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.