Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 22:37:53 +0800
Subject: Re: Nietzsche/Nazism - biologism
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>



On Sunday, November 2, 2003, at 02:33  AM, GEVANS613-AT-aol.com wrote:

> Jud:
> What 'issues?' I see no 'issues' I just see the Nazi defeat 
> gobbledegooked
> into Heidegger-speak.

Yes, all you see is gobbledegook, that much is at least clear. But at 
least you're doing some basic research, and I too like the Sheehan 
book. I think you'll find that the more you read and understand the 
more you'll be able to cobble together a much more critical 'rampant 
Nazi' interpretation, I still won't agree with you but hopefully you'll 
be more interesting to read. So lets persist then in this reading of 
Heidegger's Nazism, I'm having fun aren't you?

So far we've outlined Heidegger's initial optimism, founded in the 
strange belief that he could singlehandedly philosophically influence 
Nazi ideology to change its course towards an internationalist European 
focus and bring about a revolution in human understanding and its 
relation to modernity's global technological order. This global 
revolution has something to do with how we understand the term 'truth', 
where for Heidegger it means an openness to the world in which one's 
own self-understanding has already been historically constituted in 
terms of rationality and its objectivity. But from the perspective of 
an openness to truth, interpretive reason is only meaningful on the 
basis of an 'aesthetic/affective' disclosure of beings as a whole, an 
a-rational truthful relation to our lived, shared world exemplified by 
the work of art.

Something about Hitlerism, its willful relation to truth, power and the 
aesthetic/political appeal to the volk, sucked Heidegger into his 
political involvement, much to the dismay of his friends and the wider 
academic world. I personally think the end should have been apparent 
from the beginning, although we can only view Nazism in historical 
hindsight through the lens of the holocaust of WW2. An entire 
generation of Germans were taken in by 'Hitler's hands' and the bread 
that the German revolution brought to their tables after the chaos of 
the Weimar years and crippling reparations. And again, it was not yet 
illegal in the mid 30's to support a democratically elected ultra right 
wing nationalist government, no more than it is today for Anthony to 
support his Bush administration and its unilateral nationalism, 
military dominance and redefinition of international law, he may even 
be a fully paid up member of the Republican party if he so wishes, and 
good luck to him.

The other side of the coin of Heidegger's Nazism is of course his 
pessimism. It is no surprise to us that the Nazi leadership was a 
severe 'disappointment' for Heidegger's absurdly grandiose 
anti-democratic optimism, but a lot of commentators do seem to elide 
his strident condemnation of Nazism as an extremity of the will to will 
and its amoral machination. I really don't know why this is, unless 
perhaps they're uncomfortable following the logic of his writing on 
power and technology through to its contemporary consequences. For me 
there are some very difficult moral problems equating the allied 
victory in WW2 with the final obliteration of the truth of being, and I 
think the philosophical ideal of democracy is something much more 
interesting than any form of totalitarian closure, although of course 
actual democracy is always going to be a compromise with power, no 
matter whether it has a liberal or social emphasis. I guess for you Jud 
this pessimism just gets in the way of your rampant Nazi 'theory', and 
all these philosophical/political issues to do with truth, justice, 
freedom, power, democracy and so on are meaningless gobbledegook. I'll 
leave you to your meaninglessness for the moment and continue with this 
reading.

Lets backtrack a bit and maybe see if we can follow the development of 
Heidegger's critique of Nazism starting with his attempt to inform the 
Nazi's Nietzschean ideology about its 'metaphysical essence and 
destiny', back to the optimism of 1936 and the lecture on Nietzsche, 
and specifically the problem of 'biologism'.

The entire critique of Nietzsche is conceived from within the 
philosophical problem of modernity and its nihilism, and involves the 
problem of a certain form of subjectivity whose historical context is 
nothing less than what Heidegger himself considered to be the 
historical destiny of the German and European powers being played out 
in the mid-twentieth century struggle for a genuinely authentic German 
nationalist movement. Heidegger's politically enjoined critique of the 
will to power is therefore not merely a commentary on Nietzsche's 
philosophy but rather an appropriative interpretation of the implied 
subjective grounds on which Nietzsche posits the truth of will to power.

For Heidegger's Nietzsche, the basis of will to power is 'life'. It is 
from out of the fundamental experience of 'life', of being alive, that 
will to power can be conceptualized in terms of "art as object of a 
physiological aesthetics" (N1, p. 126). The dynamic 'biologism' of will 
to power, its artistic essence, is "an eruptive state of rapture. Such 
a state would evanesce without deciding anything, since nature knows no 
realm of decision" (p. 126). The notion of 'life' brings will to power 
back to the immediacy of the constant emergence into the living moment, 
back to one's own embodied activity in this lived world. Again here I 
can't help but see this in phenomenological terms as an interpretation 
of the lived context in which modern humanity is thought biologically 
as the animal rationale, the thinking beast. As for the rational side 
of this dualism, in order for will to power as art to be "a 
countermovement to nihilism" (p. 126), that is, in order for the 
healthy directing of our essential animality, this will must contain 
and direct its rampant physiological rapture, for "if art has its 
proper essence in the grand style, this now means that measure and law 
are confirmed only in the subjugation and containment of chaos and the 
rapturous" (p. 126).

These two tendencies, willful decision and ecstatic rapture, Apollo and 
Dionysus, must balance one another in a self-overpowering harmony for 
which "art in the grand style is the simple tranquility resulting from 
the protective mastery of the supreme plenitude of life" (p. 126). 
'Life' is the basis of Nietzsche's will to power in the sense of art in 
the grand style, and "the physiological is the basic condition for 
art's being able to be a creative countermovement" (p. 126). At this 
early point in the Nietzsche lectures Heidegger is still optimistic 
about the possibility of will to power as a creative force against 
modern nihilism, and this optimism derives from an appreciation of the 
ecstatic rapture of Nietzsche's physiological aesthetics. I can 
understand this in terms of a phenomenological way to approach the 
basis for our modern scientific emphasis on biology, and the hold that 
medical science and psychology have on how we understand ourselves as a 
human animal. Here, all empirical observation is founded on one's own 
lived experience of 'life' or being alive in the sense of a 
'physiological' experience of one's own embodied existence.

However, given the context of our current reading, how proximal might 
this emphasis on the 'biological' essence of will to power as art - an 
essence never fully explicated by either Nietzsche or Heidegger - be to 
that of a fascist aesthetic of the body, especially given that 
Heidegger is obviously reinterpreting the Nazi emphasis on 'blood' and 
its animality of human being? For the Nazi's their folk were human 
material, literally breeding stock, and a material human resource in 
the service of the state. I was introduced to one of Hans Frank's 
grandsons by my former supervisor while researching my thesis. His 
grandmother had been part of the Aryan eugenics program, living in a 
sort of Nazi pagan nunnery were they were visited by selected members 
of the Nazi hierarchy to be inseminated, just as you would run a cattle 
breeding program. This guy had a lot of issues to work through and my 
supervisor asked me to talk to him honestly about Heidegger's Nazism. I 
basically told him I thought it was an open ended problem, although a 
philosophical one rather than a mundane political problem. He decided 
not to continue with his Heidegger research as it was all to close to 
the bone so to speak. Which is fair enough.

I do think Heidegger is dealing with the Nazi ideology of 'biologism' 
here, and he is necessarily close to his subject, but it's in the 
context of a philosophical reinterpretation and retrieval of Nietzsche 
from the ideological misuse of his philosophy for the Nazi biological 
world view. For me this does not imply that Heidegger was party to the 
crude anti-semitic racism of 'blood and earth', of German biological 
superiority, but on the contrary is attempting to rescue the will to 
power from its perversion in Nazi biologism. According to Heidegger 
(N3, p. 46) "When Nietzsche thinks beings as a whole - and prior to 
that Being - as 'life', and when he defines man in particular as 'beast 
of prey', he is not thinking biologically. Rather, he grounds this 
apparently merely biological world view metaphysically". Nietzsche's 
apparent biologism gives rise to a "biological illusion" which explains 
for Heidegger (p. 46) "why the many writers who whether consciously or 
unconsciously expound and copy Nietzsche's treatises invariably fall 
prey to a variety of biologism". What then, of this proximity of 
Heidegger's Nietzsche with Nazi biologism? Is it possible that there is 
a fascist progression from Nietzsche's metaphysical biologism to the 
Nazi's ideological misinterpretation and its virulently racist 
biologism, and on through to the threshold yet erasure of an openness 
to the historical truth of being? This would be a fascist fallacy that 
is nonetheless founded in the sensuous truth of the immediate 
physiological realm, the ecstatic realm of the here and now. How close 
did Heidegger initially think (hope) Hitler was to the truth of the 
will to power?

Already in 1934, Levinas (1990, ‘Reflections on the philosophy of 
Hitlerism’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (Autumn), p. 70) was warning about the 
"Germanic ideal of man", an ideal whose self-same truth is "anchored in 
his flesh and blood", where "truth is no longer for him the 
contemplation of a foreign spectacle; instead it consists in a drama in 
which man is himself the actor". The crisis of Nazism is thus a 
question of a subjective relation to truth concerning "the very 
humanity of man", and for Levinas this crisis is grounded in 
"Nietzsche's will to power, which modern Germany is rediscovering and 
glorifying" (p. 71). Like I keep saying, Heidegger is a dangerous 
thinker because of his proximity to Nazi ideology, but for all that 
it's a critical proximity and one that constantly undermines the 
ideology while traveling along with it, at least in this early 
optimistic phase.

According to Heidegger (N3, p. 121), "Nietzsche's 'biologism', which 
although it does not constitute Nietzsche's fundamental position still 
belongs to it as a necessary ambiguity". That is, the question of 
Nietzsche's biologism, although necessarily ambiguous for Heidegger, is 
somehow relegated to a secondary position in relation to Nietzsche's 
more fundamental metaphysical thinking. Yet if the 'vitality of life' 
expresses itself as a volk (nationalist) relation to self-righteousness 
or self-justification (to what will become the essence of will to power 
as such), in which Heidegger stresses the historical destiny of the 
German-speaking peoples as the guiding destiny of the West, then is 
this not merely a metaphysical racism that, although dismissive of 
crude biologism, remains its bedfellow? As Derrida (1989, Of spirit: 
Heidegger and the question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel 
Bowlby, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 74) asks: "A 
metaphysics of race - is this more grave or less grave than a 
naturalism or a biologism of race?" It's still an open question as far 
as I'm concerned, and I think you really should give this some thought 
Jud as it would be a rich mine to excavate for a critically informed 
version of your otherwise bankrupt Nazi vilification of Heidegger.

 From this essentially ambiguous notion of 'life', Heidegger's Nietzsche 
posits the necessity of a completion of nihilism in the sense of the 
devaluing of all values. This completion is necessary because, although 
the older traditional values have been devalued through the project of 
modernity, this bourgeois modernity or 'incomplete nihilism' "still 
posits the [former values] always in the old position of authority that 
is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the 
suprasensory" (Overcoming Metaphysics, p. 69). Completed nihilism 
distinguishes itself by doing "away with the place of value itself, 
with the suprasensory [uebersinnlich] as a realm, and accordingly must 
posit and revalue values differently" (p. 69). The notion of the 'death 
of god' reflects this devaluation of all the 'supersensuous' or 
'transcendental' guarantees for our traditional value systems, while 
the meaningless concepts of god, or the transcendental, or the 
fundamentality of 'human rights' and democratic principles are still 
held onto as such a guarantee.

So a new ground for truth must be conceived which has no recourse to 
themes of transcendental meaning or any authority 'beyond' its own 
positing. A belief in the supersensuous as an ideal realm which 
structures the merely sensuous or apparent, a belief in 'Platonism', 
must be done away with. For the Platonic supersensuous is imaginary and 
projects attention away from an absorption in the moment, in the 
constant becoming of the sensuous or the 'rapture' of the 'supreme 
plenitude of life'. Thus it is that "Nietzsche, inverting Platonism, 
transposes Becoming to the 'vital' sphere, as the chaos that 'bodies 
forth'" (N3, p. 172).

Completed nihilism is attained by constantly willing a return to the 
sensuous, to the 'vitality' of being 'alive', where "animality is the 
body bodying forth, that is, replete with its own overwhelming 
urges.... Because animality lives only by bodying, it is as will to 
power" (p. 218). Here, the will to power is always becoming, in the 
sense of a continual circling back to self-presence and out of an 
immersion in ideation. The sensuous is embodied, and it must be 
constantly willed in an ongoing 'bodying forth' which in the constant 
return to willing, goes forward toward itself, towards the sensuous as 
the a-rational foundation for truth. In this way will to power 
consummates itself in an ecstatic tumescence. This activity of willing 
a constant return to the sensuous realm of one's own body, a willful 
return to 'life', is that which constitutes the subjectivity of will to 
power. Such a willed subjectivity does not ground its identity in 
bourgeois dreams because it is its own ground as a constant willing. 
This is the metaphysical essence of and Heidegger's hope for modern 
humanity, lost in the meaninglessness of its old traditional values but 
coming back to itself, back to 'life' as the origin of truth and the 
foundation for a revaluation of all values.

What do you think of this philosophical notion of 'biologism' Jud?

Cheers,

Malcolm


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