The Sage of Being

The final piece included in Volume 4 of Heidegger's Nietzsche doesn't actually have much to do with Nietzsche at all.  However, the 1945 essay Nihilism as the History of Being that Heidegger composed in the wake of his various lecture series on Nietzsche does encapsulate what he took away from this encounter for his own thinking.  Obviously, Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche was a nihilist, notwithstanding the latter's claims to have overcome that problem.  But, to ask it as Heidegger would, "what is the essence of nihilism?"   

In trying to answer this question, Heidegger weaves a long and winding trail that is significantly more densely written than the lectures; this essay was clearly not meant to be read aloud.  So I feel the need to trace back over the main twists and turns of his thought process in order to get a handle and what otherwise risks degenerating into world salad like this:

The authenticity of nihilism historically takes the form of inauthenticity, which accomplishes the omission of the default by omitting this very omission. (H.4.220)

I contend that this monstrosity of a sentence actually means something, and not even something as complicated as Heidegger seems to want to make it appear.  But to get to the point where we can read this stuff, we have to start at the beginning and systematically translate his German Philosophy into Plain English.  As this is our first foray into the new GPiPE market segment, certain glitches with the technology are to be expected.  Bear with me here.

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Heidegger is convinced that Nietzsche was a nihilist.  As I said before, I think Heidegger willfully misconstrues Nietzsche's philosophy.  In fact, I don't believe any part of his whole history of philosophy stands up to a close reading of the original works, at least it doesn't with the ones I'm familiar with.   But rather than argue, I find it more interesting to just focus on the way his interpretation of Nietzsche and others functions within Heidegger's philosophy.  So 'Nietzsche' in this context is going to mean exclusively 'Heidegger's Nietzsche'.  

'Nietzsche's' particular brand of nihilism is important to Heidegger because it represents the culmination of a certain type of nihilism, one that, as we'll see, Heidegger proposes to supersede.  Nietzsche's nihilism is still metaphysical.  What Heidegger means by this is that Nietzsche does not think about Being in itself, but only thinks of it as a value for "the" being.  Being versus the being is the great divide that always obsesses Heidegger.  Usually we take "the" being, any particular being, for granted as our starting point.  Then we compare it to other beings, maybe to ourself as a being, and try to figure out what these beings have in common that makes them "be".  This is what Heidegger means by the "Being of beings", which for him always amounts to a philosophical slur.  Metaphysics only talks about the Being of beings, where Heidegger is interested in the forgotten question: what is Being "as such" or "in itself"?  Nietzsche is a nihilist because he explicitly thinks that the Being of beings is nothing because the being as will to power is the sole ultimate fact.  For Nietzsche, the Being of beings is just an empty abstract concept made up by some sicko priest-type being looking to buy a bigger yacht.  For Heidegger though, this form of nihilism is still metaphysical, because it only deals with the nothingness of the Being of beings, and not with Being in itself.  A more essential nihilism would say that there is nothing to Being itself.  

But, you perceptively ask, what the fuck is Being?  In fact, why do we even think there is such a thing as Being?  What does Being mean for Heidegger?  This is a good question, but I want to postpone it for a moment.  The point right now is just that this question can't even come up in come up within metaphysics because it only thinks about the Being of beings.  Therefore, metaphysics can't see, much less overcome, the true essence of nihilism.  So Nietzsche's form of nihilism is the most complete version of a certain, metaphysical, type of nihilism, but it is merely a way station along the path towards a more essential nihilism.  

Nietzsche, however, was not the first nihilist.  In fact, Heidegger believes that the entire history of metaphysics is the history of the development of nihilism.  Metaphysics has always begun with the particular, individual being.  For Plato, the essence, the whatness, of beings was the Forms. This whatness is the only thing that truly exists, truly is; the beings are only granted their Being through the Forms.  With the theory of Forms, and particularly with the Form of the Good, the Being of beings is understood as the most universal a priori given principle that underlies all beings.  This meta-physical move essentially converts it into a particular being, basically God, which becomes the transcendent cause of all beings.  So metaphysics merges ontology and theology into what Heidegger calls "onto-theology".  Metaphysics always finds the Being of beings through transcendence, but always starts with and returns to the being.  It never thinks Being in itself, so Being remains 'nothing' for it.  Thus, metaphysics is a type of nihilism, even though it doesn't believe itself to be.  So, yeah, he's saying that Plato was a nihilist.  This description applies all the way up through Nietzsche, who reverses Plato by explicitly takes the Being of beings as nothing in itself, nothing more than a value for the being.  For Nietzsche, particular beings, determined as the will to power, are the only thing that truly is, and what we call "Being" is just a projection of the needs of those beings.  While this at first seems to make Being itself a complete nothing, we've seen how it really just makes the Being of beings a meaningless power grab.  Somehow, all of Western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche has failed to ask about Being in itself.

But now let's come back to the question of what is Being for Heidegger?  To me, the word Being sounds an awful lot like God.  And not just the God of the philosopher's either.  Heidegger will constantly talk about Being in terms that tend to go beyond just generally anthropomorphizing it and move towards actually personifying it.  It seems to have some sort of unity and way of acting, even some needs, though all these descriptions turn out to be pretty paradoxical.  In fact, reading Heidegger we can easily get the impression that Being itself is the only thing that truly is, and the only actor in all of history.  And yet we just laid out Heidegger's critique of "onto-theology".  How can we reconcile these views?  On some level, this is an insoluble problem, because Heidegger himself claims that, "Any discussion of "Being itself" always remains interrogative." (H.4.201)  Nevertheless, Heidegger obviously needs to have some idea of what Being is, or at least what it's not, to tell us about the problems with metaphysics.  If we want to read generously, I think we could try to interpret Heidegger's pre-idea of Being as simply the intuition that there is something more to reality than just particular individual beings.  We suspect that there is something more than what's right in front of us all the time, a suspicion that seems immediately confirmed when we try to consider the reality of past and future, or more generally, the reality of possibility.  The quest to understand this something more, something beyond or behind or between, is of course exactly what launched metaphysics.  But metaphysics tries to solve this problem without first really understanding what the problem is, whereas H would just like us to see it, and leave it, as a problem.  So in this here story I'm about to unfold, we can try to hear "Being itself" as whatever would respond to this vague hunch that there is something more to the world than meets the eye.

Given this context, Heidegger's sudden decision (H.4.212) that Being is presence, unconcealment, aletheia, makes more sense.  Instead of starting with beings as a given and asking what they share or what grounds them, Heidegger wants to begin straightaway with Being itself.  If we take this "something more" as a given (even if we're not quite sure what that means yet, and this given is only given as a question) and look through the eyes of Being, as it were, the first thing we see is exactly what metaphysics took for granted and never thought about -- the fact that Being reveals itself as beings.  That is, what we actually find are particular beings that somehow appear out of the mist of this "something more".  Of course, Heidegger would object to this way of phrasing it because he wants to think of Being as the (sorta?) solid starting point, without the implication that it is 'beyond' beings which the phrase "something more" conveys.  From what I gather, this attempt to shift to a Being-first perspective is the central move in all Heidegger's later philosophy.  It's as if he proposes to channel Being for us, showing us what Being looks like from its own perspective rather than the perspective of beings, or of one particular hairless chimp type being.   

Shifting perspective like this puts on odd twist on the critique of metaphysics that Heidegger has just given us though.  Before, we might have though he was smugly saying that all earlier philosopher's were stupid and he was smart -- he was going to finally think Being first.  But if we begin with Being, then the fact that metaphysics never thinks about Being itself must be accounted for as something other than a failure of human metaphysics.  If Being is presence, sheer disclosure, then how did a particular being lose touch with this light that is literally always in right in front of it and all other beings?  To blame the mistakes of metaphysics on humans is to look from the perspective of the being.  Instead, Heidegger is trying to see how Being itself created the possibility for this error, namely, the forgetting of Being that occurs when metaphysics focuses on beings.  Seen in this light, historical metaphysics is not a human creation, but just part of the unfolding of the essence of Being.  As I suggested before, it's as if Being is the only actor that creates all of history.  This results in a huge paradox though, because it means that Being, which is unconcealment, goes through a historical phase, so to speak, in which it conceals itself.  In this phase, Being unconceals beings, but conceals that fact that it itself is the principle of this unconcealment.  We call this phase "metaphysics".  We can also call it "nihilism", because during this phase Being itself will cease to be a question and instead be converted into a pre-given first principle or ultimate fact that transcends beings -- it will become the Being of beings.  That is, since metaphysics focuses on beings, Being in itself will go unexplored, unthought, and be as if it were nothing.

[This whole shifting to the perspective of Being might sound a little mystical, and in some sense I think it is.  The more I consider Heidegger's vision of Being and the history of Being (which really is Being itself), the more I am reminded of the non-dual idea of spacious awareness.  Everything occurs within this awareness, even though this awareness is not itself a thing.  "Looking from the perspective of Being" sounds a lot like being in touch with a non-dual awareness prior to the subject and object.  From this perspective beings, including our selves, are seen as empty, fabricated, constructed.  Lest we confuse this with Plato's idea of the Forms, we should note that emptiness is not a synonym for non-existent.  Emptiness is the middle way between Being and Nothing, a type of non-Being without negation.  And the problem that Heidegger is encountering here is exactly the problem that Mahayana Buddhism wrestled with -- if everything is already enlightened Buddha-nature, why is it that we don't immediately realize this?]

Heidegger calls this concealement of unconcealment the "default" (the lack or absence) of Being.

   In the meantime, it has become clearer that Being itself occurs essentially as the unconcealment in which the being comes to presence.  Unconcealment itself, however, remains concealed as such. With reference to itself, unconcealment as such keeps away, keeps to itself. The matter stands with the concealment of the essence of unconcealment. It stands with the concealment of Being as such. Being itself stays away.
   Thus matters stand with the concealment of Being in such a way that the concealment conceals itself in itself. The staying away of Being is Being itself as this very default. Being is not segregated somewhere off by itself, nor does it also keep away; rather, the default of Being as such is Being itself. In its default Being veils itself with itself. This veil that vanishes for itself, which is the way Being itself essentially occurs in default, is the nothing as Being itself.  (H.4.214)

As you can see, Heidegger's language is complicated, but the idea is fairly simple.  What we call history, the world, everything, basically arises from Being hiding what it is while at the same time revealing beings.  Since the Being of Being, so to speak (H seems to avoid this circumlocution, presumably because it suggests thinking of Being as a being), is defined by this hiding, Being itself is not what is; it is other than what it is; it is the nothing.  So, in fact, the history of Being, the history of the unfolding of Being as hiding the fact that it is unhiding, is really the history of a super-revelatory Nothing.  History is the autobiography of Nothing.  

At this point we've become so deeply wrapped in paradox that we can't really even say what Being or the Nothing is or even whether they're different.  So Heidegger briefly tries calling whatever-it-is that hides its revelation simply the "It" -- das Es, precisely Freud's term for the unconscious.  

The essence of nihilism proper is Being itself in default of its unconcealment, which is as its own "It," and which determines its "is" in staying away. (H.4.216)

Heidegger doesn't make much of this connection in his essay, which is a shame because there's an obvious link between the structure he's trying to describe and the psychoanalytic idea of repressed material.  This unconscious material is 'forgotten' in such a way that it exerts a constant impact on our lives.  Insofar as most of our reactions stem from our unconscious relation to situations, the world we consciously find arrayed around us is a construction that appears in the wake of something we don't have access to.  Heidegger, however, knows to his very core that the only interesting discipline is philosophy, and he doesn't want his pure talk of Being polluted with some discussion of the merely human unconscious.  If he's going to somehow insert humans into this history of pure Being in itself (ie. the world), it will have to be from the ground up.

And sure enough, Heidegger's next move is to explain how, starting from Being, there could come to be thinking beings who could think up metaphysics, which as we saw is precisely the history of not thinking about Being.  Essentially, his answer is that Being differentiates itself into places.  Or at least, it differentiates itself by providing one place, an abode which defines man as da-sein, Being-there, the place where Being reveals beings but hides itself.  

... in staying away, there comes to be a relation to something like a place, away from which the staying away remains what it is: the default of unconcealment as such. That place is the shelter in which the default of unconcealment essentially persists. But if it is precisely concealment that remains in the staying away of unconcealment as such, then the staying of concealment also retains its essential relation to the same place. (H.4.217)

I imagine the abode of Being as a small clearing in the forest that when you stand in it seems to somehow magically expand all the way to the horizon and consequently leads you to forget that you happen to be standing in a clear spot in a forest.  Specifying the relationship of this place to the rest of Being is what Heidegger means by thinking.  And since humans are essentially defined by this place where the opening of Being closes itself off, it seems it is only humans who can think (H also seems to consider language as somehow indispensable to thinking).  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that humans are thinking.

As the relation to Being, whether it is to the being as such or to Being itself, ecstative inherence in the openness of the locale of Being is the essence of thinking. (H.4.218) 

So just to recap.  Being is revealing.  But revealing hides itself in plain sight.  Human thinking is the relationship between this place where things are revealed but the force that revealed them is hidden.  At this point a new problem arises. Now we begin to wonder exactly how Heidegger can himself be a thinking human if his own thinking reveals the concealment of revealing.  If thinking only happens when Being hides itself but reveals beings, then when Heidegger "thinks Being as such" he should be revealing that there's something hidden.  But then the hiding place, and consequently the thinking, would seem to have evaporated.  If thinking consists in articulating the relationship between the place within Being marked "human" -- a place from which Being has withdrawn itself -- and the rest of Being, then Heidegger's philosophy itself almost doesn't seem to count as thinking.   Of course, in Heidegger's mind, he's really the only one that truly thinks, so his preliminary definition of thinking as any relation between Being and the "locale of Being", which would include metaphysics' inability to see the hiding of Being, is a bit of a put on.  

We probably shouldn't be surprised then when the next thing Heidegger does is introduce the idea of authentic and inauthentic nihilism.  The Western metaphysical tradition that culminates in Nietzsche is of course the inauthentic form of nihilism.  Despite all the fuss it makes about the Good, or a priori subjectivity, or the will to power, it is never able to think about Being in itself, but only about Being insofar as it relates to beings, as something those beings value.  So while Being seems to always be an important question, the history of metaphysics is the story of Being in itself getting ignored or only considered as the Being of beings.  Hence metaphysics is nihilistic without knowing that it is nihilistic; it is inauthentically nihilistic.  But since, as we've seen, the story of metaphysics is the unfolding of the history of Being itself, this inauthenticity is not really the fault of metaphysics, but a result of Being hiding itself in disclosure.  What metaphysics really is then, seen from the perspective of Being, rather than from its own perspective rooted in the human being, is the authentic unfolding of nihilism as the absence of the question of Being.  In short, metaphysics is authentically inauthentic.  It's genuinely clueless that it's an unconscious asshole.  Naturally, by contrast, Heidegger's thinking, since it knows that Being is hiding itself in its unconcealment, is authentic.  

So is Heidegger then the one true authentic nihilist?  That's obviously the set-up here.  But wait, isn't nihilism, you know, bad?  Don't we want to overcome it?  Isn't that the whole point of Heidegger's project here, to directly think Being itself, and not forget about it?  But now it has turned out that Being itself is something other than itself.  That instead of simply being light, Being itself is the hiding of the fact that it lights beings.  In short, the Being Heidegger has described unfolding in the history of metaphysics is a Nothing that unfolds as a Something which hides the fact that it was Nothing.  Which makes Heidegger the supreme nihilist who, as we put it last time, believes in the Nothing.  

So Heidegger has no intention of overcoming nihilism.  As if he would ever dream of taking your bullshit nihilism!  Truly overcoming nihilism would be tantamount to erasing the entire history of Being that he has described. 

    If we heed the essence of nihilism as an essence of the history of Being itself, then the plan to overcome nihilism becomes superfluous, if by overcoming we mean that man independently subject that history to himself and yoke it to his pure willing. Such overcoming of nihilism is also fallacious in believing that human thought should advance upon the default. 

    Instead of such overcoming, only one thing is necessary, namely, that thinking, encouraged by Being itself, simply think to encounter Being in its default as such. Such thinking to encounter rests primarily on the recognition that Being itself withdraws, but that as this withdrawal Being is precisely the relationship that claims the essence of man, as the abode of its (Being's) advent. The unconcealment of the being as such is bestowed along with that abode.  (H.4.225)

 

But what do we do if we can no longer overcome nihilism, but merely wallow in it as the lack or default of Being?  Heidegger proposes that we "step back" from the problem entirely.  We cannot overcome nihilism and force Being to appear.  This is precisely the mistake Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche made in forcing Becoming into the mold of Being with eternal return and the will to power.  Instead, all we can really do hope to is rather passively "encounter" Being in its self-withdrawal.  It's as if Being withdrew, but left us a trail of breadcrumbs indicating that something was here.  We can't find what was here, what left the breadcrumbs, but we can at least authentically know that something was lost, and that our own being and thinking somehow appeared out of this disappearance.  

If, instead of stepping back, we pursue Nietzsche's desire to actively overcome nihilism, we only get more deeply entangled within nihilism without ever thereby reaching its true essence.  Nihilism acts like quicksand because any effort to overcome it can only come from a particular being, and no particular being can even see the withdrawal of Being itself, much less overcome it.  Overcoming nihilism would mean overpowering a Being which has somehow already escaped.  If we force Being to appear, it can only appear in the form of the values created by a particular being who seeks to bring literally everything into the glaring light of its power.  The will to power (according to Heidegger at least) is the final defenestration of Being itself and the enthroning of a human subject as the central being in a world of beings whose only reality is now their use-value as objects for us.  The attempt to overcome nihilism creates the most perfectly, authentically, inauthentic nihilism.

In the occurrence of the default of Being itself, man is thrown into the release of the being by the self-withdrawing truth of Being. Representing Being in the sense of the being as such, he lapses into beings, with the result that by submitting to beings he sets himself up as the being who in the midst of beings representationally and productively seizes upon them as the objective. In the midst of beings, man freely posits his own essence as certainty for and against the being. He seeks to accomplish this surety in the being through a complete ordering of all beings, in the sense of a systematic securing of stockpiles, by means of which his establishment in the stability of certainty is to be completed. (H.4.233)

However, we still need to remember that in a sense none of this is our (or Nietzsche's) fault.  Even his extreme and authentically inauthentic nihilism that attempts to overcome rather than acknowledge itself is really just a phase in the unfolding of Being.  Nevertheless, that phase has consequences for us.  Since human existence, da-sein, is, roughly speaking, a designation for the place where Being hides, our inability to see this hiding place is equivalent to our inability to see our own essence.  It seems we are a sort of blindspot within the vision of Being, and reciprocally, Being is a blindspot within our own vision.  We cannot know ourselves in some essential sense.  Which is a bummer man.  And so we end up anxious about it, in an existential dread kinda way.  Only this dread isn't really a product of some flaw in "human nature" so much as the action of the very lack that defines us as part of the history of Being.  This anxiety, this abyss that we simply are at our core, leads us to do everything we can to secure ourselves as beings.  Basically, it sounds a whole lot like the first two noble truths.  Not surprisingly, when we are so anxious and insecure that we turn everything into a means for trying to fill the bottomless whole of our metaphysical lack, we tend to fuck shit up.  Here's what that looked like around the time H was writing this essay. 

Everywhere, the being as such has brought itself into an unconcealment that lets it appear as what posits itself on itself and brings itself before itself. That is the fundamental trait of subjecticity. The being as subjecticity omits the truth of Being itself in a decisive way, insofar as subjecticity, out of its own desire for surety, posits the truth of beings as certitude. Subjecticity is not a human product: rather, man secures himself as the being who is in accord with beings as such, insofar as he wills himself as the l-and-we subject, represents himself to himself, and so presents himself to himself. (H.4.238)

In this final step in losing sight of the way Being hides itself, we turn ourselves into universal subjects who represent the world as objects. Basically, we reify everything, including ourselves, into a thing, a being, and then forget we're doing it, just as the non-dualists are always pointing out.  The world becomes a stockpile of stuff.

By this point, an astute observer can probably see that Heidegger keeps flipping back and forth between telling this story from the perspective of humans, and telling it from the perspective of Being.  While this naturally brings up the question of whether Heidegger is simply anthropomorphizing Being, part of this slippage is actually by design, and intended to place man and Being in an essential rather than accidental relation.  In the final pages of the essay Heidegger points out that since Being hides itself in its revealing, and since the locale or hiding place constitutes humanity, then Being actually needs humans for its essential unfolding.  But because of the metaphysical way Being unfolds, we can't see this need, and we vaguely think of Being as some simple and neutral underlying substratum, without any needs at all.  Being just is.  In place of Being's need for us we discover a world that is aimless and needless and valueless in the sense we commonly associate with nihilism.  In this sense, a human experience of this needlessness is the most pressing need of Being itself.  Being had to go to this point of extreme nihilism in which it most fully denies itself.  

Which just begs the question: what do you need that for dude?  Being had to make humans ... in order to be Being?  At this point it seems to me that Heidegger has so anthropomorphized Being that nothing can happen except by its divine grace, and yet somehow, miraculously, Being needs us.  Because of this theological tone (which peaks in a notable passage at H.4.248), I think we lose any ability to convincingly read Being as something like possibility in the way I proposed earlier.  Being seems to look and act just like us.  Our history and its history seem to be the same story told from two different, but nonetheless completely convergent, angles.  It seems to me that if Heidegger wanted to get out beyond beings into "something more" he has failed.  Neither his language nor his thinking are adequate to the task, so despite the great problem he raises, he basically just gives us back the psychology of existentialism disguised as a deep -- but don't call it metaphysical -- principle.

 

Maybe Heidegger's problem is exactly his idea that Being in itself should be "something more" than a mere being.  For all his critique of transcendence, he seems to have created an unbridgeable ontological difference between Being and beings.  We can never close this abyss; the best we can do is "step back" from the precipice.  But what is it that we are meant to understand when we step back?  It seems that this should just mean that we become aware of the whole history of Being that unfolds as a need for (human) beings.  The "something more" is actually just what's right in front of us.  It is us, and everything else.  The Being of Being is beings.  And the Being of those beings, our being, when understood authentically, is the history of Being itself.  The being is an expression of a Being which can be expressed in many ways, but all of these expressions are 'isomorphic' to what they express.  Each part expresses a whole which is nothing more than all the other parts expressing this same whole.  Like Leibniz, we see the world directly in every grain of sand.  This is the point of eternal return -- to think of Being in itself is just to return to the being again, exactly as it always could have been.  The "something more" that inspired this epic quest for Being in itself turns out to be just the possibilities of the world around us.  Paradoxically, this world is already something more than itself, just by being itself. 

Deleuze's idea of the univocity of Being is the closing of ontological difference.  Or, more accurately, it's the point where this difference in itself becomes repetition for itself.  Being is said in the same way of everything of which it is said.  The Being of Being is therefore no different than the Being of beings.  But this single voice 'says' all kinds of different things.  Perhaps the simplest way to understand this is to say that Being is a process which always happens in the same way; essentially, Being is the process of unfolding.  Everything that is, all beings, expresses this unfolding in the sense that they point to it, designate it as a process.  And the way beings point to this Being is always the same.  The Being of these pointers also lies in unfolding, which means that these beings are isomorphic with what they are pointing to.  They are not simply pointers, but they are also examples or instances of what they point to.  Which means that in pointing at Being, what they are pointing to is themselves.

It's only in point to the same thing in the same way that the pointers can each remain different.  The clarity and distinctness of this world, right here and now, passes through everything on its way back to itself.

We Believes in Nothing

The fourth and final volume in Heidegger's Nietzsche focuses on the exhausting subject of nihilism.  If you are looking for a better understanding Nietzsche's philosophy, this is by far the least interesting volume in the series.  Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy has by this point ossified into the form we saw take shape in volume 3.  He sees Eternal Return as the Being of Becoming, the Will to Power as a pure overpowering, and the Overman as the supreme representative of the will to power, "who is prepared to embark on the absolute domination of the globe." (H.4.9).  In short, he see Nietzsche's philosophy as "classical nihilism" in which might makes the right ... to make more might.  We become machines for self-positing and self-transcendence with no goal beyond constantly lapping ourselves, so to speak.

The real goal of this lecture series has nothing to do with interpreting Nietzsche, and everything to do with fitting a sadly diminished version of him into Heidegger's history of metaphysics.  Nietzsche is meant to be the final stop on the metaphysical train that began with Parmenides and Plato, first took a modern form in Descartes, and arrives at its ultimate destination with the nihilistic idea of the will to power.  While it's interesting to think about the problem Heidegger lays out through this history -- essentially the problem of what should count as the ultimate ground or beginning of philosophy -- his interpretation of the particular philosophers he chooses as signposts is entirely forced and unconvincing.  After Heidegger's exceedingly liberal "translations", these men end up saying things that are completely different than what at first seems to come out of their mouths.  While I love a good reinterpretation of a philosopher, these seem arbitrary and even violent.  In fact, it's closer to the truth to say that Heidegger simply invents the lines they need to speak to fit into his metaphysical play, and then attributes these pronouncements to them as if they were characters.  We've seen in detail how this happened with Nietzsche, and here we see the same technique applied to Parmenides, Plato, and Descartes.  

So, if Heidegger's interpretations have become forced, what can we get out of this lecture series?  The most interesting way to proceed is to skip to the final third of the class, where Heidegger actually lays out the problem that he wrestles with.  The goal of philosophy, for Martin Heidegger at least, always seems to be to find the deepest ground, the most basic starting principle of ... well, of everything -- of Being.  As far as I can tell, at least up to this point in his philosophy, Heidegger sees this quest as a failure.  He hasn't failed because he's not smart enough to solve the problem though.  It's more like he's (so far) failed because he hasn't worked out quite the right way to pose the problem to begin with.  In his view, merely seeing this problem of grounding as a problem is a major improvement on prior philosophy.  In fact, the whole history of metaphysics he outlines in this lecture series is essentially one long attempt to solve the problem of establishing some fundamental ground.  Protagoras said that man was the measure of all things.  Plato claimed everything derived from the Forms.  Descartes founded the whole works on his own thinking.  And finally, Nietzsche decided that everything, including us, was will to power and nothing besides.  Heidegger claims that all of them were working on the same problem that interests him, but that in 'dominating' that problem with their solution, in providing some particular theory that grounds life, the universe, and everything, each thinker fails to appreciate the full extent of what's problematic about grounding.  In other words, offering a solution seeks to close the question rather than open it up.

But wait, what exactly is the problem?  The real root of the problem seems to be our attempt to understand things in general.  How can one finite being called 'human being' understand everything that 'is'?

Metaphysics speaks of beings as such and as a whole, thus of the Being of beings; consequently, a relationship of man to the Being of beings reigns in it. Nonetheless, still unasked is the question of whether and how man comports himself to the Being of beings, not merely to beings, not simply to this or that thing. One imagines that the relation to "Being" has already been sufficiently defined by the explanation of man's relations with beings. One takes both the relations with beings and the relationship to Being as the "selfsame," and indeed with some justification. The fundamental trait of metaphysical thought is intimated in such an equivalence. (H.4.151)

Although unexpressed and at first perhaps even inexpressible, the one-and-the-same is already experienced and claimed in advance in the four guidelines [of metaphysics]: the relationship of man to Being. (H.4.152)

Meta-physics begins when we go beyond the 'physics' of the beings immediately around us.  We begin to postulate some principle that would account for the 'Being' of all those beings, including our own being.  The idea that there is and must be such a principle is for Heidegger the core idea that defines metaphysics.  What exactly this principle is varies from era to era.  But in every case, metaphysics presumes that there is some principle of Being behind or prior to beings that we can come to know.  By presuming this, metaphysics overlooks the most questionable thing of all, namely the assumption that there is such a principle, that there is a difference between Being and beings, that there is more beyond what "meets the eye", so to speak.  

As Heidegger tells it, the history of metaphysics is the history of taking Being for granted and transforming it into the most a priori and universal category.  All beings 'are'.  While this appears to attribute a central role to Being, it actually leads us not being able to say much at all about it.  Being retreats into a universal abstraction, the unquestionable given that is the condition of possibility of all beings and all thinking.  Meanwhile, this Being is always presumed to be given to some particular hairless chimp type beings.  So the trend of metaphysics is towards exalting Being as the most fundamental principle while simultaneously emptying it of any content and replacing the missing center with the subjectivity of man.  This at least is Heidegger's understanding of the trajectory that moves between Plato, where the Form of the Good is the light that illuminates all other Forms, to Descartes, where human thinking directly guarantees our being.  Nietzsche is the culmination of this history precisely because he denies the reality of Being entirely, claims that "truth is an error", and tells us that all of the principles or values we use to organize and totalize the world are merely things we made up for the benefit of enhancing our own purposeless animal power.  Heidegger's idea is that with the nihilism of the will to power, all Being is reinterpreted as merely a projection of beings, so it withdrawals completely and we can no longer formulate the question of whether there could be anything beyond or different from beings.  In fact, in this reading of Nietzsche, there really 'is' nothing other than us, constantly projecting ourselves onto the world.  

Final conclusion: 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 naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things. (WP #12)

Heidegger imagines that Nietzsche claims this constant invention and projection of ourselves is simply part of human nature insofar as we, like everything, want more power.  And since we only ever find ourselves reflected back to us, we can no longer discover any Being different from beings.  All we see is a carnival funhouse mirror of beings.  

In my mind this is a terrible reading of Nietzsche, but the idea of an important "ontological difference" between Beings and beings is an interesting one.  It's easy to pinpoint why this is a terrible reading of Nietzsche because Heidegger points it out himself (while thinking that he's critiquing Nietzsche). 

   What we have just been examining in an indeterminate way, the relations of man with beings, is at bottom nothing other than the differentiation of Being and beings, which belongs to man's natural disposition. Only because man differentiates in such a way can he comport himself toward beings in the light of differentiated Being; that is, sustain relations with beings; which is to say, be metaphysically determined and defined by metaphysics.
   However, is the differentiation of Being and beings the natural disposition - indeed the core of the natural disposition - of man? But what is man? In what does human "nature" consist? What does "nature" mean here, and what does "man" mean? Whence and in what way should human nature be defined? (H.4.184)

This question, "but what is man?" is core to all Nietzsche's ideas in a way that Heidegger just can't seem to see.  For some reason he constantly imagines that Nietzsche simply defines man as nothing but a power hungry beast.  In fact, Nietzsche's nihilism goes much deeper than that.  Which is not to deny that we are in some sense just power hungry beasts, but to ask the obvious follow-up questions: what is a beast and what does power mean?  And why do humans think they are so different from beasts and think they have access to some privileged ontological difference?  What makes the truth of Being such a temptingly obvious question for us even if we can never seem to do more than push it back into the background as we reassert our being?  Heidegger approaches these questions in his final lecture without any intention of answering them.  In asking about the relation of the being man to Being we are asking a question in which neither side nor their relation are defined.  Which perhaps pushes the question towards something beyond the "classical nihilism" Heidegger attributes to Nietzsche and into something more like a true nihil-ism where we are asked to believe in the nothing, in its un-differentiation into either Being or beings, and to make everything out of it.  

Over-powering

In Volume 3 of his lecture course on Nietzsche, Heidegger finally jumps the shark.  'Nietzsche' now becomes entirely 'Heidegger's Nietzsche', a caricature of original designed to fulfill a pre-determined role in Heidegger's philosophy.  That's not to say that there aren't some interesting thoughts in this volume, but the tone now shifts fairly dramatically.  Heidegger moves away from the exploration of the first two classes and towards building a case that Nietzsche's philosophy represents, "the end of metaphysics".  Once he's decided on Nietzsche's place in the history of philosophy (which Heidegger's grandiosity always equates with the entire history of the West) there's no room left for Heidegger to see any of the novelty in concepts like the Will to Power or the Eternal Return or the Overhuman.  These concepts all have to be read as simple inversions of Platonism that nevertheless secretly buy into the same underlying assumptions as Plato.  The bookends of Western philosophy must be a matching pair.  Looking from this perspective does indeed shed some light on Nietzsche's ideas, but in a very oblique way that does much more to illuminate Heidegger's thought than Nietzsche's.

All this means that I should probably briefly examine where Heidegger himself is coming from, or perhaps better said, going to.  I say briefly, because I'd have to read a lot more Heidegger to feel like I can adequately characterize his trajectory.  However, Volume 3 does end with a long standalone lecture entitled "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and The Will to Power" where Heidegger starts to lay his cards on the table.  This talk was apparently meant to serve as a concluding lecture for the entire series of 3 classes that we've discussed.  Accordingly, it steps back from Nietzsche to reveal a bit more of the context of Heidegger's thought.  And basically, the guy sounds like a grumpy theologian.  "Kids these days have forgotten all about the Truth of Being!  They only want to talk about beings, and especially what those beings can do for one special being called a human being.  They think they have finally triumphed over the world, rid themselves of the illusion that Being was even an important open question, and have thus become all powerful gods who make their own meaning.  But actually, they don't even realize that True Being has forsaken them!"  And get off my lawn!  To an extent I sympathize with Heidegger's reaction to our society of more, more, more domination!  But it's not at all clear how he's thinking much beyond a sort of reactionary, conservative, and ultimately theological vision of philosophy as the "shepherd of true Being".  And it's even less clear how this vision would help us live better.  Like I say though, I'd have to read and reread a bunch more to see whether my initial reaction holds up.  I will, however, note in passing that I recently discovered this negative view of Heidegger's project and his interpretation of Nietzsche is one of the core contentions of Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber.

Maybe the most interesting aspect of this third semester of lectures is the way Heidegger repeatedly reflects on Nietzsche's "biologism".  It's obvious that "life" is an important concept for Nietzsche, indeed perhaps the most important concept in his philosophy.  But it's much less obvious just what life is.  Does life only belong to the individual?  And if so does this life have to do most fundamentally with preserving or perhaps reproducing that individual?  Or is life a broader term for Nietzsche, to the point where we might say that life is something which merely flows through the individual.  But then what defines this more mystical sounding life?  Is it even one thing, like God or the Cosmos or Spirit?  Does it even make sense to ask what it wants?  I think this question of where to locate the agency of life is an important and complex one in Nietzsche's philosophy.  Heidegger's answer -- that Nietzsche's Life wants Being interpreted as the permanent presence of Becoming -- doesn't seem very compelling to me.  But examining how he constructs this conclusion might help me clarify my thinking about the problem.

This third lecture series builds towards the same conclusion that Heidegger reached in the second series (both of which are slightly at odds with the conclusion of the first series).  Nietzsche's philosophy is understood as a way to, "stamp Becoming with the character of Being", in other words, to make impermanence permanent.  Instead of illustrating this by interpreting ER, Heidegger now tries to show us that the concept of the Will to Power demonstrates the same idea in another form.  Since you can't get far interpreting the will to power without asking whose will it is, we almost immediately get to the question we wanted to explore.  In short, it's life that does the willing in the will to power.  

Already in 1885 Nietzsche initiates a train of thought with the question "And do you know what 'the world' is to me?" By "world" he understands beings as a whole, often equating the term with "life," just as we like to equate "worldview" with a "view of life." He answers: "This world is will to power-and nothing besides! And you yourselves are this will to power - and nothing besides!" (WM, 1067)."'
Nietzsche thinks the fundamental character of beings as a whole in the unique thought of will to power. The utterance of his metaphysics, that is, of the determination of beings as a whole, reads: Life is will to power. Something twofold and yet singular is contained in this: first, being as a whole is "life"; second, the essence of life is "will to power." (H.3.18)

But what exactly is this life?  Just calling it the will to power is not terribly helpful at this point.  According to Heidegger, life is above all characterized by the desire to make itself permanent.  Life is the struggle to be alive, to endure.  We'll gradually see that life's will to permanence is a bit of a paradoxical affair.  In fact, the only thing that remains unchanged in it is the desire for constant self-overcoming.  But we can already see Heidegger's conclusion in his departure point.  Nietzsche's concept of life is just the final twist in a history of Western metaphysics defined by its taking Being to mean permanent presence -- in this case, what's permanently present is the Becoming of life.  WP and ER both signal the end of metaphysics because they substitute modern Becoming in place of Greek Being without fundamentally changing anything.  Like I say, I don't think this is a compelling interpretation of what Nietzsche means by life, but it's certainly the only one we should have expected from the Being-crazed Heidegger.

Heidegger is able to smuggle his conclusion in at the beginning because he starts off with a fairly prosaic description of life.  He begins by outlining Nietzsche's idea that truth is a type of error that is necessary for life (WP #493).  As a result, what we hold to be true expresses nothing about how the world is, and everything about how we need it to be if we are to live in it.

The "value-estimation" that is determined by the essence of truth in the sense of holding-to-be-true, any "estimation of value" whatever, is the "expression" of conditions of preservation and growth, as conditions of life. What is appraised and valued as a "value" is such a condition. (H.3.38)

None of this sounds odd to our post-post-modern ears.  All truth is perspectival and relative, colored by the hidden agenda of the one who believes it.  However, Nietzsche is after something deeper that what we often understand by relativism.  While he often explains himself in way that sounds like simple pragmatism by claiming that truth is what is useful for life, the real underlying issue is whose life truth is useful for.  Heidegger spends many pages fleshing out Nietzsche's concept of truth-as-error by discussing how truth is a way to fixate the flux of the world, to impose categories and schemata on it.  In fact, he basically slurs together the concepts of being, perceiving, knowing, and praxis and equates them to stabilizing, schematizing, categorizing, reason and logic.  On the one side we have what we think is, and on the other we have the operations of a mind or life that don't represent what is but instead produces it.  Essentially, we are inventing a world that it suits our needs. Today we would simply call it confirmation bias.  Or sagely point out that the victors write the history.  But while this idea is important and interesting, it is merely the first part of the question.  To his credit, Heidegger never completely loses sight of the fact that the more important question is how there is anyone there to do all this schematizing to begin with.  Sure, once there is an agent around, that agent perceives the world from its own perspective and manipulates the world to its own advantage and for its own preservation and self aggrandizement.  But why is there any agency at all?  Or perhaps it would be better to ask why there is any affect at all, and agency that feels like it wants to do something.

The answer of course is that the agent is alive, and it 'feels like something' to be alive.  But unless we already understand what it means to be alive and feeling, this just deepens the mystery.  Consider two passages that set up the problem:

As strange as it may sound at first, the truth of the following assertion can be founded by sufficient reflection: when Nietzsche thinks beings as a whole-and prior to that Being-as "life," and when he defines man in particular as "beast of prey," he is not thinking biologically. Rather, he grounds this apparently merely biological worldview metaphysically. (H.3.46)

The "truth" of knowledge consists precisely in the usefulness of knowledge for life. This says clearly enough that what generates practical use is true, and the truth of what is true is to be estimated only according to its degree of usefulness. Truth is not at all something for itself that can then be estimated; it consists in nothing other than estimability for an attainable use.
     However, we may no more take the idea of use and usefulness in Nietzsche in this crude, everyday (pragmatic) sense than we may take his use of biological language in a biologistic sense. That something is useful here means simply that it pertains to the conditions of "life." And for the essential determination of these conditions, the ways of their conditioning, and the character of their conditioning in general, everything depends upon the way in which "life" itself is defined in its essence. (H.3.52)

We we speak of the relativity of truth, we often take for granted that we know all about the subject to whom the truth is relative.  But the life of this subject is exactly what's at issue here.  If we simply presume that we are hairless chimps, we have already decided the question.  Or perhaps it would be better to say that we have pushed it back, because, what, after all, is a chimp?  Appealing to biological science may raise interesting new questions, but it doesn't solve the original one of how the subject got constructed.  Why is there any subjective and perspectival life that could want to preserve itself at all?  [Those who wish to shout "evolution!" at this point are advised to reread the beginning of this post.] Just like the "hard problem of consciousness", this is not a question that science is equipped to answer, which means that Nietzsche's appeal to biological metaphors can't mean that he considers WP a basic biological "function".  It's not that all living things want power.  Rather, it would be better to say that the existence of a biological agent is a function of the operation of WP.

To get anything out of this lecture series we have to understand the way Heidegger makes a real attempt to address this hard problem of the definition of life (but, in my opinion, fails to provide an adequate solution).  It lies beneath the way he contrasts and then later harmonizes Nietzsche's ideas of art and truth, which shift defines the central movement of the lectures.  And it is the driving force behind a number of passages that would be easy to misinterpret.  For example, Heidegger explores at some length Nietzsche's assertion that the difference between the "true" world and the "apparent" one comes down to a question of values.

"The real and the apparent world"—I have traced this anti­ thesis back to value relations. We have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general. Because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the "real" world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being. (WP #507)

It's clear that Nietzsche is saying that the "real" world we see is simply the one we invent to help us preserve ourselves.  So a different organism would invent a different "real" world necessary for its preservation.  What's less obvious is the multi-valence of the word "value" here.  Life evaluates the world for things it can use, but it also evaluates itself.  In fact, for Nietzsche, the most important question is life's evaluation of itself as strong or weak, sick or healthy, seeking stability or embracing change.  The difference between the "master" and the "slave" morality comes down to a question of a life's positive or negative evaluation of itself.  As you can see in his elaboration on this aphorism, Heidegger doesn't miss this essential ambiguity.

Yet life, and here especially human life, will in advance direct the positing of its proper conditions and thus the positing of the conditions of securing its vitality according to how life itself determines its essence for itself. If life as such is first of all and constantly and only concerned with maintaining itself and being perpetually secured in its constancy, if life means nothing other than securing the constancy that has come down to it and been taken over by it, then life will make whatever suffices for and serves the securing of its constancy its most proper conditions. What conditions most of all in this way is what has the highest value. If life is concerned in its life with constantly maintaining itself as such in its constancy, it must not merely have secured the corresponding individual conditions. Only what has the character of maintaining and securing constancy in general can be taken as a condition of life, that is, as a value. Only this can be addressed as "in being." But if the true is taken for what is in being, everything that is to be true must have the character of being constant and stable; the "true world" must be a constant one, one that is removed from mutability and transformation. (H.3.61)

In short, we value in the world exactly what we value in ourselves.  And we find in the world only that aspect of ourselves that we project onto it.  Our evaluation of the world is an evaluation of ourselves.  Since Heidegger presumes we want ourselves to be permanent, then it follows we value a permanent world to facilitate this.

The way and manner in which the essence of beings is interpreted, namely, as permanence, arises from the way and manner in which human life understands itself in what is most of all its own: as the securing of its own permanence. These determinations alone - permanence and perpetuity and stability - thus stipulate what is and may be addressed as in being, that about which the determinations "in being" and "being" can be uttered. (H.3.63)

 

It's almost as if he's saying that the only principle one can value is permanence, because the only thing one ultimately values is the persistence of the self.  There are many things that may be of value to the self, but the very concept of valuation is nothing more than the self's innate valuableness to itself.  

But is the permanence of itself really the thing that life finds most valuable?  Is the point of life simply to be alive, or perhaps just to be at all?  These questions are only sharper versions of the hard problem I mentioned earlier.  We take it as obvious that life loves itself, that every organism fights tooth and nail to survive and reproduce.  But aren't we again taking for granted the identity of the very thing we set out to explain?  We've concluded that life sees the world as a projection of itself, and that this selection of what is "in being" for an organism is a fabrication of the conditions necessary to its preservation.  But how does life itself know what it is?  What exactly is this projected world a projection of?  Has Heidegger already given up on the deepest question by presuming that life's highest value is its own permanence?  Even if we don't consider this value life places on itself "biological", it still seems that we've smuggled in some ability to identify ourselves insofar as we can identifying the bits of the world that would serve to preserve those selves.  How would we preserve something if we could not identify what it was beforehand?  

While I've already suggested that the short answer to these question is yes -- Heidegger presumes Nietzsche's life is fundamentally about permanence -- the road to this conclusion takes an interesting twist here.  Because Heidegger has not simply forgotten about the hard problem of why there is any affective life at all.  In fact, he knows that Nietzsche explicit claimed that the highest value for life does not lie in constructing a world of permanence but in affirming becoming.  "Art is worth more than truth" (WP #853).  So the question of the essence of life isn't as settled for Heidegger as it might appear to be when he first takes for granted life's desire for permanence.

Nietzsche opposes what becomes to what is true, that is, what is secured, agreed upon, and fixed and in this sense is in being. As opposed to "Being," Nietzsche posits Becoming as a higher value (see WM, 708). From this we initially conclude only one thing, namely, that truth is not the highest value: "To transform the belief 'it is thus and thus' into the will 'it shall become thus and thus' " (WM, 593; from the years 1885-86). Truth as holding-to-be-true, committing oneself to a once-and-for-all fixed and decided "it is thus," cannot be life's highest form, because it denies life's vitality, its will to self-transcendence and becoming. To concede to life its vitality, that it might come to be something becoming as becoming and not merely be as a being, that is, lie fixed as something at hand - this is what that valuation evidently aims for compared with which truth can only be a deposed value. (H.3.65)

Heidegger spends the next several lectures discussing the "vitality", or we might say the creativity, of life.  This, "will to self-transcendence and becoming," appears in the form of a body, or as he puts it, a bodying.  The term means something more for Heidegger than simply having a physical or biological instantiation.  It's less that we have a body than that we are a process of embodiment.  Life is affective because we are constantly surrounded by -- indeed are -- a chaotic mass of bodily sensation.  While Heidegger says that Nietzsche calls this raw material of the world we encounter "chaos", he spends a lot of time pointing out that this chaos is already pre-selected by us and for us.  In a sense, there's nothing chaotic about it at all.  Its role is really just to provide for the possibility of going beyond the fixed beliefs we happen to hold at any given time.

What is to be known and what is knowable is chaos, but we encounter chaos bodily, that is, in bodily states, chaos being included in these states and related back to them. We do not first simply encounter chaos in bodily states; but, living, our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos. (H.3.82)

But while Heidegger's explanation of the relationship between life and this bodily chaos emphasizes that the laying out of the chaos is inventive because it opens up new horizons of possibility, those possibilities are always possibilities for us.  It's as if he believes that we can never reach a true perception of "chaos in itself", but can only ever see as much of it as would benefit us by the practical possibilities it affords us.  This time though, the notion of "practical benefit" includes some margin for necessary change, and not just for securing our immediate needs.  His goal with this interpretation is to begin to collapse the distinction that Nietzsche emphasizes between being and becoming, art and truth.  While Heidegger spoke ambiguously about the "raging discordance" between art and truth in the first lecture series, he seems to have definitively changed his mind.  Now he wants to see both the opening of a new horizon of possibility (art), as well as the fixing of particular possibilities within that horizon (truth as necessary error), as two sides of the same coin.  That coin is the practical operation of life, which is now seen as needing both a measure of stability and a measure of variation to preserve itself.

    Both what becomes and what is stable point back to a more original commencement of their essential unity-provided that they are to be thought with equal essentiality in their relatedness. Because forming a horizon and imposing a schema have their essential ground in the essence of life-occurrence, in praxis as the securing of stability, praxis and chaos essentially belong together.
   The connection of the two is by no means to be represented in such a way that here we have a living being at hand in whose inside, as in a compartment, "practical needs" arise, and there, "outside" this living being, chaos. Rather, the living being as praxis, that is, as the perspectival-horizonal securing of stability, is first installed in chaos as chaos. Chaos as the onrushing urge of living beings for its part makes the perspectival securing of stability necessary for the survival of the living being. The need for schematizing is in itself a looking for stable things and their ascertainability, that is, their perceptibility. This "practical need" is reason. (H.3.88)

Any attempt to approach the hard problem of affect, the question of what is life, is bound to result in some kind circularity.  Here, Heidegger seems to be saying that it's the practical attempt to secure some stable horizon for ourselves that leads us to conceive of the world as a "chaos" that needs stabilizing if we are to live in it.  We seem to be trapped in this paranoid circle of attempting to control the world, and thus seeing everything that resists this control as another threat requiring even tighter control.  Even the "chaos" we appear to be struggling against is our own creation.  In this circle we can never get away from ourselves, and everything that happens occurs within a horizon that we ourselves have laid out as a projection of our needs.  It's as if we invent a semi-tame chaos only in order to be able to finish domesticating it.  Of the truly wild world we cannot even speak.

As the directives for man's relation to men and things, directives placed in advance on account and first regulating calculation, the schemata are not impressed on chaos as a stamp; rather, they are thought out in advance and then sent out to meet what is encountered, so that the latter first appears always already in the horizon of the schemata, and only there. Schematizing in no way means a schematic ordering in readymade compartments of what has no order, but the invention that places on account a range of configurations into which the rush and throng must move in order thus to provide living beings with something constant, and thus to afford them the possibility of their own permanence and security. (H.3.92)

While Heidegger doesn't say anything specific about it, it's hard not to see this reading of Nietzsche as a new version of Kant's transcendental schema.  Instead of God, Self, and World as the ideas we never fail to find, we have Chaos and the Permanent Identity of Life.  In this way of thinking, schematizing (or reasoning) is less a thing we do than what we inescapably are.  So Heidegger seems to suggest that Nietzsche is reinventing the Kantian transcendental from a biological perspective.  Instead of the a priori unity of the transcendental subject, everything, including even the chaos of an open and 'unschematized' space of possibilities, depends on what we might call a transcendental life.  For Nietzsche this life isn't biological, but, Heidegger claims, metaphysical.  In fact, this transcendental life is little more than the metaphysical personification of the goal of being permanently alive that we empirically associate with animal life.  Which, in turn, seems to me to be nothing more than the principle of self-identity disguised as a goal rather than a given.  Insert Deleuze's critique of transcendental-empirical doubling here.  

The flow of Heidegger's lectures lends support to this reading; the very next thing he discusses is the principle of non-contradiction as a sort of master schema that govern the creation of all the other schemata.  The idea is to understand the principle of non-contradiction not as a rule of logical thinking, or even as a law that we assume Being itself somehow has to obey, but as a transcendental schema necessary for life's empirically observed will to preserve itself.  Thus we find Heidegger talking about how, "Reason consists in adjustment, invention of what is identical." (H.3.93).  The "poetizing essence of reason" must first invent a world of A=A that operates according to the principle of identity and non-contradiction.  But since this "invention of the identical" depends entirely on the goal of preserving life, its first and most important invention is that there is such a thing as this goal.  The category of "final cause" that lies behind our notion of will and purpose is nothing more than an effect of life's need to preserve itself.  

Nietzsche has no intention of denying what we have just clarified, namely, that the purpose, what is represented in advance, has the characteristic, as something re-presented, of directing and thus causing. What he primarily wants to emphasize is this: the on-account-of-which and the for-this-reason that are represented in advance originate as such, that is, as what has been fixed in advance, from the poetizing character of reason, from its being intent on something constant; thus they are produced by reason and for such reason are an effect. As a category, finality is something poetized and thus effected (an effect). Yet what is thus poetized, the category "purpose," has the horizonal characteristic that it gives directives for the production of something else; hence it causes the effecting of something else. Precisely because finality as a kind of cause is a category, it is an "effect" in the sense of a poetized schema. (H.3.99)

So the traditional law of non-contradiction becomes the law of having-a-purpose and finally the law of preserving-the-identity-of-a-"biological"-self.  However, the transcendental nature of this law -- the fact that it's only a law after the fact (so to speak), that is, an a priori law made necessary by an empirical fact -- means that life experiences this law as a sort of command issued by itself to itself.  Such a strange circular structure of course reminds us of Nietzsche's discussion of the feeling of 'free will' in BGE #19.  In free will we ourselves are simultaneously the one who commands and the one who obeys.  Which is to say that Heidegger claims that life is 'free' to the extent that it commands itself to go on living.  It's a freedom that expresses itself by inventing a world that would permit the organism to continue inventing a world that ... would permit the organism to continue existing.  While the bedrock of the command is to be alive, the means to accomplish this lie in inventing a would that suits us, rather than in changing anything in our life (whose inventive essence we only want to preserve).  Now that Heidegger has defined life as a freedom to invent your own necessity, he feels he has reached the essence of Nietzsche's conception of life.

Nietzsche thinks the "biological," the essence of what is alive, in the direction of commanding and poetizing, 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 poetizing - in general, in terms of the representing of beings. (H.3.122)

Ultimately, Heidegger would have us believe that Life, for Nietzsche, reduces to a particular conception of human life, a life free to impose its schemata on the world around it because it is compelled to be what just what it is, namely, the constant projecting of itself onto a world that then appears as nothing more than useful to itself.  It's an interesting meta-level twist on the simple idea of an anthropomorphism that prevents humans from seeing the world in anything other than human terms.  Instead of seeing our presumed essence everywhere it's as if we're seeing our non-essence, our lack of essence, our constant and essential fabrication of the world, reflected back to us from all directions.  In both cases, however, the essential point is that the human is conceived as having some distinct essence that serves as the ontological center of the universe.  Since what we find in the world -- even if this is its purported lack of essence, its endless Becoming -- is ultimately nothing but ourselves, Heidegger will say that Nietzsche recreates the classic ideas of truth and justice in a supreme anthropomorphism where everything is like us in wanting permanency, ie. Being.  Here, he states the idea as the reciprocal relation of a Knowledge that fixes the world for our us and an Art that constantly opens new possibilities ... for our fixation.   

   For knowledge as the securing of permanence is necessary, although art as the higher value is still more necessary. Transfiguration creates possibilities for the self-surpassing of life at any given point of limitation. Knowledge in each case posits the fixated and fixating boundaries so that there can be something to surpass, whereas art is able to retain its higher necessity. Art and knowledge require each other reciprocally in their essence.  Art and knowledge in their reciprocity first bring about the full securing of permanence of the animate as such.
   But after all we have said, what is the securing of permanence now? Neither simply fixation of chaos in knowledge nor transfiguration of chaos in art, but both together. Yet both are in essence one: namely, the assimilation and the direction of human life to chaos, homoiosis. Such assimilation is not imitative and reproductive adaptation to some- thing at hand, but transfiguration that commands and poetizes, establishes perspectival horizons, and fixates. (H.3.140)

At this point it's pretty clear to me that Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche has gone off the rails.  The idea that Nietzsche's fundamental teaching has to do with likeness (homoiosis) and representation and harmony with chaos just doesn't hold up.  Heidegger's detour through the creative freedom of life was only meant to create a tautology where even creation could be interpreted as a form of the re-presentation of permanence.  While any transcendental question involves a degree of circularity, the circle that Heidegger has described doesn't have any genuine novelty to it.  The desire for life to preserve itself is presumed as the starting point for a definition of life, and then this same desire for permanence returns to us through life's invention of the concept of a goal for itself, namely the desire for its own permanence.  The circle completely closes in the dead dry reiteration of the same self that it begins with.  Just as ER was for Heidegger nothing more than the permanence of Becoming, the will to power now becomes nothing but the will to more power interpreted as the will to dominate reality by imposing our own empty freedom on it.  Heidegger interprets the will to power as an contentless addiction to overpowering our reality and our self.  This overpower defines our own essence as well as the essence of Being. 

The three determinations-constructing, excluding, annihilating - characterize the way of thinking by which justice is understood. These three determinations, however, are not only ordered in a certain hierarchical sequence, they tell at the same time and above all of the inner animation of this thinking. By constructing, it set itself up (first erecting the height) in this movement; thus, what thinks in this way surpasses itself, separates itself from itself, and brings what is fixated under and behind itself. This way of thinking is a self-surpassing, a becoming master of oneself from having climbed and opened a higher height. We call such self-surpassing heightening overpowering. It is the essence of power. (H.3.146)

In short, Heidegger's reading turns the will to power into overpower, eternal return into a circle of permanent Becoming, and life into a cosmic life that perpetually overcomes itself and the individuals who bear it, but which is structured just like them, and so is ultimately reducible to them.  I just don't think Nietzsche was this ... boring.

This post has been a bit of an odyssey, so let me attempt a simple summary of what went right and wrong in this interpretation.  Heidegger understands the fundamental idea that the self is constructed.  But he still sees Nietzsche as saying that the being of this self is like a cardinal point on a circle of constant self-positing and self-overcoming.  The necessity of a self at the center of this process derives directly from Heidegger's straightforward assumption that life seeks to preserve itself.  He assumes this characteristic of life at the outset, and despite the twist he gives it, his final definition of life as the permanently impermanent only gives us back what we began with.   The will of this living self constantly seeks to overpower itself (as well as all other beings).  This is why he interprets WP and ER as the permanent revolution of impermanence and what turns them into the boring and question-closing repetitive end of metaphysics.  The revolution he describes isn't really a qualitative break but just a revolving around a circle whose trajectory constantly departs from and re-approaches the point marked "self".  

The idea that life is defined as what wants to make itself permanent is certainly not foreign to Nietzsche.  But this is just one type of life, the life of revenge and ressentiment.  There's another, deeper type of life that forgets all about its self.  It has nothing to preserve and nothing to overcome.  If life wants to 'repeat' itself, it's a paradoxical sort of "unhinged" repetition without an original model to be repeated as copy.  This depends crucially upon the emptiness of what would serve as the hinge.  Life doesn't need any identities or have any essence.  It's neither imprisoned within individuals, nor is it an individual 'cosmic life' of its own.  If we were to put it in Buddhist terms, we could simply observe that Heidegger seems to hypostatized emptiness as self-overcoming, and we know that, "one who adopts emptiness as a view is thereby pronounced incurable."  

In answer to our original question then, there really isn't any agency to life at all.  The real meaning of the will to power as, "the one that wants in the will," is that the movement of life produces and destroys agents only at the end and as a byproduct, not by some design for self-overcoming.  The affective agent we were looking for is not the starting point Heidegger takes it to be, but itself another illusion or simulacra that life necessarily produces as an effect in the sense of a 'special effect'.  Likewise, eternal return is the great discovery of an unpulsed time that isn't measured by a repetition of the same self, even if this self is just a construction that overcomes itself.  ER leaves the self and the not-self behind entirely.  This is why at the end of TSZ, Nietzsche can see life as the placid, deep joy of eternity rather than the frenzied repetition of self overcoming that dominated the discussion of the overhuman in Part 1.  Like every other spiritual idea, ER represents a peculiar triumph of powerlessness. Life can also be the power of letting go of ourselves rather than always trying to find ourselves, even if that search is interpreted as merely preliminary to overcoming ourselves.