Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning

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Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 26, 2003

Copyright 2003 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Meaning

DAVID CAMPBELL

ietzsche writes more or less unsystematically on many subjects, includ-

ing morality, art, religion, and politics. In this article I explore the pos-

sibility 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 interpretationthat 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 mean-

ing. 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, consis-

tently 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 GMdeclares that the subject of the

present work is the provenance of our moral prejudices. Nietzsches ques-tion here, then, is the origin of morality.2 Previously, however, in the first sec-

tion, 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 sub-

stance (Preface, 1). This anticipates his answer to the question of the ori-

gin 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 judg-

ments, but engages actively and in some ways creatively in experience. His

starting point is therefore the autonomous agent. He emphasizes this againat the end of the work:

N


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26 DAVID CAMPBELL

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 inter-

pret 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 ori-

gin of the opposites goodand badis 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 comesabout 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 pres-

sure 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 utili-

tarian 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), sug-

gesting that his will would be ascendant in its own terms only, if the cir-

cumstance 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 dis-

cussion of priests is further evidence that he operates a theory of self-inter-pretation. 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:


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NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 27

Granting that political supremacy always gives rise to notions of spiritual

supremacy . . . the ruling caste is also the priestly caste and elects to charac-

terize itself by a term which reminds us of its priestly function. In this con-

text we encounter for the first time the concepts pure and impure. . . . Thedesire 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 sym-

bolized 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 tendencyfor its part in forming Western culture (III, XXIVff.), but nonetheless he

attacks it for enabling those with morbid, feeble will to claim moral author-

ity 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, assistedby 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 feel-

ing 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, hopelesslymediocre, and savourless, he considers himself the apex of historical evolu-

tion (I, XI).

Eventually altruism evaporates into nihilism, that is, loss or denial of mean-

ing 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 defi-

ance alone creates meaning.

The self-characterization of rulers and priests and reaction of plebeiansor slaves explains only one aspect of moral talk. Nietzsche goes on to gen-

eralize this type of explanation, describing any autonomous agent as self-

characterized; 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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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 comple-tion . . . 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. ForNietzsche, 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 itsrealization, as he notes in GM. Ones life gains an aim and narrative struc-

ture, 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 self-

interpretation.

Nietzsche also explains terms such as responsibility and conscience,

together with obligations such as promise-keeping, as expressions of virtu-ous, 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 train-

ing. But his etymology is also a genealogy, attempting to show that

values originate in character, and that this is a matter of choice or self-

characterization. Yet this is only one application of his etymological method;it also applies generally to the objective areas of natural science and phys-

iology. 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 see-

ing 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 mean-

ings 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 fan-

ciful example, the term forest can be understood by recognizing connota-

tions 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 torediscover that pure meant originally inactive, so we ordinarily forget

that the term forest was originally interpreted as hunting ground and sup-

pose 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 convention-

ally whatever conjures up these connotations, though many are subsequently

lost or forgotten. Naming consists neither in labeling preexisting mean-ings 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, gener-

alizes 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 canbe said to connect existential and semantic meaning.

The background to this theory is Nietzsches attack on cognitivist meta-

physics. 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 hecalls it, which is inherently unstructured and indifferent to us. There is no

given, preconceived end or telos that could remove the contingency of exis-

tence 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 our-

selves 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 cog-

nition; 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 undiffer-

entiated 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 thiscircularity, 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 interpreta-

tions or perspectives is possible. Here will to power is a nihilistic circle of

interpretation that continuously consumes and overcomes itself. The doctrineof eternal recurrence reflects this circularity also. Nietzsches epistemologi-

cal 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 metaphys-

ical 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 tran-

scendence, 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 mean-

ing. Thus he questions two assumptions: that there are transcendent objects,

and that knowledge is merely representation. These assumptions leave unex-

plained both the notion of an object, as preconceived, and the notion of knowl-

edge, 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. Onedifficulty with this is that we are onlookers as well as agents, and interpre-

tation 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 willsuch 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 valuesthat sustain it. Morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation . . .

spontaneously (GM1, 10). The worth of an action depends on who does

it. . . . It is no longer the consequences but the origin of action which deter-

mines 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, congen-

ial, honest, proud (megalopsychos), courageous, generous, just, courteous,

exuberant, and playful; and one has presence, energy, sensibility, self-disci-

pline, 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 under-

taken 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 itrecurred 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-interpre-

tation: 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 sit-

uation . . . [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 universalizingor 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 thatimplies 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 characteriza-

tion 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 univer-

salist ethics of Utilitarianism and Kant with what is commonly called moral-

ity, which he believes his ethic overcomes. Utilitarians say that actions

are right if they produce the best results for the majority regardless of feel-ings 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 sim-

ply 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 par-

ticular, 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 per-

sonal 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 par-ticular feels, not simply what anyone, in the third person, ought to do regard-

less 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 admit-

ted 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 appro-

priately 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 intel-

lectual as opposed to a sensory perception. For Nietzsche, however, onefeels

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 over-

comes its inherent senselessness and the Christian view that we can be grate-

ful 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 feel-

ings 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; wecan be glad for life though we tend to feel these things and, in addition, suf-

fer 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 sim-

ply 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 opposesChristianity. He further misrepresents Christians not only as debilitated but

also as compensating for their debility by conceiving of moral rules as pro-

hibitions 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 undertak-ing. 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 ormakes a difference to oneself, and character is in this sense a question of feel-

ing; we are deceived if we suppose that we act on judgment alone. An altru-

ist 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, intel-

lect 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 nonethe-

less 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 ade-quately 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 virtu-

ous 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 articu-

lates and shapes prior formless, raw emotion, or whether what we feel can-not 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 GMbe

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 inter-

pretation 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 suchas the classical tragedians endure the threat of disorder and, without guide-

lines, create myths that provide a monolithic order. Their orgiastic Dionysian

energy and formalizing Apollinian principle are at odds except when achiev-

ing 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 hor-

ror 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 orderthat 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 ofThe 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 inexplica-

ble; 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 accord-

ing to our perspective. Anyone may contribute to the perspective of some tra-

dition 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 supposedinstead that anyone can contribute to our interpretation, and it is now partic-

ular to individuals and their traditions, even when it seems unified. Whether

such perspectives are strong or excellent, or weak and poor, is not deter-

mined 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 judg-

ment as general in form, and Nietzsche shows how these apparently opposed

particular and universal standpoints can be reconciled.

BTand GMtogether 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 indeci-

pherable, 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 nar-rative 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 per-

spectival diversity and self-directing control makes him more liberal politi-

cally than in other modes, but his wider point is nonpolitical: each individual

36 DAVID CAMPBELL


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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 sen-

tences are true or false only in relation to the parochial perspective they

express. Thus any perspective can be criticized from another perspective, solong 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 par-

ticular 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 per-

sons 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 judg-

ment is an exercise of power, and true if it fits a living perspective; hence tra-

ditions 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 vision-

ary 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 doesnot thwart felt concerns and desires but interprets them so as to become

what you are, that is, authentic or strong (D, 448). Autonomous respon-

sibility 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 proj-

ect. Autonomy does not imply independence from such forms, since passionsdo 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 self-

interpretation 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 notjust choose the ethical language in which she expresses herself and the cri-

teria 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 val-

ues, his shift from a universal to a particularist stance has a religious ana-

logue. 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 mas-ter-slave distinction to explain them. His target is still the objectivist, cog-

nitivist 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 knowl-

edge 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 physicsand biology, but here, at the level of human motivation, it concerns knowl-

edge. 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 ofHeraclitus. When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evi-

dence 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 toBeyond

Good and Evil, is denying perspective. A piece of knowledge does not sim-

ply 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,

38 DAVID CAMPBELL


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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 judg-

ments 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 symbol-ically in a judgment such as This is a tree and then investigate the predi-

cates. This direction of explanation also means that we first understand any

object in relational terms: for example, wood is first serviceable, then cellu-

lar. Judgments ascribing physical properties depend for their meaning on cer-

tain 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 inter-

pretation, are misleading. Hence talk of things is fictional or conven-

tional. A routine objection to what we may here loosely call linguistic

conventionalism is that while it may purport to explain the variability of con-

cepts 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 isnot a type or degree of rigidity.

Nietzsche claimed to have abolished Being. He does not mean that noth-

ing 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, how-ever, 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 conven-

tional 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 illu-

sion, and at the same time explains such metaphysics in the contrary sense

of undermining pernicious illusion. Nietzsches aim, however, is not merelyto distinguish useful and pernicious illusions. Even while vindicating ordi-

nary talk, he does not leave it undisturbed, but finally reduces it to a mani-

festation 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


16/30

account of their origin, namely, the attempt to objectify Being anthropo-

morphically.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 mean-

ing that it is as ifthere 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 the-

ory 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 onecould intelligibly theorize. Metaphysicians suppose that knowledge is con-

tingent 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 read-

ing off, and recasts it as an expression of perspective without the imprimaturof fixed and final truth. His suggestion is then that the criteria of knowl-

edge 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 appli-cation; 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: impor-

tant, period.20 Such a larger meaning is not only synoptic and final, as

40 DAVID CAMPBELL


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Nagel indicates: it seems also to have dramatic unity and heightening or ten-

sion, together with qualitative or emotional richness and depth. Thus for a

romantic or pantheist, a landscape, for instance, can seem to convey a mes-

sage that does not quite form itself into words, having what might be calleda 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 narra-

tives 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 under-

stood 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 tech-

nology 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 actualizinga 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 pos-

sibilities 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 dis-

closure 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). Aristotleattributed 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 every-

thing 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 under-

lying unintended reality. Objects are in the first instance available or handy

for projects (zuhanden), not simply occurrent (vorhanden): judgments ascrib-

ing 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 pro-

gressive loop. Experience has a fivefold structure that depends on art andthus 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 distin-

guishing 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 mat-tering 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 ofthings from this tendency. For instance, most of us do not know how com-

puters 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

42 DAVID CAMPBELL


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means to other goods.23 Thus preindustrial technology could reveal the struc-

ture of means and ends. The danger is now that the distinction between means

and ends disappears in technological systems.24 Technology has become self-

referential, having a role only for rational organization, so that ends are sub-sumed 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 vul-

nerable 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 isour 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 inter-

pret 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 exis-

tence, which are then illuminated and articulated, and we are enlightened.

The problem with technology is psychological, and only indirectly philo-sophical, 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 pres-

ent 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 Beingand knowledge to instrumentality; Platos defense of Being led to its aboli-

tion. Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche is right to see Western philosophy as

finally nihilistic, but wrong to see Platos aim of defending Being as mis-

guided.26 Nietzsches perspectives merely express psychological attitudes,

whether concerning worldviews (Weltanschauungen) such as a particular


20/30

Dasein might assume, or systems of particular historical epochs such as

Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, and so forth. That is, philosophi-

cal systems as perspectives are what Heidegger calls ontic, not as Nietzsche

supposes ontologies to which his reduction could apply. We escapeNietzsches 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 independ-

ent 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 cir-

cular. Yet willing eternal recurrence makes truthfulness or integrity, creativ-

ity 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 worldat 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 pos-

sible, but lets beings or things finally be. In Aristotles terminology, but revers-

ing 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 inits 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-

44 DAVID CAMPBELL


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tive subjectivity.29 For instance, it is not down to us that a stone is service-

able as a makeshift hammer, though it is not a hammer unless we so inter-

pret 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 beforeit 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 inter-

pret 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 dis-

closing 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 judg-

ments. For Heidegger, however, such an account leads to a notion of irre-

ducible truth, whereas Nietzsche understands truth reductively and finally

eliminates it; thus his theory is incomplete. Indeed any argument that mean-ing 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 say-

ing 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 mate-rial objects is a property of judgments that correspond with fact. For this test

to apply, such judgments must already have a meaning, disclosed in under-

standing objects as available. For instance, I do not need to thematize a cer-

tain 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 pointing-

out 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 understandp, for instance, the statement This isa hammer, there must be a degree of agreement as to whetherp 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 inter-

pretation, 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 illu-

sion 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-dimen-

sional objects.

The second comment concerns categorial structure. For Nietzsche, will

to power is inherently undifferentiated, and objects as natural units derivefrom it, just as they reduce to it. A difficulty he faces is that unity or self-

identity 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 mean-

ing 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, prop-

erty, relation and so on. As he says, The goal of all ontology is a doc-

trine 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 asimilar 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 log-

ically prior to its becoming: Art as will to semblance is the supreme con-

figuration 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 some-

thing about what is meantby saying that things exist, but it fails to explain

what it is for them to exist, so far as that concerns what we must necessar-

ily, not simply conventionally, say if we are to say anything at all.

Heidegger makes these points concerning truth, the categories, and exis-

tence without offering extended supporting argument, at least in their imme-

diate 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 sus-

taining 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 cate-

gories, in order to avoid Nietzsches reduction (on the ground that we can-

not 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 debil-

ity; 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 expres-

sion 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 correctcausal 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 alter-

natively 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

inBeing 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 non-

voluntarist, but Heidegger does not mean that choice determines character

without labor so much as that choice is now uncontrolling. We do not seizethe meaning of Being and wrest it from everyday prattle as inBeing 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 shep-

herd of Being (LH, 221). We can become less controlling by using the pre-

Socratics 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 asIM, 42, 50). We need now to look at these beliefs as the back-

ground 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 prob-

lem here or various sorts of problems, some perhaps more theoretical than

others. Some questions might well be political, concerning pay and condi-

tions of work, for instance, or the right not to be dismissed unfairly; othersmanagerial, concerning, for instance, damage to an employee in her relations

with colleagues and clients by arbitrarily changing her role. Heidegger, how-

ever, 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 indus-

trial rationalization destroys the sense of an enduring community and place

with a common language and history.

35

He meant that ethnic Germans couldlead 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; accord-

ingly, 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;

48 DAVID CAMPBELL


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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, nostalgiafor German values. But having sought a third way (or ThirdReich)

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 exam-

ple, 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 suit-

able 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 technol-

ogy 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. Heremains unequivocal, however, in believing, like Nietzsche, that technolog-

ical 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 politi-

cal power, Heidegger could not have supported this movement consistently

with denying in this way (as I suggest he did) that truth is in general reducibleto power. For present purposes therefore, I shall assume that his political

tastes and character do not ultimately affect his general theory, while recog-

nizing 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 weset 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 road-

side calvary (323ff.). These four elements indicate related foci of meaning

that concern us aside from consumption and control. The bridge also has arole more fundamental than to mark a point in geometric space, namely, as

a landmark that opens a place and apportions space by orientation to var-

ious ends that are not merely quantitative (143ff.). Indeed space, as mere geo-

metric 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 inBeing and Time of interpret-

ing 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 com-mercial 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 specif-

ically religious than, say, contemplation of nature. This divinity could not beequated 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

Documents

Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning