Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 17:51:37 +0200
Subject: Re: Nietzsche / Heidegger (4)


(3):
>What Nietzsche wants to overcome - not out of whim, but because
>he knows the bell tolls - is what he calls the revenge (of Platonism)
>against the transitoriness of time. The revenge against time, which (time) 
>the will can't control, was till now, Zarathustra says, man's best thinking.
>In order to overcome this man as hitherto, who isn't ready for the 
>dominion of the earth, another man is needed, the one that is
>capable of thinking the ER, the Uebermensch. Neither Nietzsche, nor
>Zarathustra, are Uebermensch. 

Heidegger in "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" (German p. 99):

[Zarathustra] looks forward into the Wesen of the Over-man and
brings it into a visible Gestalt. Zarathustra is only the teacher, not
already the Over-man himself. And Nietzsche again is not Zarathustra,
but the one that questions, the one that tries to think/imagine 
(erdenken) him.

It is true that Nietzsche, conform to his valuation of art vs. truth, composes
Zarathustra: "When I had created the overman, I ordened around him the great 
veil of Becoming en let the sun stand in midday."

But also: "At the same time as the overman, I created the last man."
They go together. (love & contempt)

If it is true that "Also sprach Zarathustra" is a work of art, and should
be 'sung',
still then it is more akin to Kant's (productive) imagination, than to the
arts poetry,
drama, music. Heidegger discerns the "dichtende" character, that thinking
CAN have,
and the "dichterische" character, that poetry CAN have. Nietzsche I (of 2
vol.), 
German p. 524 ff.  
The German 'dichten' means litteraly: tighten, make dense. Poetry:
condensed speak.
The way, Kantian categories, oriented towards their temporal and spatial
schemes, 
'tighten' a priori what is empirically given - the poeticizing of thinking
- differs overall from  
evocative poetry (das Dichterische).


This all has to do with Platonism and its inversion. Plato says: when the
idea is that
what makes that-which-is stable and visible, then the sensuous is a 'me
on', that
which shouldn't be, that which 'really' is not, because it is fleeting and
opaque: it is
the seeming world. (scheinbare vs. wahre Welt)
We have come to a point, writes Nietzsche in "The history of an error" in
"Twilight
of the idols", where the supernatural world has become untenable. "Let's
abolish it.
What remains? The seeming world? No. With the real, also the seeming world
is abolished.
The heyday of mankind - INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA." 

The ER is the extreme expression of a seeming, becoming world: no thing in
itself is stable,
and staying. Not even the thought itself! It goes through the same gate of
the moment.
In the beginning we said: the ER is earlier than WtP, meaning to conceive
of a will, that is
not Schopenhauer's blind will, a totally different conception of *** is
necessary. Of what?
That is the question. Heidegger calls it: that which is, as a whole (das
Seiende im Ganzen).
(Nietzshe: the world)  From then on, Nietzsche is willing and capable to
determine EVERYTHING that
is as WtP: WtP as nature, as knowledge, as society - see the content of the
book Wille zur Macht.
No will could manage - or it fools itself - when it hasn't gone through the
moment of
eternity, the most laming thought, that can be thought.  But only then a
possibility is given
to AFFIRM everything fleeting: AS fleeting it returns: the world is always
the same: becoming.

This is clearly a 'spiritual" (damned word) will: the seeming world doesn't
lie ready there.
Here the great stimulator of life: art, is needed. But this is not the
aesthetic art, but
art as WtP: "The world as work of art, giving birth to itself." (WzM, no. ?)

I'm not going to discuss Heidegger's question, whether Nietzsche really has
overcome
the revenge against time. He didn't, says Heidegger. But that he didn't,
was his greatness,
the holding tight to his task (Aufgabe). It has to do with a thinker's
always being farther
on his way than he can realize, or that everything really thought has its
un-thought.
(un-thought means always also THOUGHT) 
The tragedy surrounds the hero ("Um den Helden herum wird alles zur
Tragoedie"), 
so that something remains hidden.
The 'effects' of this in Nietzshe's last year, the explosion of polemics,
the self-denudation of Ecce homo.
And a last 'Widerwille', counter-will: Dionysos AGAINST the Crucified.

But also apart from this, the thought of the ER, says Heidegger, can't be
brought to
full clarity, it remains vision and riddle, it must be guessed.

In GA 45 Heidegger says: without Nietzsche (and Hoelderlin) we wouldn't
have the right 
to demand, to go back to the beginning. Because both experienced the end 
(completion, not Spengler's downfall) of the Abendland, held out this
experience
in their creating (Schaffen) and transformed this experience into their
creating.
And we know, that is: could know, that this happened because they turned their
meditating to the beginning of our history, the Greeks. (p. 126)
(e.g. History of an error)

I think, Heidegger means, that without Nietzsche, we don't know where we are.
Compare the remark on the ER at the end of "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra":
"What is the essence (Wesen) of a modern machine, if not ONE kind of the ER."
Something is hiding here. 


(3):
>So far we have these 2 relations in the structure of Nietzsche's thinking:
>
>1. ER - WtP                        (Sein - Seiendes: OD)
>2. ER - Uebermensch            (Sein - Denken/Wesen des Menschen)

"Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra" concentrates on (2). The Gestalt of
the ER is thought from the Gestalt of its teacher. The 'how' of its being
thought decides 'what' is thought. (incorporation) 
Heidegger quotes Zarathustra's comment, when he sees snake and
eagle circling, three times in the course of the treatise: 
"They are MY animals." 

animaliter,

Rene



-----------------------------------
drs. René de Bakker
Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
Afdeling Catalogisering 
tel. 020-5252368              


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