115: Martin Heidegger, pt 3 - Will to Power as Knowledge & Metaphysics

This is the Nietzsche Podcast. If will to power is Nietzsche's metaphysics, if will to power is Nietzsche's ontology, what does that imply? What does that reveal to us about the world, or as Heidegger would say, about the nature of being? Heidegger says in his lectures on Nietzsche, quote, Nietzsche belongs among the essential thinkers.

With the term thinker, we name those exceptional human beings who are destined to think one single thought, a thought that is always about beings as a whole. Each thinker only thinks one single thought.

thought. It needs neither renown nor impact in order to gain dominance. In contrast, writers and researchers, as opposed to a thinker, have lots and lots of thoughts. That is ideas that can be converted into much prized reality and that are also evaluated solely in accord with this conversion capability but the single thought of a thinker is one around which unexpectedly

Unnoticed in the stillest stillness, all beings turn. Thinkers are the founders of that which never becomes visible in images, which can never be historiologically related. or technologically calculated, yet which rules without recourse to power. Thinkers are always one-sided, namely, on the sole side assigned to them in the very beginnings of the history of thinking.

by a simple saying. The saying comes from one of the oldest thinkers of the West, Periander of Corinth, who is accounted one of the seven sages. The saying goes, Take into care. beings as a whole. End quote. Nietzsche said of the pre-Platonic philosophers, usually called the pre-Socratics, but Nietzsche loops in Socrates with, you know, the lot of them.

Nietzsche said of them that they were single-minded sages, that they each had one fundamental thought, one fundamental paradigmatic framework. And with this one fundamental thought, whether the thought of Thales, that all is water... or Heraclitus that all is becoming, or Parmenides that all is being, or Democritus that all is atoms, with this one paradigmatic thought, the pre-Platonic philosopher recasts reality.

He makes the whole of the world resound with a single chord, which chimes out of his very being, or at least that's the way Nietzsche puts it. And in other words, what Nietzsche is saying is that it's an artistic, creative act to philosophize. during this era before there are formal systems of philosophy or schools of thought or all these presuppositions and groundwork laid that each had to discover philosophy for himself and so nietzsche describes them as proceeding by great

leaps rather than careful steps. There's a sort of contrast between the artistic leaping philosopher, whom Nietzsche and apparently Heidegger would consider to be true thinkers. versus the systematizing sort of carefully, the philosopher carefully builds and constructs his framework from a starting axiom in this sort of syllogistic chain. And so Heidegger sees in Nietzsche arguably this same tendency, which is perhaps why he was so enamored with the pre-Socratic philosophers, as was Heidegger.

The pre-Socratic philosopher tries to discover the arche, the one, the beginning place, the first principle of existence, the principle from which we can understand the whole, the entirety of being. And it's from grasping the archae that the philosopher can then possess knowledge of the beings within that whole picture. Now, Heidegger would have said that the pre-Socratics attempted to discover the being of beings.

being with a capital b of beings lowercase and plural to give a name to that which provides the origin the basis of existence the basis of the existence of the many things within existence. And Heidegger understood his own project as a return to the pre-Socratics, sort of going back before the errors of Western metaphysics.

And so it's not surprising that he would appreciate this tendency in Nietzsche also. So for Heidegger, Nietzsche's will to power, therefore, is analogous to that claim, all is water, or to that claim, all is becoming or all is atoms nietzsche is saying all is will to power this is nietzsche's single thought out of which

his whole philosophy flows, out of which his whole philosophy is a consequence. Again, not as a sort of rational syllogistic chain, but in that everything in his philosophy sort of resounds with that same chord. you could say it's an artistic unity. And that, you know, as with the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche's style of philosophy is an artistic act. And last week, we discussed Nietzsche's will to power.

seen through the perspective of art, where we considered the artist as the most perspicuous example or exemplar of the will to power. And... therefore come to the understanding that this is what will to power does. Will to power describes a world where the various forces all attempt to push themselves out beyond themselves and thus gather themselves in the same act, thus to recreate themselves anew. And they represent a horizon to themselves from their given perspective of the ideal.

or the goal. In other words, in every act of valuing, there is that sort of artistic creation of a representation of the world, and a representation of the, we might say, the good in that world, and what results from this.

From Nietzsche's creative act, from his legislation of value, is a new picture of knowledge. And for Heidegger, this should not be construed into psychological terms or even epistemological terms. It is not... as he says, intended to be a, quote, theory of knowledge, something boring and esoteric. Rather, Heidegger draws out the implicit premise.

of the word knowledge that knowledge is necessarily true knowledge and false knowledge is by definition not knowledge knowledge therefore depends on truth as a concept the the very fact that we speak of knowledge points to the truth in an ontological sense. And so will to power, therefore, is supposed to open up a true way of viewing the world. And people don't often speak of...

Nietzsche's philosophy in these terms, but Heidegger emphasizes that it is on the basis of the will to power that we can apprehend other truths. When Nietzsche says that life is will to power, Heidegger argues that's the same as saying the world is will to power. And the way that your view of life or your worldview, those could be the same thing, at least colloquially speaking. We could use those terms interchangeably.

Quote, already in 1885, Nietzsche initiates a train of thought with the question, and do you know what the world is to me? By world, he understands beings as a whole, often equating the term with life.

Just as we like to equate worldview with a view of life. He answers, this world is will to power and nothing besides. And you yourselves are this will to power and nothing besides. End quote. So... in heidegger's reading nietzsche is really speaking about existence itself that is to say the being of beings and he is giving that existence a content will to power and for this reason nietzsche's philosophy

for Heidegger, cannot be understood as opposed to truth. Rather, will to power becomes the essence of truth. It's not as if Nietzsche believes that a view of truth other than one based in the will to power is just as good as his view of truth. We could perhaps put it that way. On the contrary, Nietzsche would say that will to power is the correct view of the world.

He might not necessarily believe that what correct means is the same that someone who holds the correspondence theory of truth, what they might mean. But nevertheless, it is a truer view of the world than other views. In fact, it is to become the new standard of evaluating whether a worldview is quote-unquote true or not. Truth now has a very different sense if we measure the truth of a statement according to whether or not it reflects will to power, however.

If we see that as the truth of the world, it has some very funny implications. Heidegger says, quote, If Nietzsche's thought of will to power is the fundamental thought of his metaphysics, and the last thought of Western metaphysics, then the essence of knowledge, that is the essence of truth, must be defined in terms of will to power.

Truth contains and grants that which is, grants beings in the midst of which man himself is a being, in such a way as he relates to beings. And thus, in all relating, man somehow keeps to what is true. Truth is what man strives for. It is that of which he demands that it dominate all action and letting be, all wishing and giving, experiencing and shaping, suffering and overcoming. One speaks of a will to truth. End.

quote. You know, as usual, Heidegger is giving us a very unorthodox reading of Nietzsche, but I think it is true, at least to some degree. So this is the next step, however, from the artistic act of creation. which is to recast the world as will to power. Now we have a new image of the world, and thus we have a new image of truth.

In some sense, we're gesturing toward the same thing with both phrases, with, you know, invoking an image of the world or an image of truth, because presumably the world is being for Nietzsche insofar as...

The world as we actually experience it. The things themselves, right? And presumably to be a useful image of the world anyway. If we're evaluating viewpoints according to their relative strength or weakness, that image of the world ought to be true. And furthermore, it's the very usefulness, the validity in praxis, we might say, that becomes...

determinative in Nietzsche's thought. We don't mean usefulness in the sense of narrow conceptions of utility or of pragmatism, but rather usefulness toward the goal of making. fundamental perceptions and judgments about reality and the key really is judgment we might also point out however that

Perception has an aspect of judgment, and judgment has an aspect of perception. These are sort of the dynamics of the will to power that Heidegger's already brought out in the previous lectures. So the Mora viewpoint gives us an accurate power. of judgment, the truer it is. And judgment means the ability to determine values. Ultimately, that's what it means. To separate the healthy from the sick. To separate healthy values from sick values.

Which means now, in this new language, the true values from the false. Because values which do not serve will to power are not actually values, but unvalues. And by serve will to power, I mean making the capacity for judgment possible. So a judgment that undoes the ability to judge, or a value that devalues value itself, that's what we mean by sick values, and that's the sense in which they're not even true, in which they are unvalues.

And as we discussed last time, this is the urgency that underlies Nietzsche's project, that the highest values hitherto, what we have called the highest values, have been sick values, which means... not of value at all, actually undermining value. So Nietzsche seeks for the principle of a new valuation.

That's the name of one of his sections of Will to Power, and that's the role that Will to Power as a concept is to play in his work. Will to Power is the principle upon which Nietzsche will revaluate our values in order to redetermine what it is that constitutes life, which is to say, what the world is for us. Quote, the principle of a new valuation is what determines life. for which values are the perspectival conditions in its essential ground.

But if the principle of the new valuation is will to power, this means that life, or being as a whole, is itself will to power in its fundamental essence and essential ground. this and nothing else. Thus a note from the last year of Nietzsche's work begins with the words, quote, if the innermost essence of being is will to power, end quote. And something I would point out.

because it's not obvious from just hearing the passage read that Nietzsche does capitalize being in the passage that Heidegger cites, which means he is thinking about it in the same sense that Heidegger is. Nietzsche has written about being in that same sense when he wrote about the pre-Platonics, when he wrote about Parmenides and the pure theory of being and the Heraclitian rejection of being with a capital B.

So by now, this kind of description, this kind of reading of Nietzsche, if you've been following along through the last couple of episodes, we're probably all a bit used to it. But I just want to, again, emphasize... Heidegger is claiming that will to power is a metaphysical claim and the basis of knowledge, the basis of truth claims.

which is certainly not how Nietzsche's position is normally regarded, but he's able to find these notes from Nietzsche in which he explicitly makes reference to the idea that will to power could be the grounding of being. And you could read that... as not quite a literal statement. You could read that as another Nietzschean experiment. It could be another artistic fiction, another bit of creative license for Nietzsche. But nevertheless, there it is.

I think, personally, that is how I understand this, that Nietzsche was self-aware that what he was doing was a work of art. And I think it's interesting that Heidegger also establishes this. But, nevertheless... If will to power is to become the principle of a new valuation, which is fundamentally a valuation of values, the judgment as regards how the values of mankind stand in relation to one another, how they ought to be rank-ordered,

then we ought to ask what constitutes value for Nietzsche. We might recall the definition that Nietzsche gives in Beyond Good and Evil that valuations are physiological demands for a certain way of life. Heidegger puts it this way, quote, Value for Nietzsche means a condition of life, a condition of life's being alive. In Nietzsche's thinking, life is usually the term for what is, and for beings as a whole, insofar as they are.

Now, I think it's worth pointing out that when we speak of a condition of being alive, many people will... Think of this perhaps in terms of like a drive to self-preservation. And Heidegger makes reference to Nietzsche's rejection of the Darwinian picture of life as a struggle for existence.

if the world is will and will is will to power and willing is reaching out beyond oneself setting new goals for what the self can become and we might say in the grand scale for what life can become Well, in such a world, any value that simply aimed back towards the organism continuing to exist wouldn't actually fulfill the condition of being.

They wouldn't be true values and thus they would be unvalues. Because life, by its very definition, is growing, changing, movement. So the descriptions of the essence of life... as Conatus, or A Will to Exist, or Schopenhauer's Will to Live, or Darwin's Struggle for Existence, these all refer back to that desire to maintain oneself.

But Nietzsche is now measuring the truth of a worldview by the ability to facilitate or make valuing possible. And valuing judgment always involves that element of... out beyond of movement change and growth so any view of life that doesn't incorporate that is in some sense speaking of living things as if they're inanimate dead objects And therefore, they don't facilitate valuing. They actually undermine the ability to value and make judgments.

Now, we can make an empirical argument for Nietzsche's picture of life and unfavorably contrast the view of life as a will to exist with Nietzsche's picture of life as will to power. Because after all, if you take away... the aspects of life that involve movement and reproduction and the drive for nourishment. I mean, once again, you're not talking about life. You're describing an inanimate existence.

And an observation that I've often brought up is that mutation is such an essential aspect of life. It's responsible for all speciation. Life is not just, you know... things that reproduce themselves in the same manner, in the same fashion, as though it were a factory line. There is no form of life that exists without that mutative element.

And this seems to be essential for what life is. It seems to be essential to life. So it's not just that life is animate. And it isn't even just that it reproduces itself. It's that it's constantly... changing. And again, you can establish all of this empirically, but I do want to set that aside, that kind of defense of Nietzsche's worldview. And I want to point out something very critical to understanding this, because

Heidegger, by the way, is very much opposed to using these type of just-so arguments from empiricism. He's always about interpreting. You go to the things themselves, but... what the phenomenon indicates is not immediately obvious. You need to interpret it. You need to bring to bear logos in order to reveal what the object really tells you. So we have all these facts about life that I could list out.

but in some sense that's not as important as the interpretive judgment we make about those facts. And so I want to point out something that's critical here.

that in some sense the basis of Nietzsche's rejection of the world as a will to exist is tautological. In other words, it's circular. Nietzsche says, life is will to power, that is my evaluative principle, and therefore on the basis of that principle, a depiction of life as will to live is wrong. And this type of circular reasoning...

might trouble us, but we can perhaps understand Nietzsche this way. Valuing is now the basis of all truth claims for Nietzsche. To say that the world is will to power is to say precisely this, by the way. valuing is required for judgment. Evaluative judgments are the basis of truth. We've established this all in the previous lectures that Heidegger gave. It's the very act of pushing yourself out beyond yourself by which you value.

which is to say by which you will, understood as will to power, because the content of willing itself is will to power. Why is this? Because a being values by looking out into the world from its perspective, determining that new horizon. In other words, a value is something we find beyond ourselves.

The value is found in our relation to something beyond ourselves. It's something that we draw ourselves toward in some sense. That's the judgment that's being made. That's the nature of judgment. So judgment is movement yet again.

This is the essential difference between Nietzsche and Darwin, or indeed between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The will to exist refers back to the thing existing already. It turns its perspective back to itself. But a value... always turns our gaze to a horizon beyond the self so on a physiological or biological level we might say the most primordial form of valuing is like nourishment good predator bad

But it's not just from the fact that we can empirically study that even a single-celled organism does this. It's the description of what is happening, what is revealed by that. that those are both valuations projected outside or beyond the organism. The organism is driven towards or away from. It seeks nourishment. It flees. It goes away from the predator.

And you can make this more and more sophisticated until we get to the ways that human beings value. Or we might say, a common one I often use, I value discipline. What does that mean? Well, it means... You have found a new horizon for your being, a better version of the self that lies outside and beyond that self somewhere in the future that's attainable through discipline. So values are perspectival.

determine new horizons of being for particular forms of being, but they always have that element of pushing or moving or something like that. Heidegger says, quote, Valuation then means determining and ascertaining those perspectival conditions that make life what it is, that is, assure its essential enhancement, end quote. And again, the idea of enhancement, elevation.

All of this is inseparable from the ideas of valuing and judging, and they're inseparable from the ideas of movement. A goal towards something is... It establishes a relation between the self now and some sort of value or goal in the future. So, for Nietzsche, the question is about enhancement, growth. not mere existence, and that has to be the picture of valuing that we use because it's that picture of valuing that makes it possible. If valuing does refer us back to what already exists,

then the entire operation of valuing collapses into itself, so to speak. And Heidegger doesn't bring this up at this juncture in the lectures, but it very much reminds of the last man. So, you know, as... a type of being that simply values the continuation of its own existence says what is longing what is a star what is a great man all of these things who's completely exhausted their ability to value

So Nietzsche's view can be construed as tautological in that way, that the new values of life ought to be based on enhancement, movement, and growth, etc. But if we don't base the values of life on this understanding... then our picture of life is at odds with valuing itself and thus undermines our ability to judge. And if we can't judge, then we can't ascertain truth.

That's the essential thing about Nietzsche's new picture of truth, is that judgment is essential to it. So, understood truth, understood in Nietzsche's sense, in the new sense of the word, requires judgment, requires value. thus requires a picture of life that incorporates all of these elements of moving out beyond oneself, not referring back to the organism the way it is. Heidegger says, quote, we must determine anew.

the essence of life itself, and at one and the same time, that is, as an essential consequence, the corresponding perspectival conditions for this essence. Since the essence of life is seen as life enhancement, all conditions that simply aim at life preservation are downgraded to the level of those that basically hinder or even negate life and life's perspectival enhancement. to the level of those that not only preclude but undermine in advance the possibility of other perspectives.

Strictly speaking, life-hindering conditions are not values but unvalues. If life were traditionally understood merely as self-preservation in the service of other and later things, and if the essence of life as self-enhancement were thus misunderstood, So now we have...

a new standard a new principle the the new standpoint for evaluation and this is necessary because all the highest evaluations have been set from the standpoint of declining life And Heidegger doesn't get into this as much in his lectures, but Nietzsche would say there are many reasons for this. For one, oftentimes a culture begins to philosophize in its existence.

like very late into its existence, just by the nature of the activity of philosophy. And whenever a philosophy is produced by the old age of culture, it's always necessarily from the standpoint of... declining life. Or we've gotten our philosophy from the priests, which is to say the class of men that was the least physically active and potent, the most hostile towards the values of physical existence.

physical power and pleasure their power flows from the opposite of all of those things from asceticism from deadening all of those desires and all of those drives And furthermore, many of the philosophers have simply been a species of priest. They take popular prejudices, which are rooted in either the theoretical way of life or the Christian view of life, which are deeply related. They're connected by...

Platonism, by idealism. They take those prejudices and reify them. They put them into the language of abstract reasoning rather than faith or just, again, just-so scientific arguments. And by the way, even some of the pre-Socratics did this in Nietzsche's view. So, you know, in any case, either from this abstract view of the world as governed by laws or a theological view, of the world as governed by a creator god there's this super sensible world placed above our own and as such

That's what kind of worldview comes out of the perspective of declining life. And so these worldviews make judgments about life from the perspective of that super sensible world. The world that doesn't appear, that doesn't have presence, that doesn't even seem to manifest in physical reality, and it's from that perspective that they judge physical reality.

And so oftentimes the people doing philosophy, those who have purported to provide an image of the world, and therefore an image of truth, have done so from the perspective of false values.

So, for example, Schopenhauer philosophizes out of resignation, as Nietzsche says, his weariness toward the world. And he gives us a picture of the world. in which the objects perceived by the senses are totally illusory, in which the will is the will to live, and in which the highest good is to negate that will. So he has that picture of existence in which the values refract back unto themselves.

This creates a fundamentally dissatisfying world in which it's impossible to judge anything in it as good or valuable. And thus the valuable thing is to undo the very capacity for valuing and... that completely eliminates this world because it's illusory anyway. So Nietzsche's attack on Schopenhauer fundamentally is that this pessimistic resignationist view of the world

is again false as a sort of presupposition in order to make the very basis of valuing and thus truth possible. And so Nietzsche's project has to begin from the idea that those who have a healthy view of existence

ought to be the ones to philosophize. That philosophy has to begin from a healthy place. It has to begin from those who are well disposed towards life. And many of his central ideas depend on this orientation towards life in order to be comprehensible. And just as a brief aside, there are questions that I get all the time in the YouTube comments and that I see all the time on the Nietzsche subreddit.

And it's either where they're trying to criticize Nietzsche or they're saying, I just don't understand. But where they'll say, well, how could somebody whose whole life is, you know, a life of oppression and struggle. Agree with the master morality. How can I, somebody who's had a terrible life full of suffering, will the eternal return? What is Nietzsche's amor fati? How does that apply to someone who doesn't actually value?

and enjoy their lives, celebrate their lives. Somebody who's not grateful to be alive. And the answer to all of these is that you're just the wrong person to read Nietzsche's philosophy. He would say you're the wrong person to philosophize. That when you think, if you're the kind of person who hates your life,

thinks life itself is characterized by suffering because that's what your life has been, then that's the image of life that you're going to give. And it will necessarily be a false image because it will be a sick image because you will... Make valuing impossible in the image of life that you give. Because your very mode of valuation, your entire equipment, your philosophical equipment that you're working with, the software you're running.

is antithetical to valuing, and thus incapable of making accurate judgments. And so, for example, with the eternal return, Nietzsche asks us in that aphorism, the greatest weight, how well disposed toward life would you have to be to take the eternal return as the confirmation and seal of the value of life? The eternal return, therefore, He presents it as a sort of artistic creation where it first appears, as this hypothetical, as a sort of story, as a narrative.

a fantastic story about a demon appearing to you and revealing the truth of eternal return but it has this evaluative character and that's the thing about the eternal return that i've always emphasized The relation between ourselves and the eternal return is that this idea becomes the basis of judging our disposition towards existence.

It gives us the standard to determine how well disposed to life we really are. We might also think of Nietzsche's comments in philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks. that the Greeks did not end their philosophizing at the right time. He says they began at the right time, but they... They didn't end at the right time. They philosophized for too long and too late into their civilization. And so they produced all of this philosophy of decline, decadent philosophy, as he says.

And Nietzsche would say, we see this in Plato and all of the philosophical schools that emerge after Plato.

But he says, you know, again, the Greeks began at the right time. They reveal to us the best time to begin philosophizing, which he says is on the cusp of youth and adulthood. When a culture is old enough to have the maturity of adulthood, but... not so old that they lose the vigor of youth, that you should begin contemplating existence, attempting to produce a picture of existence when you're in a place of health, of abundance, of well-being.

or at the very least, begin crafting a view of life while well disposed towards it. You might be somebody like Nietzsche, who in many ways has... quite a bit more suffering in his life than most of us do, just simply owing to his illness, and yet he is still very well disposed towards life. And so the picture of life and knowledge that you produce from that standpoint...

will reflect truth, will reflect an image of truth in the sense we're now using the term truth. Heidegger says, quote, gives to life the perspective of something supersensuous, superterrestrial, epicana, beyond, in which true bliss has its home, in contradistinction to this veil of tears.

that is called the earth and world. The reversal of the valuation, the old and the new, is hinted at in a passage from Nietzsche. Quote, what must I do to become blissful? I don't know, but I say unto you, be blissful. Then do what you feel like doing. End quote. The question posed is the Christian question of the Gospels. The form of Nietzsche's answer is adapted to biblical language. But I say unto you.

Yet the content reverses everything, since blissfulness is not placed after the deed as a consequence, but before it as a ground. However, Nietzsche does not give carte blanche. for unleashing all kinds of drives that would compel and pull us in some sort of direction, but be blissful. Everything is contained in that." And I think it's a wonderful section of Heidegger's. lectures that really untangles a Gordian knot that a lot of people tie themselves up in when they approach Nietzsche.

This is the answer to all those people asking, well, what if I can't love my fate? What am I supposed to do then? What if I'm one of the weak and the botched? Shouldn't I then reject Nietzsche's philosophy? I mean, what if the eternal return sounds terrible to me? Can I really be a Nietzschean? And Nietzsche would say, again, if you are incapable of being blissful, if you lack that grounding,

You will not be able to philosophize. You won't be able to understand his philosophy if you find life a burden or a torment. or a constant struggle, of course you're not going to love your fate. Again, these statements are tautological, but they reveal something. That whatever judgments come from that non-blissful position will be... hostile valuations, that it isn't a moral indictment of the people in this situation who stand negatively towards life. It's simply, I mean, because of course...

To say yes or no to life, it's not a rational choice, as Nietzsche says. It's not something a human being can rationally decide. It is an expression of whether one is healthy or sick. And just like we don't morally judge people for getting sick, it's not that you're wrong to be ill-disposed towards life. But again, the important thing to recenter ourselves on this question of the willpower as knowledge in metaphysics.

From Heidegger's perspective, even if they aren't morally wrong, they are factually incorrect in their judgments. Again, based on the new understanding of... truth that we get from Nietzsche. Their judgments collapse into themselves. They actually provide us with false knowledge, which is to say, not knowledge at all. And it should be noted once again that the sick values have been the highest values. So those of you who say, what if my perspective...

fundamentally differs with Nietzsche, he would say that's typical. It's almost always from sickness that we get our values. And this is why Nietzsche would argue that he stands relatively alone.

in putting forward a principle of a new valuation that privileges the view of life from those who are well disposed towards it. And so to sum up, Nietzsche's view is that life is being, the essence of life is will to power. And according to Heidegger, this assertion completes Western metaphysics, which is guided by the question, what is being, but also destroys it. I mean, one of the earliest answers is that being is physis.

You could see those thousands of years as all leading up to this clarification that physis is will to power. We have dealt so far with the argument for why this must be the case for Nietzsche. But from this perspective of will to power as the being of beings, we should look at also the consequences of this perspective.

Heidegger says we should expect, then, that the will to power would appear, so to speak, in every context, in science, in art, in religion, in morals. Perhaps the most important domain

human activity to consider for our purposes today considering that we're talking about truth knowledge and so on is science quote according to nietzsche knowledge is a form of will to power But what does he mean when he says knowledge? That must first be characterized and described." And Heidegger recognizes and indeed emphasizes the profundity and radicalism of this claim.

Science is will to power. Reflective thought itself is will to power. That reveals something not only about thought, but also about will to power. It's not only a statement that through science, the Western mind has power, that we've organized the world, we've conceptualized it, we've given it form, we've taken hold of it, all of which...

are functions of the will to power as truth, represented in the will to truth, we might say, manifest in the will to truth. You might say that Nietzsche provides us with an understanding of science through this understanding of power, but it's also a statement. that the will to power is scientific, that the will to truth is the will to power, which means the will to power is the will to truth, that truth is a power, in other words.

That within the structure of truth-seeking, there is power-seeking. But more importantly, in all power-seeking, there is truth-seeking. And that statement is comprehensible really only within the new vision of truth that Nietzsche provides, that the way we cognize the world is rooted in these value judgments, that judgment is the first step. not just in the conceptual representation of the world, but even in the sensory representation of it.

Again, just as we described last time that every drive has its own form of logic, that the impulses are thinking in this way, that mentation suffuses willing and willing suffuses mentation. This is all involved with what... Heidegger's trying to bring forth. And so Heidegger says, quote, Nietzsche goes still farther. Not only does truth revert to the scope of conditions of life with regard to its essence,

but the faculties for grasping truth also receive here their sole determination. Quote, All our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions end quote. Accordingly, truth and grasping the truth are not merely in the service of life, according to their use and application.

Their essence and the manner of their organization, and thus their entire activity, are driven and directed by life. End quote. And so, to risk a vulgar oversimplification of Heidegger's point, You could simply say that the reason why we have sense organs is because sense organs were useful for the organism. But again, not useful in the sense of narrow utility. We might say useful for enhancement, something like that.

and there's a very, we've gone over at the beginning of the episode, a long chain of how we get there, but the sensation of the world, the investigation of the world through the senses, is that not the basis of science? So the fact that we seek truth at all, or even have a notion of such a thing as truth, is because it enhanced our life to do so, which means will to truth is an aspect of it, is a consequence of will to power.

And so every human and indeed every form of life or every drive within the human cognizes the world, calculates about the world for the sake of power, for the sake of willing out beyond oneself based on... its values, its judgments. Now, Nietzsche also makes a number of remarks about the truth that you might remember from the last episode in which he refers to truth as a type of error. And I bring this up now

not just to address this potential objection to Heidegger's line of reasoning, which does need to be addressed, but because it will be really helpful to talk about Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche's classification of truth as a kind of illusion. And in doing so, Heidegger makes a brief sidetrack into Heraclitus, which was Nietzsche's favorite among the pre-Socratics, who Heidegger says had a similar understanding of truth as Nietzsche. And this is...

clarifying in light of the statements that Nietzsche makes that truth is error or illusion. For Heraclitus, to know is to take hold of what shows itself. Remember in the Greek that the phenomenon, the object that appears, is called literally that which shows itself. Logos, of course, has the connotation of seeing. Logos is that which allows us to make... seen what has appeared. And Heidegger insists that the image, therefore, as Heraclitus discusses image, is not image in the sense of

Christian theology or later philosophical views of epistemology that make the image the mind's mere representation. He says this view doesn't relate to Kant and his division between thing-in-itself and phenomenon. So when we look out into the world, we see image. The image is not understood as something grasped only subjectively, but rather as a being which shows itself. I hope that's quite clear. I think it's all there in the face of it. Philosophy tend to overcomplicate this.

Remember, Heidegger's trying to go back before Kant even existed between this phenomenon and numinous split, these theories of knowledge which he thinks were a mistake. And he's trying to recapture, in some sense, almost the naivety of the Greeks. So, to know the image, that means for the intellect to grasp the image. So truth is illusion in the sense that truth is what appears.

It is neither something invisible behind the appearance, nor is it something in appearance that corresponds to some objective reality, quote unquote. So Heidegger argues in so many words, Nietzsche calls truth an illusion. to shift our thought about truth out of modern epistemology. That ultimately the truth of the world for us is the way the world appears for us.

But what's key for Heidegger is that Nietzsche is now operating according to this new evaluative standard, right? Which is very important because it's not that Nietzsche says all truths are equally illusory and therefore of equal value. No, truths could be rank ordered. And Nietzsche will do this, but he will do so by a standard other than the correspondence to objective reality. And when I say objective reality here, I mean that mind-independent thing in itself.

which we cannot sense or even cognize, and might as well not even exist, but nevertheless, there you have it in Kant's phenomena numina split.

And in some sense, Heidegger's saying, Nietzsche's closing the book on that whole chapter of Western metaphysics, where that was how we determined truth. He is destroying that, leveling that, starting again with... this standard based on will to power heidegger says quote if according to nietzsche knowledge is will to power then the essence of will to power must also be illuminated by a sufficiently clear insight into the essence of knowledge

But knowledge is supposed to grasp what is true. Truth is what is essential about knowledge. Accordingly, the essence of truth must also strip all veils from the essence of will to power. What Nietzsche says about truth is, briefly, truth is an illusion. To sharpen and broaden this essential definition of truth, we cite by way of anticipation a second statement by Nietzsche, quote, truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live, end quote.

Truth, illusion? Truth, a kind of error? Again, we are about to conclude, therefore, everything is error. Therefore, it is not worthwhile asking about truth. Nietzsche would answer, no. Precisely because truth is illusion and error, therefore there is truth. Therefore truth is a value. Strange logic. Certainly.

but let us first try to comprehend before we hasten to elect as judge our all too straight and narrow understanding, condemning this doctrine of truth before it has reached our inner ear."

So precisely because truth is error, therefore there is truth. And therefore, truth is a value. And, you know, how does that work? Again, I could give a logical or kind of empirical... argument for this but I think we should understand this again as tautological at least in a sense everything in this line of reasoning is referred back to whether one's view of life makes valuing possible or not

And again, valuing doesn't just mean judging, but it means judgments which enhance life, which therefore mean make judgments possible. And any judgment or any value that doesn't qualify... is an unvalue. Even the ones that purport to preserve life, therefore hinder it if they are hostile to willing and thus to valuing. And it's precisely because the value of a truth, or we might say the truth of a truth,

is evaluated according to will to power, that truth, quote-unquote, is possible at all. Because without the evaluating glance, without judgment, we can't perceive the world. Because judgment is perception. Value is a prerequisite for knowing. But this means that we've included perspective. We've included the image, the perceptual system that...

renders an image out of that evaluative judgment, which is not objective or universal. We've made that essential for making truth claims. That's the very strange thing that's happened.

Nietzsche's metaphysics, again, using Heidegger's language here. And Heidegger quotes from some of Nietzsche's notes in Will to Power that I also want to read. In fact, I read a section... earlier where heidegger was was referring to this section but i think it'll be good to read it in full because nietzsche explains the same issue another way in this passage that belief is the essence of truth which is a funny phrase

If we consider it in light of Socrates' standard of truth, or his standard of knowledge that comes through in the Protagoras, that knowledge is justified true belief. That's usually how we translate it. So we might say knowledge is a higher form of belief for Socrates. Nietzsche, in some sense, he doesn't fully repediate this framing, but he says that... The converse, that without belief there is no knowledge. That...

So in a way, you could say he's almost making the same point, but he's saying that belief is less like a lower form of knowledge and more like its essential foundation. We could put it like that. So in other words, wherever truth appears, where truth exists, it is in the belief of the knower as a necessary prerequisite for having truth.

Truth comes into being at the point when a perspective grabs hold of it, we might say. If we separate that element of belief from truth, we have to ask if we're even speaking in meaningful terms anymore. What is truth? If it exists outside of minds that have grabbed hold of it, that there's no mind to believe in the truth, what does it mean to say anything?

would be true regardless of a mind to believe in it. So Nietzsche writes this in Will to Power 507, quote, The estimation of value. I believe that such and such is so.

as the essence of truth in estimations of value are expressed conditions of preservation and growth all our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions of preservation and growth trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, thus the value estimation of logic, proves only their usefulness for life, proved by experience, not their, quote, truth.

that a great deal of belief must be present, that judgments may be ventured, that doubt concerning all essential values is lacking, that is the precondition for every living thing and its life. Therefore, what is necessary is that something must be held to be true, not that something is true. I have traced this antithesis back to value relations. We have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general.

Because we have to be stable in our beliefs, if we are to prosper, we have made the true world a world not of mutability and becoming, but one of being. End quote. Really an incredible passage that I could do. an entire episode on if you know i had the if i wanted to do so but i think in some ways we are right because much of what nietzsche says here we've sort of already begun to elucidate through heidecker's lectures

But it's very interesting the way Nietzsche speaks of this, especially at the end. We've made our beliefs stable in order to prosper. We've created the true world as this world of... eternality and durability rather than mutability and becoming because values that last that endure are the most useful for the preservation of life something like that or for a way of life for

promoting a way of life. We might just think of this, I think Nietzsche is literally putting this forward in sort of like physio-psychological terms, that the values that seem to be, what might we say, the most enduring in their usefulness over long generations begin to become reified, begin to appear to have being and perdurance. And that's why we...

Nietzsche's analogizing from that to say that that's why we believe in being at all. That's why we believe in enduring truths at all. So once again, if we're operating from that framework of will to power, it was that... that perspective that made being appear to be eternal, right? The observation that within the social life, okay, this set of values seems to endure and seems to be useful across multiple generations. It seems to outlast any one human and the fleeting changes of life.

And we reason from this that being itself, that there are objects with substance that have fixity, that endure beyond the flux of becoming and so on and so forth. But to go back to earlier in the passage, What is necessary is that something must be held to be true, not that something is true. Truth is held. It's grasped. So truths are what we believe.

Therefore, truths can be understood as a kind of property of the mind. I don't mean property in the sense of equality. I mean property, right? In the sense of a possession, in the sense of wealth, objects that we own. And so that's how Nietzsche can call truths illusory and at the same time assert his understanding of truth as true. Truths are no longer to be evaluated as to whether they are a correct representation of reality.

And Heidegger explains this further, quote, Nietzsche writes the word truth in quotation marks. Briefly, this means truth as it is ordinarily understood, and as it has long been understood in the history of Western thought.

and as Nietzsche himself must also understand it in advance, the essential definition of truth that since Plato and Aristotle dominates not only the whole of Western thought, but the history of Western man in general down to his everyday doings, and ordinary opinions and representations runs briefly.

Truth is correctness of representation and representation means having and bringing before oneself beings. Representing adjusts itself to beings, assimilates itself to them and reproduces them. Truth means the assimilation of So is Nietzsche a radical departure from Plato and Aristotle? Well, we could say that his worldview is also a representation of beings.

which attempts to more closely reproduce those beings in its image. And further, Nietzsche still distinguishes false views of the world from true views of the world. And in this way, Heidegger says, he accommodates himself to the Western metaphysical. project. But the key point again, so you can notice all of those similarities, right? But the evaluative glance, the estimation of value,

Nietzsche makes that into the standard of determining true from false. So we might say that aspect exists in traditional, quote-unquote, Western metaphysics. It's just that they make the standard, the principle evaluation, The representation of beings. Again, so the evaluative glance, the judgment still goes on, it's accounted for, but that's the kind of thing, again, that Socrates would source to being a mere opinion or something like that.

We're always sort of denigrating valuing in different ways, at least insofar as we don't believe that values can be rationally determined. For Nietzsche, it's like that representation goes on. But it's not the essential fulcrum. It's not the essential way of coming to truth claims. He's completely displaced that.

The representation is in service of valuation. We could put it like that. Our valuations are not in service of the representation. And so to return to the issue of belief, as Nietzsche teased it out, Heidegger says, quote, believing is holding for something, holding it as in being. Thus, believing here by no means signifies assent to an incomprehensible doctrine, inaccessible to reason, but proclaimed as true by an authority, nor does it mean trust in a covenant and prophecy.

Truth as value estimation, that is, as holding for something, as holding for something as being in this or that way, stands in an essential connection with beings as such. What is true is what is held in being, and thus and thus in being. what is taken to be in being, what is true is being. If its essence is value estimation, then truth is synonymous with holding to be true, to hold something for something.

and posited as such, is also called judging. Nietzsche says, quote, judging is our oldest belief, our most habitual holding to be true or holding to be untrue, end quote. The judgment An assertion of something about something is the essence of knowledge. To it belongs being true in the tradition of Western metaphysics, to hold something for what it is, to represent it as thus and thus in being, to assimilate oneself in representing to whatever emerges and is encountered.

is the essence of truth as correctness. Accordingly, in the sentence we are clarifying, which says that truth is a value estimation, Nietzsche is basically thinking nothing other than this. Truth is correctness. He seems to have completely forgotten his saying that truth is an illusion, end quote. And further down, Heidegger continues, quote, the key word about the essence of truth as belief.

does have as its presupposition the unspoken position that truth is correctness, but it says something else, and that is what is essential for Nietzsche. For this reason, it moves immediately to the foreground by means of the sentence structure and emphasis. That means that the essence of truth as correctness

Correctness as such is really a value estimation. Nietzsche's decisive metaphysical insight lies in this interpretation of the essence of correctness, of the traditional unquestioned concept of truth. This means that the essence of correctness will by no means find its explanation and basis by saying how man, with the representations occurring in his subjective consciousness, can conform to objects that are at hand outside of his soul.

how the gap between subject and object can be bridged so that something like a conforming to becomes possible. With the characterization of truth as estimation of value, the essential definition of truth is rather turned in a completely different direction. We see this from the way in which Nietzsche continues his train of thought. Quote, and estimations of value are expressed conditions of preservation and growth. End quote. So Heidegger makes the striking claim.

that Nietzsche is not really that different from the Western metaphysical tradition. And that, in fact, it's his similarity to that tradition and the fact that he answers the same question. engages in the same metaphysical activity, that's actually what allows him to distinguish himself from his predecessors. So Nietzsche's philosophy permits that we conceive of truth and falsehood.

correct and incorrect beliefs. In fact, this is demanded by Nietzsche's philosophy, according to Heidegger. It's just that the key is that we understand the principle evaluation by which we determine this. Estimation of value as truth. and thus we estimate views of truth according to whether they account for estimation. Truths as beliefs about truth, therefore as valuable property which allows us to organize and take hold of the objects in the world.

The essence of correctness, therefore, is not whether we can best conform our representations to the object in itself. Instead, our estimation of the value of truth concerns whether the representation makes possible enhancement or growth. And so as regards many of the errors that Nietzsche critiques in his work, I mean, as he lists them in the gay science, line, form.

Substance, self, will, cause and effect, constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, the equation of unequal things in the word concept. These are errors. If we take the platonic...

sense of truth and error and follow it through to its ultimate conclusions, we have to conclude that many of the platonic assumptions about the world are actually error. Maybe a good way to talk about this is through Schopenhauer, who studied only Plato and Kant.

and regarded his philosophy as really depending only on Plato and Kant. And he even attempts to synthesize Plato's philosophy with Kant's. And so Kant had held that in division of the thing in itself from appearance, that we only know the world through appearance. Kant countered Hume, who raised the problem of induction, that we can't prove induction by means of induction. In other words, we don't know that the future will be like the past.

which is the entire basis of inductive reasoning. And no matter how many times we observe the future being like the past, we can never establish that in the future, the future will be like the past. Kant's counter was that we don't know that the future will be like the past through induction itself, but we do know it as a transcendental precondition for reasoning about the world. That time and space and causality...

can't be understood as pertaining to the thing in itself. Can't make any statements about the thing in itself. Instead, our minds structure the world. There's a principle of sufficient reason. We need to... adopt certain a priori judgments in order to reason about the world at all. Our conceptualization of the world, our representation of it, that's the reason why we perceive spatiality, temporality, causality, and so on.

And so Schopenhauer takes Kant's judgment that these aspects of existence are not in the world as such, but a precondition for thinking about the world. And that means that time and space and causality only exists insofar as we represent the world. It exists in our representations of reality, not in reality itself, which means the thing in itself.

is actually acausal, it's actually atemporal, it's actually spaceless, and therefore it's monistic. It's one essence behind everything. And all the individual represented things, the phenomena that we see, are just illusions. And I think Schopenhauer is instructive to Nietzsche because he draws those final consequences of the two worlds doctrine. In that, you end up positing a real reality that in fact bears no resemblance to our world at all.

And so in what way is it a real reality? Isn't it just Parmenides' theory of pure being all over again, in which Parmenides sort of has to conclude that all of our sensations about the world... that tell us that there is motion, that there's time, that there's space. That's all an illusion. Schopenhauer shows that by thinking of the world in this platonic representation,

in which the form and the mere appearance are separated, inevitably leads to the conclusion, even if it takes thousands of years, that our perceptions are errors. And so this is the way in which, for Heidegger, Nietzsche remains dependent on Plato. You could see this aspect of Nietzsche's critique of truth as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of Platonism.

But it's a reduction to absurdity based on this new standard. Well, that's the funny thing. You could say it is logically absurd, even from the starting principles of Platonism. But it also... It's reduced to absurdity in the sense that the representations of the world fail to enhance life. Platonism fails to make valuing possible. And we see with Schopenhauer again, he has a view of the world that totally denies the world.

He also represents the sickly view of life. He says it would have been better if we were never born. The worst thing you can do is reproduce. He's hostile to life in an open kind of way, even as an antinatalist. And so to bring all this back to Nietzsche's view of truth as error or truth as illusion, truths are, in the platonic sense, The way that Plato judged truth from error, made that division, means that what truth actually is, is called error.

under the old system of Western metaphysics. That's the way of Heidegger squaring the circle, of how Nietzsche can call all of these things errors, how he can have a view of truth, and therefore implicitly a view of correctness. in order to say that will to power can give us knowledge or to make knowledge possible. But again, error is the very thing that Nietzsche elevates into truth. Truth, quote unquote, or error, quote unquote.

Because, you know, when Nietzsche says truths are errors which are indispensable for life, I mean, what are those? Well, again, those same familiar shadows of God, right? Line, form, substance, self, will, cause and effect. time and space. If we take Platonism through to its conclusions, we arrive at Schopenhauer eventually. It makes it clear the real reality is timeless and spaceless. And it's the thing lurking behind these images. The images are totally false.

Every apparently stable conception is actually incorrect. There's only the blind, unceasing will. That's where this all leads, right? So Platonism undoes itself. The highest values devalue themselves. Platonism tries to grab hold of the world with the intellect. It tries to establish truth on the basis of whether our representations match the object in itself, the object as it exists independently of the mind, independently of any value judgment. But it ends with...

making everything we perceive about the world an error. And so Nietzsche says it's those very errors, if we take Platonism through to its ultimate conclusion, we must conclude they're errors that are actually... indispensable for life, and therefore the basis of judgment, the basis therefore of truth. And so accordingly, Nietzsche evaluates these errors very differently from Schopenhauer.

He estimates them on a different basis. He writes in Will to Power 515, quote, not to know, but to schematize. And so that's what we're doing with all of those apparent... Errors are those things that Nietzsche will call errors or illusions, again, like line, form, and substance. They're imposing regularity that we require for our practical needs. And what is it imposed upon?

Well, he says chaos. And that, of course, raises the question, what is chaos? And Heidegger comments on this by considering the Greek word. Quote, the Greek word chaos originally means the gaping. It points in the direction of a measureless, supportless, and groundless yawning open. End quote. And so if the ground of being is in fact timeless, spaceless, and acausal, and so on,

what is it other than measureless, supportless, and groundless? Is it not a chaos? Is it not the case then that if our minds pattern or structure our comprehension, our representation of the world, and this includes bringing to bear a notion of time and space and cause and effect. Are our minds not imposing order upon chaos? Is that what it means to judge, to estimate, to conceptualize?

not to know in the Platonic sense, not to discover these as the objective truths that Plato was looking for or that that entire idealist tradition of Western metaphysics was always looking for, something behind the reality. But are our minds not instead giving form to a chaotic reality according to our needs? Once again, Heidegger elaborates, quote,

What Nietzsche understands by schematizing, he specifies straight away in the following words, to impose upon chaos as much regularity in as many forms as our practical needs require. How and in what respects does this essentially define knowing? understood as schematizing. Schematizing is discussed as imposing a certain measure of regularity in certain forms. Schemata are here coinages that as such contain a regularity and a rule.

But equally important or even more essential is what Nietzsche says in two additional points. First, regulating forms are to a certain extent imposed on what Nietzsche calls chaos, what gets schematized by the imposition of regulating forms as what knowing initially means, what comes toward it in the first instance, what knowing encounters. What is encountered has the character of chaos.

We are startled, provided that we are not thoughtlessly hearing mere sentences in this discussion of Nietzsche's words, but rather considering and thinking these things through on our own, on the basis of our own cognizant attitude. pondering the question of what encounters us in what is to be known, if we simply look around, knowingly, here in the lecture hall, on the street, in the forest, and elsewhere, do we, knowing and taking notice,

Encounter chaos? Do we not rather find an ordered, articulated region out of which objects that pertain to one another stand over us in a surveyable, handy, available, and measurable way? We encounter all these objects in a way that is all the richer and more ordered, more adapted to and inclined toward each other, the more we let everything stand before us in a pure lingering, that is, the more we represent the world.

as we call it to ourselves even if it is only a small and narrow world but after all it is not chaos Second, Nietzsche says that the standard according to which regulating forms are imposed upon chaos is determined by our practical needs. Thus, practical behavior, the praxis of life, not theoretical representation, is the attitude from which the knowing mode of behavior arises and is determined.

The essential framework of knowledge now has its firm outlines. Knowing is schematizing. What is to be known and is knowable is chaos, and what knows is the praxis of life.

Yet these statements go against what we found a moment ago in the immediate view of our customary everyday representing of the world. End quote. So first of all, it remains to be seen... whether we can bridge the gap between nietzsche's shocking claim that the mind first and foremost encounters chaos between that and our experience because does that really match

our experience or our intuition any more than say parmenides theory of pure being does before we address that issue i just want to point out that you could come to a really profound conclusion about Nietzsche's view of life from Heidegger's analysis here, that what lives is what knows, and not incidentally so, insofar as what knows is a subset of what lives.

That isn't necessarily an essential aspect of life. No, everything that lives, in some sense, quote-unquote, knows. In that, it gives some sort of form to the chaos of the broader reality. That to live is to give structure. That again... In valuing, there's perceiving. And in perceiving, there's valuing. In willing, one pitches oneself out beyond the self, creates an image beyond the self. That's representation. It's calculation. It's an essential part of life.

down to the most rudimentary life form, the most rudimentary drive. And life does this as a praxis. In other words, there's nothing about the knowing process that is disinterested. There's no... way of knowing that's detached from valuing. But again, this understanding of every form of life, even the most rudimentary, even the most rudimentary drive within us as form giving.

to the apparent, or as Nietzsche says, the chaos all around us, I think is very, very informative about how Nietzsche thinks about knowledge. And in any case, Heidegger makes an...

excellent argument in the following section for why he thinks, if we study our own experience and we inquire a bit more deeply into our everyday perceptions, we'll find that it actually it is a chaos. The chaos we are met with in the world is not hidden behind the phenomenal. It's not something behind our representation of it in the form of, say, a true world, but rather is something that we can study phenomenologically as announced by the image.

announced by the thing that shows itself without directly showing itself. Heidegger doesn't exactly put it in those terms, but what he does is ask us to imagine walking into the classroom and seeing a blackboard. And considering that... The very fact of saying I see a blackboard there. Your mind has immediately put the object into a category with a given name. It makes sense of the object according to the form perceived. It fits it into a world picture in which the object...

is understood in relation to oneself, right? But he says you don't do that as an a priori judgment before you can comprehend the blackboard. Sort it into the right category. You have to have prior experience with what a blackboard is. You distinguish it immediately as the blackboard because your mind has become acquainted with this given form. You've learned the common word for it. You've done all this preparatory work with your mind.

in order to cognize the world and structure it. And that preparatory work is sort of going unnoticed in your instant conceptualization of the blackboard, your instant recognition of it, your instant... ability to place it into the world, make sense of where it is in the world, where it came from, what its function is, and all of these things. So what he's pointing out, you don't have an innate idea.

of what the blackboard is in fact if you were from a culture that didn't have blackboards and you walked into a room with one you might not know what it is you wouldn't immediately make sense of it out of the chaos of your perceptions at least not in the same way it's not to say you wouldn't

recognize it as a separate object that's there from the other objects. But, you know, and then actually I want to stick on this point because what Heidegger is not saying is that we wouldn't perceive the shape and the color and the... the variety of sensations that strike us when we see the blackboard. His argument is actually premised on the fact that that is what you would see if you didn't subsume the concept blackboard.

subsume into that concept the sensations of black, gray, hard, rough, extended, flat, all of these qualities of the object. That in fact, it's when we are met with a sensation that does not fit into an existing conception, that the experience is almost chaotic. And so in a way, it's that the concept is mediating your...

interaction with the sensations. That in those situations, when you are hit with sensations that you can't understand or cognize easily, that's when you feel yourself... bombarded by sense information, when you don't have a way of categorizing it, when you don't have a way of grabbing hold of the sensations, that's when it feels like chaos and when people experience things.

sensory experiences that they have no referent for. It is chaotic. It does throw you off in some way. So you do certainly experience the sensation. But what makes sensations appear to have a rule and regularity to them is precisely knowing, the concept, the form-giving power of knowledge. So Heidegger writes, quote, what is given is called the manifold of sensations.

Kant even speaks of the massive sensations, meaning by that the chaos, the jumble, that crowds us, keeps us occupied, concerns us, washes over and tunnels through us.

One says, with apparently greater precision, through our bodies, not only in the moment of perceiving this blackboard, but constantly and everywhere, for at the same time, and together with what we have been given in the so-called outer senses that we have sighted, crowd and mill, drift and float, detain and push, pull and support sensations of the inner sense that one, again seemingly, precisely, and correctly, ascertains as bodily states.

If we thus venture just a few steps in the direction indicated, behind, so to speak, what appears so harmlessly and quietly and conclusively to us as an object, such as this blackboard or any other familiar thing, we do meet up with a mass of sensations, chaos. It is what is nearest. It is so near that it does not even stand next to us as what is over against us, but we ourselves, as bodily beings, So just to reiterate, I mean, the chaos doesn't refer to an arbitrary jumble of sensations.

The fact that we sense all of these things about the blackboard, it's not random or it's not chaotic in the sense of like unpredictability, right? Like in the sense of quantum physics, the way they talk of randomness. We can assume at least that people will have the same series of sense perceptions when seeing a blackboard, whether they're seeing one for the first time or the thousandth time.

Rather, the chaos is what we're always taking in into our bodily states as the unmediated existence of Dasein. That's so near to us that it isn't even next to us, it is us. So chaos doesn't bombard us from outside, we are chaos. The sensations are as much in us as they are in the world. And the sensations come from us as much as from the world. But again, it's not random or arbitrary. It's not chaos in that sense. It's not just pure subjectivity.

Chaos is used in this context to refer to the senses that are, again, unmediated. The sensations that we haven't given form to. The fact that we're able to form sensations together into something comprehensible seems to reveal that there was a form to comprehend already within the sensation, right? So again, that's another way in which...

Heidegger's not just saying that it's just your subjectivity that imposes from totally outside the sensation and order. It's again that phenomenological perspective of... going to the thing itself and then revealing, bringing to light, uncovering what it tells you. So the form is already there in the sensation and our knowledge is what sort of...

mediates that into our perception of it or something like that. And so Heidegger says the following quote, chaos is what urges flows and is animated whose order is concealed.

whose law we do not describe straight away. Chaos is the name for a peculiar preliminary projection of the world as a whole, and for the governance of that world. Again, it seems, and here most of all, and uninhibited biological thinking is at work it represents the world as a gigantic body as it were whose bodying and living constitutes beings as a whole and thus lets being appear as a becoming

Nietzsche declares often enough in his later years that the body must be made the guideline of observation, not only of human beings but of the world, the projection of world from the perspective of the animal and animality. The fundamental experience of the world as chaos has its roots here. But since the body is for Nietzsche a structure of dominance, chaos cannot mean a turbulent jumble. Rather, it means the concealment...

of unmastered richness in the becoming and streaming of the world as a whole, end quote. And here I want to point out a parallel between the last lecture series we looked at, where we talked about will to power as art. there was a theme in those lectures i didn't talk about as much but where nietzsche puts forward the theory of rapture is the center of art which we could translate as ecstasy or frenzy and there's that passage that's in twilight of idols but it's part of how

Nietzsche views art from the point of view of the artist, from the inside out, so to speak. And when we look at art from the perspective of the artist, we find that rapture is the essential state. Literally, Rapture meaning being abducted, being taken out of yourself. And remember how Heidegger talked about anger lifting us out of our ordinary self-awareness and putting us in a state beyond our mind. Rapture does this for the artist.

We might call it genius or inspiration, but the important thing is that it's a state of mind in which the individual's ordinary self-conception is overwhelmed and he begins to project himself into something beyond himself. And speaking as an artist myself, I think this is dead on. I think art should be viewed.

from the perspective of the artist if you really want to understand art so often it's viewed from the outside in from the the point of view of the audience or the connoisseur or the critic or the productions of art rather than the activity in the process And rapture is a key part of that experience, and it's really where the creative act originates and is initiated. But Heidegger focuses on rapture in that lecture as form giving. And here...

Again, looking at will to power as knowledge, truth, which has been called a kind of error, if we consider truth an error from the platonic standpoint of what error is, a kind of illusion. which is nevertheless form-giving, because these forms are essential to us in practice, in praxis. And this is the activity of science. And so science and art are both will to power.

and they're both form giving but they they do so in very different ways neither of which is actually related to this like objective representational standard of evaluation that the past

theories of knowledge or whatever we're based on. And this dovetails into why Nietzsche values art more highly than the truth. Again, using truth in the platonic sense. because art's method of form giving is more conducive to life it's more commensurate with will to power which is to say with valuing or judging um

But so it's notable that Heidegger brings out this nuance that all domains of human striving are defined by will to power. And that includes art and that includes science. And we have to understand that Nietzsche, therefore, isn't anti-science and pro-art. So much as Nietzsche's new evaluative principle just holds art higher than science, they're both methods of giving form to the world. But we ought to view science through the optics of the artist, as Nietzsche says.

Understand science as something subordinated to life, not the other way around. And the reasons for that I think are clear based on all of the things we've discussed throughout this whole episode really. I just wanted to point out that they both have that form-giving element to them. It's just, Nietzsche thinks art does it better. Art is better at establishing new valuations. Heidegger argues, quote,

Thus, the thinking that, as revaluation of all values, strives for a new valuation also includes the positing of the highest value. If truth cannot be the highest value, That highest value must be yet above truth, that is, in the sense of the traditional concept of truth. It must be nearer and more in accordance with true beings, that is, with what becomes. The highest value is art.

in contradistinction to knowledge and truth it does not copy what is at hand does not explain matters in terms of beings at hand but art transfigures life moves it into higher as yet unlived possibilities These do not hover above life. Rather, they awaken life anew out of itself and make it vigilant. For, quote, only through magic does life remain awake, end quote. And that was from Stefan George that he...

Heidegger is quoting there, continuing with the passage, quote, yet what is art? Nietzsche says it is, quote, an excess and overflow of blossoming bodily being into the world of images and desires, end quote. We must not take this world in an or a psychological sense, we must think it metaphysically. The world of art, the world as art, discloses it by erecting it and placing it in the open, is the realm of what transfigures. What transfigures...

Transfiguration, however, is what becomes. It is a becoming that lifts beings, that is, what has become fixed, stable, and congealed over and beyond to new possibilities." So I mentioned this before, but that's the reason why the analogy from biology to mutation and species or the mutation versus the stable genome is so useful.

Whatever the exceptional variation is versus the norm, the template, whatever we want to call it. The reason why truths sought in a scientific way as the pursuit of the will to truth. The reason why they're necessary for praxis, why they're practical, well, as we already said, that's not because of a pragmatist view of life. Practicality is not a final value. It's not a motivating value. It's more of a structure for relating truth to life, something like that. And so science...

Meaning the will to power as knowledge provides us with fixity. It provides us with a stable picture of the world. It takes hold of the chaos and gives it form. And form is precisely duration. The standing still of the phenomenal world, at least for a time, at least insofar as we can grab hold of it. And this is power. The power to make the chaos, the flux, stand still.

That is, in fact, what grabbing hold of it means, right? That's what the metaphor of grabbing points to, holding it still. And this is power. It's error.

In the same way that Schopenhauer points out that our conditioning of the reality through the principle of sufficient reason is an error if we view the world as will. That is to say, if we view the world for what it really is, quote unquote. But if we don't regard the world as hiding... a true world, hiding a monistic substance, and instead being a series of images, not illusions, right, but appearances which present or unveil themselves to us.

not randomly, but in a way that must first be taken in, held by the mind, in order for that stream of sensation to mean anything, in order for it to transcend chaos, well, then in that case, I mean, science, the will to truth, again, that's... Real power, that's one of the highest forms of power. But again, art is set above it. And why? Because art is transfiguration, being transfigured. What becomes? A becoming that lifts beings.

What lifts what has become fixed and stable and congealed to new possibilities. Now, Nietzsche also says art is form-giving, so how does that work? Well... You could almost say, I mean, to put it really simply, you could say that art has the power to both make fixed and to destroy the boundaries of what was fixed. That in some sense, just as we talked about at the end of last episode, that... becoming itself requires fixity, that change requires...

something that is changed and something that changes into, that fixity sort of is presupposed by the idea that there's changing. If it was just pure flux, pure change, there wouldn't be anything that is changed, which would be sort of an absurdity. And so really... Art has both of those powers, or rather, in such that things can become, art gives them form. That might be a way of putting it. But that its ultimate activity of art is that transfiguration.

That is in a way of just putting it to bring it back again to my first sort of interpretive stab at this passage is that science speaks to that world of fixity towards the rule, the template, whatever. And art speaks to those new possibilities, those types of life that are yet unlived. And that's why art is higher than science. And that's also the way of understanding how they both give form, although art also transforms.

Might be the good way to put it. And so we return then to this whole idea of we take perceptual hold of the reality or an object in the reality or a state of affairs within the reality or even ourselves.

And that this is a necessary grounding in order to set a horizon, which is nevertheless, again, that relation between ourselves now and a potential in the future, a value that... orients us towards change towards pushing ourselves beyond ourselves that's like the significance of the concept of a horizon the horizon is always perspectival it's always pitched into the future and it relates us to this

whole act of willing or valuing, and Heidegger shows how the Greek word for schema, schemata, relates to the concept of a horizon, and further he argues the idea of perspectivism and the horizon on which values are set. are interrelated concepts in Nietzsche's philosophy. Quote, Nietzsche often equates horizon and perspective, thus he never reaches a clear portrayal of their distinction and their connection.

This lack of clarity has its foundation not only in Nietzsche's way of thinking but also the very matter itself, for horizon and perspective are necessarily related to each other and intertwined so that one can often stand for the other. Above all, both are founded in a more original essential configuration of human being, in Dasein, which Nietzsche sees, and can see, as little as all metaphysics before him. End quote.

So the meaning of perspective is to be able to delineate a horizon and remember Heidegger's being and time. We always pitch ourselves out into the future. We always live in the future. The future is where value exists. Now, the future is indelibly related to the present, obviously, because we're standing in the present, pitching ourselves into the future.

But again, there's this great significance to the future within temporality. And that comes out in Nietzsche. Our being in the world, our perspective, our Dasein, is what determines our horizons. the determination of a horizon possible. So to return to the broader point, fixity, duration, that's required for valuing, because values are found where the will pitches itself out beyond itself. We need that image, which...

beckons us from the horizon and motivates our willing. We need it to hold still. We use... the operation of the mind of thought to keep it to hold still, because if it kept moving, we could never catch up to it, so to speak. That would be a metaphorical way of putting it.

the will to power the will to truth and its operation the way it grabs hold of the world yet again quote the living being needs on the basis of and for its vitality what is crucial for it as a living being namely that it live, that it be, that, as we saw, it not succumb to the torrent of its own characteristic chaos, but erect itself and come to stand in that chaos. such standing in the torrent entails a stance against the onrush

bringing it somehow to a stand, not in such a way that life comes to a standstill and ceases, but in such a way that it is secured in its stability precisely as a living being. As life occurrence, Praxis is, in itself, the securing of stability. Because this securing is possible only through making chaos stable and fixed, Praxis as the securing of stability demands that what is overwhelming us be transposed into something standing, into forms, into schemata.

Praxis is in itself as the securing of stability a need for schemata. Thought metaphysically, practical need means being intent upon forming schemata that make the securing of stability possible. In short, the need for a schema. The need for a schema already looks for what stabilizes and thus limits. In Greek, what limits is called to horizon. A horizon belongs to the essence of living beings in their vitality, to the securing of stability in the form of the need for a schema.

Accordingly, the schema is not a limit imposed on the living being from without, not a limit with which life activity collides so as to stunt its growth. So as we've gone over, life has this need of fixity, but as a basis of establishing the terms for change. It's required that you have fixity for the value you aim at in order to triangulate your position, so to speak, to plot a course to your value.

Art stands higher than truth because it's the realm of transfiguration, transformation, and change. But nevertheless, we have a need for fixity. It just subordinates, this viewpoint subordinates fixity to change. being necessary for change to occur. So stability is necessary insofar as it's needed for change. It's a very strange kind of claim. But I mean, consider, let's go all the way back to the beginning of this episode.

The Darwinian struggle for existence. Values that turn back to the stability of what the self already is, which means non-values. They, again, give form to chaos, but they made... changed subordinates to stability. They made change useful only insofar as it is necessary to establish fixity.

The sense in which there is a reversal of the existing valuations and it's a way in which Heidegger would say Nietzsche is still dependent on Plato or it's the anti-Plato or it's the reverse of Plato. But, you know, so to sum up, Nietzsche thinks we should do science. We should view science through the lens of the artist. But, above all, by grabbing hold of a truth, we have not merely ascertained something which was, say, an objective fact. There's art in our scientific pursuit of truth.

And there's the need for conceptual fixity even in the artistic rapture that gives form to existence. So Nietzsche is showing how our knowing the world is necessarily also commanding the world, poeticizing the world. And all of this, again, it sounds very strange, but when you understand that revaluation of placing art higher than science, of placing stability as subordinate to transformation.

And perspective and horizon as a part of valuing and as necessarily part of the artistic process, right? Which is the artistic process reveals what will to power is. That sense of commanding the world, poeticizing the world, as we said at the beginning, making the world sound with the total cord of your whole being, that begins to make a bit more sense. Heidegger says, quote, What is the securing of permanence now?

Neither simply fixation of chaos in knowledge, nor transfiguration of chaos in art, but both together. Yet both are in essence one, namely the assimilation and the direction of human life to chaos. Homo oasis. Such assimilation is not imitative and reproductive adaptation to something at hand, but transfiguration that commands and poeticizes, establishes perspectival horizons, and fixates."

And so Heidegger will say that the essence of will to power is that it permanentizes becoming into presence. So not into being, in the Parmenidean or Platonic sense, but into presence. presence. Now for Heidegger, of course, everything is being. It's definitively a world of being. But what he sees in Nietzsche is not that he puts forward this idea of the will to power, that it actually grounds existence in some sort of

permanence or duration. The important thing, again, is our belief in the idea of permanence or duration. The important thing is that the mind stamps becoming with the character of being. That's what it is to grab hold of something with the intellect. And so then what does it become when we stamp becoming with the character of being? It becomes presence. It's not eternal. It's not enduring forever behind the phenomenon.

Rather, the will to truth is the mind's capacity to structure the chaos into form or schema, and the end result is presence. And that's really what is meant. That's the best term to use for phenomena. as being, because both of those terms are kind of inadequate, right? Because phenomena has that aspect of just indicating a mere appearance or of being an image in the platonic sense rather than the Heraclitian sense.

And being has all that baggage associated with it. But really what we're saying is it's presence. It's actually present. Heidegger says, quote, as opposed to all that, we must consider anew what will to power means, empowering to the excelling of one's own essence. Empowering brings excelling, becoming to stand. into permanence. In the thought of will to power, what is becoming and is moved in the highest and most proper sense, life itself, is to be thought in its permanence, certainly.

Nietzsche wants becoming and what becomes as the fundamental character of beings as a whole, but he wants what becomes precisely and before all else as what remains as being proper. being in the sense of the Greek thinkers. End quote, and further down he continues, we ask, why is this the supreme will to power? The answer is because will to power in its most profound essence is nothing other than the permanentizing of becoming into presence.

In this interpretation of being, the primordial thinking of being, as physis, advances through the extreme point of the fundamental position of modern metaphysics, thus coming to its completion, rising and appearing. becoming and presencing are in the thought of will to power thought back to the unity of the essence of being according to its initial and primordial meaning not as an imitation of the greek but as a transformation of the modern thinking of being

to its allotted consummation." And so, in this way, Nietzsche thought Western metaphysics through to its completion, and in so doing, he brought about its end nietzsche sought the being of beings he finds will to power which allows him to understand how becoming is stamped into being but as we discussed in the lap last episode in doing this

Being itself, being with a capital B, dies. Platonic being dies. Error, at least as the platonics would have seen it, is what reigns in Nietzsche's work. Truth becomes a kind of error. The image becomes the truth. It becomes presence. The truth, therefore, becomes dependent on belief. Beliefs reflect the multiplicity of perspective. And perhaps this is a large part of why beings have turned away from being.

In other words, why our drive to knowledge has thrown itself into the sciences with that positivistic bent. Nietzsche opens the way for that. The idea that metaphysics is not really necessary. All the action is in physics. physics it's all in the actual what you might say and heidegger says it is because of being capital b that beings have abandoned the pursuit of being

In other words, with our evaluative glance, with our evaluative judgments, we've ranked the practical power of science above all else. And Nietzsche, he doesn't agree with this, he wants to...

plays art above science, but he accounts for all of this. But what did Nietzsche himself do? How did he relate himself to the pursuit of truth? Well, Heidegger argues, and I think convincingly, that he did seek the whole. He sought... being he sought out a view of all life an account of life a world picture a world view and so nietzsche even if he reveals the world as perspectival and thus

beings pursuing or grabbing hold of truths, here we put truths in scare quotes, he does this through his own metaphysical activity, his own seeking of being. Being is what reveals to him the nature of the intellectual activity of beings. Heidegger's emphasis, therefore, at the end of the lecture is that we cannot rest now on our laurels because Western metaphysics has been solved or something.

And I mentioned this in the earlier episodes, that this is what I love about Heidegger. He's not trying to close anything off. He's not trying to reach the end. Of course, his interpretation of Nietzsche has to end in some sense, because...

You know, Nietzsche's life and works do have a beginning and end. And with the retrospective glance, we can kind of sum up his project. And the lecture has a beginning and an end. And so Heidegger's project has to end at some point. Nietzsche's project has to end at some point.

And it's only when someone's project is finished and closed off that we can make those evaluative statements about them. It's only then that we can determine what their meaning was, what the significance of Nietzsche has been.

But that shouldn't mean that we stop thinking, that our inquiry can now end. Heidegger says, quote, We dare not plunder Nietzsche merely for the sake of some contemporary spiritual counterfeit, nor can we, ostensibly in possession of eternal truth, pass him by. We must think him. That is to say, we must always think his sole thought, and thereby the unitary guiding thought of Western metaphysics to its own intrinsic limit, end quote. And so Nietzsche destroys Western metaphysics.

so that we can have a new beginning. And that's Heidegger's goal. And one of his most famous quotations is from what is called thinking, in which he says, quote, we are still not yet thinking, end quote. We think that thinking is something obvious. We think that it comes easily to us to think. We take it for granted. And thus we don't give enough thought to thinking itself. We don't even know, properly speaking, what thinking is.

That very point is anticipated by Nietzsche, by the way, in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche writes the following, quote, that is expressed in the sentence, I think, I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible. For instance, that it is I who think,

That there must necessarily be something that thinks. That thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause. That there is an ego. And finally... that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking, that I know what thinking is, end quote. It's almost kind of, it's like a stereotype about philosophers, right?

They're the kind of people who will spend all afternoon thinking about what thinking is. But perhaps we don't have to be so cynical and reductive about all of this. Maybe there's a real value to introspecting about the things we take for granted. things we find to be obvious, and asking ourselves why we believe these things. And in that way, it's another similarity to, if not Plato, his teacher Socrates, investigating, inquiring after.

the everyday, the everyday assumptions. Why do we believe that thinking is such an easy and obvious thing when it seems that in our everyday thinking, we oftentimes, we don't come up with original thoughts? Usually our thoughts respond to or react to external stimuli. Oftentimes these responses are patterned by past experience, by what we've already learned or been told. Our thoughts also are...

patterned by, as I often point out, how much sleep you got the night before, what you ate that morning, whether you're stressed or angry or any of these things. And so, in short, how much of your thinking actually represents a real... Conscious attempt at generating some new or original insight or consideration. How much of your thinking is an affirmative, creative activity that isn't just a reaction, that isn't just something based on...

presumptions or presuppositions? How much of your thinking do you actually put effort into? How much of your thinking is self-reflective?

I mean, forget about the problem of free will. What about free thought? Are your thoughts free? Never mind your actions. So in making the very act of thinking a problem and a mystery and a question,

Heidegger makes us expend effort on thought once again. By making metaphysics once more a question of ontology, Heidegger forces philosophy to... have to address itself to the truth with a capital T once again, to make being a concern, a real concern, not just some detached epistemological theory of knowledge.

And I think while his interpretation of Nietzsche can be unorthodox in many ways, he also encourages us to apply ourselves with that same level of effort to interpreting Nietzsche anew or to thinking through. the central thoughts of Nietzsche to the end for ourselves. And so Heidegger opens up new possibilities for interpreting Nietzsche. He reopens some of the old questions of Nietzsche that you may feel have already been answered. But...

What he's trying to do is, again, like a true existentialist, make everything more difficult. But in doing this, maybe our engagement with it will require us to actually care. That's a beautiful thing about Heidegger's work. This man really deeply cares about these intense philosophical entanglements. And even though his work can feel like a maze sometimes, the very act of working our way through the maze, I think, will be...

to put it in Nietzsche's terms, life-enhancing. Now, as with the other episodes on Heidegger, I've had to leave out quite a bit here. I mean, I've tried to give you the best summary of the broad points that I can give. And I'll leave all of you to explore the other issues in these lectures. For example, truth is justice in the latter chapters of this lecture. You can also find more material about...

the eternal return of the same, or about nihilism and the history of nihilism in these lectures in Heidegger and Nietzsche, Volumes 1 and 2. But, you know, I hope that I've given you a new... Or if you haven't read Heidegger before, just a novel understanding of what will to power is and the possibilities for interpreting Nietzsche's will to power and just for interpreting Nietzsche himself. I'm very glad.

to finally have discussed heidegger on the program i hope you've all found this valuable i hope i've provided something of a guide to the perplexed with heidegger's reading of nietzsche and heidegger in general he's been one of the most requested thinkers And we're going to get to a couple more of those thinkers that have been requested before the end of this season. But next week, we're going to come back for...

Kind of an interesting hard left turn out of what we've been talking about recently. We're going to go back to one of Nietzsche's early lectures. In fact, his earliest lecture as a professor, his inaugural address. on Homer. And this does tie in to what we're going to talk about in subsequent weeks after that. But it's a topic I didn't necessarily plan on ever covering in Nietzsche was his opinion on Homer.

But I think the more I dove into that lecture and especially read it in conjunction with the fragments in We Philologists, I think there's a lot there that's very valuable and interesting, at least from the standpoint of the history of ideas. So with that, everyone, thank you for joining me. This is Essential Salts, da signing off. Please forgive me for that one, but I just couldn't resist.

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