SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hermeneutics

Gianni Vattimo, Peter Carravetta, Peter Carravetta

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438473833
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Beyond the Subject Gianni Vattimo offers a reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger that shows how the premises to overcome the metaphysical Subject were already embedded in their thought. Vattimo makes a case for a Nietzsche who is not concerned with the structure and glorification of the Overman, but rather with its opposite, by showing how it is the single individual who must see and accept his/her potential and then excel and develop an inner strength and ethic. He reads Heidegger as concerned with the inevitable distortion present in every interpretation, which, when confronted and accepted, humbles us to deal with a less overarching telos or Grund, and makes us more attuned to contingency and interpersonal communication—what Vattimo calls a "weakened" notion of being. These original readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger pave the way for Vattimo's concept of weak thought and open up to a future social ethic that is less agonistic and more community oriented. This edition includes two supplementary essays from 1986 and 1988 that expand on the same themes, providing a deeper look at an important decade in the development of Vattimo's thought.

1

Nietzsche, Beyond the Subject

Georges Bataille’s essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealism” contains some of the most illuminating (and historically influential) pages on Nietzsche.1 Here Bataille turns his attention to the meaning of the prefix über, whose sense is crucial for understanding the concept of Übermensch, which is central for the later Nietzsche. On his part, Heidegger also, both in his seminars on Nietzsche and in his essay “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” contained in Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), places at the heart of his reflection precisely the meaning of “overcoming” implied in the notion of Übermensch, according to him one of the five well known Leitworte of Nietzsche’s thought. These are but two examples of the importance that the problem of the Übermensch has for both the proper reading of Nietzsche and the recognition of its vast theoretical implications. Even the question of Nietzsche’s affinity with the ideologies of fascism and Nazism, which for years weighted on Nietzsche studies, is tightly linked with the sense we attribute to the notion of Übermensch, as both the preceding and the ensuing discussion is based precisely on the question of the prefix. The idea of a Nietzsche precursor of Nazism presupposes, in fact, that the superman (superuomo)—or, as I believe we should say, the overman (oltreuomo)—can be portrayed in relation to a pure and simple overturning of all Humanität ideals handed down to us by European humanism.

The problem, however, does not concern just or primarily Nietzsche’s position in the humanistic tradition of Western thought. It concerns also and perhaps above all his relation to the philosophic dogmas of that nineteenth- and twentieth-century form of thought that has condensed in an exemplary way the values of the European humanist tradition, that is to say, Hegelian-Marxian dialectics. Under the form of the materialist conception of history, to this day dialectics avers to offer the only valid interpretation of the conditions of human existence in the world, indeed it claims to be perhaps the only still feasible philosophy of history (and as such it is still widely practiced in our culture). It is precisely against dialectics that we must measure Nietzsche’s effort to diagnose the evils of modern culture while suggesting some remedies. The question of the meaning of the über becomes thus a crucial factor in the discussion of the relation between Nietzsche’s thought and dialectical thought (which, for example, takes up much of Deleuze’s work).2 This factor in turn is decisive for anyone who looks to Nietzsche with theoretical expectations—that is to say, seeking answers still pregnant with a future.

In our efforts to figure out the sense of the über that defines the overman, and with it the sense of Nietzsche’s rapport with the humanistic and metaphysical tradition of the West, we cannot but run into the problem of the subject. I think there is reason enough to state that the overman of which Nietzsche speaks beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be characterized as a “reconciled subject” (soggetto conciliato), a subject thought within the horizon of dialectics.

We can speak of a reconciled subject provided we conceive of it as the endpoint of a movement of Aufhebung (resolution), as an overcoming. But this concerns consciousness, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as institutions, as in the Philosophy of Right and, more broadly and radically, in Marx’s idea of the revolutionary suppression of alienation. Now, in a certain sense, Nietzsche’s Übermensch undoubtedly manifests traits that bring him close to a reconciled subject. When, in fact, Nietzsche links him to another locus of his doctrine, namely the eternal recurrence of the same, the Übermensch is distinguished from the human being of the preceding tradition, the bisheriger Mensch (previous man), insofar as he no longer lives the tension between existence and sense, being and having to be, fact and value. Rather, he realizes in each moment of his existence a perfect coincidence of the two terms. The meaning of this can best be grasped if we think of medieval theology and its thesis of the coincidence of essence and existence in God and in God alone, whereas in all finite creatures finiteness is expressed precisely in the never perfect unity of the two terms. Nietzsche’s description, in aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, of the individual capable of wanting the eternal recurrence of the same—and therefore of an individual who can be considered as the model for the Übermensch—is that of a happy person, someone who may want the repetition of the present moment because in it such a person experiences happiness, the coincidence of the event with its sense.3 Seen in the context of a broader and deeper analysis, the eternal recurrence cannot be coherently defined in Nietzsche’s text other than as the condition of an existence no longer severed from sense (Deleuze 1985 [1962]). In existence thus understood, the structure of temporality is profoundly altered. For temporality has always been experienced by Western human beings as a movement toward transcendent values, goals, and objectives, which confer meaning to becoming only inasmuch as they withdraw from it. Yet this coincidence of sense and event, which following our hypothesis is what Nietzsche is thinking with his doctrine of the eternal recurrence, can it not be understood also as just another name for the self-transparency of spirit as Hegel theorized and imagined it realized in (his own) philosophy? Or even, as another name to indicate the unalienated subject, emancipated from the division of labor and the fetters of ideology, as was expected from the communist revolution—so suggestively described, in the tracks of Marx, by Ernst Bloch in his philosophy of hope?4

If such a coincidence were to obtain, we could legitimately think that the Nietzschean overman, and with him the proposal of the rebirth of a tragic, Dionysian culture, are still bound to the preceding tradition by means of a rapport of dialectical overcoming which is suppression, though also conservation and fulfilment. Now, the most reliable definition of Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch remains the one that thinks of him as identity of event and sense. There are, however, also solid reasons to believe that this identity cannot justify the identification of Nietzsche’s Übermensch with the “reconciled subject” of dialectical thought. Above all, the Übermensch cannot be understood as a reconciled subject because it cannot be thought as subject. The very notion of subject is in fact the constant target of Nietzsche’s unmasking of the contents of metaphysics and Platonic-Christian morality. As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, paragraph 34: “Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the predicate and object?” This is an irony that, in Nietzsche’s development, surfaces most strongly in his mature writings, right about the time when he is outlining the doctrine of the overman. This irony is justified by the superficial, non-originary character of the subject. One cannot speak of certain “things in themselves,” writes Nietzsche in some note for the Wille zur Macht, because no things are given without reference to some horizon of sense that makes their self-giving possible. If this is how matters stand, we must then say that things are the work of the subject that represents, wants, and experiences them. Yet the subject also is something that is similarly “produced” (Geschaffenes), a “thing” among things, “a simplification with which to designate the power which posits, invents, experiences, distinguishing it from all other single positing, inventing, even thinking. That is, the faculty characterized in its difference from any particular. Ultimately, doing (fare) understood from the point of view of all the doing which we might still expect.”5

A power, however, he writes in another entry from the same period, “has not yet been able to come into being as such, what we get rather are its effects. But when these are marked as effects of a power they are as if translated into a completely different language.”6

In these and similar texts, one can gauge Nietzsche’s distance from any sort of empirical or transcendental idealism, as well as from any dialectical perspective. The power or force which we discover underneath the traditional notion of the subject is nothing comparable to the transcendental subject and its being distinct from the empirical subject, which makes it possible for dialectics—or for history itself—to exist as process of progressive identification of the two terms. For Nietzsche, the very term power is already a translation, or better: power is given only through its Wirkungen, which are ultimately translations. With respect to effects, the pointing to a power, a Vermögen which remains while distinguishing itself from all its changeable positions, is once again but an act of translation, a metaphor. Everything happens according to Nietzsche’s example in a page from Twilight of the Idols. A distant cannon shot is heard while sleeping; in the dream, we link it to a story which a posteriori seems to be its cause and explanation.7 Now, the will, consciousness, and the I as causes or subjects of what we happen to be doing or suffering, “are merely after-products, obtained after causality had, on the basis of will, been firmly established as a given fact, as empiricism” (Twilight of the Idols, par. 3). The subject is not a primum to which we can dialectically return, for it is itself a surface effect and, as the same paragraph states, has become “a fiction, a play on words.” It could not be, or it did not have to be, considered as such (a fiction) for a long period in our history because at a certain point in this story “causality established itself as given.” Much like the other great errors of metaphysics and morality, belief in the I also goes back, by means of the belief in causality, to the will to find someone responsible for the events. The structure of language and above all the grammar of subject and predicate, of subject and object, together with the notion of being that metaphysics has built on such a structure (with principles, causes, etc.), is entirely modeled on the neurotic need to attribute a responsibility to becoming (ibid., par. 8). But “meanwhile we have thought better. Today we do not believe a word of it” (ibid., par. 3). The “meanwhile” to which Nietzsche refers here stands for the entire arc of the history of thought in which the constitution and destitution of metaphysics is consumed: It is that history of the death of God which makes superfluous any ultimate explanation, principles, and even the responsible subject. Dominated by the category of Grund (foundation), the universe of metaphysics is shaped by the superstitious belief in the subject. And it is this superstition that makes us see everything on the basis of what to do and what to endure.8 This perspective is formed following the will to find someone who is responsible, a will conditioned by the sentiment of fear, which in turn finds its justification in a reality where nature, not yet subdued by technique, shows itself as a permanent threat. This fear causes the institution of a complex metaphysical view of reality (by attributing causes) only by means of the complex mediations of the social realm. This is precisely what we see, for example, in Twilight of the Idols, in the concluding paragraphs of the section on the four great errors, where belief in causality is linked with belief in responsibility, and this leads to the “priests placed at the top of the ancient communities” who wanted to find at all costs those who were responsible in order to impose and inflict penalties, that is, in order to exercise one of the most basic aspects of power.

The “produced” aspect of the subject harks then back to a series of acts of metaphorization and interpretation that are determined by the social relations of power. These relations, however, do not falsify or distort anything: rather, they posit (pongono) the world of things, of causality, of the subject-object relation. As it is given to us today, this world does indeed have a history, however, and it is the one provisionally sealed off by the death of God, in other words, by the realization that when it comes to subject, responsibility, or causes, “we do not believe a word of it.” From this perspective, however, we are not compelled to turn to less superficial, truer and originary structures—the very notion of force is only a Bezeichnung, a characterization by means of a sign, that is to say, a play on words and a linguistic effect, again much like the subject.9

The reasons for excluding the possibility of calling the Nietzschean Übermensch a subject are lodged within the destitution of the notion of subject as a notion tied to morality and Platonic-Christian metaphysics. We have, therefore, a better reason yet not to call the Übermensch a reconciled subject. (It would not be difficult to show, even in detail, that the notion of reconciliation is closely knit with that of subject; insofar as reconciliation is the removal of a conflict, it entails also a substantial conservation, the conservation of a substrate … a subjectum, to be precise.) This, however, does not mean that the notion of Übermensch—much like other late Nietzschean Leitworte connected to it, such as eternal recurrence, will to power, nihilism—is an untranslated, nonmetaphorical notion, a word endowed with its own “ownmost” sense, in other words, an essence that somehow falls outside the general law of interpretation, metaphorization, translation. Quite the contrary, it is precisely the theoretical status of Nietzsche’s philosophical Leitworte to furnish us the key to understand the sense of the prefix über in the term Übermensch, as well as and more broadly the non-dialectical character of its overcoming of the Western metaphysical tradition.

The surfacing of the metaphorical, produced, character of metaphysical notions such as thing and object does not lead to the recovery of more fundamental structures of production, but to the overt generalization of production itself. It is this, I think, that makes for Nietzsche’s peculiar position with respect to the philosophical tradition, and for the radically ultra-metaphysical character of his thought. Affirmations such as the one we cited above, according to which what happened in the meantime is that we no longer believe in the dogmas of metaphysics, or we believe in the thesis of the Gay Science whereby “God is dead,” which is not a poetic way of saying that God does not exist but rather the strong acknowledgement of an event that has occurred—these affirmations disclose one of the fundamental mechanisms of Nietzsche’s thought: the idea that the emerging of the nihilistic essence of becoming is an event that derives from the very logic of the development of metaphysics; and moreover, that becoming aware of this represents a real change in the history of metaphysics itself (but not because we thus recover the true essence of being against false and alienated theories). What happens, rather, is what I thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• Translator’s Introduction: The End(s) of Subjectivity and the Hermeneutic Task
• Author’s Preface: The Bottle, the Net, the Revolution, and the Tasks of Philosophy: A Dialogue with Lotta Continua
• Chapter 1 Nietzsche, Beyond the Subject
• Chapter 2 Towards an Ontology of Decline
• Chapter 3 Heidegger and Poetry as Decline of Language
• Chapter 4 Outcomes of Hermeneutics
• Appendix 1 The Crisis of Subjectivity from Nietzsche to Heidegger
• Appendix 2 Hermeneutics as Koine
• Notes
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Terms
• Back Cover