Nietzsche, Heidegger and Meaning

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Meaning
DAVID CAMPBELL
ietzsche writes more or less unsystematically on many subjects, including morality, art, religion, and politics. In this article I explore the possibility that enquiry into meaning unites his thought, so far as anything does. This topic is wide, but I focus on the suggestion in The Genealogy of Morality, The Birth of Tragedy,1 and less systematic works of a theory of interpretation that explains how terms such as knowledge, being, and truth come to have their meaning and, in cases such as Platos, as he believes, to lack meaning. Commentators often take Nietzsches notion of meaning for granted; in attempting a sustained account, I look at Heidegger both as indebted to him and as responding critically. Thus I do not simply interpret their writings but treat them as a starting point for analysis and systematic reflection, consistently with what they say. The first part of the article considers critically the suggestion in these works of a virtue ethics, based on self-interpretation, and also of a wider theory of interpretative meaning. The second part examines Heideggers comments.
NIETZSCHE
The second section of the Preface to GM declares that the subject of the present work is the provenance of our moral prejudices. Nietzsches question here, then, is the origin of morality.2 Previously, however, in the first section, he had asked how we are to understand ourselves. We ask . . . Who are we, really?. . . The sad truth is that we dont understand our own substance (Preface, 1). This anticipates his answer to the question of the origin of morality: it originates in us. He goes on to indicate that our substance is in his view will or agency. The self is not simply a mirror to the world, passively undergoing experiences and reproducing them symbolically in judgments, but engages actively and in some ways creatively in experience. His starting point is therefore the autonomous agent. He emphasizes this again at the end of the work:
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 26, 2003 Copyright 2003 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.
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D AVID C AMPBELL Until the advent of the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man, had no meaning at all on this earth . . . the ascetic ideal . . . is and remains a will. Let me repeat, now that I have reached the end, what I said at the beginning: man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose. (III, XXVIII)
Nietzsche suggests, rather than states, a theory of self-interpretation. One understands oneself as interpreting felt concerns and related abilities in terms of chosen, willed projects, particularly ones role. In this way, ones life as agent has meaning both as felt or qualitative and as structured, and moral terms acquire both their sense and efficacy. He introduces this theory by assuming that there can be natural aristocrats and imagining that they interpret their noble and high-minded qualities and mighty abilities in terms of the highly placed role of ruler:
It was the good themselves, that is to say the noble, mighty, highly placed and high-minded who decreed themselves and their actions to be good . . . in contradistinction to all that was base, low-minded and plebeian. . . . The origin of the opposites good and bad is to be found in . . . the dominant temper of a higher, ruling class in relation to a lower, dependent one. (I, II)
The meaning of the terms good and bad is determined not for a time only . . . but permanently by the rulers decree. In this way there comes about a common currency of values and social cohesion. This decree is not arbitrary, but a quick jetting forth from his character. The source of supreme value judgments is, then, the agent, somewhat as water under pressure jets out a fountain. To find the origin of moral terms we need to look back, so to speak, to character, not ahead to consequences or utility. Nietzsche dismisses the lukewarmness which every scheming prudence, every utilitarian calculus presupposes. He further highlights impassioned agency by castigating its opposite, the slave ethics of the low-minded, as merely passive and reactive rather than active and creative. Slave ethics requires . . . an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all its action is reaction (I, X). Nietzsche speaks of the rulers triumphant self-affirmation (I, X), suggesting that his will would be ascendant in its own terms only, if the circumstance of a pathos of distance between a natural ruler and plebeians did not dictate his ascendancy over them. The feelings one interprets have a bodily basis, in what Nietzsche calls ones physiology: in other words, perhaps, ones physical type. His discussion of priests is further evidence that he operates a theory of self-interpretation. Their morbidity and neurasthenia explain their turning away from action, their self-disgust and consequent asceticism, and hence the moral terms they typically deploy such as pure and impure, and their idea of God as nothingness. Their self-understanding as priests depends on their interpreting morbid feelings, and these on physical debility:
N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING
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Granting that political supremacy always gives rise to notions of spiritual supremacy . . . the ruling caste is also the priestly caste and elects to characterize itself by a term which reminds us of its priestly function. In this context we encounter for the first time the concepts pure and impure. . . . The desire for a mystical union with God is nothing other than the Buddhists desire to sink himself in nirvana . . . here has the human mind grown both profound and evil. (I, VI)
Evil here therefore means ascetic; profound means reflective, implying the use of linguistic symbols (I, VI). Together, these characteristics produce the will to truth, that is, a tendency to affirm an independent reality symbolized in judgments that can be tested against it for truth and falsity, and thus to deny a role for the self in knowledge. Nietzsche admires this tendency for its part in forming Western culture (III, XXIVff.), but nonetheless he attacks it for enabling those with morbid, feeble will to claim moral authority and hence political power. His account of moral concepts thus includes a genealogy of . . . democratic prejudice (I.IV). Those with feeble passions are herdlike and servile, resent their weakness and their rulers strength, and pity each other. With the eyes of a thief [such a type] looks at everything splendid, with the greed of hunger it sizes up those who have much to eat; and always it sneaks around the table of those who give.3 The uncreative majority, however, is supreme when united and, assisted by priests, codifies and institutionalizes compassion and altruism. In this way the term good comes to mean bad and vice versa, and their original senses are forgotten. Natural rulers acquire a bad conscience, inappropriately feeling ashamed of their superior qualities and repressing them. Democrats are convinced that their creed has objective natural or divine authority, but such a spirit of seriousness is merely the fug of stifled passion. Altruism is a sublimate from this noxious source, like alcohol, for instance, when freed from water. The vermin man occupies the entire stage . . . tame, hopelessly mediocre, and savourless, he considers himself the apex of historical evolution (I, XI). Eventually altruism evaporates into nihilism, that is, loss or denial of meaning and value. Nietzsche speaks of the death of God and predicts social fragmentation, with dire political consequences. He does not try to reinstate altruism on a sound footing, however, but answers the nihilistic resentment of the weak with the joyful passion of the strong for life. Such proud defiance alone creates meaning. The self-characterization of rulers and priests and reaction of plebeians or slaves explains only one aspect of moral talk. Nietzsche goes on to generalize this type of explanation, describing any autonomous agent as selfcharacterized; on this basis he explains values such as promise-keeping. Thus he envisages a type of individual who, far from being neurasthenic and self-denying, characterizes himself independently:
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D AVID C AMPBELL The ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral . . . the man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises and in him a proud consciousness, a sensation of mankind come to completion . . . his measure lies in his own demands on himself . . . he becomes authentically moral. . . . He determines himself not according to consequences . . . but from his beginning. (II, II)
One does not acquire good character and a sense of oneself by first taking goals and rules for granted. Instead, one first identifies whatever matters or makes a difference to oneself in particular, and then interprets this passion in terms of a role. Somewhat similarly, if one cares about fine art or fishing, for instance, one may interpret oneself as a budding artist or angler. Nietzsche, however, is concerned with role choice as determining where ones values lie, not where ones talents lie. In fulfilling ones passion one makes explicit the values it implies; a self-interpretation is not derived from preconceived values, but forms a background against which one conceives values. As a jetting forth of value judgments from ones character, this process is largely emotional and inarticulate rather than calculated and conscious. Values then depend on singling oneself out as author of ones biography, so to speak, not, for instance, on doing distinctively human things such as talking, tickling, or driving fast cars. Goals, rules, and values depend in this sense on choice. For Nietzsche, however, choice is responsible not only as liable to praise or blame but also as a settled response to feelings; it implies that one knows oneself and accepts its costs and benefits. Thus the metaphor of jetting forth does not imply that ones choice is simply voluntarist, like playing the lottery and winning the jackpot: good character is a prize hard won, commanding a high price and a cause for pride (I, VIII). By so interpreting felt concerns in terms of ones role, one also creates oneself: Nietzsches theory has implications for the nature of the self and its realization, as he notes in GM. Ones life gains an aim and narrative structure, and one acquires a sense of oneself as of a piece, enduring through time, and bearing rights and obligations. One makes the sense one does of ones life from this first-person stance. There cannot in general be a self that does not make sense to itself, more or less, and one interprets oneself and ones values together. What it is to be a self thus depends on will, exercised in selfinterpretation. Nietzsche also explains terms such as responsibility and conscience, together with obligations such as promise-keeping, as expressions of virtuous, aristocratic character: Those who promise [are] like sovereigns . . . whose promises are binding because they know that they will make them good. . . . His proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege responsibility confers has penetrated deeply and become a dominant instinct. . . . Surely he will call it his conscience (II, II). Nietzsche calls this method of explaining
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moral concepts etymological: understandably, given his philological training. But his etymology is also a genealogy, attempting to show that values originate in character, and that this is a matter of choice or selfcharacterization. Yet this is only one application of his etymological method; it also applies generally to the objective areas of natural science and physiology. He excuses himself from showing how, saying, I cannot enlarge upon the question now (I, IV), but adds in parenthesis that [t]he lordly right of bestowing names is such that one would almost be justified in seeing the origin of language itself as an expression of the rulers power. They say, This is this or that; they seal off each thing and action with a sound and thereby take symbolic possession of it (I, II). Such lordly naming is not a matter of picking out and labeling meanings we perceive as though already formed independently of us. Nietzsches methods include challenging such assumptions, but it does not follow that linguistic terms have in his view only rhetorical meaning. Instead, he seems to mean that we bestow names in the sense of stipulating meanings: words mean what we conventionally want them to mean. Perhaps we can concoct a nonmoral example by adapting his metaphor of the aristocrat. In this fanciful example, the term forest can be understood by recognizing connotations with stag-hunting and the like in the minds of nobles who reserve their woods for such purposes. Just as we have to dig into etymology to rediscover that pure meant originally inactive, so we ordinarily forget that the term forest was originally interpreted as hunting ground and suppose that it simply means something like woodland. Thus, to extrapolate from Nietzsches brief discussion, a name does not mean just what the namer wants it to mean, somewhat as words have meaning for Humpty Dumpty. Instead, a name initially expresses various connotations in the minds of whoever does the naming, and so comes to denote conventionally whatever conjures up these connotations, though many are subsequently lost or forgotten. Naming consists neither in labeling preexisting meanings nor in arbitrarily allocating a denoting use and specific sort of reference to a verbal sign that then over time accrues connotations; instead, denotation presupposes interpretation of objects in terms of interests. In this way, his account of the meaning of moral terms, based on self-interpretation, generalizes to a theory of semantic meaning based on interpretation of objects. If for present purposes we can call self-interpretation existential as concerned with personal existence, and interpretation of objects also existential as concerned with what it is to be an object to which we refer, Nietzsche can be said to connect existential and semantic meaning. The background to this theory is Nietzsches attack on cognitivist metaphysics. He describes the metaphysics of his great teacher Schopenhauer as noncognitivist (Preface, V). Amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly [while doubting] the cognitive mode of expe-
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rience (TBT, I, p. 22). There is no ultimate, metaphysical truth or reality that could be a foundation for knowledge, but only a disorderly cosmic will or striving; human beings can do little but observe events, renounce self, and pity each other. Nietzsche agrees that there is only a will to power, as he calls it, which is inherently unstructured and indifferent to us. There is no given, preconceived end or telos that could remove the contingency of existence and redeem tragedy or justify its pain. But he questions his mentors view of the value of ethics (GM, 153), denying that we need to resign ourselves to impotent passivity. Rather, will to power manifests itself in us as interpretation of passion or emotion strong enough not to end futility and disorder but, on the contrary, to overcome them by willing their eternal recurrence. Empiricists also, among others, deny the possibility of metaphysical cognition; but Nietzsche maintains that all cognitive assumptions need to be explained, while they exempt sensory cognition. For empiricists, further, ideas and their relationships in thinking derive from sensory experience, where for Nietzsche they derive from will to power. Unlike them, also, he uses an aphoristic, epigrammatic writing style to exhibit a poetic mode of thinking that does not rely on explicit deductive argument, and to thwart an argued account of his thought. The present article nonetheless tries to see whether such an account is feasible. In general terms, will to power is a commanding drive to use whatever is available as a means to itself: there is in the end only a circle of control and consumption. The term power is here an intensifier and does not indicate an external telos or aim of will. Metaphysically, this inherently undifferentiated process manifests itself as spatiotemporal, causally related natural units; conversely, since everything is a means to control, the process has no internal structure of means and ends. For any thing or object, to be is then not only to manifest will to power but also to be reducible to it. Nietzsches doctrine of the eternal recurrence of every state of the universe reflects this circularity, and in this respect is also a metaphysical doctrine. Ethically, virtue answers nihilistic resignation and not only expresses felt control or will to power but also reduces to it. Epistemologically, one is constrained by a need for order and meaning to interpret the world in ways that others may share. Truth as the adequacy of statements to represent facts can then be reduced to interpretation in response to constraints. Any number of such interpretations or perspectives is possible. Here will to power is a nihilistic circle of interpretation that continuously consumes and overcomes itself. The doctrine of eternal recurrence reflects this circularity also. Nietzsches epistemological particularism means that talk of knowledge and its objects expresses some perspective or other, which in turn manifests will to power. In emphasizing passion and control, Nietzsche hopes to avoid metaphysical commitment. One reason he attacks Christianity is that he assumes that
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it claims metaphysical knowledge. His objection is not to the idea of transcendence, since his superman is transcendent in a sense, as the name implies. Rather, he rejects transcendental arguments such as that there must be objects outside experience to be mirrored or symbolized within it. At most, these arguments establish that we must believe that there are such objects, not that they exist, and he explains this belief by our need for order and meaning. Thus he questions two assumptions: that there are transcendent objects, and that knowledge is merely representation. These assumptions leave unexplained both the notion of an object, as preconceived, and the notion of knowledge, as reproducing something preconceived. He proposes to resolve this problem by explaining both knowledge and its objects as manifestations in us of will to power. In effect he distinguishes a judgment as representing fact and as a mental act expressing interest or power. Nietzsches assumption that any metaphysics must be transcendental and cognitivist may seem unduly narrow; perhaps indeed he himself might be said to hold a metaphysics of will or agency. His attack on Christianity is then curious given that will, along with intellect, is for Christians fundamental to the nature of both God and human beings. A metaphysics of sheer will is hard to swallow, however, so far as the world is not only a sort of event or manifestation of agency but also there.4 Consonantly with his emphasis on will, moreover, Nietzsche thinks of human beings primarily as agents. One difficulty with this is that we are onlookers as well as agents, and interpretation is an occurrence as much as a willed action; hence we can consider things as instruments to ends other than control. For Nietzsche, however, at least after Thus Spake Zarathustra, will to power is our fundamental drive. He calls it the emotion of command;5 thus it is a passion rather than a psychological faculty. It has a bodily basis, and is stronger in some individuals than others. Will to power manifests itself as felt ability in doing and making, as distinct from a sense of achievement in completing an activity or product. The term power does not here indicate an object of will such as power over others; as an intensifier, it implies that one copes well. Hence will to power in human beings is a passion concerned with coping and control, and will in the sense of agency is the basis for choice. Such choice implies voluntary, intentional action, not free will: Nietzsches theory of motivation is deterministic, though he is interested in feeling not simply as a causal antecedent of choice but as embodied and expressed in it. At the same time, such a notion of choice is not voluntarist in the sense that flipping a coin decides an outcome without effort, but is made amid struggle and strife. Twilight of the Idols (IX.38), for instance, describes choice or freedom as measured . . . by the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs. Will to power in us is opposed to a spectators passivity, sustains a feeling of life, and gives rise to virtue. Nietzsche is immoralist in some modes, but in others, and perhaps in the round, he suggests a virtue ethics.6 In his ver-
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sion, enhanced vitality overflows into particular virtues: [a] heart [which] flows full and broad like a river . . . wants to overflow, so that the waters may flow golden from him and bear the reflection of your joy over all the world.7 If we are to act virtuously, we must have this feeling, and promote values that sustain it. Morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation . . . spontaneously (GM 1, 10). The worth of an action depends on who does it. . . . It is no longer the consequences but the origin of action which determines its value (BGE, Part Two, 32). A heightened feeling of life, that is, strong will to power, brims over into particular virtues, as opposed to either lacking or bottling up strong passion. One is then socially engaged, congenial, honest, proud (megalopsychos), courageous, generous, just, courteous, exuberant, and playful; and one has presence, energy, sensibility, self-discipline, and self-sufficiency (284).8 In the case of generosity, for example, The noble human being aids the unfortunate but not, or almost not, from pity, but more from a superfluity of power (260). Well-being pours over into well-doing: one undertakes obligations voluntarily from virtue, and one is accountable to others for discharging obligations only as having undertaken them. A difficulty for this theory is that filial obligations, for instance, do not depend in this way on undertakings. For Nietzsche, however, what gives meaning and value to ones life is a feeling of vitality both strong enough to meet its contingency, disorder, and pain and stable enough to persist if it recurred numberless times.9 Affirming eternal recurrence therefore stabilizes strong feeling. On this basis one makes the sense one does of ones life. Emotional debility, by contrast, manifests itself as incoherent self-interpretation: ones will devises ways of defeating itself, and a vicious life is a botched expression of weak, resentful feeling. Will to power is controlling, and so also therefore is virtue as manifesting it. Presumably we can cultivate or neglect virtue, but Nietzsche does not mean that we control our character in the sense that choosing and acting are said to be under our control or free; his view of character is determinist. For Hume also the final term in moral explanation is emotion; but unlike Nietzsche, the moral standpoint is in his view universal. Moral judgments express sentiments in which [a man] expects all his audience are to concur with him. He must here, therefore, depart from his private and particular situation . . . [to] some universal principle.10 For Nietzsche, however, one is virtuous so far as one expresses feeling particular to oneself. Such an ethic is particularist in holding that moral obligations, commendations, and so on are products of virtuous feeling, not simply of mechanical universalizing or deduction from preconceived rules. We grade such feeling on a scale from, say, excellent to poor or, as Nietzsche says, from strong to weak, not simply judging the actions right or wrong by universal rules. In a broadly similar sense, there is no right or wrong literary essay. Thus virtues such as courage, generosity, and courtesy are analogous to one another and form
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a class in that each is in its own way an expression of strength, that is, heightened vitality in exercising coping skills. Aristotle also is particularist in holding that a virtue such as courage depends on feeling particular to oneself, at a mean between excess and defect that implies the thinking (logos) of the practically wise; a courageous act is not simply a reflexive, automatic deduction from a preconceived rule (though Aristotle seems to take for granted rules prohibiting murder, adultery, and so on). The end (telos) of happiness consists in so acting, at least for those incapable of intellectual wisdom. Thus his ethics is self-regarding like Nietzsches, though for Aristotle, unlike Nietzsche, ones interests include those of family, friends, and fellow-citizens. His account, however, is more structured than Nietzsches, since his virtues are analogous as lying at their respective means. He also tabulates an analogy between vices as each in its own way an excess or defect, where Nietzsche has a catchall characterization of vices as weak, resentful, and self-defeating. But Nietzsche agrees that ethics has no metaphysical telos as its foundation, somewhat as Aristotle rejected Platos foundationalism. Nietzsches imperative is to choose solitude: he associates the universalist ethics of Utilitarianism and Kant with what is commonly called morality, which he believes his ethic overcomes. Utilitarians say that actions are right if they produce the best results for the majority regardless of feelings particular to oneself; Nietzsche would protest that generosity, for instance, is not merely calculated giving, and one ought to keep a promise even if no one benefits. Kant held that one ought to act from regard for duty, not simply from feeling; a duty in one situation is a duty in every similar situation, and thus objective relatively to us. For Nietzsche this takes a third-person, onlookers view of action. Ones motive then has no meaning of its own that could explain why one would want to act in this way. One ought to honor ones promise, for instance, because this obligation matters to oneself in particular, not simply for the reason that anyone ought to do so. Virtue for Nietzsche thus depends on the irreducible first-person stance of felt meaning. According to Nagel, we need to distinguish knowledge that a bat navigates by echo location, for instance, from knowing what it is like to be a bat.11 For Nietzsche, one could do what one ought for the reason that one ought without being moral, if the actions lack significance or importance for oneself in particular. This is not a matter of suiting ones narrowly personal interest. A virtuous person in a situation requiring her to do something rather than nothing typically asks what she ought to do given how she in particular feels, not simply what anyone, in the third person, ought to do regardless of such feelings. Thus she keeps a promise because fulfilling such an obligation matters to her even if she does not benefit and if, when called on to fulfill it, she is disinclined, through weariness, for example. To suppose that what Nietzsche calls passion is merely such capricious inclination
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would imply a contradiction. Thus to say that his ethics is narrowly egoistic rather than more broadly self-regarding, if such a distinction may be admitted for present purposes, would be too simple. In some ways, Nietzsches theory resembles intuitionism. The word red, for instance, is descriptive, but a person blind from birth could not appropriately request an account either of its content or of why it must apply to red things. Somewhat similarly, one simply sees that one ought to keep ones promise, for example. What is particular to oneself on this theory is an intellectual as opposed to a sensory perception. For Nietzsche, however, one feels that this obligation matters. Intuitionists fail to explain why one would want to act on ones moral knowledge, but if, as for Nietzsche, one cares about ones obligations, such caring explains ones subsequent actions. Nietzsche often contrasted his position with Christianity yet ignored, or failed to spot, an affinity between his view that joyful passion for life overcomes its inherent senselessness and the Christian view that we can be grateful for life despite evil. He enlivens his account of emotional health by opposing it to religious feeling, which he misrepresents as typically feeble and morbid. He would have been more accurate if he had said that Christianity is in his terms healthy, the highest expression of will to power. Natural feelings are for Christianity occasions for rejoicing so far as they are consistent with respecting persons, that is, they avoid malice, lust, envy, and so on; we can be glad for life though we tend to feel these things and, in addition, suffer pain and tragedy. Somewhat as for Nietzsche, one welcomes the eternal recurrence of ones life, such gratitude is a comprehensive felt intention, not simply a particular natural feeling; though it is also a kind of gift, not simply chosen, whereas for Nietzsche good character requires heroic effort as well as choice. The grace of gratitude is also particular to oneself from the first-person standpoint, where Nietzsche wrongly assumed that Christianity imposes a universal altruistic ethic regardless of perspective. Nietzsche calls himself antichrist because he believes, to this extent wrongly, that he opposes Christianity. He further misrepresents Christians not only as debilitated but also as compensating for their debility by conceiving of moral rules as prohibitions in order to repress passion. In fact, however, moral rules on their view mark the frontiers of regard for persons, and forgiving others restores the equality disturbed by trespass. Hence this notion of the person is not milk and water, as Nietzsche alleges, but offers a means of making sense of moral rules, and of uniting them under one concept: a unity that is not available to his theory that recognition of any such rule is simply a voluntary undertaking. It also provides a more successful test of what is to count as a virtue if we suppose, contrary to his self-regarding theory, that virtue at least in part concerns ones bearing toward others, and thus presupposes relationship with them. In these respects his ethical theory is then deficient. One might also question whether virtue must depend on feeling, as virtue
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ethicists maintain. Pride and humility, for instance, seem to be matters of judgment concerning ones abilities, whether or not one also swells with a feeling of pride or shrinks with a feeling of humility. As a virtue ethicist, Nietzsche could reply that pride and humility are tied to what matters or makes a difference to oneself, and character is in this sense a question of feeling; we are deceived if we suppose that we act on judgment alone. An altruist may believe that she acts on a judgment that the person has inherent value as an end, not simply from felt interest or inclination to which persons are mere means, and so monitors her feelings for traces of self-regard; but in so denying herself she in fact acts from a warped, ascetic kind of self-interested feeling. His point is not simply that she is deceived or muddled about her motives, but that judgment, unlike feeling, cannot of itself lead to action. The reason why altruism is illusion is that, as Aristotle and Hume put it, intellect or reason alone cannot motivate us to act. A problem for Nietzsche, however, is that while such a judgment is plainly not a feeling, it is nonetheless typically accompanied by feeling. The Good Samaritan need not have felt compassion for the mugged Levite he assisted, but such feeling would clearly have been appropriate. Indeed, Nietzsche believes that the noble aid the unfortunate not from altruistic pity but more from a superfluity of power, and such lack of sympathy is from an altruistic stance small-minded in a sense, contrary to his intention. This argument cannot be explored adequately here, but it would follow that Nietzsches weakness is not that he is a self-regarding virtue ethicist, but that he is a virtue ethicist at all. If virtuous social feeling presupposes the judgment that the person has inherent worth, morality is not simply an expression of felt meaning or derived from it, as Nietzsche assumes. The notion of meaning is therefore less inclusive than he supposes. A wider question concerning the relation between judgment and feeling, which lies beyond the scope of this article is whether interpretation articulates and shapes prior formless, raw emotion, or whether what we feel cannot be separated in this way from what we think we feel, expect to feel, and so on. Nietzsches other systematic work, The Birth of Tragedy, can like GM be regarded as offering a noncognitivist account of meaning; here he calls such an account aesthetic. This work is the starting point for his perspectivism. When it was first published, Nietzsche held that an elite generates an interpretation of the world that is then accepted universally. The world is, as he later described it, a seething, formless will to power. Only great artists such as the classical tragedians endure the threat of disorder and, without guidelines, create myths that provide a monolithic order. Their orgiastic Dionysian energy and formalizing Apollinian principle are at odds except when achieving order in an artwork. This process is emotional and hence inexplicable. For the slavish majority, meaning depends on making this aesthetic standard
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its own.12 In this way, artists redeem our existence from its terror and horror and provide a socially unifying system of values (TBT, 1872). The aim is not beauty but coping, through pleasure in the harmony of beauty. Art does not represent an unintended underlying reality but provides a feeling of order that we regard as objective once we forget its origin. Art is therefore what Nietzsche calls a metaphysical supplement that overcomes nature and justifies existence. Thus he reduces belief in an objective order to a need for control. However, in his introduction to the later, 1883 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, headed Towards Self-Criticism, Nietzsche rejects his earlier view that values are universal. There are instead various particular perspectives (452). Previously he held that the process of artistic creation is inexplicable; now an artists ability is no more miraculous than that of an inventor, scholar, or tactician (HH, 163). The source of value is therefore not the artist but his work, whose perspective requires us to rethink our lives. Art does not make a universal ideal of the best in us: rather, we interpret our best according to our perspective. Anyone may contribute to the perspective of some tradition or other, and realize the hero concealed within (JW, 78). Nietzsche therefore first supposed that artists supply a framework of order and meaning that is objective relatively to the majority in the sense of being originally unified rather than particular to individuals. But he later supposed instead that anyone can contribute to our interpretation, and it is now particular to individuals and their traditions, even when it seems unified. Whether such perspectives are strong or excellent, or weak and poor, is not determined simply by arbitrary choice on voluntarist lines, as though Jacks hill could be Jills pail, or murder wrong for Jack but right for Jill. A perspective is not merely tied to the individuals need for meaning but takes the form of a tradition or convention to which one contributes. Its criteria of meaning and value are not independent of individuals, yet are objective relatively to them as a tradition is public relatively to its contributors. In a similar way, moral motivation is particular to individuals yet connects with moral judgment as general in form, and Nietzsche shows how these apparently opposed particular and universal standpoints can be reconciled. BT and GM together reveal an approach that leads to perspectivism. The term perspective has an optical sense, but Nietzsche does not mean that there is a world independent of us that is somehow ambiguous, or indecipherable, or that all see differently, as a house can be viewed from different sides. He means rather that each has a different notion of the world, a narrative beguiling enough to be mistaken for truth. These perspectives may be both incommensurable and compatible, but their fundamental concepts, such the category of thing, evidently converge. Nietzsches emphasis on perspectival diversity and self-directing control makes him more liberal politically than in other modes, but his wider point is nonpolitical: each individual
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relates to his world from within, not as a neutral observer with a view from nowhere. At the same time, Nietzsche is not a relativist who claims that sentences are true or false only in relation to the parochial perspective they express. Thus any perspective can be criticized from another perspective, so long as doing so is not offensive (JW, 335). But no perspective can be criticized from a supposedly objective standpoint that is above criticism rather than perspectival: there is no such Archimedean view. This has particularist ethical implications. Previously the artist was free to do as he likes: now all are free where justice is done by recognizing their particular contributions (HH, 300). Once artists gave universal meaning, and justice was equity: now justice is love with open eyes, giving each his due from his own perspective. This means treating contributors justly, not persons equally: Nietzsche consistently rejects such equality. We need this sense of justice to grow in everyone and the instinct for violence to weaken. Further, justice is tied to self-realization, which can take heroic effort, so that a judgment is an exercise of power, and true if it fits a living perspective; hence traditions no longer become ossified, but ideas can be reviewed and invented (GM, 155). This view of justice, as regard for each perspective according to its strength, suggests an interplay between liberty and equality that partly subsumes, rather than fully supplants, Nietzsches earlier view that a visionary elite determines the rules of justice. Strength now lies in autonomy as well as passion. Autonomy consists in freely choosing a personal style that integrates conflicting feelings into an artistic plan, that is, a sustainable order of pleasures (JW, 290). Ones choice cannot be justified safely in advance, for instance by preconceived rules; it involves risk and self-overcoming, as distinct from self-preservation. Since one shapes ones narrative, it is an artwork; values such as honesty and integrity are aesthetic, not moral or religious. One develops a life-enhancing structure of satisfactions by doing what one in particular cares about. Gifted, proud, integrated, and resolute, ones sustained joy in living is attractive. One does not thwart felt concerns and desires but interprets them so as to become what you are, that is, authentic or strong (D, 448). Autonomous responsibility is also solitary, unlike the relational responsibility of a master or slave, for instance; Thus Spake Zarathrustra speaks of a solitary rambler on icy peaks. One detaches oneself from sociocultural forms and ties, including the language in which one expresses oneself and the criteria of concepts in it, in order to determine what ones own passions are and express them in a project. Autonomy does not imply independence from such forms, since passions do not arise in a vacuum and projects involve direct or indirect relationships. Somewhat similarly, a passion for football, for instance, implies teamwork and rules; a researcher relies on professional controls, the contributions of other scholars and a shared specialized vocabulary, and asks others to trust him.13 Virtue then concerns an individuals relation to herself as self-deter-
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mining, true to herself, and so on, not her relation to others; but while selfinterpretation plays a central role in Nietzsches account of virtue, this does not entail that she can just choose either herself or her character: not only is good character won by long hard labor, as noted earlier, but she also does not just choose the ethical language in which she expresses herself and the criteria of concepts in it, as for Humpty Dumpty words mean just what he wants them to mean. Although Nietzsche takes an aesthetic rather than a religious view of values, his shift from a universal to a particularist stance has a religious analogue. The medieval world picture was transmitted downward to the majority by a priestly hierarchy, and claimed a universality that ruled out dissent; later the priesthood embraced all believers, whatever their particular experience and point of view. Nietzsche somewhat similarly argues that an elite, unified sense of the world leads to social instability and mediocrity; excellence or virtue and social harmony depend on perspectival diversity. This analogy is confirmed by his evoking medieval practices such as self-flagellation to attack altruism as ascetic, though weakened by the fact that both earlier and later religious doctrines demand self-denying altruism. Previously, Nietzsche had asserted that culture depends on slavery. He does not now do so, not simply because he wants individuals to be treated justly but also because he no longer assumes uniform standards and needs the master-slave distinction to explain them. His target is still the objectivist, cognitivist theory that moral judgments are true if they fit moral facts such as that lying, stealing, and killing are wrong. He rejects the theory that these are facts, as distinct from the nontheoretical belief that the actions are wrong: we can attach no sense to the notion of such a nonsensory fact or knowledge of it. Indeed objectivists themselves differ in what they call right or good, reflecting different agendas. The source of difficulty is the assumption that knowledge claims in general, not only claims concerning ethics and the self, fit preconceived facts. Will to power is fundamentally a matter of physics and biology, but here, at the level of human motivation, it concerns knowledge. Human beings feel a need for stable meaning and control and, to meet this need, create the fiction of things or natural units; thus knowledge claims reduce to interpretations of experience: I set apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity. . . . [He] will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction.14 The most dangerous of all errors, Nietzsche says in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, is denying perspective. A piece of knowledge does not simply fit fact, but serves powers or interests, that is, will to power. There are no things (they are fictions invented by us).15 The notion of an occurrent object presupposes its interpretation as an instrument that, according to GM,
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we subsequently name. For instance, what it is for a tree to be is explained by potentialities for, say, food, shelter, and fuel. We give meaning to judgments about an actual tree by interpreting such potentialities as a group; it is not as though we could first reproduce the fact of there being a tree symbolically in a judgment such as This is a tree and then investigate the predicates. This direction of explanation also means that we first understand any object in relational terms: for example, wood is first serviceable, then cellular. Judgments ascribing physical properties depend for their meaning on certain sorts of relational judgments, and these in turn depend for their meaning on interpretative coping skills. The same statement may then both correspond with fact and provide an adequate interpretation, and the questions what the thing also is in itself, and whether it also exists in itself, apart from interpretation, are misleading. Hence talk of things is fictional or conventional. A routine objection to what we may here loosely call linguistic conventionalism is that while it may purport to explain the variability of concepts such as east or work, it fails to explain the invariability of logical, mathematical, and categorial concepts. Nietzsche could possibly reply on perspectivist lines that such a dichotomy need not be exhaustive: there can be indefinitely many incommensurable but compatible kinds of linguistic convention, each with its own cluster of public criteria and type and degree of rigidity or flexibility. This reply fails, however, so far as invariability is not a type or degree of rigidity. Nietzsche claimed to have abolished Being. He does not mean that nothing exists: will to power exists, and is finally all that there is. He is not an idealist who believes that the mind creates a world from nothing, so to speak; yet it is down to us that things are serviceable, and thus that they are as they are. To this extent his view is both controlling and nonvoluntarist at the same time; in parallel fashion, he holds that words mean what we want them to mean conventionally rather than voluntaristically. We ordinarily speak of existence in connection with spatiotemporal, causally related objects, however, not with their prior conditions such as will to power. Thus to say that an object exists is not to indicate its independence but to express in conventional form our intention to speak of unity, causality, and so on. In this way, Nietzsche defends ordinary talk of real things against doctrines such as Platos concerning an unintended metaphysical reality. The theory of will to power both explains such ordinary talk in the sense of supporting it as useful illusion, and at the same time explains such metaphysics in the contrary sense of undermining pernicious illusion. Nietzsches aim, however, is not merely to distinguish useful and pernicious illusions. Even while vindicating ordinary talk, he does not leave it undisturbed, but finally reduces it to a manifestation of will to power. Like metaphysics, it attempts to control knowledge and truth by conceiving of things as existing independently. He therefore replaces both ordinary and metaphysical ontological assumptions with an
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account of their origin, namely, the attempt to objectify Being anthropomorphically.16 We can say nothing about the thing itself. . . . A quality exists for us. . . . Knowing is nothing but working with the favourite metaphors. But in this case first nature and then the concept are anthropomorphic. . . . We produce beings (Wesen).17 Hence any belief that Being, knowledge, and truth are independent of art, that is, the art of interpretation, is illusion.18 To say that there are things with properties and so on makes sense only as meaning that it is as if there are such things.19 Talk of things is metaphorical, not as hinting at their independence, but in conveying the intention to talk in this way. Nietzsche therefore explains such talk by its force or will to power. This is not to say that linguistic meaning reduces to rhetoric, but that it is a matter of conventional naming, as he calls it in GM. Since there is in the end only will to power, it is in this sense impossible to speak with a straight face about knowledge of Being or objective truth and reality. Nietzsches defense of ordinary talk of things might appear to contradict his view that these are fictions; further, he might be supposed to offer a theory of truth that tries but fails to resolve this contradiction. But there is no such contradiction if we assume that he aims at a theory of meaning, not of truth. For he can then be said to take the coherent line that truth is a product of interpretation, useful for ordinary talk but, philosophically, a fiction rather than a subject matter to which one could refer literally, or about which one could intelligibly theorize. Metaphysicians suppose that knowledge is contingent on a foundation of truth; but truth is on the contrary a contingent, not foundational, notion. The notion of an unintended reality is a perspective, but one that lacks meaning: a fiction in the sense of a lie. There could be infinitely many such interpretations of experience: Plato, Locke, and Kant, for example, all in their different ways assert an unintended reality. Nietzsche thus abolishes the notion of reality as the subject matter of metaphysics in Platos mode of reading off, and recasts it as an expression of perspective without the imprimatur of fixed and final truth. His suggestion is then that the criteria of knowledge are aesthetic in that a perception is objective, not illusory, for instance, if it meets its implicit public criteria, somewhat as we are not misled about whether a certain painting by Rembrandt really is a work of art. A problem with the theory so expressed is that it fails to explain the difference between saying that the painting really is a work of art, not kitsch, for instance, and that it really is a painting, not, for instance, an illusion or hallucination. Nietzsche would reply, however, that this distinction has no systematic application; it concerns only specific cases of deception, and any perspective can be criticized from the standpoint of another. Nagel points to a parallel contrast between a sense that what you are doing is . . . important to you . . . [and that it is] important in a larger sense: important, period.20 Such a larger meaning is not only synoptic and final, as
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Nagel indicates: it seems also to have dramatic unity and heightening or tension, together with qualitative or emotional richness and depth. Thus for a romantic or pantheist, a landscape, for instance, can seem to convey a message that does not quite form itself into words, having what might be called a quasi-literal symbolic meaning somewhat like a printed page, as distinct from metaphorical meaning whether as frost patterns look like leaves, for instance, or as when we say it is as if the landscape has meaning. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the world is a disorderly will that surges up in us as a superabundant energy and feeling of health or wholeness. The narratives we subsequently invent have internal unity and give a deceptive sense of truth but, as merely perspectival, have no systematic application. Heidegger, unlike Nietzsche, connects such a feeling of wholeness with intimations of universal rather than perspectival significance. At the same time, he followed Nietzsches noncognitivism; whether such meaning should instead be understood cognitively, as romantics, for instance, assume, is a wider question that cannot be investigated here. Will to power, then, is meaning for Nietzsche not only in this specialized sense but also in the senses in which we speak variously of the meaning of art, religion, science, politics, morality, and the self, as well as of knowledge, language, being or objectivity, and truth.
HEIDEGGER
The theory of meaning that we have attributed to Nietzsche was made more explicit by Heidegger. We need not, however, examine his debt or expound his theory in more detail than is required to show where his view of technology diverges in general from Nietzsches theory of will to power, as the background to his more specific criticisms. According to Heidegger, I lack reason to exist in the sense of actualizing a preconceived end, yet try to meet such contingency by actualizing one (das Man), that is, by acting as anyone would in my circumstances; however, I am authentic or genuinely myself only so far as I interpret and choose possibilities particular to myself. So far he and Nietzsche agree, but where Nietzsche demands solitude, Heidegger assumes social interaction. I cannot perceive my possibilities except against a background of universal everyday concerns, so that I have little option but to remain mostly inauthentic. He ties this notion of self-interpretation to interpretation in general.21 To exist as a thing is to stand out or emerge into disclosure, through interpretation; to exist as a human being is to stand out from oneself as interpreter to receive and express the existence of particular things. Man is being-in-the-world since subject and object are united in him before they are distinguished (BT, 33). Heideggers metaphor for the mind is a forest clearing, where light enters
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unhindered and surrounding trees and other objects are disclosed; the disclosure of things, and of man to whom they are disclosed, are co-original. Self-interpretation is thus tied to interpretation of things as instruments to felt concerns; Heidegger calls concern in general care (Sorge). Aristotle attributed Being only by analogy in the various categories of thing, relation, and so forth,22 but care lets us make a project of ourselves in which everything has its meaning, so unifying the meaning of Being. We cannot be said simply to believe (or desire, think, and so on) but must, logically, believe something or other; hence phenomena can have no underlying unintended reality. Objects are in the first instance available or handy for projects (zuhanden), not simply occurrent (vorhanden): judgments ascribing physical properties depend for their meaning on certain sorts of relational judgments, and these on interpretative coping skills, that is, on technology. The term technology might suggest only bridges, computers, and so on, but Heidegger has in mind techne in general, that is, art or skill as a form of knowing. Here knowing is not conceived simply as an act of reading off that is complete at any moment, but as implying a degree of understanding that can be greater or less, depending as it does on a dynamic process of first interpreting potentialities instrumentally, then interpreting these instruments as having their own potentialities for further uses, and so on in a kind of progressive loop. Experience has a fivefold structure that depends on art and thus on technology (BT, 97104). Tools form a context, such as a factory, to which products give unity; nature yields material and power that are before us in leading to their uses; science aims at a theoretical understanding of material objects; and intersubjectivity, that is, the social organization of labor, means that there is always someone who knows what a particular tool is for. This structure concerns production and utility, and lets us cope by distinguishing what is and is not serviceable, and the human from the nonhuman or natural. Thus it provides a spatiotemporal context: objects are near if available and serviceable, distant if not; they have a past as already mattering to us, a future as ahead of us in roles, and are present as disclosed in tasks. What is initially indeterminate is assigned a role: how things such as leather or shoes are depends on our interest in there being such things, that is, as Heidegger says, on the meaning of their Being. Technology lets things be as instruments, much as will to power does for Nietzsche; but for Heidegger, unlike Nietzsche, things are not reducible to instrumentality. Our tendency to reduce things to mere means is itself an expression of will to power, and we need to rescue a sense of the being of things from this tendency. For instance, most of us do not know how computers work, and so we have power without relating to them as objects over against us. The premodern view, derived from Aristotle, was less subject to this tendency. Artifacts such as tools were only means to ends determined independently; for instance, money has no value inherently but only as a
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means to other goods.23 Thus preindustrial technology could reveal the structure of means and ends. The danger is now that the distinction between means and ends disappears in technological systems.24 Technology has become selfreferential, having a role only for rational organization, so that ends are subsumed to means and instrumentality. The problem is control with a view not to utility but to power. Nietzsche failed to see that such control presents a problem. Technology enframes or gathers together and arranges nature while rejecting the deviant and recalcitrant. This involves a will to mastery that thwarts and conceals rather than discloses the Being of things and of human beings (QT, 300ff.): Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by [as] standing-reserve [and] no longer stands over against us as an object [but] disappears into objectlessness (QT, 298300). For example, the system of air travel is from the technological standpoint a process of control. Aircraft are not objects in their own right; similarly, the passengers merely so to speak fuel the system and are not subjects in their own right. One may perhaps enjoy the sort of happiness that consumption and control can yield, but one has no basis for a goal or narrative that could give a sense of oneself. Technological control is, in other words, overbearing. We are at our most vulnerable nowadays, encountering ourselves as essentially meaningless and merely anxious about what we are. Nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, that is, his essence (QT, Krell, 308). Yet this anxiety is our saving power since it indicates our plight, and we can counteract will to mastery by reflecting on our role in technology. We are not mere means within a technological process but have a hand in it; conversely, we can interpret wood, for instance, as supplying cellulose to make paper (299300), yet it is not down to us that wood has this potentiality. Further, it is not simply down to us if we interpret nature for our purposes, but also a potentiality in us to do so. Thus we can be open to the meaning of things and of human existence, which are then illuminated and articulated, and we are enlightened. The problem with technology is psychological, and only indirectly philosophical, in that we are disposed by the history of Western philosophy since Socrates to think of things simply as instruments (QT; also OWA, 16266). Plato explained changeable ordinary things as copying their eternally present Forms; for an object to be depends on an unintended realm of Being. This tendency to objectify Being as inert presence was modified by Descartes so that for something to be means for it to be present to the human subject.25 For scientists, the role of the human subject was then to extend knowledge in order to win benign control of nature. In this way we come to reduce Being and knowledge to instrumentality; Platos defense of Being led to its abolition. Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche is right to see Western philosophy as finally nihilistic, but wrong to see Platos aim of defending Being as misguided.26 Nietzsches perspectives merely express psychological attitudes, whether concerning worldviews (Weltanschauungen) such as a particular
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Dasein might assume, or systems of particular historical epochs such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, and so forth. That is, philosophical systems as perspectives are what Heidegger calls ontic, not as Nietzsche supposes ontologies to which his reduction could apply. We escape Nietzsches nihilism by providing an alternative foundational account of Being to Platos,27 namely, that technology provides not only control but also truth in the sense of phenomenological disclosure of Being (aletheia). Thus, for instance, water is experienced as wet, even though this experience is inseparable from its instrumentality as thirst-quenching, lubricating, and so forth. Such a notion of truth as disclosure contrasts with truth as independent of the human subject.28 We saw that for Nietzsche will to power and eternal recurrence have no telos, but subsume ends as mere means, and are in this nihilistic sense circular. Yet willing eternal recurrence makes truthfulness or integrity, creativity and joy, possible, and thus the annihilation of nihilism. If his theory of will to power is applied consistently, however, these ends also are subsumed as mere means, and in this respect their claim to overcome such nihilism is not sustained. Heideggers reading therefore fits better than Nietzsches insistence on integrity and creativity might seem to suggest. Heidegger agrees that things are means, but not that they are mere means. Nietzsche reduces talk of the Being of things to instrumentality, but we cannot talk about a world at all, even to say as Nietzsche does that it is metaphor and illusion, without an interpretative structure of ends, and in general of things, in so to speak their own right. Nietzsche does not reduce Being and truth to interpreted meaning but to meaninglessness. Five detailed comments on Nietzsche arise from Heideggers discussion of technology. These concern truth, the categories, existence, and choice. First, the process of interpretation connects us to things as intentional objects and lets us say what it means for them and us to exist. For both writers, such a process implies Becoming as distinct from Being. But for Nietzsche, Becoming is prior to Being: the process of interpretation makes talk of objects provisionally possible, but finally impossible. For Heidegger, on the other hand, the process of Becoming does not make Being only provisionally possible, but lets beings or things finally be. In Aristotles terminology, but reversing his direction of explanation, the potentiality to be a thing makes its actualization possible. Nietzsche tried to reduce Being-talk to a mythopoeic psychological and physiological process; but if each particular thing is merely a phase, so to speak, in a process of control, nothing can be said to exist in its own right, and true-or-false judgments about things are impossible. Thus will to mastery has no grasp of Being or truth. What Nietzsche thinks is mere talk formed by felt interests, for Heidegger concerns what there is, namely, the Being of objects disclosed in a world not simply of our making. Mind and world clarify each other in a hermeneutic circle of what he calls objec-
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tive subjectivity.29 For instance, it is not down to us that a stone is serviceable as a makeshift hammer, though it is not a hammer unless we so interpret it. How we read the world is not how it is, like interpreting a Rorschach inkblot. Tautologically, the hammer cannot be said to exist as a hammer before it so exists; yet we do not bring hammers and computers into existence out of nothing. Thus Heidegger is not an idealist who holds that to be is to be perceived, and that the notion or narrative of the world is simply a yarn spun as it were from nothing by the mind and wrongly credited with truth.30 There must be something to interpret prior to our interpreting, a potentiality not of our making and not fully under our control. Nietzsche fails to draw this distinction: will to power has two aspects at once, that which we interpret and the activity of interpreting it. For Heidegger, on the other hand, we free something that is a potential tool to become an actual tool, and products, nature, theory, and social organization for their actualization. Up to a point, Heideggers argument follows roughly Nietzschean lines. Aristotle held that the actuality of a thing is its end (telos), fulfilling and thus explaining the potentiality to be that thing. For Heidegger as for Nietzsche, the reverse is the case: potentiality, not actuality, explains the thing. We can understand things by means of the art (techne) of interpreting and so disclosing their possibility or potentiality. What it is for a tree to be is explained by potentialities for, say, food, shelter, and fuel; their actualization as fruit, planks, and firewood derives from these (speaking logically rather than causally). We do not first picture, as it were, or reproduce symbolically, the fact that this is a tree in the judgment, This is a tree, and then investigate the potentialities for fruit and so on. Rather, by interpreting a certain set of potentialities as instrumental we give meaning to judgments concerning the actual tree. Hence producing meaning is prior to reproducing facts in judgments. For Heidegger, however, such an account leads to a notion of irreducible truth, whereas Nietzsche understands truth reductively and finally eliminates it; thus his theory is incomplete. Indeed any argument that meaning is prior to truth has to fail, since these are equiprimordial. In other words, even if Nietzsche explains the sense in which a particular hammer, for instance, might really be an artwork in some genre, this is not what is meant by saying that it really is an object as distinct from an illusion. Heidegger in effect escapes this sort of charge since, on his view, how a stone can be a hammer for certain purposes is not as for Nietzsche simply down to us but, as he puts it, withdrawn from us. Similarly, Heidegger broadly agrees that truth in the case of occurrent material objects is a property of judgments that correspond with fact. For this test to apply, such judgments must already have a meaning, disclosed in understanding objects as available. For instance, I do not need to thematize a certain hammer as an object unless it breaks and needs to be repaired. Its felt meaning, as meeting needs, is a prior condition of rational assumptions and
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procedures concerning the fit of judgments about it with fact. The pointingout which assertion does is performed on the basis of what has already been disclosed (BT, 199). This is not to say that the reverse does not hold in an oblique way: if we are to understand p, for instance, the statement This is a hammer, there must be a degree of agreement as to whether p is true. (Wittgenstein makes this sort of point in Philosophical Investigations, 24142.) But the same statement may then function both as a judgment and as an interpretation, and it is misleading to ask what the thing is in itself, and whether it also exists in itself, aside from appearances.31 But Heidegger goes on to maintain in effect that Nietzsche wrongly confuses the question of how a judgment such as This coat is yellow is formed, that is, of the conditions of its having meaning, with the question whether it is true or false. Nietzsches reductive theory implies that the perception of color, for instance, is illusory because it relies on interpretation, and the distinction between truth and illusion applies to specific cases, not systematically. Heidegger contends in reply that the fact that I can experience an illusion, such that it is false to say that I see a yellow coat, does not mean that it is ultimately false, a fiction or mere convention to speak of yellow coats, or generally of colored three-dimensional objects. The second comment concerns categorial structure. For Nietzsche, will to power is inherently undifferentiated, and objects as natural units derive from it, just as they reduce to it. A difficulty he faces is that unity or selfidentity seems to be underived and irreducible. As Heidegger puts it, Over against appearance being is the enduring . . . the always identical (IM, 202). On Heideggers theory, by contrast, interpretation discloses the meaning of an orange, say, as a natural unit that is also edible, but does not make it either edible or a unit. Thus the unity is underived, and interpretation lets us understand the underived identity of individual things. In Heideggers terms, the categories of availability and occurrence are equiprimordial with such identity, so that it is interdependent with but not derived from them. Heidegger therefore explains the structure that experience must have if it is to be intelligible, in accordance with the categories of thing, property, relation and so on. As he says, The goal of all ontology is a doctrine of categories (IM, 187). He does not aim to provide a complete list of categories, but simply to establish an irreducible categorial structure. Nietzsche, on the other hand, explains categorial structure provisionally but finally undermines it. Third, one could also extrapolate from Heideggers theory to reply in a similar way to Nietzsches treatment of existence or Being. Nietzsche explains the existence of things by their origin in the process of Becoming, that is, will to power. A difficulty is that existence seems underived and irreducible. In Heideggers words, Over against becoming being is permanence . . . the already-there (IM, 202). This problem is compounded for Nietzsche if he
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assumes that the process of will to power exists, since its being is then logically prior to its becoming: Art as will to semblance is the supreme configuration of will to power. But the latter, as the basic character of beings, as the essence of reality, is in itself that Being which wills itself to be Becoming.32 Thus Nietzsches account of things as fictions may or may not tell us something about what is meant by saying that things exist, but it fails to explain what it is for them to exist, so far as that concerns what we must necessarily, not simply conventionally, say if we are to say anything at all. Heidegger makes these points concerning truth, the categories, and existence without offering extended supporting argument, at least in their immediate context. One might wonder whether in that case his own doctrine of unified meaning escapes Nietzsches reduction. Further, Nietzsche replaces a nihilistic response to contingency with an affirmative response, so sustaining his reduction. Thus his strategy for dealing with a nihilistic attitude is also an attitude, that is, the same kind of thing, on the principle that it takes a thief to catch one, so to speak. In these terms, Heideggers strategy seems less effective: he adds a different sort of thing, namely, a doctrine of categories, in order to avoid Nietzsches reduction (on the ground that we cannot conceive of a world, even as contingent, without them). If all of this suggests a standoff, however, the dispute does not quite end here: there are also doubts about the reductive form of Nietzsches argument. For Nietzsche, our ascribing objective authority to morality is caused by debility; hence any such authority is illusory. Similarly, the belief that things are independent of us is an illusion explained by our need for order and control. These claims assume that a causal explanation for a belief invalidates it by reducing the explanandum to the explanans. In some such way, a mans claim that whisky is good for him might be redefined as no more than an expression of his desire to drink, that is, as an oblique comment on himself, not the comment on whisky it might seem. But a difficulty with this is that a correct causal explanation need not either invalidate or validate a belief; in that case, there is no ground for reducing the belief to its explanation. Being motivated by a desire to drink does not make a mans belief that whisky is good for him either fanciful, if, for example, alcohol assists tired heart muscles, or alternatively true, if, for instance, he is an alcoholic. Indeed reductionism as a form of argument is self-defeating, since eliminating the explanandum also by implication eliminates the explanans, there being nothing then that does any explaining. Whether or not these objections are conclusive, there does seem to be a residual problem between Nietzsche and Heidegger that is wider than their stated arguments. We conclude with the fourth comment, which concerns choice. Disclosure depends on intentional acts, and Heidegger seems to have inferred wrongly in Being and Time that this involves the will or choice. He went on to regard
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disclosure as instead an event or occurrence (Ereignis), unlike an action that is willed or chosen.33 His account of meaning here is often described as nonvoluntarist, but Heidegger does not mean that choice determines character without labor so much as that choice is now uncontrolling. We do not seize the meaning of Being and wrest it from everyday prattle as in Being and Time; instead, we wait with docility and listen attentively to Being. His declaration that Only a god can save us is not religious but metaphorical: in some such way, Plato did not will his profound effect but was inspired.34 Heidegger concludes that Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being (LH, 221). We can become less controlling by using the preSocratics and poets such as Hlderlin to illuminate the world and bring the meaning of Being into resolution (Entschlossenheit) in the sense perhaps of optical focus; though the fine arts and similar activities are marginal and cannot easily become the focus of attention in a technological age. Thus Heidegger distanced himself further from the controlling will to power that he found in Nietzsche. Heidegger assumed that his general theory is connected somehow with his social and political beliefs, and some commentators look between the lines throughout his writings for the National Socialist agenda that is explicit in places (such as IM, 42, 50). We need now to look at these beliefs as the background to his turn (Kehre) toward an uncontrolling account of technology. One early anxiety about technology was that factory workers were in effect an extension of machines; today employees are often defined as human resources, for instance, and thus by implication treated like resources such as raw materials and equipment. Heidegger thought that in such ways our humanity or, as he said, our spirituality is distorted, marginalized, and ignored. A fuller discussion of his view might well consider whether there is one problem here or various sorts of problems, some perhaps more theoretical than others. Some questions might well be political, concerning pay and conditions of work, for instance, or the right not to be dismissed unfairly; others managerial, concerning, for instance, damage to an employee in her relations with colleagues and clients by arbitrarily changing her role. Heidegger, however, assumed that there is one general kind of problem and, initially, that it is political, though having to do with what we now call moral education rather than with rights and the like in employment. He upheld the folk values of crafted implements and rustic cosiness (Gemtlichkeit), suggesting that industrial rationalization destroys the sense of an enduring community and place with a common language and history.35 He meant that ethnic Germans could lead mankind back to true spirituality. (Ironically, this folksy reaction soon found itself industrializing ways of killing people, in battle and camps.) Human meaning is in any case essentially historical, not Archimedean; accordingly, a certain nostalgia is true to civilized values and conserves the best in us. Indeed in harking back to the pre-Socratics he went beyond nostalgia;
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and his attempts to ground such meaning historically in language were often weakened by overstretched etymology, as he liked to call it. National Socialism replaced the conservative aim of humanity with the reactionary means of a deceptively comforting, in fact heartless, nostalgia for German values. But having sought a third way (or Third Reich) between the technological cultures of capitalism and communism (3739, 4546), Heidegger distanced himself from this project. It is not clear whether he did so because it brought out the least truthful and worst in many people, contrary to his intention. In any event, he now wrote about bridges, for example, without bias either against the motorway sort or in favor of the rustic sort (BDT, 330). Technological progress cannot be undone, and improves the human lot in many ways. He accepted also that folk values are not easily recovered, given the dominance of economic thinking, with its lucrative will to mastery. (Even nostalgia is now sold as heritage.) If high-rise flats delete a sense of place and community, the Black Forest farmhouse was not a suitable model for postwar reconstruction, and he focused on the homelessness not of Germans but of man as interpreter standing out from things in the world (339). The problem of sustaining our humanity in the face of technology now had an apolitical, uncontrolling solution. Heidegger might seem ambivalent in favoring first preindustrial but later industrial technology, and first a political but later an apolitical solution. He remains unequivocal, however, in believing, like Nietzsche, that technological interests, powers, and processes are fundamental to knowledge, and, unlike Nietzsche, that what is known on this basis cannot be reduced to them. His attempt to reaffirm the unity of interpretative meaning included, for a time at least, a reaction against cultural diversity in line with National Socialist repression of dissent, which contrasts with Nietzsches perspectivism; at the same time, if we assume that National Socialism assimilates truth to political power, Heidegger could not have supported this movement consistently with denying in this way (as I suggest he did) that truth is in general reducible to power. For present purposes therefore, I shall assume that his political tastes and character do not ultimately affect his general theory, while recognizing that this is disputed.36 Being and Time distinguished five elements in experience that give it an instrumental structure: tools, products, nature, theory, and intersubjectivity. Heideggers later work, however, speaks of a noninstrumental fourfold structure.37 The formal art of engineering, for instance, lets us build a bridge as a means to cross a river, but also points to the informal arts by which we set up the bridge as a landmark. As Heidegger says, the bridge gathers places in a region, so disclosing the surrounding world in which we find our orientation. This gathering explains the unity implied in the notion of a world, not simply the metric separation and layout of objects. He describes these four corners poetically: the bridge gathers together the rivers banks;
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the heavens from which the water comes; men to whom it gives passage; and gods, sometimes supposedly there in effigy, for instance, at a roadside calvary (323ff.). These four elements indicate related foci of meaning that concern us aside from consumption and control. The bridge also has a role more fundamental than to mark a point in geometric space, namely, as a landmark that opens a place and apportions space by orientation to various ends that are not merely quantitative (143ff.). Indeed space, as mere geometric extension, contains no spaces and no places. We never find in it any locations, that is, things of the kind the bridge is (333). The fourfold does not simply supersede the fivefold: Heidegger does not now deny a role for instrumental thinking. But our relation to the world is primarily a matter of what he calls dwelling. Knowing is the art by which one orientates oneself, and this was a matter in Being and Time of interpreting instruments, but now of dwelling (OWA, 16266). Such dwelling, or sense of place, is an event of opening (Ereignis); a free gift, not an aim of action, regulatory ideal, reward, or seal of approval. Here meaning is not willed and controlling, but thinking is thanking: we can be grateful for our potentiality for interpreting things and for their potential for interpretation, not merely active in so interpreting them as Nietzsche supposes. A sense of place depends on art but lacks the will to mastery that accompanies arts. Dwelling cannot be reduced to the function of buildings within, say, a commercial framework, or to architectural styles or other cultural forms. Rather, it involves various sorts of interest or end: social and economic ends such as accommodation; topography, which determines, for instance, where a bridge is to cross a river; historical community, to which the universal notion of man is now central, not simply the local and ethnic nation; and religion, even when unspecific, or pushed wholly aside (331). An account of such religion would require further discussion, but Heidegger evidently has in mind some notion of divinity, that is, something more specifically religious than, say, contemplation of nature. This divinity could not be equated with Being as a sort of general, immaterial object, a notion that he rejects. For those who believe that man is Gods image, however, his account of the human subject as tied intentionally to objects, rather than detached from them on Cartesian lines, is perhaps a guide. A sense of place thus implies a single environment linking physical, social, historical, and religious concerns, aside from control and consumption. Such holism does not make Heidegger totalitarian since it concerns dwelling, not control in the context of either political dissent or moral responsibility. Heideggers point is rather that we have one world and relate to it from within; like Nietzsche, he believes that we are not neutral observers with a view from nowhere. In addition, however, the interests that so tie us to the world are not reducible to control. Thus Heideggers nonvoluntarism does not mean that our concept of the world is no longer tied to interest, but that he rein-
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terprets interest so as to siphon off that element of control that, he thinks, persisted within the doctrine of Being and Time. The language appropriate to this later account of being-in-the-world is more poetic than philosophical. Heideggers writing can be lyrical when describing a bridge or farmhouse, for instance, a Greek temple (OWA, 16870), or peasant life (16264). Such poetic thinking is not aconceptual in the way that musical thinking and feeling, for example, cannot be put into words. But poetic notions do not here simply convey the intention to talk in this way, as for Nietzsche talk of Being is metaphorical. For while such poetic talk cannot be analyzed philosophically like talk of material objects, it is no less literal in the sense of being objectivist, underived, and, as Heidegger would say, primordial rather than secondary.38 Hence we should perhaps say that these ends indicate the structure of noninstrumental meaning quasi-metaphorically. Heidegger holds that whatever exists unfolds itself to language, and man brings it to language, contrary to the linguistic conventionalism that we have attributed to Nietzsche (LH: Krell, 23940). This linguistic unfolding might seem to present a problem since some ways of knowing are aconceptual, as we have just noted, while philosophy cannot be articulated except in words. Thus technological disclosure seems to be preconceptual where in their different ways the fine arts and philosophy are not. Further, as quasi-metaphorical his fourfold is not susceptible of conceptual analysis. For Heidegger, however, language need not be verbal only, and he cites semaphore as an instance. Heidegger speaks of the holy. This is not anything narrowly religious: he glosses it as the hale, implying a sense of wholeness or health, reminiscent in some ways of Nietzsches will to power. He hints at the arcadian sense the peasants world can make, however, bleak, for instance, when she takes off her shoes late in the evening in what he insensitively calls deep but healthy fatigue (BDT, 163). He also claims that as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer (339), presumably because reflection on our role in technology clarifies the limitations of will, so that thinking is thanking and so on. Perhaps indeed we sense such wholeness rarely, and more in promise than attainment or, in view of natural and moral evil, as simply missing.39 However that may be, Heidegger seems to mean that one senses wholeness not only qualitatively or emotionally, as, for instance, rich or bleak, but also as a necessary structured unity, where for Nietzsche a sense of health is simply a manifestation of an ultimately undifferentiated will to power. Thus for Nietzsche, one creates nonutilitarian goals through enhanced vitality and makes sense of ones life as something brought under ones control. Felt meaning is fundamental and comprehensive. A problem he faces is that, as we saw earlier, felt meaning alone does not explain morality, for instance, contrary to his belief that he has explained morality away. Heideggers argument that meaning is not only felt, as Nietzsche supposes, but also is necessarily structured, lets him escape this sort of charge.
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Meaning in life depends not simply on control but also on the irreducible context of the meaning of Being; we are not finally subject to power in nature and politics as for Nietzsche, but are above all answerable to truth. Nietzsche and Heidegger seem to agree, then, that Being and truth meet our need for order and meaning, and that the process of interpreting felt concerns makes talk of objects possible. But for Nietzsche, such talk expresses the particular perspectives of a fissiparous will to power that, directly or indirectly, subsumes objects to instrumentality and reduces our intentions to consumption and control. Heidegger instead reaffirms Being and truth: the process of interpreting instruments for control discloses a unified categorial structure that is not reducible to this process, and gives us a sense of ourselves in a common environment with a shared history and a religious interest.40 University of Glasgow
NOTES
1. The Birth of Tragedy [BT] and The Genealogy of Morals [GM] are translated in a single paperback by Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956). More recent translations include The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), and The Genealogy of Morality, ed. and trans. Keith Ansell-Pearson (1994). 2. Golffings translation of Herkunft as provenance usefully suggests an artworks ownership history, back to its creator; Nietzsche need not have intended this simile for it to be apposite to his method and conclusions, particularly in BT. 3. Thus Spake Zarathustra [Z], quoted by R. J. Hollingdale in The Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1976), 1, p. 187. 4. John Macmurray argues as a Christian in The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), chap. 10, that the world is one action. 5. Beyond Good and Evil [BGE] (Harmondsworth: Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 19. 6. Many commentators find in Nietzsche a virtue ethics. See, for example, Lester Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (London: Routledge, 1991); also Bernard Williams, Moral Luck; Alastair MacIntyre, Beyond Virtue; Gilles Deleuze, Kants Critical Theory, Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Inoperative Community, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. For a general discussion of virtue ethics, see How Should One Live? ed. Roger Crisp (1996); Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (1997). 7. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), 1, p. 39. 8. See also, for instance, Daybreak [D], trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 551. 9. Joyful Wisdom [JW] (Edinburgh: Foulis, 1910), 341, 27071: Do you want this [life] once more and for innumerable times? 10. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University at the Clarendon Press, 1962): sec. IX, part 1, 222, p. 272. 11. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chap. 12. 12. Human, All Too Human [HH], trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980), 222. See also BGE 260. Salim Kemal notes a shift of emphasis from the artist
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to the artwork in Nietzsche, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 11, Nietzsches Politics of Aesthetic Genius. 13. It is a further question whether Michel Foucault in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History is right to suppose that Nietzsche is concerned only to describe power structures, not to show how we may escape from them. 14. Twilight of the Idols [TI], trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), 36. 15. The Will to Power [WP], trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 334. 16. See, for example, Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), chap. 3, esp. 14056; Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche As Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965), chap. 4, esp. VI and VII. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1979), 37 and 5052. 18. Hans Vaihinger discusses Nietzsches notion of illusion in The Philosophy of As If : see Robert Solomon, ed., Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1973), chap. 4. 19. Maudemarie Clark considers whether Nietzsches view that Being and Truth are fictions contradicts his common sense realism and equivalence principle (Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy [Cambridge University Press, 1990], 40). I suggest that this problem is resolved if he is taken to offer a theory of meaning rather than of truth. 20. Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 101. Nagel analyzes what he calls larger meaning first as concerned with God, for instance, but then, confusingly, as a self-concerned tendency to take ourselves too seriously. He concludes that life may be not only meaningless, but absurd; but this is also confusing since saying that life is absurd implies that the question whether life has a meaning itself has meaning, and is therefore to be taken seriously after all. Unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger, he does not connect what he calls meaning with interpretation in general. 21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [BT], trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 1112. 22. The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus, 1915. 23. Webster F. Hood, The Aristotelian versus the Heideggerian Approach to the Problem of Technology, in Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology (New York: Free Press, 1972), chap. 26. 24. The Question of Technology [QT], in David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger Basic Writings (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 288ff.; Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics [IM], trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 14, 202. 25. Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics, in Krell, 280. 26. Letter on Humanism [LH], in Krell, 225ff.; IM, 14, 202. 27. Heidegger assumed that he had distanced himself from Platos alleged decline into particularism. Richard Rorty challenges this view of his relation to Plato: Heideggers comments on prattle mean that he believed wrongly that he had attained a world-historical, Archimedean view in place of the Western, Platonic view that knowledge is embedded in common linguistic practices and related world-pictures (Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others [vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers] [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], part 1). David Hoy seems nearer the mark: on Heideggers theory of Interpretation (Interpretieren), the notion of complete knowledge is incoherent (BT, sec. 31) (David Couzens Hoy, in Charles Guignon, ed., Companion to Heidegger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], esp. 17477). In that case, Heideggers objectivism could not have been Archimedean; he rejected the possibility of a view from nowhere.
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28. Dick White holds that Heidegger opposes thinking and willing (Heidegger on Nietzsche: The Question of Value, in Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton, ed., Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy [Albany: State University of New York, 1988], 116). This fails to take account of the complexity of a relationship in which thinking about objects is connected with but not reducible to willing instrumentality. White also points out that will to power is not the same in master and slave, and concludes that it is not one thing as Heidegger supposes. This ignores the congruence of the masters strength and the slaves will to possess power, both of which White notes. 29. In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger emphasizes that world does not at all signify beings or any realm of beings but the openness of being (Krell, 228). 30. William D. Blattner argues in Heideggers Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) that in Being and Time Heidegger is a transcendental idealist about being as distinct from entities (253), but that by the time he wrote Contributions he had abandoned even this position (309). 31. See, for instance, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Krell, 17477; QT, 295. 32. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 218. 33. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 120: Gods and men are . . . appropriated into the event of lighting, and therefore never concealed. 34. Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview (1966), trans. William J. Richardson, in Thomas Sheehan, ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981). 35. See, for instance, Building Dwelling Thinking [BDT], in Krell, 338. 36. Keith Ansell-Pearson, for instance, discusses this question in The Fate of the New Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Howard Caygill (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993), chap. 4, Geist and Reich. See also Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 37. These structures are not categories in the sense of things and qualities. Heidegger distinguishes beings, that is, things or entities, as ontic from Being as ontological (BT, 1). To conceive of a thing as ontic is to think of it a priori as having a certain character such as its quantity or quality. Being is neither an entity nor the highest ontological category in the sense of everything in general, but the foundation of beings. To have an ontological interest in anything is to think of it in relation to its Being, that is, as something disclosed rather than nothing. On Heideggers theory of interpretation, this disclosure concerns man as being-in-the-world. Thus as ontological, the five- and fourfold structures are a priori characteristics of man (BT, 4955). In his ontological aspect, man is transcendent in regard to things, and a free agent (BT, 3 and 4). 38. See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper, 1971), 100; also Jacques Derrida, White Mythology, in Margins, and Le Retrait de la Mtaphore, in Psyche; and John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1994). 39. See IM, 1. 40. Thanks to Stephen Hogg, John Llewelyn, Paul Loeb, Marcin Milkowski, and David Owen for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Nietzsche, Heidegger and Meaning

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Nietzsche, Heidegger and Meaning

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Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Meaning

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

N IETZSCHE, H EIDEGGER, AND M EANING

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