Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson - Hardcover

David Wittenberg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804734151 ISBN 13: 9780804734158

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger’s highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche’s thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history’s more “proper” reading.

The author argues that Heidegger’s revisionist project recasts the philosophical text as paralipsis, a special kind of ironic statement that when “properly” received by the philosophical rereader, expresses what the text did not and could not say. The study of such paraliptical revisionism within the philosophical canon offers a new way of understanding the basic historicity of the philosophical text, a text that is critically indistinguishable from its own future history of interpretations. Philosophy itself is revision, a deeply historicist rereading practice, a continuous reappropriation of its own improper textual past.

In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early essays on history, read both with and against Heidegger’s analysis of metaphysics, demonstrate why the historical intervention achieved by revisionist reading is not only a formal and thematic alteration of the past, but also a rhetorical coercion of future interpretive tendencies. No philosophical reader is simply a user or victim of revisionist methods: in rereading philosophical pasts, the reader is the very mechanism by which such interpretive tendencies are first formed into problems or thoughts within the philosophical canon.

About this title

About the Author

David Wittenberg is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Iowa.

From the Back Cover

"David Wittenberg's Philosophy, Revision, Critique is a pertinent and well-argued contribution to the debate on the nature of philosophy, and its relationship to the kindred disciplines of rhetoric, history, and literary criticism."--MLN
"Scholars with an interest in theories of literary revision have much to learn from this fine book."--Comparative Literature

From the Inside Flap

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger’s highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche’s thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history’s more “proper” reading.
The author argues that Heidegger’s revisionist project recasts the philosophical text as paralipsis, a special kind of ironic statement that when “properly” received by the philosophical rereader, expresses what the text did not and could not say. The study of such paraliptical revisionism within the philosophical canon offers a new way of understanding the basic historicity of the philosophical text, a text that is critically indistinguishable from its own future history of interpretations. Philosophy itself is revision, a deeply historicist rereading practice, a continuous reappropriation of its own improper textual past.
In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early essays on history, read both with and against Heidegger’s analysis of metaphysics, demonstrate why the historical intervention achieved by revisionist reading is not only a formal and thematic alteration of the past, but also a rhetorical coercion of future interpretive tendencies. No philosophical reader is simply a user or victim of revisionist methods: in rereading philosophical pasts, the reader is the very mechanism by which such interpretive tendencies are first formed into problems or thoughts within the philosophical canon.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Philosophy, Revision, Critique

Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and EmersonBy DAVID WITTENBERG

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3415-8

Contents

Abbreviations................................................................................xiIntroduction.................................................................................11. The Art of Reading Properly, Part 1: The Discordance of Art and Truth.....................222. The Art of Reading Properly, Part 2: Nietzsche's Philosophy Proper........................413. Paralipsis, Part 1: A Rhetoric of Rereading...............................................624. Paralipsis, Part 2: Revision as History of Being..........................................81Interlude: The Reception of Revision.........................................................995. Revision as Canon Formation: Misreading in Harold Bloom...................................1126. Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Rereading in Emerson..........................................1317. Thought for Food (Eating Eternal Return)..................................................157Epilogue: A Suggestion About Canon Formation in Philosophy...................................193Notes........................................................................................207Works Cited..................................................................................251Index........................................................................................261

Chapter One

The Art of Reading Properly, Part 1: The Discordance of Art and Truth

The best insights are arrived at last. But the best insights are methods! -NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power

In a fragment dated 1888 and published after his death, Nietzsche writes, "Very early in my life I became serious about the relation of art to truth: and even now I stand in a holy terror before this discordance" (Ne, 1:74; Ng, 1:88). Heidegger, in his lecture course for the winter term of 1936-1937, sets out to rethink Nietzsche's philosophy in such a way that art and truth will no longer stand in this "Entsetzen erregender Zwiespalt," or "terror arousing discordance" (Ne, 1:142; Ng, 1:167). Instead, what Heidegger's interpretation will expose is an underlying "concordance [Einklang]" or "unity [Einheit]" between the concepts of art and truth. On the face of it, then, Heidegger's first revision of Nietzsche proceeds by means of a simple reversal, a tactic ostensibly borrowed from Nietzsche himself, whose characteristic "procedure," Heidegger writes, "is a constant reversing" (Ne, 1:29; Ng, 1:38).

Ultimately, Heidegger will not follow this procedure, although, as I will discuss, he will recast the relationship between art and truth in a number of more complicated ways. The full character of his engagement with Nietzsche's discordance can only be understood by pursuing his references to the underlying and overarching context of Nietzsche's essential "thinking," with respect to which reversals and revisions in Heidegger's reading acquire consequences far beyond those of any straightforward correction of Nietzsche's understanding of two concepts. Heidegger offers his entire analysis of Nietzsche in the light of a general concern with "Western metaphysics," a term which names an epoch of thought both he and Nietzsche also characterize as "Platonism," conceptions I will analyze in more detail. For Heidegger, the dispute between himself and Nietzsche over the relation of art and truth signifies a profound divergence in their respective interpretations of the character of Platonism and its influence on Western thinking. The discordance of art and truth within Nietzsche's thinking is symptomatic of his "failure" properly to understand this broader context and to understand his own immanence within it. Thus, quite in contrast to a reversal of Nietzsche's thoughts on art and truth, Heidegger's interpretation attempts to contextualize and "ground" Nietzsche's faulty stance with respect to Platonism overall, an essential revision not only of Nietzsche's position on truth and art, but of the entire metaphysics his position represents. And through this broader understanding of Nietzsche, and of the context of his thinking, Heidegger's reading aims, or at least begins to aim, at an overcoming of metaphysics itself.

The reading of Nietzsche that Heidegger offers is therefore revisionist in a quite fundamental sense, for in his effort to make Nietzsche "understood," Heidegger presumes to say what is most crucially implicit in the underground of Nietzsche's thinking, but often directly against what Nietzsche explicitly states. Heidegger's reading will expose meanings within Nietzsche's thinking truer than any Nietzsche would or could have thought of himself: indeed, he identifies such implicit meanings as Nietzsche's "fundamental metaphysical position [metaphysische Grundstellung]." So, for instance, although the discordance of art and truth is manifest and even obvious in Nietzsche's writing, the putatively more basic concordance that Heidegger uncovers and interprets out of the context of Nietzsche's thinking is a facet of Nietzsche's metaphysische Grundstellung, despite what the text says, and despite what Nietzsche might have thought it says. With the identification of such a basic divergence between Nietzsche's explicit statement and his underlying position, we have a first indication of the shape of Heidegger's revision, beyond simple reversal: the revision forms itself around a distinction between, and an evaluation of, at least two different levels of Nietzsche's thinking.

The big picture that will allow us to distinguish Nietzsche's immanent Platonism from its historical ground can emerge only in a historical epoch after Nietzsche, an emergence in contrast with which Nietzsche's own philosophy appears essentially nascent. Heidegger names this epoch with terms peculiar to his own historical self-description: for instance, he calls it the "epoch of the question of Being." Under such a hermeneutical umbrella Heidegger finds himself at a vantage from which to perceive a general economy of unity or belonging-together not only between art and truth but also between any number of Nietzsche's most adamant discordances and antipathies, indeed within his very tone of discordance. In general, Heidegger declares with respect to Nietzsche's texts, "only those [things] which are related to one another can be opposed to one another" (Ne, 1:189; Ng, 1:219). Or, more elaborately: "Discordance is present only where [the elements] which sever the unity of their belonging-together must diverge from one another by virtue of that very unity.... While truth and art belong to the essence of reality with equal originality [gleichursprnglich], they [must] diverge from one another and go against one another [gehen sie auseinander und gegeneinander]" (Ne, 1:217; Ng, 1:250). The discordance of art and truth, and indeed the typical (and strategic) discordant tone of Nietzsche's polemical conceptualizations generally, are viewed by Heidegger as an epochal prolepsis; they are the historically determined anticipations of their own unifications in a concordant reading such as Heidegger's own. Thus Nietzsche's own procedures are placed quite in a passive position by Heidegger's reading, as though the discordance of art and truth were something that happened to Nietzsche by virtue of a certain metaphysical predicament. Heidegger calls his own more advantageous viewpoint upon this predicament simply "understanding Nietzsche's philosophy," but at times he also calls it "confrontation [Auseinandersetzung]," to be distinguished from argument or simple interpretation, and of course, from mere disagreement or reversal:

Confrontation is genuine criticism [echte Kritik]. It is the highest and only way to the true estimation of a thinker. For [confrontation] undertakes to reflect on his thinking and to trace it in its effective power [wirkende Kraft], not in its weakness. To what end? So that through the confrontation we ourselves may become free for the highest exertion of thinking. (Ne, 1:4-5; Ng, 1:13)

When we are "freed" through the hermeneutical or quasi-therapeutical standpoint of a confrontation, a "genuine criticism," art and truth will belong together in Nietzsche's text all the more because they discord. Hence the imperative tone of the passage cited above: "art and truth ... [must] diverge." Or, as Heidegger asserts in a formulation not paradoxical but thoroughly dialectical, a discordance such as that of art and truth, far from contradicting the unity of these concepts, may be "proof for it." Because of the historical context to which it constantly refers, Heidegger's rereading of art and truth in Nietzsche's philosophy is neither a critical substitution of relatedness for nonrelatedness, nor even a step in the evolution of the truer relation between art and truth. It is rather a basic revision in the perspective from which such a relation must be viewed, the opening up of the more grounded and grounding position and level of argumentation. With this, we arrive at a second preliminary description of the shape of Heidegger's revision of Nietzsche, and a more subtle one: Heidegger reinterprets Nietzsche's discordance as a concordance, precisely because he interprets Nietzsche's text as having first asserted concordance as, or in the form of, discordance.

This double "as" is the linchpin of Heidegger's entire interpretation of Nietzsche, and even in the later years of the lectures, when Heidegger's emphasis has shifted away from the topics of art and truth, the structure of this basic dialectical move will remain intact: to read the text's x as y, because from the viewpoint of a broader context, the text already connotes y in the form of x. In the first lecture course, the revision entailed by this "as" develops particularly around Nietzsche's and Heidegger's differing definitions and interpretations of the concept of "the true," and I will look closely at that particular difference. Heidegger claims that the definition of truth that Nietzsche holds, along with the discordance that follows from that definition, is inherited from a tradition of Platonic thinking by which Heidegger believes Nietzsche, along with "all other philosophy before him," to be constrained. Despite Nietzsche's efforts to overturn the Platonic tradition, he remains its last full subscriber, and therefore also its most conspicuous signifier. However, to follow Heidegger's own general formulation of the "as-structure [Als-Struktur]" in Being and Time, to make something explicit is to disclose its "as" for the understanding: "the `as' makes up the structure of the explicitness [Ausdrcklichkeit] of that which is understood; it constitutes the interpretation" (BT, 140 [149]). When Nietzsche's immanence in Platonism is made explicit by Heidegger's reading, "we" ourselves will be in a position to "understand," and then revise-essentially, to "appropriate [zueignen]"-what has so far remained only implicit in whatever Nietzsche actually wrote; we will be able to view Nietzsche's explicit statements about truth as his metaphysische Grundstellung, and Platonism itself as the prolepsis of the grounding Origin.

Art and Truth

If the concepts of art and truth relate to one another at all, then it is not because a work of art is similar to a logical proposition or a truth claim (although this is sometimes the case), but rather because art and truth are rubrics for a family of working oppositions familiar to Western philosophy at least since Plato. To speak with the extremely broad vocabulary Heidegger himself offers us at such moments, these oppositions are collected, or collectively signified, by the term "metaphysical distinction [metaphysische Unterscheidung]," and, in a manner which will require more explanation, point to the "older" and more basic, but still concealed, "ontological difference [ontologische Differenz]," out of a response to which metaphysics in the West has developed throughout its history since the pre-Socratics. The metaphysical distinction takes particular conceptual forms in its emergence within philosophical discourses, for instance, physical versus metaphysical, material versus spiritual, or sensuous versus ideal. Heidegger evokes the latter pairing when he states bluntly that for Nietzsche "art is the will to semblance as the sensuous" whereas "`truth' means the `true world' of the supersensuous" (Ne, 1:74; Ng, 1:88), an opposition borrowed from Plato, although Nietzsche of course ironizes and reverses its respective valuations. While truth is not as obviously related to art as it is, say, to falsehood or semblance, the fact that for Plato the inherent sensuousness of art is prejudged precisely as falsehood or semblance makes its discordance with truth virtually automatic within any thinking structured by Platonism. Part of Heidegger's task in the lectures is to question the spontaneity with which associations such as the one between art and "mere semblance" are made within a type of thinking that remains, still with Nietzsche, bound up in Platonic preconceptions, even as these preconceptions come to critical attention within Nietzsche's work.

The variety of distinctions that the opposition art/truth collects has also, indeed more often, been collected or signified by the pair of terms "Being" and "becoming." Truth-and here we refer to the Platonic interpretation-is Being, and art is becoming. To be sure, we are dealing in vagaries here, as well as invoking a copula that has not yet been carefully defined-truth "is" Being, art "is" becoming. But the vagueness of these words, and indeed the vagueness generally under which Heidegger conducts his argument with Nietzsche, and Nietzsche in turn with the Platonic tradition, are not incidental to the dispute itself, nor do they represent some failure on the part of the disputants to get down to brass tacks. Vagueness itself signifies the historical scope under which the argument is designed to take shape, the breadth of its intended effects, and the variousness of the phenomena it is designed to explain. This breadth and variousness are themselves subjects and contents, not merely attributes, of Heidegger's rereading of Platonism.

During the first lecture course, Heidegger gives more or less equal time to each term of Nietzsche's discordance, art and truth-that is to say, he addresses matters of aesthetics approximately as much as he analyzes "the true." Nonetheless, it is clearly the concept of truth that is his primary concern, and from the outset his chief interest in aesthetics is to discover "that which in the essence of art calls forth the question concerning truth" (Ne, 1:142; Ng, 1:167). To this end, Heidegger offers, in the form of a paraphrase, five "statements" about art culled from Nietzsche's Nachla. The final of the five statements, which Heidegger identifies as the most important, is, "art is more valuable than `truth.'" But what makes this the most important of Nietzsche's statements on art is that through it one arrives at a very particular set of follow-up questions: "Everything hangs on the clarification and grounding of the fifth statement; art is more valuable than truth. What is truth? In what does its essence consist?" (Ne, 1:141; Ng, 1:166). This pair of questions about the essence of truth-or rather, the implicit basic question of truth to which the two questions point-comprises, for Heidegger, the "preliminary question of philosophy," and therefore Heidegger concludes that "the question about art leads us directly to the question preliminary to all questions" (Ne, 1:142; Ng, 1:166). I want to ask, not whether Heidegger's perhaps antithetical interpretation of Nietzsche's statements on art-that they lead us not to art, but rather to truth-are valid or legitimate, but how this gesture on Heidegger's part illuminates what I have been calling the shape of Heidegger's revision, or how it may begin to suggest a mechanism or terminology that we can use to describe that shape more fully.

With his gesture toward a "question preliminary to all questions," Heidegger has already departed from whatever specific emphases Nietzsche himself places on his own interpretations of the problem of truth. This departure is justified because Heidegger's "sole concern is to know Nietzsche's basic position as thinker" (Ne, 1:131; Ng, 1:154), or in other words, to grasp the proleptic "as" that Nietzsche himself only "indirectly" understood, and which continued to remain essentially "beyond" him (see Ne, 1:68; Ng, 1:81). What Heidegger seeks is a "direction" in Nietzsche's thinking, a "path [Weg]" or "bypath [Seitenweg]," and along such a path an access to metaphysics as a whole (see Ne, 1:163; Ng, 1:190, and Ne, 1:143; Ng, 1:168). Nietzsche, calling into question for the first time the value of truth by linking it to its apotheosis and antithesis, art, even if only to devalue or destroy it through art, culminates Western philosophy's inquiry into its most "preliminary question." Thus, for Heidegger, Nietzsche's devaluation of truth is ironically equivalent to the highest valuation of truth so far-the first inquiry into truth as such, the first absolute inquiry, and thus metaphysics' own special synecdoche.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Philosophy, Revision, Critiqueby DAVID WITTENBERG Copyright © 2001 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804734151
• ISBN 13: 9780804734158
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288