Abstract
The phenomenon that both Nietzsche and Heidegger refer to as “nihilism” is often understood as a historical event, an episode in late modern Western culture.1 The event is taken to be a widespread collapse of confidence in what Nietzsche calls our “highest values,” especially religious and moral values, at least among the educated classes in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These highest values have, according to Nietzsche, somehow “devalued themselves.”2
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Notes
Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche were published by him in a redacted form in two volumes in 1961, which have now been reissued again in the Gesamtausgabe, Vols. 6.1 and 6.2. I will cite the English translation first, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vols. 1, 2, 3, and 4, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1991), followed by references to the 1961 edition
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Bd. I and Bd. II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). See Heidegger’s summary of the original coinage and use of the term by Friedrich Jacobi, especially in his letter to Fichte where he poses as the natural contrary of Idealism what he calls Nihilism (or “Chimerism”). Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 4, 3; Nietzsche, Bd. II, 31. Heidegger goes on in this first lecture to note the uses of the word in Turgenev, Jean Paul, and in Dostoevsky’s foreword to his Pushkin lectures in 1880.
Nietzsche’s account is strongly and surprisingly dialectical. It was the cultivation of “truthfulness” [Wahrhaftigkeit] about motivation required by Christianity and Christian morality that eventually produced too much truthfulness about the “low” origins of the “high.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauffmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 10; Der Wille zur Macht (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1964), 11.
F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. A. Del Caro (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9 (T); Also Sprach Zarathustra, Bd. 4, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruter, 1988), 19.
F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §56, 64; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Bd. 3, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruter, 1988), 418. In Genealogy of Morals, §12, in commenting on the “stunting and leveling of European man,” he again suggests that nihilism is some kind of affective disorder, a fatigue or failure of desire. “The sight of man now makes us tired—what is nihilism today if not that?…We are tired of man.”
F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diether (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25; Zur Genealogie der Moral, Bd. 5, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 278. In the Nachlass, Nietzsche characterizes nihilism in a wide variety of ways, at one point saying that nihilism amounts to, all at once, “the repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 7; Der Wille zur Macht, 7. I am grateful to Ken Gemes for some clarifying correspondence about this issue.
Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 17–64.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 31; Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972), 11.
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© 2013 Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax
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Pippin, R.B. (2013). Heidegger on Nietzsche on Nihilism. In: Pangle, T.L., Lomax, J.H. (eds) Political Philosophy Cross-Examined. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299635_12
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