Power is the Feeling of More

I've worked my way through the first volume of Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche.  While these lectures are way better than Jung's as an interpretation of Nietzsche, as well as philosophically interesting in their own right, I must admit that I don't love Heidegger.  I find his style a bit pedantic and portentous.  Compare Nietzsche's pellucid prose to, for example, a passage like the following.

The decisive question is this: how, and on what grounds, do the willed and the one who wills belong to the willing to will? Answer: on the grounds of willing and by means of willing. Willing wills the one who wills, as such a one; and willing posits the willed as such. (from the David Farrell Krell translation of Heidegger's lectures, pg. 40)

Ugh.  Nevertheless, that creep can roll; Heidegger already reaches an important point in lecture 7 that Jung wasn't able to come to in more than two years worth of talks.  I think what Heidegger is trying to convey with his tongue twister is that the act of willing is prior to the subject and object of the will.  Willing is a single act which creates its own subject and object.  This reverses our normal understanding of how 'will power' works, and overcomes grammar's tyrannical insistence that there must be someone who wills something.  This change in perspective is the key to understanding Nietzsche's entire theory of the will to power.  

At first, it may seem I'm contradicting the idea that, "the act of willing is above all something complicated," which we saw earlier (BGE #19).  There, however, Nietzsche is looking at the will from the perspective of what we take to be an already constructed self or subject -- an "I", an ego.  The always pre-assumed unity of this ego hides the complexity that went into creating the will, a will this ego only later laid claim to as its own.  When we don't take this unitary ego for granted as our starting point for examining the will, suddenly the complexity of willing becomes apparent.  But by the same token, the complexity of this process of willing ultimately comes together to produce a single will, governed by a "commanding thought".  Willing is valuing, evaluating, which is to say ordering and ranking, at bottom, integrating a series of differences.  When willing happens, a unity is produced.  It's a complex process with a simple result -- an entity powerful enough to be capable of willing -- which then serves to hide or mask the complexity of the process.  I think Deleuze is saying the same thing in his introduction to Nietzsche and Philosophy: 

Power is therefore not what the will wants, but on the contrary, the one that wants in the will. (Preface to the English Translation, xi).  [It occurs to me that in English this would be improved if it were, "Power is therefore not what one's will wants, but on the contrary, the one that wants in the will."  No idea whether the French would permit that.]

To sum up our starting point, Heidegger puts his finger on the key insight: Nietzsche has a non-dual theory of willing.  Willing precedes the subject-object duality and gives rise to the 'appearance' of this duality as its 'effect'.  The scare quotes around 'appearance' indicate that the arising of subject-object duality in a sense falsifies the process of willing, and is in that sense a mere appearance or illusion.  However, this mere appearance is in a sense exactly how 'reality' itself is produced as a sort of objective illusion, a type of special effect.  So finally, we see that this non-dual theory of will immediately implies the non-duality of appearance and reality.  Or as Nagarjuna would have put it:

Nothing of samsara is different from Nirvana, nothing of nirvana is different from samsara.  That which is the limit of nirvana is also the limit of samsara; there is not the slightest difference between the two. (Translation from what looks to be an interesting David Loy article)

Since Heidegger is really only ever interested in one philosophical question -- what is Being? -- it's his reflections on the appearance-reality duality that drive the overall trajectory of this first lecture series.  Which is basically to say that he interprets the concept of the will to power metaphysically, and uses the way Nietzsche links this concept to art as a springboard to ask a metaphysical question about the relationship between art (appearance, Becoming) and truth (reality, Being).  I won't try to trace the whole winding path of the class, especially since I think the main interest of it lies in the final two lectures where he grapples with how Nietzsche overcame the appearance-reality duality as it had been handed down from Plato.

Before we get to Nietzsche's solution though, it's helpful to set up the problem as he saw it.  For this, Heidegger points us to the brilliant aphorism "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable: History of an Error" that appears in Twilight of the Idols (and in modified form in WTP #567).

1. The true world, attainable for the wise, the devout, the virtuous—they live in it, they are it. (Oldest form of the idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Paraphrase of the assertion, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the devout, the virtuous ("to the sinner who does penance"). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more refined, more devious, more mystifying—it becomes woman, it becomes Christian . . .)
3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but a consolation, an obligation, an imperative, merely by virtue of being thought. (The old sun basically, but glimpsed through fog and skepticism; the idea become sublime, pallid, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world—unattainable? In any case, unattained. And if it is unattained, it is also unknown. And hence it is not consoling, redeeming, or obligating either; to what could something unknown obligate us? . . . (Gray dawn. First yawnings of reason. Rooster's crow of positivism.)
5. The "true world"—an idea with no use anymore, no longer even obligating—an idea become useless, superfluous, hence a refuted idea: let's do away with it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens [good sense] and cheerfulness; Plato blushes; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. We have done away with the true world: what world is left over? The apparent one, maybe? . . . But no! Along with the true world, we have also done away with the apparent! (Midday; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) (pg. 23 of the Polt translation)

I won't follow Heidegger's explanation of this aphorism too closely since it involves a lengthy detour through his interpretation of Plato.  Instead I'll give you my gloss on it.  One way to see the trajectory Nietzsche describes here is to think of it as a journey from unconscious through conscious willing, and back again.  In other words, despite the claim that we're overturning Plato, the starting and ending points are remarkably similar.  In both cases what we're searching for is a unified ability to will.  This power isn't a given, but something that needs to be pro-duced, (Heidegger hyphenates this to emphasize its construction as "bringing forth") along with the agent and object of the will.  Plato possessed this power in what we might call an "unconscious" sense.  He willed into being an evaluative hierarchy that was simply identical to who he was -- "I, Plato, am the truth."  There's no distinction between the being of Plato and the values of Plato, he creates himself at the same time as he creates and orders his world.  This is exactly what we were describing as non-dual willing, so in a sense, Plato is a great hero for Nietzsche.  

Plato's Good, however, is only fully convincing to himself.  This stands to reason as this Good is literally his own self-assertion, his self-positing.  By definition, others cannot follow in this path and simply appropriate this good; they have to find their own.  What we get when they try is Christianity, a "Plato for the masses" or Platonism, which is precisely where Nietzsche thinks the wheels started coming off.  Because now a gap opens up between the evaluation of the what's good, and its attainment.  The Good literally moves away from us, into another world, beyond us.   We don't usually think of it this way, but Christianity is the first step in the history of nihilism that culminates in the more forthright nihilism of step 5.  For Nietzsche, the importance of nihilism is not that we believes in nothing, so much as that we lose the belief in ourself.  We already saw that this is the secret message of the death of God.  Since Heidegger is always trying to make a proper metaphysician of Nietzsche, he prefers to define nihilism as the way that, "the highest values devalue themselves".  Of course, for Nietzsche the highest value is to create, to value, to will oneself into being, so to speak -- ie. to do exactly what Plato did.  Christianity begins to doubt our power to create in this world when it categorically separates us from a good we can no longer achieve in this life.  Hence it initiates the long downhill slide into the nihilistic belief that there's isn't any good or will at all, which is what Nietzsche describes in the aphorism.  A shorthand way of describing this history would be to say that we erred when we became conscious of the good as something outside ourselves.  When we just were the good and did the good without thinking much about it, the problem didn't exist.  The problem ultimately stems from opening up an unbridgeable metaphysical gap between our world and our self as they appear before us, and the true world as it 'should' be.  And it gets more dire as we push the true world further and further away from us, until we finally arrive at the point of denying its existence.  But of course this denial is tantamount to denying ourselves.  The true world as it should be was never anything but our own image reflected back at us.  As the final step indicates, when we do away with the true and the good, we also do away with the apparent and the self.  While this might seem a sort of freedom, it's actually the moment of maximum enslavement and minimum power.  At this nihilistic endpoint we can no longer even create our self.  We are free from everything and free to nothing.

So how does Nietzsche propose to solve this problem of nihilism?  It is clearly central to his entire philosophy.   And as we can see from the aphorism, this problem is also where TSZ begins, which suggests that its solution is contained in the 'plot' of Zarathustra.  If the way backwards to Plato's naive equation of his good with his self is barred, how can regain that same creative power by another means?  Paradoxically, the solution is essentially to change nothing.  Nihilism actually overcomes itself.  Just like with nirvana and samsara, it's as if the two opposite ends of the line bend together to nearly touch.  At the very end of Nietzsche's history we are powerless to create a goal and unable to will ourselves into existence.  Unless of course we want exactly this goal, exactly this moment of powerlessness that history has built towards.  Indeed, as the product of this history, we are almost uniquely powerless.  Our inability to believe that, "I am the truth," is precisely what makes us modern.  We have witnessed the long history of this errant belief in the true world, seen what Plato was somehow able to subconsciously hide from himself (H,1,pg 199).  Maybe all the long process of degeneration was necessary for us to become exactly who we are.  Maybe, in fact, our powerlessness is the very culmination and meaning of history.

If we were to create ourselves as powerless, would this in itself be a sort of miraculous power?  Can the goal become simply the power to will when history has demonstrated to us that there is no such thing as will power?  In fact, this is exactly why Nietzsche calls it the "will to power".  Will simply is power, so this formula is the same as is the 'will to will'.  It means to be able to will, to have the power of a will which is not ours by default (since by default, there is no us to begin with).  We labor to attain what was for Plato more like an instinct.  We reach the point of consciously knowing there is no such thing as will or self, and yet we will anyhow.  This is how nihilism overcomes itself, and how we overcome an image of our self as the pre-existing agent of will.  We have to reach this ground zero of power, the sort of body without organs of power.  

In practice, what this means is that we have to experience ourselves as inventing the truth.  Or, equivalently we have to find the beauty in how thoroughly we lie to ourselves.  Because this lying and invention -- this art, in short -- is how we come to be truly capable of willing, which is to say of existing as agents in the world.  Obviously, this is all pretty paradoxical, since I'm suggesting that we become agents only by acknowledging that we are not actually agents.  But all of Nietzsche's ideas are paradoxes, self-contradictions sharpened to the point of koans.  Here, he is basically claiming that the truth is that we are always lying to ourselves in a completely essential, and not at all accidental, way -- we have to have the will to lie to ourselves.

Knowledge-in-itself in a world of becoming is impossible; so how is knowledge possible? As error concerning oneself, as will to power, as will to deception. (WTP, #617, Kaufmann translation)

Truth is only possible as artifice, fabrication, the will to deception because adopting some particular perspective is the fundamental condition of life.  And for us, at just this moment in history, our own life depends on our ability to embrace the 'identiity' (non-duality) of truth and art.  

[I say, "us", but perhaps this should read "Nietzsche".  One of the more curious aspects of both TSZ and BGE is that way they paint their main characters -- 'Nietzsche' is in a very real sense the main character of Beyond Good and Evil -- as merely precursors and profits of a future philosophy.  As we saw when we talked about the religious nature of ER, for Nietzsche to become Nietzsche, he needed to redeem his own personal suffering by seeing that only this suffering could have produced him.  This deep affirmation of the necessity of suffering converts it on the spot into joy, as if one created a sort of self-schadenfreude.  Likewise, Nietzsche's suffered philosophically from seeing himself as the nihilistic endpoint of the Western degeneracy that began with Christianity.  This philosophical suffering could only be redeemed if that very degeneracy was necessary for him to see that truth is always artfully manufactured for the purposes of life.  Notwithstanding these overcomings, Nietzsche's physiological constitution and his philosophical inheritance of a deep Christian moralism mean that he really does suffer in both these cases.  That is the feeling that his own particular place in history dealt him.  But he looks forward to future philosophers who do not occupy suffer this same constitution and do not carry this same baggage.  Exactly what these future philosophers and overhumans might look like is a good question.  Are they a return to the 'instinctive' and 'unconscious' creativity that Nietzsche associates with Plato?  Or do they still need to go the same process of overcoming suffering that Nietzsche had to, even if the contents would differ according to their different place in history?]

At this point we've finally worked our way back to the way Heidegger expresses the situation.  He focuses on Nietzsche's statement that there is a "raging discordance" between art and truth.  Krell's note on the translation of that phrase is helpful here.

That is to say, discordance between art and truth "rages" insofar as it arouses dread. (H, 1, 142)

While this may initially make it sound like art and truth are simply opposites, this is not what Heidegger means by discordance.

Discordance is present only where the elements which sever the unity of their belonging-together diverge from one another by virtue of that very unity. The unity of their belonging-together is granted by the one reality, perspectival shining. (H, 1, 217)

Obviously, this could be another way of stating the non-duality of art and truth; they are not one, but they are also not two.  I say "could be", because it's not clear to me whether Heidegger conceives Being itself, "the one reality of perspectival shining," as a higher unity that would encompass both art and truth, or whether he is thinking of this Being too in a non-dual sense.  But now we're shifting into a discussion of the way Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche functions within the context of his own philosophy.  I haven't read enough Heidegger to answer this question.  

What's clear from these lectures though is that he really wants to think through how art and truth somehow belong together when we ask the question, "what is Being?"  This is why he begins his discussion of Nietzsche's idea of art with a long detour through Plato's concept of art, truth, and their relation to Being.  The main point of Heidegger's analysis of Plato is to emphasize that while the reality of knowledge ranks higher than the appearance of beauty (ie. art), the two modes both point us in the direction of one and the same True Being, defined as un-concealing, or standing forth, or pure disclosing, or simply opening.  We recall from the Symposium that Beauty is "first among Forms".  For Heidegger the essence of Being always has something to do with bringing-into-presence, a-letheia, literally "un-forgetting" or "un-oblivion".  From this perspective, Nietzsche's equation of art-as-fabrication with truth-as-error-necessary-for-life seems to appeal to Heidegger as a way of reconstructing a unity of Being lost since Plato.

Truth, that is, the true as the constant, is a kind of semblance that is justified as a necessary condition of the assertion of life. But upon deeper meditation it becomes clear that all appearance and all apparentness are possible only if something comes to the fore and shows itself at alL What in advance enables such appearing is the perspectival itself. That is what genuinely radiates, bringing something to show itself. When Nietzsche uses the word semblance [Schein] it is usually ambiguous. ... " 'Semblance' as I understand it is the actual and sole reality of things." That should be understood to mean not that reality is something apparent, but that being-real is in itself perspectival, a bringing forward into appearance, a letting radiate; that it is in itself a shining. Reality is radiance. (H, 1, 215)

  

Reality is radiant in the same way that beauty is radiant; as Nightingale mentioned, beauty is a self-showing property of things.  In other places, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche's paradoxical contrast of art and truth as pointing to two essentially different modes of Being, namely coming-into-being and enduring, or as we usually call it, being and becoming.  In the end though, Heidegger always seems to emphasize that these differences recompose a unity of Being.  Here are some examples from the lectures:

Art is the most genuine and profound will to semblance, namely, to the scintillation of what transfigures, in which the supreme lawfulness of Dasein becomes visible. In contrast, truth is any given fixed apparition that allows life to rest firmly on a particular perspective and to preserve itself. As such fixation, "truth" is an immobilizing of life, and hence its inhibition and dissolution. (H, 1, 216)

The unity of their belonging-together is granted by the one reality, perspectival shining. To it belong both apparition and scintillating appearance as transfiguration. In order for the real (the living creature) to be real, it must on the one hand ensconce itself within a particular horizon, thus perduring in the illusion of truth. But in order for the real to remain real, it must on the other hand simultaneously transfigure itself by going beyond itself, surpassing itself in the scintillation of what is created in art-and that means it has to advance against the truth. While truth and art are proper to the essence of reality with equal originality, they must diverge from one another and go counter to one another. (H, 1, 217)

Art as will to semblance is the supreme configuration of will to power. But the latter, as the basic character of beings, as the essence of reality, is in itself that Being which wills itself by willing to be Becoming. In that way Nietzsche in will to power attempts to think the original unity of the ancient opposition of Being and Becoming. Being, as permanence, is to let Becoming be a Becoming. The origin of the thought of "eternal recurrence" is thereby indicated. (H, 1, 218)

 

and finally a quote from a later work that appears in Krell's concluding "Analysis" essay:

Only in the following way does truth happen: it installs itself within the strife and the free space which truth itself opens up. Because truth is the reciprocal relation [das Gegenwendige] of lighting and concealing, what we are here calling installation [Einrichtung] is proper to it. But truth does not exist ahead of time in itself somewhere among the stars, only subsequently to be brought down among beings, which are somewhere else.... Lighting of openness and installation in the open region belong together. They are one and the same essential unfolding of truth's occurrence [Geschehen]. Such occurrence is in manifold ways historical [geschichtlich]. (H, 1, 255)

In each of these, you can see Heidegger drawing a contrast between motion and rest, coming and staying, creation and endurance.  But these distinctions seem to always be in the service of adequately describing a single thing he calls Being.  Like I said though, I don't feel confident I understand Heidegger's overall philosophy enough to make a strong point here.

Enantiodromia

While I found Jung's theory of enantiodromia -- the conversion of things into their opposite -- equal parts vague and simplistic, there's no question that the way apparent opposites share a secret root is an idea dear to Nietzsche's heart.  It's expressed in many images throughout TSZ, and is stated as an explicit theory as early as the second aphorism of BGE.  But, as with most of his important ideas, Nietzsche doesn't just state this as a theory, but actually shows it to us in action by applying it to his own ideas.  The second point is more subtle and profound version of the first that requires careful reading to see.  For example, the following aphorism is situated in the middle fo the third chapter of BGE, where Nietzsche discusses "The Religious Disposition", or "The essence of religion", or, "What is religious", depending on your preferred translation.  

Anyone who has struggled for a long time, as I have, with a mysterious desire to think down to the depths of pessimism and redeem it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity with which it has most recently been portrayed, namely in the form of Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has truly looked with an Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye into-and under­ neath-the most world - denying of all possible ways of thinking (beyond good and evil and no longer helplessly deluded, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, by morality) - this person may, without really intending it, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: to the ideal of the most audacious, lively, and world-affirming human being, one who has learned not only to accept and bear that which has been and is, but who also wants to have it over again, just as it was and is, throughout all eternity, calling out insatiably da capo, not only to himself, but to the whole drama, the whole spectacle, and not only to a spectacle, but ultimately to the one who has need of just this spectacle - and makes it necessary, because he continually has need of himself - and makes himself necessary.­
Well? And wouldn't this then be - circulus vitiosus deus? (BGE, #56)

Nietzsche is of course alluding here, for the first time in BGE, to the doctrine of eternal return.  Look carefully at how this crowning idea is presented though.  Not only is it presented in the context of a chapter that discusses the way religious sentiment ultimately stems from weakness, from a simple need to make the suffering stop, but Nietzsche directly traces the inception of his idea to following the Schopenhauerian or Buddhist view of the life as suffering all the way to its end.  In other words, ER is an explicitly religious doctrine.  Nietzsche is concerned with exactly the same problem that he claims has led to every religious solution -- what do we do about the fact that the world sucks?  Christianity "solved" this problem by inventing another world that doesn't suck, thus converting our world into a mere appearance, a test, a brief weigh station on the highway to heaven.  Buddhism is at least more honest about the problem itself, making it the first noble truth.  But Nietzsche interprets the Buddhist "solution" as another version of Shopenhauer's nihilism -- this world sucks and there's no other world that doesn't suck; the only escape from suffering is just to stop existing, to stop being reborn into the suck.  It's not important here whether this is a good interpretation of either Schopenhauer or "Buddhism" (and which Buddhism).  The point is simply to notice that these highest religious values -- heaven, the cessation of Nirvana -- are structured as the-opposite-of-suffering.

I think it's safe to infer from Nietzsche's biography that he was a man who knew a thing or two about suffering.  And he had a simple theory about how these religious doctrines came into existence.  They represented the creative genius of people who suffered a lot.  These poor weak people who suffered so mercilessly created a way for their suffering to end by creating a way for their suffering to mean something.  This is the upshot of Nietzsche's description of the fascination exerted by saints.

Until now, the most powerful people have continued to bow down with respect before the saint, as a riddle of self-discipline and deliberate, ultimate renunciation: why have they bowed down? Behind the question mark of the saint's fragile and pitiable appearance, they sensed the superior force that wished to test itself through a discipline such as his. It was the strength of the will; in it they recognized anew and were able to honour their own strength and lordly pleasure: they were honouring something in themselves when they honoured the saint. The sight of the saint also planted a suspicion in them: 'Such a monstrous denial, so contrary to nature, cannot have been desired for nothing,' they said to them­ selves and wondered. 'Maybe there is a reason for it, maybe there is some very great danger, which the ascetic, thanks to his secret counsellors and visitors, knows more about?' Suffice it to say, in his presence the powerful of the world learned a new fear; they sensed a new power, a strange enemy, still unconquered: it was the 'will to power' which brought them to a stop before the saint. They needed to ask him -- (BGE, #51)

The saint overcomes his suffering by means of his religious belief.  The denial and denigration of life he counsels is actually the product of an extraordinarily powerful life within him.  Because for Nietzsche, there is no life beyond life, which is to say that there is nothing but the will to power, we see that the essence of religion is for the weakest life to save itself by slandering itself.  

The doctrine of eternal return is invented for the same reason as any religious doctrine.  It is designed to redeem the insupportable suffering of life by making it mean something.  It is inspired by the same pessimism about life taken to its nihilistic extreme.  But at this extreme point, it somehow converts into the opposite.  Instead of hoping for an end to suffering, an escape from the wheel of samsara, ER affirms this suffering into infinity.  Instead of wanting something to be different, ER wants it all to be exactly the same, forever and ever, amen.  Suffering isn't to be rejected and avoided, but embraced as such, to be desired again and again, as suffering.  Here, suffering transforms into joy without anything changing; the two were only apparently opposites.  The whole sordid spectacle of life is necessary in its entirety not because of some divine plan that governs it from without, but because it leads to the creation of a soul within it capable of needing it to be exactly as it is.  Nietzsche overcomes his suffering and himself with ER only by becoming exactly who he is -- the precise saint capable of inventing this new religion of affirmation, the one who is capable of it only because he stands in the direst need for it.  The purpose of suffering is to produce someone capable of giving purpose to suffering.  It's not clear whether this god should be called vicious or virtuous, but it's certainly a circle.