philosophical conversations

Heidegger: Nietzsche's 'good man'

Chapter 12 of Heidegger's Nihilism book (vol.4 of Nietzsche) is entitled 'Nietzsche's "Moral" Interpretation of Metaphysics'. It is concerned with Platonism, which is understood in terms of a transcendent realm of the true and the good over and above the sensible material world.

Heidegger says:

If "truth"--that is, the true and the real---is transposed upward and beyond into a world in itself, then the being proper appears as that to which all life must be subordinated. The true is what is inherently desired, what ought to be. Human life is therefor worth soemthing, is determined by the correct virtues, only when these virtues exclusively urge and enable us to realize what is commanded and desired--to comply with, and so be subjected to, "ideals".

The person who so humbles himself before these transcendent ideals as the only true world is called the "good man" by Nietzsche. The will that wills the good man is a will to submission beneath ideals that exist in themselves, and over which human beings may no longer have any power.

Christianity is a Platonism as it divides the world of beings into two: the transcendent world of ideals, of what ought to be, the true in itself and the sensible world of unending toil and self-submission to the unconditioned ideal values. So morality is the morality of the good man who lives by and within the opposition to evil and not beyond good and evil. Beyond good and evil does not mean chaos outside all law and order; it means the necessity of a new positing of a different order against chaos.

And what is the way Nietzsche goes about doing this?

On Heidegger's reading Nietzschhe holds that this new positing involves human beings self-sconsciously imposing values on all things; a humanization of being:

"Man ought to claim everything for himself as his own, something he can do only if first of all he no longer regards himself as wretch and slave before beings as a whole, but establishes and prepares himself for absolute dominance. But his means that he himself is unconditioned will to power, and he regards himself as the master of such domination, and so consciously decides in favour of every exhibition of power; that is, decides for the continuous enhancement of power."

So Heidegger reads revaluation in terms of commanding and legislating by human beings as the lords of the universe. The man of such dominance is the Over-man. He steps out over the past, and is the master of the absolute administration of power with the fully developed power resources of the earth.

Heidegger is generally criticized for this interpretation of Nietzsche but there is good textual references for it in The Will to Power, especially Bk 4, part I section 4, entitled 'The Masters of the Earth.' In para. 957 Nietzsche poses the question:

"..how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to what end shall 'man' as a whole---an no longer as a people or race--- be raised and trained"?

In para 958 he says that

'I write for a species of man that does not yet exist: for the "masters of the earth."'

Heidegger brings the chapter to an end by saying that we need to step beyond weat Nietzsche has revealed about metaphysics to take an orginal look into the history fo metaphysics. He says that he first step is to make Nietzsche's description and conception of metaphysics clearer. Nietzsche's is:
'..a "moral" conception. Morality means here a system of evaluations. Every interpretation of the world, be it naive or calculated, is a positing of values and thus a forming and shaping of the world according to the image of man. In particular, that valuation which acts on the basis of insight into the origin of human value and so completes nihilism must explicitly understand and will man as the lawgiver. it must seek the true and the real in the absolute humanization of all being.'
So Nietzsche's doctrine of the Overman thrusts human beings into the role and the absolute and unique measure of all things.

philosophy and the discourse of the nation

One of the contradictions about philosophy that has stuck me is how analytic philosophy says that it is universal, meaning that one's nationality has nothing to do with the eternal problems and the universal language of modern philosophy; but then the talk is soon about Anglo-American philosophy being good and continental (French philosophy) being bad. Then we have the denial that modern analytic philosophy is a part of the discourse of the nation.

And yet, in practice, there is a cordoning of Australian philosophy institution off from the philosophy of France and Germany. Australians view deconstruction as French philosophy and hermeneutics as German philosophy. You are prevented from studying this bad or non-philosophy. Modern philosophy is universal but that of the classical Greeks, the Germans in the 19th century and the French in the 20th century is bounded by the nation.

Interesting isn't it. The way that a universalist philosophy is a part of the discourse of the Anglo-American nation, and yet it is unreflective about its 'contamination.'

From memory the reflection that does exist takes the form a defence that sees the national discourse as a mere colouration of the universal language of philosophy. Colouration means style or the odd metaphor that is a form of decoration. Philosophy is like mathematics.

I would say that nationality is the spectre that haunts philosophy because nationalism is buried in the heart of the Western philosophical tradition.

Heidegger, Technology, television

This article by Dan Scoggin on Heidegger and Technology in the Spring 2002 issue of Negations is interesting. Scoggin says:

"On the one hand, the current phenomenon of television, with its privileged status as a cultural event, serves as an excellent example by which to explore Heidegger’s complex notion concerning how technology becomes intertwined with our Being. On the other hand, we can start to unravel the complex existence of the event of television today by returning to his notion of Enframing (Gestell)--which proposes that the essence of technology is not technological, but a way of life. In either case, the first step of bringing Heidegger and television together involves an overcoming of the instrumental logic that suggests that television is best thought of as a home appliance, a window to the world, a marketplace, a piece of furniture, a companion, or something fully human."

Heidegger rarely touched upon television in his writings and speeches we can understand television to be a technological extension of visual and auditory images, an incontrollable plurality of messages, and a space where where human beings are taken as standing-reserve.

Heidegger's ontological politics

Heidegger's overall philosophical project is one of deconstructing the Western metaphysical tradition of calculative thinking that objectifies beings and transforms all forms of existence into resources to gain mastery over the earth.

His politics is based on a Volk rooted in its own earth that can summon the historical energy necessary for embracing and transforming its own destiny. The German destiny, which is based on the notion of a singularly German form of rootedness in the earth, is a response to the historical crisis of Europe and modernity.It combats both the rootlessness of Weimar culture and the rootlessness and forgetfulness of being inherent in the entire Western metaphysical tradition.

This is seen as a Nietzschean counter-movement to the nihilism and vulgarization of modern life (liberal democracy, technical-rational dominion, mass consciousness, the rootlessness of urban life). Only a Volk committed to its roots could provide a bulwark against the forces of nihilism and reawaken the power of philosophy.

Reference Review

viewpoints as points of entry

A quote that connects to the Nietzsche/Heidegger idea of viewpoint:

"What has emerged from this critical posture toward beginnings [by postmodernism] is an awareness about the significance of what I will call "points of entry"--those interpretational thresholds which allow us to enter into a dialogue with a text, a thinker, or a tradition. Points of entry frame the possibilities of all interpretation; they open up pathways for discovery even as they close off other venues and approaches. Entering into a thinker's work from a certain vantage point determines much about how an interpreter will frame her questions and follow her path of inquiry."

The quote is from a review by Charles Bambach of Arendt and Heidegger:The Fate of the Political by Dana Villa in the Winter 1998 issue of Negations.

Heidegger, Nietzsche, history

Chapter 11 of Heidegger's Nihilism book (vol.4 of Nietzsche) is entitled 'Subjectivity in Nietzsche's Interpretation of History'.

It starts by summarizing what Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism has involved up to now:

"The dominance of valuation thought in metaphysics signifies....that Nietzsche conceives the task of future metaphysics to be the revaluation of all values. At the same time..the dominance of evaluative thought presupposes as self evident the fact that all prior metaphysics---that is, all metaphysics that historically preceded the metaphysics of the will to power---has been, even if only tacitly, metaphysics of the will to power. Nietzsche conceives the whole of Western philosophy as a thinking in values and a reckoning in values, as value positing. Being, the beingness of beings, is interpreted as will to power."

This is what has been established so far. Nietzsche's philosophy is more than his particular view, as it is a revaluating stance towards previous metaphysics--a confrontation that examines and interprets the past in terms of its own horizons.

Heidegger says that it may be the case that this confrontation lends metaphysics the words to say what it has always wanted to say but could not. Rather than being a distortion of previous metaphysics it is an enrichment of metaphysics and a bringing of the fundamental thoughts of metaphysics to completion.

Heidegger then highlights the significance of Nietzsche's understanding of the beingness of being. He says that Nietzsche's interpretation of all metaphysics in terms of valuative thought is rooted:

"... in the basic definition of being as a whole as will to power. Neither Hegel nor Kant, neither Leibniz nor Descartes, neither Medieval nor Hellenistic thought, neither Aristotle nor Plato, neither Parmenides nor Heraclitus knew of will to power as the fundamental character of beings."

What then are we to make of Nietzsche's understanding of beingness?

If valuation is included in the will to power what of will to power itself? Where does it originate, given that it is the roots of the origin of value within metaphysics. Heidegger says that:

"..in order to make the proper contrast between the history of metaphysic as it must first be experienced and Nietzsche's conception of metaphysics, we must on the basis of what has already been said first place his interpretation of the history of metaphysics before us in a comprehensible form. Until now, we have learned that only that for Nietzsche valuations have their ground and necessity in the will to power."

If a definite will to power was involved in the first positing of the highest values hitherto at the beginning of metaphysics, then the values "purpose", "unity", "truth" etc have been falsely projected into the essence of things. How did that projection come to be? What configuration of will to power was at work here.

Klossowski, Nietzsche, value

I've decided to have another go at reading Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. I find it a difficult text and I did not really understand a lot of it on my last attempt. That was reading chapter 3. However, I have no idea what Klossowski is trying to do in deriving Nietzsche's philosophy from his lived experience of mental illness. This pathway puzzles me.

Chapter 4, 'The origin of the Four Critieria', addresses the issue of evaluation and what is valuable from the perspective of the categories of healthy and morbidity. Klossowski connects this understanding of valuation to the symptoms of vigor and decadence, of strength and degeneration in the social world and in himself. He then connects vigor, healthy and powerful to gregarious, successful type, exchangeable, comprehensible, communication and languages, whilst decadence, morbid and weakness is linked to singular, degenerate type, unexchangeable, muteness and non-language.

Okay. I can accept that. Nietzsche refers to ascending and descending types of life in Bk. 4 (para 857) of The Will to Power, in the section entitled 'Doctrine of the Order of Rank.'

We are continually walking the non-human/human divide and the sick/ healthy divide within the world of nihilism and the revaluing of values. Only a certain kind of person can undertake the revaluation of values--the Over-man: the powerful master type who rules the weak, the masses, slaves and sickly types.

What determines order and rank is the will to power whilst my rank is determined by my quantam of power. And so the concern is doing away withe slavish mentality of meekness, moderation chastity etc.--what could be called the Christian virtues.

Klossowski asks a couple of questions. These are:

How can the attributes of power, health and sovereignty be restored to the singular, to the unexchangeable to mutness?

And another: are things that are healthy and necessarily powerful a product of gregariousness as language seems to require?

And another: what, in lived experience refers to the singular and what, in the way that it is lived, belongs to the order of gregariousness?

Okay the questions don't mean all that much to me. But I can go along with them to see where the responses lead. Klossowski's pathway seems to be that Nietzsche's questioning of Western culture was merely an aspect of the way he interrogated himself. He quotes paragraph 909 from Bk. 4 of The Will to Power. Book Four is entitled 'Discpline and breeding' and paragraph 909 is within a section entitled the 'The Strong and the Weak.' Para. 909 says:

"909 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

The typical forms of self-formation. Or: the eight principal questions.

1. Whether one wants to be more multifarious or simpler?
2. Whether one wants to become happier or more indifferent to happiness and unhappiness?
3. Whether one wants to become more contented with oneself or more exacting and inexorable?
4. Whether one wants to become softer, more yielding, more human, or more "inhuman"?
5. Whether one wants to become more prudent or more ruthless?
6. Whether one wants to reach a goal or to avoid all goals (as, e.g., the philosopher does who smells a boundary, a nook, a prison, a stupidity in every goal)?
7. Whether one wants to become more respected or more feared? Or more despised?
8. Whether one wants to become tyrant or seducer or shepherd or herd animal?"

In this section of Book 4 Nietzsche has identified himself with the higher/exceptional types and he is fighting the mediocre herd to create the conditions that would help to breed the higher types. he sees education as a form of breeding.(para. 903).

He is pointing to something new: the new barbarian as a species of the conquering and ruling type. The lower is to provide the base for the higher sovereign types who can endure.

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Another perspective on nihilism

I came across these perspective on nihilism by Peter G. Epps over at Comment Me No Comments courtesy of Enowning. Peter is critical of what he calls modernism, and he works from a Christian (fundamentalist) perspective that highlights both the Christian influence in Anglo-American culture and the depredations of modernism.

Peter says:

An important dissonance within modernism...has arisen from the side of worldly philosophy...That dissonance is most strikingly evident in Nietzsche, is followed up in Heidegger, and eventuates in the post-structuralism of Derrida.

Pepps then spells this out in a way that accords with this weblog, though his interest is more with Derrida than Heidegger. Derrida is interpreted as saying that nihilism extends to everything. Hence the abyss. This provides an opening for the return of a fundamentalist Chrtistianity.

Peter says:

The fundamental reality grasped by Nietzsche, and explored at length in later Continental philosophy, is that the modernist lives in "the default of God" (Heidegger), or if he is honest, asserts that "God is dead" (Nietzsche's fictional prophet Zarathustra).....Modernism means standing in a relation to God such that He is declared to be dead, and in fact to have been "killed" by the growth of modern knowledge; He is now believed to have been a past human mistake, "real" in the subjectivity of the past (for the pragmatic merging of the idealist and skeptical strains is to say "It's 'real' if believing it had real effects") but no longer "real" by virtue of superior human knowledge and social development.

Nietzsche also grasped, though, that the modernist for whom "God is dead" is nihilistic; the same pragmatic evasion of reality that "kills" God also "kills" all distinctively human sources of meaning, all measures of value beyond personal preference (as pragmatically modified by social conformity). Heidegger discusses the "default of God" as becoming most desperate when the "default" is no longer sensed as such; when there is no longer any destitution-of to remark that of which we are destitute, our destitution has become so absolute as to erase itself entirely from our consciousness.

Nietzsche's response is to expect and announce the emergence of great souls who can "transvalue values," who can go beyond the negation of old systems of valuation to create their own-ultimate self-asserting selves. Heidegger's response is to attempt the destruction of the Western metaphysical tradition and the consideration of the basic questions whose "answers" formed the now-dead systems...

Peter than goes onto to spell out Derrida in terms of the inevitablity of the self-destruction of modernism. On this account Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida take modernism thoughts to its ultimate end. They discovered the destruction inherent within modernism and then set about to furhter the destruction.

On this Christian account Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are destroyers they leave a vacum for the return fo a fundamentalist Christianity. What is forgotten, ignored or pushed to one side is the way these philosophers develp alternative values to counter those of the technological democratic civilization.

Heidegger, Nihilism, Nietzsche

In Chapter 10 of Heidegger's Nihilism book (vol.4 of Nietzsche) he shifts from an exposition of Nietzsche's understanding of nihilism to confrontaton. He says that he will take one of the two lines of questioning outlined in the previous chapter. Heidegger says:

The principle points in this area of inquiry are, first, that Nietzsche thinks nihilism in its origin, development, and overcoming solely in terms of valuative thought; second, that thinking in values belongs to that reality that is defined as the will to power; third, valuative thought is a necessary constitutent of all the metaphysics of will to power.

Heidegger than asks, 'What occurs essentially and reigns in Western metaphysics, that it should finally come to be a metaphysics of power?

Heidegger argues that evaluative thinking is decisive in Nietzsche's thinking and that he locates the source of value in the will of human beings to secure a value for themselves. Every kind of value positing, including the new valuation by which the new valuation is to be accomplished must be related to the will to power. Heidegger refers to para 715 Bk 4 of The Will To Power (p.380) where it is stated that the viewpoint of value is the 'viewpoint of the conditions of preservation and enhancement.... within becoming.' Viewpoints are perspectives.

Heidegger says that will to power is a richer name for becoming. What is required are those values that establish stability and continuance (preservation) and ensure enhancement of complex constructs of relativer life durations. Heidegger adds that the essence of the will to power is more power and that this empowering is an overpowering or an overcoming.

So values are connected to becoming in the sense of the waxing and waning of power. Thus values:

"...provide a standard of measure for the appraisal of degrees of power of the construct of domination and for judging its increase and decrease...... Do values therefore arise from will to power? Certainly. But we would be committing another error in thought if we now wished to understand values as if they were "something" the will to power, as if there were the latter which then posited "values" that would from time to time be pressed into service by it. Values, as conditions of preservation and enhancement of power, exist only as something conditioned by the one absolute will to power. Values are esentially conditioned conditions."

Hence will to power and valuing are the same.

interpreting Nietzsche's eternal return

Whilst reading Adam Thurschwell's article 'Spectres of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida' I chanced upon a passage about Giorgoi Agamben's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return. Thurschwell's account of this states:

'For Nietzsche, the doctrine of the eternal return is designed to overcome the will to power's inability to master the past, the "it was" that names the "will's gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy ", the fact that "the will cannot will backwards".'

Thurschwell adds:

'Agamben certainly shares Nietzsche's understanding up to a point; like Nietzsche, he views liberation from the past--humanity's "wandering through traditions"--as the goal of both philosophy and politics. But as Agamben points out, it is not simply the past that brings the will up against its limit, but the present moment as well.'

Thurschwell says that Nietzsche's solution is to embrace the eternal return (and the associated doctrine of loving one's fate) and thus transform every 'thus it was' and thus it is into a 'thus I willed it.' Agamben rejects Nietzsche's metaphysics of the will in favour of human potential.

Nietzsche, nihilism, eternal return: an interpretation

This post is courtesy of The Tragic Sense of Life, who links to this interview with Simon Chritchley. This bears upon the concerns with nihilism we have been considering here. Chritchley says the question of nihilism is what he puts at the centre of his philosophical agenda, thereby placing himself at odds with much philosophy in the English-speaking world. It is refreshing to see someone dealing with this. What is of interest is how he understands, and interprets, Nietzsche's conception of nihilism.

The interview starts with Nietzsche's phrase God is dead'...'And we have killed him' from the Gay Science. Chritchley then adds:

"...the death of God in a sense is unimportant; what's important is that it raises the question of the meaning of life. What is the meaning of life if there can be no religious basis to the meaning of life? There are various responses to that. One obvious one is that if religion is no longer the realm in which the question of the meaning of life is to be thought through, then what other realm is?.....

Nietzsche is traumatised by the death of God, because he realises that it's a collapse of the basis of meaning.... The name for this problem is nihilism. In my work I've tried to place the question of nihilism at the centre of philosophical concerns. Nihilism is the situation where, as Nietzsche says, the highest values devalue themselves."

This overlaps with Heidegger's understanding. Critchley says that the task facing the philosopher, and also the artist, is one of responding to nihilism. He says that Nietzsche's response is to diagnose nihilism in modern culture.

So how does he understand Nietzsche's response to his diagnosis? Chritchley is clear on this.After mentioning different modes of nihilism (eg., passive and active) he says:

"Nietzsche [is] neither a passive nor an active nihilist. He comes up with a third option which he calls eternal return or eternal recurrence...Nietzsche's response to nihilism is the doctrine of eternal return. You could read that in a cosmological way, as a belief that the universe is cyclical and is going to recur. Or, as you hinted, Vico's notion of cycles of history could be seen as signalled. I don't think that's what Nietzsche means. For him, eternal return is much more of a moral doctrine...."

Eternal return as a moral doctrine is on the right interpretative pathway. But what does it mean?

Chritchley is clear on this:

"What would it be to fully affirm the fact that God doesn't exist? To fully affirm the complete meaninglessness of the universe? And to be able to do that again and again and again. If you're capable of that thought, of affirming that this universe is not for us, that we're just here by sheer chance, and you can do that again and again, then you're equal to the force of eternal return. It's a sort of moral test ...[it's] an almost physical practise: to be able to physically withstand that vertigo of meaninglessness and then transfigure oneself in relationship to that. I've got my doubts about that, but that's what Nietzsche says."

So Nietzsche's account of nihilism involves a process of devaluation, recurrence and transformation by the tragic hero? Yes, according to Chritchley:

"what people get excited about in [Nietzsche's] work is this notion of affirmation: an affirmation in relation to death. I can affirm the meaninglessness of the universe and the ultimate meaninglessness of my own life, and heroically assume that."

I think that is about right---as far as it goes. Unlike Heidegger, Chritchley avoids any consideration of Nietzsche's metaphysics of will. Where is the confronttin with Nietzsche?

What is also missing from Chritchley's interpretation is the idea of affirmation as the revaluation of all values and the creation of new values in relation to the will to power. In chapter 9 of Nihilism Heidegger remarks that Nietzsche does not regard something as null; rather he sets it aside, overturns it and creates an open field. This classical nihilism:

'emerges from "life" as it used to be, cuts a path "for a new order," and grants whatever wants to die off its "longing for the end." In this way nihilism makes a clean sweep and at the same time introduces new possibilities.'

Heidegger introduces a perspective thqat is absent in Chritchley's interpretation of nihilism: by we do not mean something present or contemporary to Nietzsche's time. Nihilism points to a historical movement that extends far behind us and reaches forward far beyond us.

nihilism as history and metaphysics

Chapter 9 of Heidegger's Nihilism book on Nietzsche suggests two lines of questioning. Heidegger says:

"First, nihilism, as Nietzsche thinks it, is the history of the devaluation of the highest values hitherto, as the transition to the revaluation of all prior values, a revaluation that comes to pass in the discovery of a principle for a new valuation, a principle Nietzsche recognizes as the will to power.

Second, Nietzsche conceives of the esssence of nihilism solely on the basis of valuative thought, and in that form alone does it become an object of his critique and his attempt at overcoming. But because the valuation has its principle in the willl to power, overcoming nihilism by fulfilling it in its classical form develops into an interpretation of being as a whole. The new valuation is a metaphysics of will to power."

Nihilism is a history of valuations. If this history is considered one of decline, then nihilism is the inner logic of the decline.If the highest values are devalued, then the feeling arises that the world has gone awry and the world seems valueless.

What then happens is an attempt to circumvent nihilism without revaluating prior values.

Blanchot & the narrative turn

I have to catch a plane to Canberra in an hour or so. Here is an article by Lars Ivers on Blanchot in Postmodern Culture (no.3 vol.12 May 2003). It is entitled Blanchot, Narration, and the Event. Lyers says:

'The "narrative turn" in the humanities is born of an insistence that there are modes of experience that cannot be captured by a theory that would transcend the historicity of experience. It calls for a new concretion, a new plunge into existence through the examination of the way in which experiences are meaningfully interconnected as elements in a sequence.'

I would add 'in a historical sequence.'

And yet does not post modernism put narrative, especially master or grand narratives that support the established social and political order into question?

Lars says:

"Maurice Blanchot shows us how we might respond to an appeal inherent in the desire to narrate that would permit us to articulate a different relationship to the dominating narratives of our time. In some of his most vehement and programmatic pages, he argues that there is a desire indissociable from Western civilization (indeed, it could be said to constitute civilization itself) to recount its history and its experience, recapturing and thereby determining its past. Blanchot retraces this desire to the monotheisms that inaugurate "the civilization of the book" (Infinite Conversation p.425). As he argues, the exigencies that are realized by the Book are reaffirmed over the course of history through a certain determination of the humanitas of the human being, implying notions of subjectivity,community, and historicity."

gobbledegook wearing the mask of commonsense

gobbledegook.
The real in Lacan refers to the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Prior to this the baby makes no distinction between itself and the objects that satisfy its needs. So it exists in the realm of the Real, which is a psychic place (not a physical place), where there is this original unity between baby and nature. In this psychic place there is no absence or loss or lack since the Real is all fullness and completeness.

Is that so difficult to understand?

What we have here is the rejection of the psychoanalytic conception of the split subject (Freud's division between the unconscious and the consciousness or between the id and ego). This account challenges or questions the humanist category of a stable subject with free will and self-determination. Hence the humanist recoil from Freud's category of the unconscious as a chaotic realm of constantly shifting drives and desires.

Do we not live with this unconscious in our daily lives in our personal relationships?

What Lacan does is rework this account in terms of a linguistic discourse about the nature of signification and value within synchronic systems of signs, with its distinction between "la langue" versus "la parole," and its concern with on the concept of the linguistic sign itself. The argument is that the unconscious, which governs all factors of human existence, is structured like a language.

Is that difficult to understand? If we accept that, then Lacan reworks Freud's picture of the unconscious as a chaotic realm of constantly shifting drives and desires so that it becomes a continually circulating chain (or multiple chains) of signifiers, with no anchor--or, to use Derrida's terms, no center. The elements in the unconscious--our wishes, desires, images--all form signifiers (they're usually expressed in verbal terms), with these signifiers forming a "signifying chain".

For Lacan, there are no signifieds; there is nothing that a signifier ultimately refers to. If there were, then the meaning of any particular signifier in the unconscious would be relatively stable--and there would be (in Saussure's terms) a relation of signification between signifier and signified, with that relation creating soem stable some kind of meaning. Lacan says those relations of signification don't exist (in the unconscious, at least).

That makes sense of the way our dreams and fantasies work, does it not?

political desire

Stavro

more here and here and here

Nihilism:Values and will to power

In Chapter 8 of Nihilism (entitled 'The New Valuation') Heidegger continues to comment on and elucidate para 12 (B) in Bk I ('European Nihilism') of Nietzsche's The Will to Power. Nietzsche ends that paragraph thus:

"All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world--all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination--and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naivete of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things."

Heidegger comments:

'Nietzsche is saying that the essence of values has its ground in "constructs of domination." Values are essentially related to "domination". Dominance is the being in power of power. Values are bound to the will to power; they depend on it as the proper essence of power.'

Heidegger then makes an interesting comment. He says that for Nietzsche what is untrue and untenable about the highest values hitherto is not their content or meaning; it is that these values have been mistakenly dispatched to a realm existing it in itself, where they supposedly acquire absolute validity. It is mistaken because these values really have their origin and authority from a certain kind of will to power.

Nihilism: valuelessness

Chapter 7 of his Nihilism (ie., vol. 4 of his Nietzsche) continues to comment on a particular passage in in The Will to Power. The passage is para 12 (A) in Bk I (European Nihilism). Nietzsche ends this paragraph thus:

'What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of "aim," the concept of "unity," or the concept of "truth." Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not "true," is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories "aim," "unity," "being" which we used to project some value into the world--we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.'

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Commenting on this paragraph Heidegger says:

"Nihilism is obviously not a mere unobstrusive collapse of values in themselves somewhere at hand. Nihilism is our despositon of values that are at our disposal with respect to their being posited. By "us" and "we" , however, Nietzsche means the man of Western history...We ourselves, the contemporary representatives of Nietzsche's era, belong to those who are once again withdrawing values that were posited earlier. The deposition of values does not arise from a mere thirst for blind destruction and vain innovation. It arises from the need and necessity to give the world the meaning tht does not reduce it to a mere passage into the beyond."

Heidegger's chapter is entitled 'Nihilism and the History of Man', and Heidegger is explicating Nietzseche's interpretation of nihilism rather than confronting him.

Heidegger: nihilism, values, categories

In Chapter 6 in Nihilism, entitled 'The Uppermost Values as Categories' Heidegger is commenting on para 12 (A and B) in Bk I (European Nihilism) of Nietzsche's The Will to Power. He says

'Nietzsche abruptly calls the uppermost values categories, without giving the terms a more precise explanation that might establish why the uppermost values are apprehended in that way, and why "categories" can be conceived of as uppermost values. What are "categories"?'

The reference is to two passages in para 12, 'Decline of Cosmological Values', in Nietzsche's Will to Power text. At the end of section (A) of para 12 Nietzsche states that nihilism means:

"One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories "aim," "unity," "being" which we used to project some value into the world--we pull out again; so the world looks valueless."

And in section (B) of para 12 Nietzsche states that:

'Conclusion: The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.'

In addressing the question, 'What are categories?', Heidegger goes back to Aristotle. Philosophically speaking categories are:

"..the basic words of metaphysics and are therefore names for fundamental philosophical concepts .... When Nietzsche in section B says without further justification that the highest values are "categories of reason" , that characterisation is once again the same as what Kant taught and Aristotle thought through."

Heidegger adds that the nature of relationship between the categories and reason--judgemental thinking--is grasped differently in Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche, depending on how they define the essence of reason and how they expereience and explain being as such.

However, Nietzsche's link between categories and uppermost values indicates how much Nietzsche thinks along the pathway of metaphysics. He is not simply the poet philosopher within the literary institution.
Heidegger then asks: 'Does Nietzsche stray from the path of metaphysics when he conceives of the categories as values?' 'Does Nietzsche become an anti-metaphysician?, as many in the literary institution claim? 'Or does Nietzsche merely bring metaphysics to completion and becomes the last metaphysician?' To answer these questions requires us to first elucidate Nietzsche's concept of nihilism.

Blanchot: writing disaster

Below is a quote from Stephen Mitchelmore's essay, Maurice Blanchot, the absent voice, from The Gaping Void. It is from a section of the essay that deals with with disaster, the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the disaster to come, specifically our own death. How does one deal with this?

"The fragmentary work, perhaps the apogee of 20th Century Modernist literature and philosophy, is Blanchot's approach. Its refusal to insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority, means both reader and writer are constantly moving toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning even as it encroaches on each clearing."

'Moving towards what is absent'----does this refer to what is absent in a positivist scientific culture? Can we think in terms of black holes in such a culture? Is this the philosophical background that enables us to make sense of the linking literature, fragments and absences.

These guys in the 1940s were just beginning to think about the consequences for art, literature and philosophy in a positivist scientific culture; just begining to think otherwise. So beginning to think otherwise deals with disaster and the abysses of modernity that a positivist science avoids, and is silent about?

Blanchot: essay on

My apologies. Posting has been light because I've been looking for a new job. My old job as a staffer (researcher/advisor) for a federal Senator in Canberra is coming to an end. The Senate is going to be a very different place after June 30th when the conservatives gain control, and I don't want to be around to see all the good work of the last ten years undone.

This is a good essay on Blanchot from The Gaping Void. It appears to be the work of Stephen Mitchelmore, formerly of In Writing and now of This Space? Is this right? Does anybody know?

The essay is entitled 'Maurice Blanchot, the absent voice', and it opens with a statement about what Blanchot offers us in relation to literature:

"what Blanchot offers...is a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That is, why do written words have so much power over us, yet also seem completely estranged from the world they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature takes us to "another world", we say more than we might imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to us relentlessly. "There is an a-cultural aspect to art and literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly" he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself, so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced even, Blanchot's resistance makes him, in my opinion, one of the most important writers.....Might the asymmetry of art and world be what makes it vital and important? In a short essay from 1953, published in a new translation by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates' preference for speech over writing."

Fine. I'll put that to one side as I'm more interested in the literary institution and the relationship between tradition and modernist rebellion.

The essay says:

"The idea of overthrowing cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition) has dominated our conception of literature for 150 years....Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled auto-de-fe and so destroy the complacent world of bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular richness. What Blanchot .... does is to point out that in order to do either requires a scrupulous attention to language."

I'm lost on the rest of it about literature, oracles, absences--literature as the absent voice. Something is missing here, which I cannot put my findger on.

returning to Heidegger on nihilism

Given the poverty of Blanchot's essay on nihilism, and that of the neo cons like Irving Kristol, I've returned to reading Heidegger on Nietzsche and nihilism. I've gone back to vol 4 of Heidegger's Nietzsche and I'm reading chapter 5, 'The Provenance of Nihilism and the Nihilism's Three Forms.'

Heidegger says:

If [the] uppermost values, which grant all beings their value, are devalued, then all beings grounded in them become valueless. A feeling of futility, of the nullity of everything arises. hence nihilism, as the decline of cosmological values, is at the same time the emergence of nihilism as a feeling of utter valuelessness, as a "psychological state."

Heidegger is reading Bk I, European Nihilism, para 12 (A, Decline of Cosmological Values) of Nietzsche's The Will to Power.

Blanchot on Bataille

In his essay on Bataille in The Infinite Conversation entitled 'Affirmation and the passion of negative thought' Blanchot mentions that Bataille's inner experience is a limit-experience.

Blanchot briefly describes what he means by a limit experience:

"The limit-experience is the response that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question. This decision involving all being expresses the impossibility of ever stopping, whether it be at some consolation or some truth, at the interests or results of an action, or with the certitudes of knowledge and belief. It is a movement of contestation that traverses all of history, but that at times closes up into a system, at other times pieces the world to find its end in a beyond where man entrusts himself to an absolute term (God, Being, the Good, Eternity, Unity)--and in each case disavows itself." (p.204)

It is a form of negative thinking that does not merge with scepticism.