{"id":642,"date":"2016-09-10T00:49:24","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T04:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=642"},"modified":"2016-09-10T08:35:55","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T12:35:55","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-heideggers-aesthetics-of-being","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-heideggers-aesthetics-of-being\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt: Toward an Aesthetics of Being"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blood<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the heart of Heidegger\u2019s engagement with Nietzsche lies a profound tension or gap that is, on my reading, insurmountable and unbridgeable: it is the conflict<\/a> between Heidegger\u2019s conception of being and Nietzsche\u2019s conviction about becoming. I would argue that this tension is what ultimately undermines Heidegger\u2019s project of reconciling Nietzsche with his Being and Time<\/em>. It accounts for what Babette Babich<\/a> referred to as the \u201cbreaking,\u201d or destruction, or corruption of Heidegger\u2014captured so succinctly in that notorious statement by Heidegger that \u201cNietzsche hat mich kaput gemacht<\/em>” (\u201cNietzsche has broken me\u201d). It also accounts, I would argue, for the shift in Heidegger\u2019s attitude toward Nietzsche and metaphysics that Taylor Carman<\/a> so ably identified in his presentation on “Heidegger’s Two Nietzsches.” It renders Heidegger\u2019s attempted reconciliation\u2014which I would summarize, brutally, as \u201cbecoming plus eternal recurrence becomes being\u201d\u2014effectively untenable.<\/p>\n

In the process of this ultimately unsuccessful confrontation, however, there is a critical move that, I think, is of genuine interest for us. Heidegger\u2019s forced marriage of being and eternal recurrence in the early lectures, rather than reifying a scientific or ontological reading of the eternal return and producing a Heideggerian conception of being, actually does something very different: it underscores the ethical dimension of the eternal return and, in connection with Heidegger\u2019s and Nietzsche\u2019s fascination with artistic creation (\u201cthe will to power as art<\/em>\u201d), produces a type of \u201caesthetics of being\u201d that can be fruitfully put in conversation with Foucault\u2019s turn to an \u201caesthetics of existence\u201d or the Surrealists\u2019s ideas of an aesthetic frisson<\/em>. This may not have been Heidegger\u2019s intention, and it may not leap off of the page, but it is nevertheless a productive critical intervention that I believe stems from Heidegger\u2019s confrontation with Nietzsche.<\/p>\n

Not all the interesting critical moves that we will identify this year will be the deliberate product of the critical thinkers we will be reading. Some will be more unintended or fortuitous\u2014some are mere collisions, accidents. That may be the case here, but it points in a terribly productive direction.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The deep tension between Heidegger and Nietzsche\u2014between being and becoming\u2014is what accounts, I would argue, for Heidegger\u2019s obsession with Nietzsche following Being and Time<\/em>. Nietzsche\u2019s emphasis on doing, rather than doers, on becoming, rather than being, posed a fundamental objection to Heidegger. And although Heidegger explicitly and adamantly maintained that he was not trying to force Nietzsche “into”\u00a0Being and Time<\/em>, my sense is that he was protesting too much\u2014this effort actually played a large role in his reading of Nietzsche. So, when Heidegger writes the following, my sense is that he is in fact revealing the hidden truth:<\/p>\n

If we bring Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cwill to power,\u201d that is, his question concerning the Being of beings, into the perspective of the question concerning \u201cBeing and Time,\u201d that does not at all mean that Nietzsche\u2019s work is to be related to a book entitled Being and Time<\/em> and that it is to be measured and interpreted according to the contents of that book. Being and Time<\/em> can be evaluated only by the extent to which it is equal or unequal to the question it raises. There is no standard other than the question itself; only the question, not the book, is essential. (Vol. I, p. 20)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reading those words only confirms my sense of the early lectures: namely, that Heidegger is essentially relating Nietzsche\u2019s work back into Being and Time<\/em> and measuring it against that metric.<\/p>\n

Along those lines, it is precisely the tension between Heidegger\u2019s being and Nietzsche\u2019s becoming that is at the heart of Heidegger\u2019s constant effort to both recognize his distance from Nietzsche, but simultaneously close the gap. As Tracy Colony remarks, this reflects the \u201cenigmatic composite of proximity and distance that formed the interpretive horizon for Heidegger\u2019s inaugural confrontation with Nietzsche.\u201d (198). Heidegger resolves this enigma, in my opinion, by means of the notion of eternal return. To be very crude, I would contend that for Heidegger:<\/p>\n

Becoming becomes being by means of the eternal return. In other words, the tension between being and becoming is resolved by converting becoming into being through the recurrence of becoming. <\/em><\/p>\n

Heidegger says as much himself when, referring to the most problematic passage in Nietzsche on becoming (\u201cTo stamp<\/em> Becoming with the character of Being\u2014that is the supreme will to power”), <\/em>Heidegger\u00a0<\/em>writes: \u201cWe ask: Why is this the supreme <\/em>will to power? The answer is, because will to power in its most<\/em> profound essence is nothing other than the permanentizing of Becoming into presence\u201d (Vol. III, p. 156; see also Vol III, p. 213).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe permanentizing of Becoming into presence<\/em>\u201d: that is what Heidegger wants eternal recurrence to achieve. Throughout Volumes 1 and 2 (of the English edition), Heidegger rehearses and repeats his central argument that, for Nietzsche, the two central concepts are will to power and eternal return, and that those two must be understood together: we must grasp \u201cin a unified way the doctrines of the eternal return of the same and will to power, and these two doctrines in their most intrinsic coherence as revaluation\u201d\u2014and only then will we essentially understand \u201cNietzsche\u2019s philosophy,\u201d as well as \u201cthe twentieth century and [\u2026] the centuries to come\u2026\u201d (Vol. I, p. 17) Here are a few recurring passages:<\/p>\n

\u201cNietzsche offers two answers with regard to being as a whole: being as a whole is will to power, and being as a whole is eternal recurrence of the same.\u201d (Vol. II, p. 198-99)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIn truth, the coherence of both <\/em>must be grasped.\u201d (Vol. II, p. 199)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cBoth thoughts\u2014will to power and eternal recurrence of the same\u2014say the same<\/em> and think the same<\/em> fundamental characteristic of beings as a whole.\u201d (Vol. III, p. 10).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe essential, historic culmination of the final metaphysical interpretation of beingness as will to power is captured in the eternal recurrence of the same\u2026\u201d (Vol. III, p. 180-181)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen in our meditations we bring the guiding projection of all metaphysics to closer inspection, we see that both thoughts think the same thing\u2014will to power in terms of modernity, eternal recurrence of the same in terms of the history of the end.\u201d (Vol. III, p. 166)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cHence, the basic character of beings as will to power is also defined as \u2018the eternal recurrence of the same.\u2019\u201d (Vol. IV, p. 7-8).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Colony asks: \u201cWhat was the hermeneutic presupposition which guided Heidegger\u2019s interpretation such that, although never posing the proper question of being as such, Nietzsche could still be described as standing in an essential and intimate relation with Heidegger\u2019s own thought?\u201d (Colony, p. 198). The answer, I would contend, is his turn to eternal return to transform becoming into being.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche, I would argue, anticipated this move, and warned against it, precisely in the passage that Heidegger returns to again and again in the late notebooks (Will to Power<\/em> \u00a7 617): \u201cTo stamp<\/em> Becoming with the character of Being\u2014that is the supreme will to power<\/em>.\u201d (Quoted in Vol. I. 19). Nietzsche in fact adds: \u201cThat everything recurs<\/em> is the closest approximation<\/em> of a world of Becoming to one of Being: –peak of the meditation.\u201d (WP \u00a7617; quoted at Vol. I, p. 19). It is almost as if he were writing to Heidegger: at best an approximation. Certainly not an equation.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Heidegger\u2019s argument pushes too hard on the ontological or scientific reading of the eternal recurrence. The effort to deploy the eternal return in this way\u2014to reconcile Nietzsche with Heidegger\u2014does too much work and, effectively, backfires. Rather than tame becoming, what it does instead is to highlight the ethical <\/em>underpinnings of the eternal return. It makes it clear that Nietzsche\u2019s notion is not ontological, but rather normative and ethical: it is a hypothetical, intended to terrorize us into leading our lives in such a way that every moment and every decision is frighteningly accentuated.<\/p>\n

Eternal recurrence, as first articulated in The Gay Science<\/em> (see Vol. II, p. 19), becomes most clearly about making every moment of our life relivable<\/em>\u2026 about making sure that every moment of your life is worth reliving. It is the ultimate expression of the creation of one\u2019s life as a work of art.<\/p>\n

It is worth here rereading, in full, the passage from The Gay Science \u00a7 341<\/a><\/em> that Heidegger quotes at length in Vol. II at pages 19-20:<\/p>\n

The Heaviest Burden. What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you: “This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence\u2014and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!” – Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: “You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!” If that thought acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to all and everything: “Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?” would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity! Or, how would you have to become favourably inclined to yourself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The heaviest burden on us: yes, that is precisely how the eternal recurrence must be read\u2014along ethical, not ontological lines. And it is precisely where we are led when Heidegger\u2019s repeated attempts at using the eternal return to substantialize becoming into being fail.<\/p>\n

[Incidentally, there is another tension at the heart of Heidegger\u2019s fascination with Nietzsche, and it is between his notions of anguished concern and care, and Nietzsche\u2019s obsession with destruction and injury. For Heidegger, the notion of anguished concern and care is central to our being as humans, including concern for self and others. Much of this, for Nietzsche, is foreign. Our essential being, as humans, is struggle and injury:<\/p>\n

\u201cHere we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially<\/em> appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one\u2019s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation\u2014but why should one always use those words in which a slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages?\u201d (BG&E, \u00a7 259).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here too there is an irreparable gap or tension. A chasm. Heidegger attempts to bridge it by means of will, which he reinterprets as being. To be crude again, \u201cappropriation, injury, overpowering\u201d becomes will to power, which becomes our essential being. So by abstracting up, Heidegger tries to avoid the tension (Vol. I, p. 18). Here too, though, the resolution is not successful, forcing us to reexamine the notion of struggle and injury.]<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

But the reinvigorated ethical reading of eternal recurrence\u2014in conjunction with such a robust interpretation of being\u2014has a way, if anything, of accentuating, of heightening the stakes.<\/p>\n

To take a step back, what was so groundbreaking about Heidegger in the 1920s was his turn to such a rich experiential worldly inquiry on the fundamental question of our existence. After the dryness and other-worldliness of the dominant philosophical approaches, from Descartes or Kant\u2014for whom being was reduced to the mind, to thinking only, and time was a mental construct\u2014, after the dominantly disembodied discourse and debates about the mind-body duality, after the predominant work of philosophers like Berkeley and the entire tradition of idealist thought, after all that disembodiement\u2026 it was such a relief to discover Heidegger and to read about the real experience of being, and to allow that real experience of being, and of angst<\/em>, and of fear, and of care and anguished concern, to allow those experiences to ground our philosophical views. That was an amazing, revolutionary time that must have felt like a groundbreaking moment. It has become for us somewhat second nature today, as has phenomenology more generally. But Heidegger\u2019s intervention in 1927 in Being and Time <\/em>was formidable.<\/p>\n

Now, the process of the struggle over being with Nietzsche served to accentuate the idea of eternal return and aesthetic creation, highlighting the unbearableness of being. The eternal return forces us to live and experience reality and choose in a way that makes life worth living\u2026 in a way that makes our lives a work of art. Aesthetic production becomes the key. And the idea of art and the artist as representing the ultimate will to power becomes central: art is creation, it is the site of real production. The artist is the creator. No wonder Nietzsche viewed this as the height of will to power. \u201cThe world as a work of art that gives birth to itself–.\u201d (WP \u00a7796; quoted in Vol. I, p. 71) This truly resonates. And it ties, of course, to Nietzsche\u2019s first book on tragedy and the Dionysian.<\/p>\n

Now this work on art and its physiological effects is what the Surrealists would study under the notion of \u201cfrisson.<\/em>\u201d Rapture, frenzy, intoxication, delirium\u2014these are the very emotions of frisson<\/em>. (Heidegger, Vol. I, p. 92 et seq.)\u00a0But it also ties to Foucault\u2019s notion of an \u201caesthetics of existence\u201d: choosing one\u2019s battles as an aesthetic choice; engaging political struggles as a work of art; making one\u2019s life an artistic creation. These are the heightened sensibilities that we reach when we conjoin the ethical notion of eternal return with the force of being in the context of art and artistic production. This, I find, has strong critical potential.<\/p>\n

This then may be the heart of one possible appropriation of Heidegger\u2019s reading of Nietzsche for a critical project: \u201cRapture as Aesthetic State\u201d (p. 92-106 Vol. I). Perhaps we need to explore this more.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Let me recapitulate. The fundamental tension between Heidegger and Nietzsche traces to the existentialist quandary of being versus becoming. In passages, Nietzsche\u2019s writings are adamant that there is only becoming and that the constant effort to impose on becoming the quality of being is precisely at the very heart of our recurring human struggles\u2014it is the ultimate expression of the will to power. Women and men exercise power when they transform someone\u2019s actions into their human nature, when they turn for instance a deviant behavior into a felon, or into a dangerous individual, or a mental disorder: when they impose on something someone did the character of their essence. This is the fundamental tension between existence and essence\u2014and it is at the root of Heidegger\u2019s confrontation with Nietzsche and of Heidegger\u2019s attempt to reread eternal recurrence so as to \u201cpermanentize\u201d becoming. In effect, Heidegger struggles throughout these early lectures in 1937 through 1939 to force the square peg of Nietzsche\u2019s thought on becoming (and will to power and the eternal return) into the round whole of Being and Time. <\/em><\/p>\n

Now, Being and Time <\/em>was unquestionably transformative when it was published, and liberating: whereas before, philosophical discourse was caught not only in religious dogma (Descartes\u2019 proof of our existence), but also in a disembodied repulsion for our materiality\u2014with the body-mind divide, cogito<\/em>, and such a fundamental distrust for everything bodily related. Heidegger was a liberation and an embrace of our human experiences\u2014of our angst, of our fears, of our anguished concerns, of our bodily existence, of being here<\/em> in the world, of our real experiences in relation to time and our own mortality. That was formative, and changed the course of philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. But it was also still tied to a metaphysical discourse that remained rigid in its embrace of the very notion of being. Nietzsche is the one who challenged that most, in part because he was not a metaphysician but rather a philologist, in part because of his temperament and intellect. Regardless, his writings fundamentally challenges the notion that there is permanence, being, a doer.<\/p>\n

Heidegger\u2019s confrontation with Nietzsche is his attempt to force the square peg, and it just does not work\u2014but in the very process of that struggle, there emerges something of critical import: an unexpected grafting of the ethical reading of the eternal return (the threat and moral imperative of one\u2019s actions recurring over and over) onto the permanence of being, under the guise of an aesthetic model of creation. It is that conjoining of the eternal recurrence of choice, heightened by the gravity of being, and understood as artistic production that I would call an \u201caesthetics of being.\u201d It can be placed in fruitful discussion with other critical concepts from the twentieth century (Foucault\u2019s aesthetics of existence or Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s aesthetics of the frisson<\/em>). It is not Heidegger\u2019s concept, but it emerges from his herculean struggle with Nietzsche and failure. So in the end, I will not refer to this as Heidegger\u2019s \u201caesthetics of being\u201d\u2014which is all the better, because Heidegger\u2019s politics makes him so utterly unbearable\u2014but rather \u201ctoward an aesthetics of being<\/em>.\u201d It is a critical insight that emerges from the confrontation of ideas. And what it does, essentially, is to heighten the gravity of ethical choice and model it on artistic creation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"blood<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Addendum<\/em>: Heidegger\u2019s emphasis on nihilism starting in 1940 and hitting a high point in 1944-46 remains untheorized here. In contrast to 1937-39, starting in 1940, with \u201cNietzsche\u2019s Metaphysics,\u201d Heidegger will say that Nietzsche\u2019s key concepts are not just will to power and eternal recurrence, but also nihilism, the overman, and justice (Vol. III, p. 189). I\u2019m not sure what to make of this shift. I can\u2019t accept that anyone would really subscribe to Heidegger\u2019s claim, repeated by the editor (David Krell), that \u201chis Nietzsche lectures of the late 1930s and early 1940s [represent] one of the principal sites of his confrontation (Auseinandersetzung<\/em>) with National Socialism.\u201d (Vol. IV, p. 263). That seems intellectually obscene. (Note the discussion of Arendt by Krell on page 272 of Vol. IV). To suggest that one\u2019s seminars could amount to anything resembling a \u201cconfrontation\u201d with a regime like National Socialism is completely preposterous and arrogant. But it leaves open the problem of nihilism\u2014to which I may need to return.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  By Bernard E. Harcourt At the heart of Heidegger\u2019s engagement with Nietzsche lies a profound tension or gap that is, on my reading, insurmountable and unbridgeable: it is the conflict between Heidegger\u2019s conception of being and Nietzsche\u2019s conviction about… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51427],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-1-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}