Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 18:06:48 +0000
Subject: Re: Plato's nihilism
From: "Michael Pennamacoor" <pennamacoor-AT-enterprise.net>


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Rene recently:

>(Heidegger stresses again and again: Geschichte is not history. Plato's
>thinking
>IS still, not because it is remembered and fixed in texts, it is there, first,
>in its radicalization (reversement) by Nietzsche, and, second, maybe, 
>it is something that is still waiting for us. (that is, when metaphysics is
>thought
>from Being))
>
>What does nihilism, the uninvited guest, mean, asks Nietzsche? That the
>highest
>values are devaluating. Bringing in new values doesn't help, as long as
>the principle of positing values remains the same, and that is that they are
>BELIEVED as the real reality. Nietzsche's perfect nihilist states with irony.

For Nietzsche, values are manifestations/productions of the will to power: they are its
visibility. The will to power is both life-enhancing and life-maintaining; life (some form
of life, beings of some kind) cannot be enhanced without being maintained (made constant);
but these can come into conflict, into a raging discordance, since a constancy of the
quantum of power is equally [sic] a diminution of power, it cannot stay still without
falling back. Since values are the reflections of monadic constellations of the will to
power, their very positing implies their very negation in time (given time, constancy
overcomes the enhancement process and the power diminishes, the value devalues itself
{like the serpent biting its own tail/tale, like the tale of Chronos}). In this sense,
values are coterminous with 'history' and the historicism of this metaphysics of the will
to power becomes apparent. So, with value taking the upper hand in the history of being,
nihilism is inevitable, somewhat accentuated in Nietzsche's radicalisation of metaphysics
as visible in the mise en scene of values. Values must devalue in the same way that things
come to pass. It seems that this everpresent facticity of the constancy of (the danger of)
nihilism is either something like a feature of the nature of being human (as
manifestations of the will to power and thus of value-positing) or an inescapable
consequence of western metaphysics.

With the rise and domination of value-positing comes the reading of things/beings as a
what-for (as Nietzsche writes concerning the highest valuing of 'freedom': instead of the
revenge-hungry response of 'freedom-from-X' Nietzsche asks 'freedom-for-what?'); pretty
soon, this for-what becomes a so-what and the mood/tone of boredom becomes ubiquitous. The
tension-cum-conflict between maintenance and enhancement (in Nietzsche's terms 'being' and
'becoming') is interestingly and more subtly reflected in Heidegger's take on the
Anaximander Fragment where the horizon(ing) of a being remaining permanently present is
opposed by the 'a-peiron', the repelling of such a limitation on be-ing. Again something
of the nature of the maintenance aspect of Nietzsche's will to power is reflected in
Heidegger's 'standing reserve' feature of the essence of technology.

I playfully wonder what Nietzsche might say about Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche.
'Heidegger' by Nietzsche, anyone?

michaelP

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