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February 20, 2006
Nietzsche has been read in vastly different and contradictory ways. He has been appropriated by both the right and the left; read as a fascist and a socialist, a conservative and a revolutionary, a religious thinker and an atheist. the post modern reading is that thesis that there is no single way of getting Nietzsche right because philosophy is an intertextual literary practice, then those with different backgrounds of texts would have different “readings” of a given text or group of texts.
Interpretations of Nietzsche continue to multiply around the biological, evolution and science. My understanding is that, despite his critique of Darwin, Nietzsche accepts the core of Darwin's theory, appropriates it for critical purposes of his own, and then builds on it in ways that continue to resonate today. Mine is a Heideggerian reading. My judgement of Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation is not a negative one, and so it is different from most contemporary American Nietzsche interpretations, which tacitly holds that Heidegger's reading is wrong , incorrect, or in error.
Here's Heidegger on the biological in Nietzsche's texts:
To be sure, Nietzsche relates everything to 'life'----to the 'biological'. Yet does he still think life itself, the biological, 'biologically', in such a way that he explains the essence of life in terms of plant and animal phenomena? Nietzsche thinks the 'biological', the essence of what is alive, in the direction of commanding and poeticizing, of the perspectival and horizonal: in the direction of freedom. He does not think the biological, that is, the essence of what is alive, biologically at all. So little is Nietzsche's thinking in danger of biologism that on the contrary he rather tends to interpret what is biological in the true and strict sense --- the plant and animal ---nonbiologically, that is, humanly, pre-eminently in terms of the determinations of perspective, horizon, commanding and poeticizing--- in general, in terms of the representing of beings. ( Nietzsche, vol. 3 . p. 122.)
This disputes the traditional interpretation of Nietzsche's biologism, racism, and eugenics, in which the biologism commits Nietzsche to some form of determinism or fatalism.
Heidegger does not simply mean biology in terms of study of living organisms ---ie., zoology--- since bios means something closer to way of life, livelihood, etc, that is organized around will to power. What we find in Nietzsche on Heidegger's reading is a systematic (metaphysical) theory of being in which becoming, change and power is ontologically basic, and in light of which we ought to understand the rest of Nietzsche's ideas.
What we have with Deleuze's interpretation is a Nietzsche as a naturalistic thinker whose philosophy of life is based on an analysis of powers as forces (ie., forces that push or set something in motion; or forces as drives or plastic dispositions to behave in ways that aim at a particular goal or values?). Yet Deleuze doesn't engage with Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche.
The non-engagement is odd isn't it. Well, I find it odd.
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Out of curiosity, do you know any books that try and defend the Heideggarian reading against the recent readings in American philosophy?
I'm intrigued that you think the Heidegger reading is actually accurate to Heidegger's mind. I admit I'm anything but an expert on this but I always took it more as akin to his readings of other philosophers like Kant where being true to what is said was less important than being true to their questions and thinking through them "originally."