. For Nietzsche’s metaphysics all previous philosophy is Platonic philosophy, and all notions of objective, supersensuous, Christian or transcendental truth are inverted as subjective value positing in the service of what is good for ‘life’. As will to power, ‘life’ defines what is good as the highest valuation for any particular metaphysics, and as such all metaphysics is a ‘moral’ interpretation of truth as value positing.

All previous metaphysics are defined by will to power as value positing without knowing it, thus Nietzsche’s metaphysics seeks to make this subjective principle explicit in a new valuation of the highest values. Will to power becomes the highest value in that it is the condition of the possibility for positing value. If nihilism is the positing of truth values, its completion is the recognition that the only absolute truth is the will to power for which all posited truth is ‘good’ only insofar as it empowers ‘life’.

(Echoes of Quine’s notion of scientific truth as pragmatic myth in the rejection of Logical Positivist mapping of truth to perception. Science can only approximate the flux of perception/becoming and is truthful only insofar as it leads to more useful outcomes than a belief in divine intervention for instance.)

Nietzsche’s nihilism in this sense devalues all notions of absolute truth but only in order to recognise itself as the arbiter of truth in the service of what is good for life. It’s a ‘positive’ or affirmative nihilism that devalues all notions of truth not explicitly founded in subjective truth positing. The proposition ‘god is dead’ understood philosophically undermines all notions of the supersensuous authority of truth guaranteed by a belief in god, moral law, reason, historical progress and/or social instinct. The human subject, rather than defining itself in relation to ‘higher truths’, becomes itself the principle of truth as value positing. This is the completion of the metaphysics of subjectness as the absolute reversal of all prior metaphysics where the transcendental or supersensuous becomes subjective truth in the service of the empowering of ‘life’.

Nihilism is the history of western metaphysics as an ongoing moral valuation that posits absolute ideals of truth, goodness and beauty that are supposedly valid ‘in themselves’. Their devaluation is thus ensured as they are necessarily incommensurable with life, and nihilism is the historical process of this devaluation. Once this traditional world is devalued its truth collapses, and the collapse can be catastrophic, and only then do we enter into the ‘preliminary form’ of the completion of nihilism, that of pessimism and the seeming valuelessness of all truth. The western world has already endured several such collapses to get where we are today, other more traditional societies are going through this transition as we speak, and our contemporary, widespread moral and truthful relativism in all walks of westernised life is I think an excellent example of Nietzsche’s notion of preliminary nihilism, where the endless display of pessimism shown on this list is a microcosm of that nihilism.

But where to with all this pessimism? According to Heidegger’s Nietzsche weak pessimism, as historicism, doesn’t posit future possibilities for change but only looks to the past in order to endlessly critique the present. Strong pessimism however analyses the present historical situation in order to open up the possibility of a new path to the future (This latter is what I refer to as Heidegger’s pessimism in his critique of his present historical situation and the analysis of the will to will of Nazism. Needless to say his version of pessimism takes the devaluation a step further (or back?) in the devaluation of truth as will to power).

These two pessimistic possibilities are an ‘intermediate stage’ in the completion of nihilism leading to firstly an imperfect nihilism. The old values are devalued but then simply replaced by new ideals - ‘early Christianity’ (socialism) is replaced with communism, dogmatic Christianity by ‘Wagnerian music’. Does anyone think this might be a veiled criticism of the metaphysical ideals of national socialism? I think perhaps it refers to the earlier Germanic idealism, or to dogmatic Nazi ideology, but we could also equate the overthrow of the ideals of dogmatic Christianity with the ideals of ‘freedom and democracy’ and scientific positivism. These various ideals overthrow the old traditional order and values, but by prolonging the rule of the supersensuous they merely postpone the emergence of ‘extreme nihilism’ and its collapsing of the supersensuous realm of truth.

I think it’s this extreme activist nihilism and the rejection of any ‘eternal truth in itself’ that Heidegger equates with at least the ‘great beginnings’ of the Nazi led German revolution, and it’s this extremism that I’d say also in part characterizes the Straussian Neocon world view (perhaps Anthony could delve into this possibility further?). Passive extremism merely accepts that the actual world does not conform to how it ought to be, and that this idealised vision of how it ought to be doesn’t actually exist, neither in a god’s moral law nor in the ideals of human progress. Active extremism takes this a step further in devaluing the past ideals and their supersensuous realm and positing new valuations based solely on its own possibilities for life, it ‘makes space and steps into the open’ as ecstatic nihilism. Free from previous traditional prejudices, such as a belief in supernaturally guaranteed Judaeo-Christian moral values for instance, ecstatic nihilism recognises itself as the arbiter of all values amidst the essential chaos of becoming. As ecstatic nihilism it keeps itself open to possibility, and this openness is an ongoing revolution against the reappearance of the supersensuous realm of ideals (something Hitler obviously betrayed from the beginning, at least in historical hindsight).

Ecstatic nihilism is an affirmative, classical nihilism, it builds its world on the basis of its own truth as will to power where all truth as value is first posited explicitly as value without recourse to supersensuous ideals. Will to power becomes the explicit principle for truth as value positing, and as such it becomes the explicit condition for the possibility of the truth of beings as a whole, the possibility of an ecstatically open ‘world view’ and its empowerment.

I think it’s this fragile, ecstatic ‘openness’ of will to power, on the threshold of the meaning of being, that drew Heidegger into his entanglement with Nazism and his initial attempt to guide the revolution ‘towards the good’ from its beginnings. The leaders however were apparently ‘too limited in their thinking’ and the initial ecstatic ‘openness’ of the German revolution (or more likely Hitler’s public semblance) inevitably fell back into the dogmatism of Nazi machination, initially evident with the crushing of the Roehm revolutionaries and consummated in the disaster of WW2.

So where does that leave us today? With our philosophical/moral pessimism and the intermediate nihilism of mass democracy and its collapsing ideals of ‘liberty and equality’ in Iraq? Ideals that the democratic leaders themselves, as extreme nihilists, only adhere to for propaganda purposes and where the slaughter of thousands of innocents, the use of concentration camps and torture, and the unilateral collapse of international law are merely effects of the total mobilisation of democratic forces in a global war to empower ‘our’ western way of life for the next century?

I guess that’s the essence of being on the open threshold of history - where to now? It’s easy enough to point out that we’re transparently being dragged en masse back into the unilateral play of global power struggles, back into the historical repetition of explicit, amoral will to will that characterised the Nazi expansion ending in the catastrophe of WW2. But now instead of the collapsing semblance of Nazi ideals and power it’s democracy’s turn to shatter its own vastly self-righteous, hypocritical self-image. Perhaps if the Neocons can get away with yet another term in power they can complete this transitional nihilism and grind us democratic populations down into an extreme nihilism and total valuelessness. Maybe then there’ll open up a historical possibility to something new beyond the empty salvation of technological ordering?

Or maybe I’m just too pessimistic for my own good.