The History of Philosophy and the Nietzsche Lectures

There is no reason to believe that that Heidegger confronts National Socialism in his first cycle of Hölderlin lectures. There is no significant criticism of Nazism in these lectures; in fact, Heidegger here reaffirms his support for the historical gathering of the Germans, the very concern that is ingredient in his original Nazi turning. But perhaps Heidegger confronts National Socialism in his Nietzsche lectures. Heidegger's insistence that like the first Hölderlin lecture series, the Nietzsche lectures record his confrontation with National Socialism is accepted by a number of commentators. We need now to explore this claim in detail.

Heidegger's Nietzsche courses exhibit his approach to the history of philosophy. As a first step toward an appreciation of his reading of Nietzsche's thought, it is useful to characterize Heidegger's attitude toward prior philosophy. In general terms, Heidegger shares a form of the antihistorical bias, characteristic of the modern tradition, against the philosophical tradition. He is not biased against the history of philosophy as such, since he clearly borrows from it with great frequency in the process of working out his own thought. Yet in virtue of his approach to Being, in principle for Heidegger as for the majority of modern philosophers who maintain the separation between the history of philosophy and philosophy, the history of philosophy is a series of mistakes. The difference is that whereas most other thinkers reject the history of philosophy in general, at least initially Heidegger believes that he can return to certain insights in early Greek thought through his more limited rejection of the history of ontology since the early Greeks.

Most thinkers who devalue the history of philosophy simply do not know much about it. Examples are Descartes, Kant, and Husserl. Heidegger, who provides a stunning counterexample to the lack of historical knowledge typical of modern thinkers, is distinguished by his knowledge of the history of philosophy.^[37] Like Hegel and few others in the modern period, Heidegger exhibits a truly comprehensive, encyclopedic grasp of the length and breadth of the philosophical tradition. Heidegger's unusual grasp of prior philosophy was apparent in Being and Time , which already exhibits a wide awareness of the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present. His interest in the history of philosophy is even more apparent in his later thought, which often takes the form of a series of commentaries on important philosophical predecessors, commentaries that Heidegger describes as an effort to dialogue with them on their own level.

Heidegger's knowledgeable approach to prior philosophy bears com-

parison with Hegel's. Heidegger explicitly credits Hegel with inventing the concept of the history of philosophy.^[38] Hegel's discussion exhibits a profound grasp of the history of philosophy, but he is not a historian of philosophy if that implies a concern to study prior philosophy in independence of philosophy; and, for the same reason, neither is Heidegger. Yet Hegel and Heidegger differ radically in their respective approaches to the philosophic tradition. As concerns prior thought, Hegel's concern is epistemological whereas Heidegger's is ontological. Hegel considers prior thought from an epistemological perspective, as a unitary phenomenon composed of related efforts, which build upon earlier positions, in order finally to demonstrate the alleged unity of thought and being. From his ontological angle of vision, Heidegger maintains that the initial pre-Socratic insight into Being was later obscured and covered up by a turn away to another, mistaken approach, which continues to dominate the discussion of metaphysics until Hegel and Nietzsche. Heidegger's effort is directed toward a recovery of the initial pre-Socratic view of Being which supposedly lies hidden behind the later metaphysical tradition.

Hegel and Heidegger exhibit opposite attitudes to philosophy itself. Hegel is positively disposed toward the history of philosophy, which demonstrates ever greater progress in the study of the conditions of knowledge, and which finally reaches its traditional aim in his own theory. Heidegger holds that since the pre-Socratics philosophy has been engaged in a long, difficult, and finally meaningless metaphysical exercise. Heidegger's bleaker assessment that philosophy has historically failed to, and in fact cannot, realize its aim is widely shared by others in the modern tradition. In his later effort to move beyond philosophy, Heidegger came to accept a version of the view held in different but related ways by, among others, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, the Marxists, and Nietzsche—each of whom desired to surpass philosophy—that philosophy as such is inadequate to respond to its concerns. He further accepted a version of the Young Hegelian view that the philosophical tradition comes to an end in Hegel, which he restates as the claim that the history of metaphysics terminates in Nietzsche.^[39]

Heidegger's thought is often understood in terms of figures in the historical tradition. Although he himself emphasizes his attachment to pre-Socratic thought, it is usual to classify his position in terms of possible sources in modern philosophy.^[40] His historical interest developed in his early thought, even before Being and Time . His dissertation on the idea of judgment in psychologism, which concerned logic,^[41] was followed in the second dissertation, or Habilitationsschrift , by a study of the categories and view of meaning of Duns Scotus.^[42]

Heidegger's writings exhibit a wide acquaintance with prior philo-

sophical thought. In no particular order, his corpus exhibits detailed study and knowledge of Parmenides, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Kant, Schelling, and Nietzsche. His early concentration on ontological themes partly explains the nearly complete lack of attention to English-language writers, including all of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and the relative inattention to such writers as Socrates, Fichte, Marx, Augustine, Thomas, and Husserl. Even Hegel, who is discussed often, is handled in a curiously incomplete manner, as if Heidegger were finally unable to come to grips with his thought.^[43]

In general terms, inspection of Heidegger's writings reveals a progression from systematic discussion—presupposing extensive historical analysis, which is initially mainly absent—to less systematic, more historically oriented discussion. Being and Time , the main work of Heidegger's early period, is highly systematic, based on thorough knowledge of the history of philosophy, with the exception of English-language sources. In the English translation, the index of proper names contains eighty-two names, not a large number, mainly philosophers, as well as an occasional theologian, the New Testament, and so on. There are no references to English-language writers. But there are extensive references to a variety of important philosophers, including most prominently Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Dilthey, Hegel, Husserl, Kant, Parmenides, Plato, Scheler, Simmel, and Thomas. Other writers whose influence on Heidegger's position is significant, even decisive, are scarcely mentioned. These include Kierkegaard, whose thought certainly provides a basic influence on the formation of Heidegger's view of human being as Dasein,^[44] Luther,^[45] and perhaps Nietzsche.

Not surprisingly, since the view Heidegger expounds in this book is basically anti-Cartesian, it contains a detailed account and critique of Descartes's thought.^[46] Heidegger further studies aspects of numerous other positions, such as Kant's refutation of idealism,^[47] the relation of his own view of historicality to the theories of Dilthey and Yorck,^[48] and Hegel's view of time and its relation to spirit.^[49] In addition, there are numerous generalizations about the history of philosophy. An example is the assertion, as early as the first page of the work, that the view of Being put forward by Plato and Aristotle remained basically unchanged until Hegel.^[50] Yet the historical interpretation underlying such interpretative generalizations is mainly absent in the work itself.

Although Being and Time mainly lacks specific historical analyses, Heidegger specifically indicates his view of the history of philosophy in his account of "The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology."^[51] To provide for a radical new interpretation of Being as time, he desires to reappropriate the history of ontology in a way that frees, or makes

available, possibilities that, in his opinion, have been covered up at least since the early Greeks. His aim is to take up the tradition but not to fall prey to it,^[52] to prevent it from, in his words, blocking "our access to those promordial 'sources' from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn."^[53] His ultimate goal is to interrogate the history of Being in order to return, beyond it, to the original experiences which determine it.

We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue , we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since.^[54]

Heidegger's approach to the history of philosophy changes significantly in later writings. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology , the text of Heidegger's lecture course from spring semester 1927, the year in which Being and Time appeared, provides extensive historical interpretation within the systematic framework characteristic of Heidegger's position before the turning in his thought. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology takes up the central theme of the third section of part 1 of Being and Time , that is, the question concerning the meaning of Being through the demonstration that time is the horizon of all understanding of Being. According to the outline, the lecture course—it was organized as a book according to Heidegger's suggestions^[55] —is divided into three main parts: a "phenomenological-critical discussion of several traditional theses about the meaning of Being in general," "the fundamental-ontological question about the meaning of Being in general," and "the scientific method of ontology and the idea of phenomenology."^[56] In fact, the text of the course covers only the four chapters of the first part and the initial chapter of the second part. Roughly the last third of the work provides a purely systematic account of what Heidegger here calls "The fundamental ontological question of the meaning of Being in general." Roughly the first two-thirds of the book consists of a systematic treatment in detail of four traditional theses about Being.

Heidegger's systematic treatment of the different historical theses about Being is at least as comprehensive and relatively more detailed than the historical sections of Being and Time . He devotes fifty pages, for instance, to the analysis of Kant's thesis that being is not a real predicate in an analysis divided into three parts. The first part, devoted to "The Content of the Kantian Thesis," contains a detailed description of the Kantian exposition of his view in a precritical essay, "The Sole Possible Argument for a Demonstration of the Existence of God," and later in the

two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason . The account of the Kantian thesis demonstrates a mastery of the relevant details, such as an effort to trace Kant's use of the term "reality" over Baumgarten to scholasticism,^[57] a remark on the difference between Kant's conception of objective reality, and reality as elucidated,^[58] and so on. The depth and breadth of Heidegger's approach to Kant's thesis is equaled by his treatment of the other historical theses he considers. Heidegger's other early writings often contain historical generalization, but among them this volume stands out in virtue of Heidegger's willingness to provide the historical analyses that underlie his sweeping judgments about prior thought.

Heidegger's inaugural lecture, "What Is Metaphysics?," delivered in 1929, is a systematic analysis nearly devoid of attention to the history of philosophy. In the same year, he published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics , a work based on lectures presented in the fall semester of 1925 and at Davos in March 1929.^[59] Heidegger's interpretation of Kant is a by-product of his work on the second part of Being and Time .^[60] Beyond the specific discussion of the critical philosophy, this book is valuable for the light it sheds on Heidegger's approach to the history of philosophy.

There is a clear link between the book on Kant and Being and Time . In his proposed destruction of the history of ontology, Heidegger represents his own position as the completion of the intention animating Kant's critical philosophy. He states that Kant is his only predecessor, although for reasons intrinsic to his approach Kant was unable to complete his study of the link between time and the "I think," which ultimately, for Kant, did not even appear problematic.^[61] Heidegger discerns the key to this problem in Kant's doctrine of the schematism. Heidegger argues for his interpretation through an exposition of selected parts of the critical philosophy, beginning with an effort to establish what he calls the problematic of temporality. He attributes Kant's inability to reach the "correct" result, for Heidegger's own view of the temporal nature of Being, to two reasons. First, Kant neglected the problem of Being, and the analysis of Dasein, to which he preferred the Cartesian position. Second, although he brought time into the subject, he took over the traditional view of time. Now although Being and Time established the problematic of temporality, it does not contain Heidegger's analysis of the Kantian doctrine of the schematism, which is provided in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics . In that sense, independently of the light it casts on Kant's position, this book represents a vital, further link in the chain of Heidegger's effort to provide his view of Being as time with "true concreteness" through a destruction of the prior onto-logical tradition.^[62]

In his study of Kant, Heidegger considers the critical philosophy as an incomplete anticipation of the problem of Being. He presents the Cri-

tique of Pure Reason as an effort to found metaphysics, which, accordingly, is revealed as a problem of fundamental ontology. The title of the Kant book, which is ambiguous, can be understood from two perspectives: as the question concerning being (Seiende ) as such in its totality, and as an inquiry into the problem of metaphysics.^[63] The discussion is divided into four main parts, including an analysis of the foundation of metaphysics, its carrying out, its originality, and its repetition.^[64]

Any interpretation needs to reflect on its relation to what it interprets. This problem is especially acute in Heidegger's discussions of the history of philosophy since he never considers other views for their intrinsic merits, and always considers them in terms of his own project. Although his book sheds considerable light on Kant's position, it would be a mistake to read it merely as a study of Kant.^[65] In the foreword to the translation, Thomas Langan, who closely follows Heidegger on this point, insists that the result is an "authentic Kantian commentary," in effect a model for all dialogue between thinkers, although he simply concedes that Heidegger is not concerned with what Kant meant or said.^[66]

The very idea of a dialogue between thinkers is problematic since it is not clear what "commentary" means in this sense. The book, which documents an encounter of one powerful thinker with another, is not a dialogue, or at least not so in any simple sense because the encounter is clearly one-sided, a kind of monologue. Kant does not, and indeed could not, answer Heidegger either directly or through his writings since Heidegger makes no pretense at concentrating on what is either implicit or even explicit in the critical philosophy. And there is more than a hint that a commentary that concentrated on such matters would be inauthentic, by implication less valuable than one that did not.

Heidegger, who is aware of these issues, responds to them briefly in two places, which further illuminate his approach to the history of philosophy.^[67] In the discussion of Kant's conception of the ground, he states that his work is concerned to bring out what Kant intended to say.^[68] He points to a passage in which Kant talks about the need to go beyond what is said to the intention, and then adds that for this reason every interpretation is necessarily violent.^[69] For Heidegger, a violent interpretation is not arbitrary since it is guided by a central insight, which is confirmed by its utility. "The directive idea itself is confirmed by its own power of illumination."^[70] But this justification is unsatisfactory. In practice, it is obviously difficult to decide whether a given interpretation is in fact confirmed, since opinions will differ with respect to the significance of a given reading. It is further mistaken to believe that an interpretation that provides insight, and is, therefore, confirmed, is not merely arbitrary. An example, among many, is Kojève's justly celebrated, insight-

ful, but demonstrably arbitrary reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit .^[71]

As if unsatisfied by his remark on the limits of interpretation, Heidegger returns to the issue of violent textual interpretation in a new preface added to the second edition of the work. He notes that he has been correctly criticized for the violence of his interpretations. In response, he argues that, in the discussion of prior views, one must choose between two mutually exclusive alternatives: what he calls the method of historical philology, from whose perspective, by implication, the objections to his approach are justified; and what he calls an inquiry that is both historical and philosophical, whose aim is, in his words, "to set in motion a thoughtful dialogue between thinkers."^[72]

Since in the second edition, Heidegger is willing to admit that some, but not all, interpretations are violent, his task becomes the justification of violent interpretations. At this point, he silently drops the claim to elicit the hidden aim of Kant's position. In fact, he no longer makes any claim to follow the text as written in any strict sense, since presumably that is the appanage of the philological approach which he rejects. The resultant views of violent textual interpretation are independent of each other. It could be the case that an interpretation captures the intent of a text even if, in practice, it would be difficult to agree on a claim to that effect; and it could also be the case that a given reading sets in motion a dialogue between two thinkers in Heidegger's sense although it demonstrably contradicts, or at least fails to grasp, the intention behind a particular text on a reasonable interpretation of it.

We can infer that Heidegger regards his study of the prior tradition as respecting the historical and philosophical, but not the philological, approach; we can further infer that Heidegger feels justified in ignoring such criteria as fidelity to the text and the intent of a thinker, what Kant would call the letter and spirit of a view, in order to bring about what he regards as dialogue.^[73] The criterion, then, of the degree of success of Heidegger's dialogues with previous thinkers is not, and cannot be, the fidelity of his interpretations or even the extent of the light he throws on their positions, since he has in effect insulated his discussion against any evaluation in terms of its relation to the texts; the criterion lies wholly and solely in the way in which Heidegger is able to make use of a prior position in order to argue for and advance his own thought. It follows that, as Langan admits, what he regards as an authentic commentary and a model for dialogue between thinkers is in fact freed of all textual constraints, and, hence, merely arbitrary.

These remarks, added to the second edition of Heidegger's study of Kant, usefully indicate Heidegger's awareness, and attempted justification, of the problematic nature of his approach to the history of philoso-

phy. Heidegger studies the history of philosophy increasingly in his later writings, although he only rarely reflects explicitly on his practice. Two exceptions occur in An Introduction to Metaphysics .^[74] In a passage on the origin of philosophy among the Greeks, Heidegger remarks that being (Seiende ) was called physis , which is usually translated as "nature," from the Latin natura , which means "to be born, birth."^[75] Heidegger regards this displacement as neither innocent nor innocuous but rather as an instance of the general problem that in the translation from Greek into Latin the original Greek philosophical impulse was lost. All later philosophy is based on the translation of Greek thought into Latin, as a result of which philosophy has lost its original inspiration. This idea grounds Heidegger's persistent effort, through the interrogation of terms, to recover the earlier, allegedly "correct" meanings, which have supposedly been "covered" up in the later discussion, in order, as he says, "to skip over this whole process of deformation and decay and attempt to regain the unimpaired strength of language and words."^[76]

The thesis underlying Heidegger's linguistic retrieval of philosophical insight is problematic. We cannot establish, and there is no reason to believe, that earlier is better, so to speak, that the so-called original meaning—even if it could be determined in a leap behind the tradition to its origins, which is highly doubtful—is in general closer to the truth of the matter, or more productive of philosophical insight. Even if translation often, even inevitably, results in a displacement of meaning, it does not follow that the result is a general loss of significant philosophical insight. To know how Aristotle employs the term "ousia " provides insight into his ontology; it provides insight into a correct view of ontology only if Aristotle's ontological view is correct. In principle, Heidegger's linguistic approach offers a way to retrieve elements of earlier views; but it cannot justify the claim that to retrieve earlier views is to retrieve the truth of the matter.

What I am calling Heidegger's attempted linguistic retrieval of original philosophical insight yields two views, both of which are problematic: the claim that there is an original insight that has somehow been covered up, and the related claim that what has been covered up can now be appropriately uncovered. These views are obviously independent of each other. It could turn out that there is an original philosophical insight that has later been covered up but which we cannot retrieve since we cannot determine the original, correct meanings of the words; it could further turn out that we can determine the original meanings of the words but no original philosophical insight is revealed; it could finally turn out, as Heidegger maintains, that to determine the original meanings of the words, by returning behind their subsequent linguistic displacement, enables us to grasp original philosophical insight.

Now ordinarily translation provides the way to recover a meaning in a language that has later changed, either through intralinguistic translation, in which we consult a manual, dictionary, or lexicon of some kind to determine, say, how an English word was earlier expressed, for instance in Middle English or even in Anglo-Saxon, or through interlinguistic translation, such as through the use of a Greek-English lexicon to determine the meaning of a Greek term. In recent years, translation has come under attack as in principle arbitrary.^[77] In virtue of his claim that a linguistic displacement has occurred in the translation of the original texts, Heidegger cannot rely on any later discussions. But if he needs in each case to determine the so-called original meaning without appealing to the available scholarly apparatus, he must find a way to guard against the charge of mere arbitrariness.

Heidegger attends to this problem in the course of a second, lengthy passage from the same work on the relation of thought to being in early Greek philosophy. He concedes that his interpretation must appear as an "arbitrary distortion"^[78] with respect to the prevailing types of interpretation. He further concedes that he is correctly accused of reading in what cannot be exactly determined. But, he asks rhetorically:

Which interpretation is the true one, the one which simply takes over a perspective into which it has fallen, because this perspective, this line of sight. presents itself as familiar and self-evident; or the interpretation which questions the customary perspective from top to bottom, because conceivably—and indeed actually—this line of sight does not lead to what is in need of being seen.^[79]

No doubt it is always useful, and sometimes unavoidable, to examine critically what we think we know, to scrutinize the habitual as a possible source of error. But it does not follow that, this having been done, the resultant textual interpretation avoids, or that Heidegger avoids, new forms of error, such as reading into the texts what one wishes to find there, which he here refers to as "what is in need of being seen."

Even in Heidegger's most systematic writings, such as Being and Time , the history of philosophy, especially the history of ontology, is never far from his mind. In the long period after this work, Heidegger directly considers historical themes with increasing frequency. This relative change in emphasis can be illustrated in various ways. For instance, the three collections of essays Heidegger published between 1950 and 1967 are largely concerned with historical topics.^[80] A better index is furnished by Heidegger's lecture courses from 1923 on, namely volumes 27-55 inclusive in his collected works, now being published. Of these twenty-eight volumes, nine are devoted to systematic and nineteen to

historical topics. It follows that Heidegger gave rather more attention to historical themes than to systematic ones in his lectures, although the proportion was inverted in his published writings. Now if we take Heidegger's 1935 lecture course as a fictitious dividing point, we note a clear change in the relative attention to historical subjects around this point. Prior to 1935, there are a total of eleven lecture courses, including four on systematic and seven on historical questions. After 1935, there are fifteen lecture courses, including one or at most one and a half on systematic issues;^[81] but all the rest concern historical topics. Hence, there is not only an increasing, but even a predominant, concern with historical matters after 1935, at least in the lecture courses.