Post on 06-Apr-2018
transcript
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
1/30
25
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 26, 2003
Copyright 2003 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Meaning
DAVID CAMPBELL
ietzsche writes more or less unsystematically on many subjects, includ-
ing morality, art, religion, and politics. In this article I explore the pos-
sibility that enquiry into meaning unites his thought, so far as anything does.
This topic is wide, but I focus on the suggestion in The Genealogy of Morality,
The Birth of Tragedy,1 and less systematic works of a theory of interpretationthat explains how terms such as knowledge, being, and truth come to
have their meaning and, in cases such as Platos, as he believes, to lack mean-
ing. Commentators often take Nietzsches notion of meaning for granted; in
attempting a sustained account, I look at Heidegger both as indebted to him
and as responding critically. Thus I do not simply interpret their writings but
treat them as a starting point for analysis and systematic reflection, consis-
tently with what they say. The first part of the article considers critically the
suggestion in these works of a virtue ethics, based on self-interpretation, and
also of a wider theory of interpretative meaning. The second part examines
Heideggers comments.
NIETZSCHE
The second section of the Preface to GMdeclares that the subject of the
present work is the provenance of our moral prejudices. Nietzsches ques-tion here, then, is the origin of morality.2 Previously, however, in the first sec-
tion, he had asked how we are to understand ourselves. We ask . . . Who
are we, really?. . . The sad truth is that we dont understand our own sub-
stance (Preface, 1). This anticipates his answer to the question of the ori-
gin of morality: it originates in us. He goes on to indicate that our substance
is in his view will or agency. The self is not simply a mirror to the world,
passively undergoing experiences and reproducing them symbolically in judg-
ments, but engages actively and in some ways creatively in experience. His
starting point is therefore the autonomous agent. He emphasizes this againat the end of the work:
N
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
2/30
26 DAVID CAMPBELL
Until the advent of the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man, had no meaning
at all on this earth . . . the ascetic ideal . . . is and remains a will. Let me repeat,
now that I have reached the end, what I said at the beginning: man would
sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose. (III, XXVIII)
Nietzsche suggests, rather than states, a theory of self-interpretation. One
understands oneself as interpreting felt concerns and related abilities in terms
of chosen, willed projects, particularly ones role. In this way, ones life as
agent has meaning both as felt or qualitative and as structured, and moral
terms acquire both their sense and efficacy. He introduces this theory by
assuming that there can be natural aristocrats and imagining that they inter-
pret their noble and high-minded qualities and mighty abilities in terms
of the highly placed role of ruler:
It was the good themselves, that is to say the noble, mighty, highly placed
and high-minded who decreed themselves and their actions to be good . . . in
contradistinction to all that was base, low-minded and plebeian. . . . The ori-
gin of the opposites goodand badis to be found in . . . the dominant temper
of a higher, ruling class in relation to a lower, dependent one. (I, II)
The meaning of the terms good and bad is determined not for a time
only . . . but permanently by the rulers decree. In this way there comesabout a common currency of values and social cohesion. This decree is not
arbitrary, but a quick jetting forth from his character. The source of
supreme value judgments is, then, the agent, somewhat as water under pres-
sure jets out a fountain. To find the origin of moral terms we need to look
back, so to speak, to character, not ahead to consequences or utility. Nietzsche
dismisses the lukewarmness which every scheming prudence, every utili-
tarian calculus presupposes. He further highlights impassioned agency by
castigating its opposite, the slave ethics of the low-minded, as merely
passive and reactive rather than active and creative. Slave ethics requires. . . an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all its action is reaction (I, X).
Nietzsche speaks of the rulers triumphant self-affirmation (I, X), sug-
gesting that his will would be ascendant in its own terms only, if the cir-
cumstance of a pathos of distance between a natural ruler and plebeians
did not dictate his ascendancy over them.
The feelings one interprets have a bodily basis, in what Nietzsche calls
ones physiology: in other words, perhaps, ones physical type. His dis-
cussion of priests is further evidence that he operates a theory of self-inter-pretation. Their morbidity and neurasthenia explain their turning away from
action, their self-disgust and consequent asceticism, and hence the moral
terms they typically deploy such as pure and impure, and their idea of
God as nothingness. Their self-understanding as priests depends on their
interpreting morbid feelings, and these on physical debility:
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
3/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 27
Granting that political supremacy always gives rise to notions of spiritual
supremacy . . . the ruling caste is also the priestly caste and elects to charac-
terize itself by a term which reminds us of its priestly function. In this con-
text we encounter for the first time the concepts pure and impure. . . . Thedesire for a mystical union with God is nothing other than the Buddhists
desire to sink himself in nirvana . . . here has the human mind grown both
profound and evil. (I, VI)
Evil here therefore means ascetic; profound means reflective, implying
the use of linguistic symbols (I, VI). Together, these characteristics produce
the will to truth, that is, a tendency to affirm an independent reality sym-
bolized in judgments that can be tested against it for truth and falsity, and
thus to deny a role for the self in knowledge. Nietzsche admires this tendencyfor its part in forming Western culture (III, XXIVff.), but nonetheless he
attacks it for enabling those with morbid, feeble will to claim moral author-
ity and hence political power. His account of moral concepts thus includes a
genealogy of . . . democratic prejudice (I.IV). Those with feeble passions
are herdlike and servile, resent their weakness and their rulers strength, and
pity each other. With the eyes of a thief [such a type] looks at everything
splendid, with the greed of hunger it sizes up those who have much to eat;
and always it sneaks around the table of those who give.3
The uncreative majority, however, is supreme when united and, assistedby priests, codifies and institutionalizes compassion and altruism. In this way
the term good comes to mean bad and vice versa, and their original senses
are forgotten. Natural rulers acquire a bad conscience, inappropriately feel-
ing ashamed of their superior qualities and repressing them. Democrats are
convinced that their creed has objective natural or divine authority, but such
a spirit of seriousness is merely the fug of stifled passion. Altruism is a
sublimate from this noxious source, like alcohol, for instance, when freed
from water. The vermin man occupies the entire stage . . . tame, hopelesslymediocre, and savourless, he considers himself the apex of historical evolu-
tion (I, XI).
Eventually altruism evaporates into nihilism, that is, loss or denial of mean-
ing and value. Nietzsche speaks of the death of God and predicts social
fragmentation, with dire political consequences. He does not try to reinstate
altruism on a sound footing, however, but answers the nihilistic resentment
of the weak with the joyful passion of the strong for life. Such proud defi-
ance alone creates meaning.
The self-characterization of rulers and priests and reaction of plebeiansor slaves explains only one aspect of moral talk. Nietzsche goes on to gen-
eralize this type of explanation, describing any autonomous agent as self-
characterized; on this basis he explains values such as promise-keeping.
Thus he envisages a type of individual who, far from being neurasthenic
and self-denying, characterizes himself independently:
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
4/30
The ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again
from the morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral . . . the man who
has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises
and in him a proud consciousness, a sensation of mankind come to comple-tion . . . his measure lies in his own demands on himself . . . he becomes
authentically moral. . . . He determines himself not according to consequences
. . . but from his beginning. (II, II)
One does not acquire good character and a sense of oneself by first taking
goals and rules for granted. Instead, one first identifies whatever matters or
makes a difference to oneself in particular, and then interprets this passion
in terms of a role. Somewhat similarly, if one cares about fine art or fishing,
for instance, one may interpret oneself as a budding artist or angler. Nietzsche,however, is concerned with role choice as determining where ones values
lie, not where ones talents lie. In fulfilling ones passion one makes explicit
the values it implies; a self-interpretation is not derived from preconceived
values, but forms a background against which one conceives values. As a
jetting forth of value judgments from ones character, this process is largely
emotional and inarticulate rather than calculated and conscious. Values then
depend on singling oneself out as author of ones biography, so to speak, not,
for instance, on doing distinctively human things such as talking, tickling, or
driving fast cars. Goals, rules, and values depend in this sense on choice. ForNietzsche, however, choice is responsible not only as liable to praise or blame
but also as a settled response to feelings; it implies that one knows oneself
and accepts its costs and benefits. Thus the metaphor of jetting forth does
not imply that ones choice is simply voluntarist, like playing the lottery and
winning the jackpot: good character is a prize hard won, commanding a high
price and a cause for pride (I, VIII).
By so interpreting felt concerns in terms of ones role, one also creates
oneself: Nietzsches theory has implications for the nature of the self and itsrealization, as he notes in GM. Ones life gains an aim and narrative struc-
ture, and one acquires a sense of oneself as of a piece, enduring through time,
and bearing rights and obligations. One makes the sense one does of ones
life from this first-person stance. There cannot in general be a self that does
not make sense to itself, more or less, and one interprets oneself and ones
values together. What it is to be a self thus depends on will, exercised in self-
interpretation.
Nietzsche also explains terms such as responsibility and conscience,
together with obligations such as promise-keeping, as expressions of virtu-ous, aristocratic character: Those who promise [are] like sovereigns . . .
whose promises are binding because they know that they will make them
good. . . . His proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege responsibility
confers has penetrated deeply and become a dominant instinct. . . . Surely he
will call it his conscience (II, II). Nietzsche calls this method of explaining
28 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
5/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 29
moral concepts etymological: understandably, given his philological train-
ing. But his etymology is also a genealogy, attempting to show that
values originate in character, and that this is a matter of choice or self-
characterization. Yet this is only one application of his etymological method;it also applies generally to the objective areas of natural science and phys-
iology. He excuses himself from showing how, saying, I cannot enlarge
upon the question now (I, IV), but adds in parenthesis that [t]he lordly
right of bestowing names is such that one would almost be justified in see-
ing the origin of language itself as an expression of the rulers power. They
say, This is this or that; they seal off each thing and action with a sound
and thereby take symbolic possession of it (I, II).
Such lordly naming is not a matter of picking out and labeling mean-
ings we perceive as though already formed independently of us. Nietzsches
methods include challenging such assumptions, but it does not follow that
linguistic terms have in his view only rhetorical meaning. Instead, he seems
to mean that we bestow names in the sense of stipulating meanings: words
mean what we conventionally want them to mean. Perhaps we can concoct
a nonmoral example by adapting his metaphor of the aristocrat. In this fan-
ciful example, the term forest can be understood by recognizing connota-
tions with stag-hunting and the like in the minds of nobles who reserve
their woods for such purposes. Just as we have to dig into etymology torediscover that pure meant originally inactive, so we ordinarily forget
that the term forest was originally interpreted as hunting ground and sup-
pose that it simply means something like woodland. Thus, to extrapolate
from Nietzsches brief discussion, a name does not mean just what the
namer wants it to mean, somewhat as words have meaning for Humpty
Dumpty. Instead, a name initially expresses various connotations in the
minds of whoever does the naming, and so comes to denote convention-
ally whatever conjures up these connotations, though many are subsequently
lost or forgotten. Naming consists neither in labeling preexisting mean-ings nor in arbitrarily allocating a denoting use and specific sort of reference
to a verbal sign that then over time accrues connotations; instead, denotation
presupposes interpretation of objects in terms of interests. In this way, his
account of the meaning of moral terms, based on self-interpretation, gener-
alizes to a theory of semantic meaning based on interpretation of objects. If
for present purposes we can call self-interpretation existential as concerned
with personal existence, and interpretation of objects also existential as
concerned with what it is to be an object to which we refer, Nietzsche canbe said to connect existential and semantic meaning.
The background to this theory is Nietzsches attack on cognitivist meta-
physics. He describes the metaphysics of his great teacher Schopenhauer
as noncognitivist (Preface, V). Amidst the furious torments of this world,
the individual sits tranquilly [while doubting] the cognitive mode of expe-
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
6/30
rience (TBT, I, p. 22). There is no ultimate, metaphysical truth or reality
that could be a foundation for knowledge, but only a disorderly cosmic will
or striving; human beings can do little but observe events, renounce self, and
pity each other. Nietzsche agrees that there is only a will to power, as hecalls it, which is inherently unstructured and indifferent to us. There is no
given, preconceived end or telos that could remove the contingency of exis-
tence and redeem tragedy or justify its pain. But he questions his mentors
view of the value of ethics (GM, 153), denying that we need to resign our-
selves to impotent passivity. Rather, will to power manifests itself in us as
interpretation of passion or emotion strong enough not to end futility and
disorder but, on the contrary, to overcome them by willing their eternal
recurrence.
Empiricists also, among others, deny the possibility of metaphysical cog-
nition; but Nietzsche maintains that all cognitive assumptions need to be
explained, while they exempt sensory cognition. For empiricists, further,
ideas and their relationships in thinking derive from sensory experience,
where for Nietzsche they derive from will to power. Unlike them, also, he
uses an aphoristic, epigrammatic writing style to exhibit a poetic mode of
thinking that does not rely on explicit deductive argument, and to thwart an
argued account of his thought. The present article nonetheless tries to see
whether such an account is feasible.In general terms, will to power is a commanding drive to use whatever is
available as a means to itself: there is in the end only a circle of control and
consumption. The term power is here an intensifier and does not indicate
an external telos or aim of will. Metaphysically, this inherently undiffer-
entiated process manifests itself as spatiotemporal, causally related natural
units; conversely, since everything is a means to control, the process has no
internal structure of means and ends. For any thing or object, to be is then
not only to manifest will to power but also to be reducible to it. Nietzsches
doctrine of the eternal recurrence of every state of the universe reflects thiscircularity, and in this respect is also a metaphysical doctrine. Ethically, virtue
answers nihilistic resignation and not only expresses felt control or will to
power but also reduces to it. Epistemologically, one is constrained by a need
for order and meaning to interpret the world in ways that others may share.
Truth as the adequacy of statements to represent facts can then be reduced
to interpretation in response to constraints. Any number of such interpreta-
tions or perspectives is possible. Here will to power is a nihilistic circle of
interpretation that continuously consumes and overcomes itself. The doctrineof eternal recurrence reflects this circularity also. Nietzsches epistemologi-
cal particularism means that talk of knowledge and its objects expresses some
perspective or other, which in turn manifests will to power.
In emphasizing passion and control, Nietzsche hopes to avoid metaphys-
ical commitment. One reason he attacks Christianity is that he assumes that
30 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
7/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 31
it claims metaphysical knowledge. His objection is not to the idea of tran-
scendence, since his superman is transcendent in a sense, as the name
implies. Rather, he rejects transcendental arguments such as that there must
be objects outside experience to be mirrored or symbolized within it. At most,these arguments establish that we must believe that there are such objects,
not that they exist, and he explains this belief by our need for order and mean-
ing. Thus he questions two assumptions: that there are transcendent objects,
and that knowledge is merely representation. These assumptions leave unex-
plained both the notion of an object, as preconceived, and the notion of knowl-
edge, as reproducing something preconceived. He proposes to resolve this
problem by explaining both knowledge and its objects as manifestations in
us of will to power. In effect he distinguishes a judgment as representing fact
and as a mental act expressing interest or power.
Nietzsches assumption that any metaphysics must be transcendental and
cognitivist may seem unduly narrow; perhaps indeed he himself might be
said to hold a metaphysics of will or agency. His attack on Christianity is
then curious given that will, along with intellect, is for Christians fundamental
to the nature of both God and human beings. A metaphysics of sheer will is
hard to swallow, however, so far as the world is not only a sort of event or
manifestation of agency but also there.4 Consonantly with his emphasis on
will, moreover, Nietzsche thinks of human beings primarily as agents. Onedifficulty with this is that we are onlookers as well as agents, and interpre-
tation is an occurrence as much as a willed action; hence we can consider
things as instruments to ends other than control.
For Nietzsche, however, at least after Thus Spake Zarathustra, will to power
is our fundamental drive. He calls it the emotion of command;5 thus it is a
passion rather than a psychological faculty. It has a bodily basis, and is stronger
in some individuals than others. Will to power manifests itself as felt ability in
doing and making, as distinct from a sense of achievement in completing an
activity or product. The term power does not here indicate an object of willsuch as power over others; as an intensifier, it implies that one copes well. Hence
will to power in human beings is a passion concerned with coping and control,
and will in the sense of agency is the basis for choice. Such choice implies
voluntary, intentional action, not free will: Nietzsches theory of motivation is
deterministic, though he is interested in feeling not simply as a causal antecedent
of choice but as embodied and expressed in it. At the same time, such a notion
of choice is not voluntarist in the sense that flipping a coin decides an outcome
without effort, but is made amid struggle and strife. Twilight of the Idols (IX.38),for instance, describes choice or freedom as measured . . . by the resistance
which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs.
Will to power in us is opposed to a spectators passivity, sustains a feeling
of life, and gives rise to virtue. Nietzsche is immoralist in some modes, but
in others, and perhaps in the round, he suggests a virtue ethics.6 In his ver-
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
8/30
sion, enhanced vitality overflows into particular virtues: [a] heart [which]
flows full and broad like a river . . . wants to overflow, so that the waters may
flow golden from him and bear the reflection of your joy over all the world.7
If we are to act virtuously, we must have this feeling, and promote valuesthat sustain it. Morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation . . .
spontaneously (GM1, 10). The worth of an action depends on who does
it. . . . It is no longer the consequences but the origin of action which deter-
mines its value (BGE, Part Two, 32). A heightened feeling of life, that is,
strong will to power, brims over into particular virtues, as opposed to either
lacking or bottling up strong passion. One is then socially engaged, congen-
ial, honest, proud (megalopsychos), courageous, generous, just, courteous,
exuberant, and playful; and one has presence, energy, sensibility, self-disci-
pline, and self-sufficiency (284).8 In the case of generosity, for example,
The noble human being aids the unfortunate but not, or almost not, from
pity, but more from a superfluity of power (260). Well-being pours over
into well-doing: one undertakes obligations voluntarily from virtue, and one
is accountable to others for discharging obligations only as having under-
taken them. A difficulty for this theory is that filial obligations, for instance,
do not depend in this way on undertakings. For Nietzsche, however, what
gives meaning and value to ones life is a feeling of vitality both strong enough
to meet its contingency, disorder, and pain and stable enough to persist if itrecurred numberless times.9 Affirming eternal recurrence therefore stabilizes
strong feeling. On this basis one makes the sense one does of ones life.
Emotional debility, by contrast, manifests itself as incoherent self-interpre-
tation: ones will devises ways of defeating itself, and a vicious life is a
botched expression of weak, resentful feeling.
Will to power is controlling, and so also therefore is virtue as manifesting
it. Presumably we can cultivate or neglect virtue, but Nietzsche does not mean
that we control our character in the sense that choosing and acting are said
to be under our control or free; his view of character is determinist.For Hume also the final term in moral explanation is emotion; but unlike
Nietzsche, the moral standpoint is in his view universal. Moral judgments
express sentiments in which [a man] expects all his audience are to concur
with him. He must here, therefore, depart from his private and particular sit-
uation . . . [to] some universal principle.10 For Nietzsche, however, one is
virtuous so far as one expresses feeling particular to oneself. Such an ethic
is particularist in holding that moral obligations, commendations, and so on
are products of virtuous feeling, not simply of mechanical universalizingor deduction from preconceived rules. We grade such feeling on a scale from,
say, excellent to poor or, as Nietzsche says, from strong to weak, not
simply judging the actions right or wrong by universal rules. In a broadly
similar sense, there is no right or wrong literary essay. Thus virtues such
as courage, generosity, and courtesy are analogous to one another and form
32 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
9/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 33
a class in that each is in its own way an expression of strength, that is,
heightened vitality in exercising coping skills.
Aristotle also is particularist in holding that a virtue such as courage depends
on feeling particular to oneself, at a mean between excess and defect thatimplies the thinking (logos) of the practically wise; a courageous act is not
simply a reflexive, automatic deduction from a preconceived rule (though
Aristotle seems to take for granted rules prohibiting murder, adultery, and so
on). The end (telos) of happiness consists in so acting, at least for those
incapable of intellectual wisdom. Thus his ethics is self-regarding like
Nietzsches, though for Aristotle, unlike Nietzsche, ones interests include
those of family, friends, and fellow-citizens. His account, however, is more
structured than Nietzsches, since his virtues are analogous as lying at their
respective means. He also tabulates an analogy between vices as each in its
own way an excess or defect, where Nietzsche has a catchall characteriza-
tion of vices as weak, resentful, and self-defeating. But Nietzsche agrees
that ethics has no metaphysical telos as its foundation, somewhat as Aristotle
rejected Platos foundationalism.
Nietzsches imperative is to choose solitude: he associates the univer-
salist ethics of Utilitarianism and Kant with what is commonly called moral-
ity, which he believes his ethic overcomes. Utilitarians say that actions
are right if they produce the best results for the majority regardless of feel-ings particular to oneself; Nietzsche would protest that generosity, for instance,
is not merely calculated giving, and one ought to keep a promise even if no
one benefits. Kant held that one ought to act from regard for duty, not sim-
ply from feeling; a duty in one situation is a duty in every similar situation,
and thus objective relatively to us. For Nietzsche this takes a third-person,
onlookers view of action. Ones motive then has no meaning of its own that
could explain why one would want to act in this way. One ought to honor
ones promise, for instance, because this obligation matters to oneself in par-
ticular, not simply for the reason that anyone ought to do so.Virtue for Nietzsche thus depends on the irreducible first-person stance of
felt meaning. According to Nagel, we need to distinguish knowledge that a
bat navigates by echo location, for instance, from knowing what it is like to
be a bat.11 For Nietzsche, one could do what one ought for the reason that
one ought without being moral, if the actions lack significance or importance
for oneself in particular. This is not a matter of suiting ones narrowly per-
sonal interest. A virtuous person in a situation requiring her to do something
rather than nothing typically asks what she ought to do given how she in par-ticular feels, not simply what anyone, in the third person, ought to do regard-
less of such feelings. Thus she keeps a promise because fulfilling such an
obligation matters to her even if she does not benefit and if, when called on
to fulfill it, she is disinclined, through weariness, for example. To suppose
that what Nietzsche calls passion is merely such capricious inclination
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
10/30
would imply a contradiction. Thus to say that his ethics is narrowly egoistic
rather than more broadly self-regarding, if such a distinction may be admit-
ted for present purposes, would be too simple.
In some ways, Nietzsches theory resembles intuitionism. The word red,for instance, is descriptive, but a person blind from birth could not appro-
priately request an account either of its content or of why it must apply to
red things. Somewhat similarly, one simply sees that one ought to keep ones
promise, for example. What is particular to oneself on this theory is an intel-
lectual as opposed to a sensory perception. For Nietzsche, however, onefeels
that this obligation matters. Intuitionists fail to explain why one would want
to act on ones moral knowledge, but if, as for Nietzsche, one cares about
ones obligations, such caring explains ones subsequent actions.
Nietzsche often contrasted his position with Christianity yet ignored, or
failed to spot, an affinity between his view that joyful passion for life over-
comes its inherent senselessness and the Christian view that we can be grate-
ful for life despite evil. He enlivens his account of emotional health by
opposing it to religious feeling, which he misrepresents as typically feeble
and morbid. He would have been more accurate if he had said that Christianity
is in his terms healthy, the highest expression of will to power. Natural feel-
ings are for Christianity occasions for rejoicing so far as they are consistent
with respecting persons, that is, they avoid malice, lust, envy, and so on; wecan be glad for life though we tend to feel these things and, in addition, suf-
fer pain and tragedy. Somewhat as for Nietzsche, one welcomes the eternal
recurrence of ones life, such gratitude is a comprehensive felt intention, not
simply a particular natural feeling; though it is also a kind of gift, not sim-
ply chosen, whereas for Nietzsche good character requires heroic effort as
well as choice. The grace of gratitude is also particular to oneself from the
first-person standpoint, where Nietzsche wrongly assumed that Christianity
imposes a universal altruistic ethic regardless of perspective. Nietzsche calls
himself antichrist because he believes, to this extent wrongly, that he opposesChristianity. He further misrepresents Christians not only as debilitated but
also as compensating for their debility by conceiving of moral rules as pro-
hibitions in order to repress passion. In fact, however, moral rules on their
view mark the frontiers of regard for persons, and forgiving others restores
the equality disturbed by trespass. Hence this notion of the person is not milk
and water, as Nietzsche alleges, but offers a means of making sense of moral
rules, and of uniting them under one concept: a unity that is not available to
his theory that recognition of any such rule is simply a voluntary undertak-ing. It also provides a more successful test of what is to count as a virtue if
we suppose, contrary to his self-regarding theory, that virtue at least in part
concerns ones bearing toward others, and thus presupposes relationship with
them. In these respects his ethical theory is then deficient.
One might also question whether virtue must depend on feeling, as virtue
34 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
11/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 35
ethicists maintain. Pride and humility, for instance, seem to be matters of
judgment concerning ones abilities, whether or not one also swells with a
feeling of pride or shrinks with a feeling of humility. As a virtue ethicist,
Nietzsche could reply that pride and humility are tied to what matters ormakes a difference to oneself, and character is in this sense a question of feel-
ing; we are deceived if we suppose that we act on judgment alone. An altru-
ist may believe that she acts on a judgment that the person has inherent value
as an end, not simply from felt interest or inclination to which persons are
mere means, and so monitors her feelings for traces of self-regard; but in so
denying herself she in fact acts from a warped, ascetic kind of self-interested
feeling. His point is not simply that she is deceived or muddled about her
motives, but that judgment, unlike feeling, cannot of itself lead to action. The
reason why altruism is illusion is that, as Aristotle and Hume put it, intel-
lect or reason alone cannot motivate us to act. A problem for Nietzsche,
however, is that while such a judgment is plainly not a feeling, it is nonethe-
less typically accompanied by feeling. The Good Samaritan need not have
felt compassion for the mugged Levite he assisted, but such feeling would
clearly have been appropriate. Indeed, Nietzsche believes that the noble
aid the unfortunate not from altruistic pity but more from a superfluity of
power, and such lack of sympathy is from an altruistic stance small-minded
in a sense, contrary to his intention. This argument cannot be explored ade-quately here, but it would follow that Nietzsches weakness is not that he is
a self-regarding virtue ethicist, but that he is a virtue ethicist at all. If virtu-
ous social feeling presupposes the judgment that the person has inherent
worth, morality is not simply an expression of felt meaning or derived from
it, as Nietzsche assumes. The notion of meaning is therefore less inclusive
than he supposes.
A wider question concerning the relation between judgment and feeling,
which lies beyond the scope of this article is whether interpretation articu-
lates and shapes prior formless, raw emotion, or whether what we feel can-not be separated in this way from what we think we feel, expect to feel, and
so on.
Nietzsches other systematic work, The Birth of Tragedy, can like GMbe
regarded as offering a noncognitivist account of meaning; here he calls such
an account aesthetic. This work is the starting point for his perspectivism.
When it was first published, Nietzsche held that an elite generates an inter-
pretation of the world that is then accepted universally. The world is, as he
later described it, a seething, formless will to power. Only great artists suchas the classical tragedians endure the threat of disorder and, without guide-
lines, create myths that provide a monolithic order. Their orgiastic Dionysian
energy and formalizing Apollinian principle are at odds except when achiev-
ing order in an artwork. This process is emotional and hence inexplicable.
For the slavish majority, meaning depends on making this aesthetic standard
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
12/30
its own.12 In this way, artists redeem our existence from its terror and hor-
ror and provide a socially unifying system of values (TBT, 1872). The aim
is not beauty but coping, through pleasure in the harmony of beauty. Art does
not represent an unintended underlying reality but provides a feeling of orderthat we regard as objective once we forget its origin. Art is therefore what
Nietzsche calls a metaphysical supplement that overcomes nature and
justifies existence. Thus he reduces belief in an objective order to a need
for control.
However, in his introduction to the later, 1883 edition ofThe Birth of
Tragedy, headed Towards Self-Criticism, Nietzsche rejects his earlier view
that values are universal. There are instead various particular perspectives
(452). Previously he held that the process of artistic creation is inexplica-
ble; now an artists ability is no more miraculous than that of an inventor,
scholar, or tactician (HH, 163). The source of value is therefore not the artist
but his work, whose perspective requires us to rethink our lives. Art does not
make a universal ideal of the best in us: rather, we interpret our best accord-
ing to our perspective. Anyone may contribute to the perspective of some tra-
dition or other, and realize the hero concealed within (JW, 78).
Nietzsche therefore first supposed that artists supply a framework of order
and meaning that is objective relatively to the majority in the sense of being
originally unified rather than particular to individuals. But he later supposedinstead that anyone can contribute to our interpretation, and it is now partic-
ular to individuals and their traditions, even when it seems unified. Whether
such perspectives are strong or excellent, or weak and poor, is not deter-
mined simply by arbitrary choice on voluntarist lines, as though Jacks hill
could be Jills pail, or murder wrong for Jack but right for Jill. A perspective
is not merely tied to the individuals need for meaning but takes the form of
a tradition or convention to which one contributes. Its criteria of meaning
and value are not independent of individuals, yet are objective relatively to
them as a tradition is public relatively to its contributors. In a similar way,moral motivation is particular to individuals yet connects with moral judg-
ment as general in form, and Nietzsche shows how these apparently opposed
particular and universal standpoints can be reconciled.
BTand GMtogether reveal an approach that leads to perspectivism. The
term perspective has an optical sense, but Nietzsche does not mean that
there is a world independent of us that is somehow ambiguous, or indeci-
pherable, or that all see differently, as a house can be viewed from different
sides. He means rather that each has a different notion of the world, a nar-rative beguiling enough to be mistaken for truth. These perspectives may be
both incommensurable and compatible, but their fundamental concepts, such
the category of thing, evidently converge. Nietzsches emphasis on per-
spectival diversity and self-directing control makes him more liberal politi-
cally than in other modes, but his wider point is nonpolitical: each individual
36 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
13/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 37
relates to his world from within, not as a neutral observer with a view from
nowhere. At the same time, Nietzsche is not a relativist who claims that sen-
tences are true or false only in relation to the parochial perspective they
express. Thus any perspective can be criticized from another perspective, solong as doing so is not offensive (JW, 335). But no perspective can be
criticized from a supposedly objective standpoint that is above criticism
rather than perspectival: there is no such Archimedean view.
This has particularist ethical implications. Previously the artist was free to
do as he likes: now all are free where justice is done by recognizing their par-
ticular contributions (HH, 300). Once artists gave universal meaning, and
justice was equity: now justice is love with open eyes, giving each his due
from his own perspective. This means treating contributors justly, not per-
sons equally: Nietzsche consistently rejects such equality. We need this sense
of justice to grow in everyone and the instinct for violence to weaken. Further,
justice is tied to self-realization, which can take heroic effort, so that a judg-
ment is an exercise of power, and true if it fits a living perspective; hence tra-
ditions no longer become ossified, but ideas can be reviewed and invented
(GM, 155). This view of justice, as regard for each perspective according
to its strength, suggests an interplay between liberty and equality that partly
subsumes, rather than fully supplants, Nietzsches earlier view that a vision-
ary elite determines the rules of justice.Strength now lies in autonomy as well as passion. Autonomy consists in
freely choosing a personal style that integrates conflicting feelings into an
artistic plan, that is, a sustainable order of pleasures (JW, 290). Ones choice
cannot be justified safely in advance, for instance by preconceived rules; it
involves risk and self-overcoming, as distinct from self-preservation. Since
one shapes ones narrative, it is an artwork; values such as honesty and integrity
are aesthetic, not moral or religious. One develops a life-enhancing structure
of satisfactions by doing what one in particular cares about. Gifted, proud,
integrated, and resolute, ones sustained joy in living is attractive. One doesnot thwart felt concerns and desires but interprets them so as to become
what you are, that is, authentic or strong (D, 448). Autonomous respon-
sibility is also solitary, unlike the relational responsibility of a master or slave,
for instance; Thus Spake Zarathrustra speaks of a solitary rambler on icy
peaks. One detaches oneself from sociocultural forms and ties, including the
language in which one expresses oneself and the criteria of concepts in it, in
order to determine what ones own passions are and express them in a proj-
ect. Autonomy does not imply independence from such forms, since passionsdo not arise in a vacuum and projects involve direct or indirect relationships.
Somewhat similarly, a passion for football, for instance, implies teamwork
and rules; a researcher relies on professional controls, the contributions of
other scholars and a shared specialized vocabulary, and asks others to trust
him.13 Virtue then concerns an individuals relation to herself as self-deter-
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
14/30
mining, true to herself, and so on, not her relation to others; but while self-
interpretation plays a central role in Nietzsches account of virtue, this does
not entail that she can just choose either herself or her character: not only is
good character won by long hard labor, as noted earlier, but she also does notjust choose the ethical language in which she expresses herself and the cri-
teria of concepts in it, as for Humpty Dumpty words mean just what he wants
them to mean.
Although Nietzsche takes an aesthetic rather than a religious view of val-
ues, his shift from a universal to a particularist stance has a religious ana-
logue. The medieval world picture was transmitted downward to the majority
by a priestly hierarchy, and claimed a universality that ruled out dissent; later
the priesthood embraced all believers, whatever their particular experience
and point of view. Nietzsche somewhat similarly argues that an elite, unified
sense of the world leads to social instability and mediocrity; excellence or
virtue and social harmony depend on perspectival diversity. This analogy is
confirmed by his evoking medieval practices such as self-flagellation to attack
altruism as ascetic, though weakened by the fact that both earlier and later
religious doctrines demand self-denying altruism.
Previously, Nietzsche had asserted that culture depends on slavery. He does
not now do so, not simply because he wants individuals to be treated justly
but also because he no longer assumes uniform standards and needs the mas-ter-slave distinction to explain them. His target is still the objectivist, cog-
nitivist theory that moral judgments are true if they fit moral facts such as
that lying, stealing, and killing are wrong. He rejects the theory that these
are facts, as distinct from the nontheoretical belief that the actions are wrong:
we can attach no sense to the notion of such a nonsensory fact or knowl-
edge of it. Indeed objectivists themselves differ in what they call right or
good, reflecting different agendas. The source of difficulty is the assumption
that knowledge claims in general, not only claims concerning ethics and the
self, fit preconceived facts. Will to power is fundamentally a matter of physicsand biology, but here, at the level of human motivation, it concerns knowl-
edge. Human beings feel a need for stable meaning and control and, to meet
this need, create the fiction of things or natural units; thus knowledge claims
reduce to interpretations of experience: I set apart with high reverence the
name ofHeraclitus. When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evi-
dence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected
their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and
unity. . . . [He] will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction.
14
The most dangerous of all errors, Nietzsche says in the Preface toBeyond
Good and Evil, is denying perspective. A piece of knowledge does not sim-
ply fit fact, but serves powers or interests, that is, will to power. There are
no things (they are fictions invented by us).15 The notion of an occurrent
object presupposes its interpretation as an instrument that, according to GM,
38 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
15/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 39
we subsequently name. For instance, what it is for a tree to be is explained
by potentialities for, say, food, shelter, and fuel. We give meaning to judg-
ments about an actual tree by interpreting such potentialities as a group; it is
not as though we could first reproduce the fact of there being a tree symbol-ically in a judgment such as This is a tree and then investigate the predi-
cates. This direction of explanation also means that we first understand any
object in relational terms: for example, wood is first serviceable, then cellu-
lar. Judgments ascribing physical properties depend for their meaning on cer-
tain sorts of relational judgments, and these in turn depend for their meaning
on interpretative coping skills. The same statement may then both correspond
with fact and provide an adequate interpretation, and the questions what the
thing also is in itself, and whether it also exists in itself, apart from inter-
pretation, are misleading. Hence talk of things is fictional or conven-
tional. A routine objection to what we may here loosely call linguistic
conventionalism is that while it may purport to explain the variability of con-
cepts such as east or work, it fails to explain the invariability of logical,
mathematical, and categorial concepts. Nietzsche could possibly reply on
perspectivist lines that such a dichotomy need not be exhaustive: there can
be indefinitely many incommensurable but compatible kinds of linguistic
convention, each with its own cluster of public criteria and type and degree
of rigidity or flexibility. This reply fails, however, so far as invariability isnot a type or degree of rigidity.
Nietzsche claimed to have abolished Being. He does not mean that noth-
ing exists: will to power exists, and is finally all that there is. He is not an
idealist who believes that the mind creates a world from nothing, so to speak;
yet it is down to us that things are serviceable, and thus that they are as they
are. To this extent his view is both controlling and nonvoluntarist at the same
time; in parallel fashion, he holds that words mean what we want them to
mean conventionally rather than voluntaristically. We ordinarily speak of
existence in connection with spatiotemporal, causally related objects, how-ever, not with their prior conditions such as will to power. Thus to say that
an object exists is not to indicate its independence but to express in conven-
tional form our intention to speak of unity, causality, and so on. In this way,
Nietzsche defends ordinary talk of real things against doctrines such as Platos
concerning an unintended metaphysical reality. The theory of will to power
both explains such ordinary talk in the sense of supporting it as useful illu-
sion, and at the same time explains such metaphysics in the contrary sense
of undermining pernicious illusion. Nietzsches aim, however, is not merelyto distinguish useful and pernicious illusions. Even while vindicating ordi-
nary talk, he does not leave it undisturbed, but finally reduces it to a mani-
festation of will to power. Like metaphysics, it attempts to control knowledge
and truth by conceiving of things as existing independently. He therefore
replaces both ordinary and metaphysical ontological assumptions with an
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
16/30
account of their origin, namely, the attempt to objectify Being anthropo-
morphically.16 We can say nothing about the thing itself. . . . A quality exists
for us. . . . Knowing is nothing but working with the favourite metaphors.
But in this case first nature and then the concept are anthropomorphic. . . .We produce beings (Wesen).17 Hence any belief that Being, knowledge, and
truth are independent of art, that is, the art of interpretation, is illusion.18 To
say that there are things with properties and so on makes sense only as mean-
ing that it is as ifthere are such things.19 Talk of things is metaphorical, not
as hinting at their independence, but in conveying the intention to talk in this
way. Nietzsche therefore explains such talk by its force or will to power.
This is not to say that linguistic meaning reduces to rhetoric, but that it is a
matter of conventional naming, as he calls it in GM. Since there is in the
end only will to power, it is in this sense impossible to speak with a straight
face about knowledge of Being or objective truth and reality.
Nietzsches defense of ordinary talk of things might appear to contradict
his view that these are fictions; further, he might be supposed to offer a the-
ory of truth that tries but fails to resolve this contradiction. But there is no
such contradiction if we assume that he aims at a theory of meaning, not of
truth. For he can then be said to take the coherent line that truth is a product
of interpretation, useful for ordinary talk but, philosophically, a fiction rather
than a subject matter to which one could refer literally, or about which onecould intelligibly theorize. Metaphysicians suppose that knowledge is con-
tingent on a foundation of truth; but truth is on the contrary a contingent, not
foundational, notion.
The notion of an unintended reality is a perspective, but one that lacks
meaning: a fiction in the sense of a lie. There could be infinitely many such
interpretations of experience: Plato, Locke, and Kant, for example, all in their
different ways assert an unintended reality. Nietzsche thus abolishes the
notion of reality as the subject matter of metaphysics in Platos mode of read-
ing off, and recasts it as an expression of perspective without the imprimaturof fixed and final truth. His suggestion is then that the criteria of knowl-
edge are aesthetic in that a perception is objective, not illusory, for instance,
if it meets its implicit public criteria, somewhat as we are not misled about
whether a certain painting by Rembrandt really is a work of art. A problem
with the theory so expressed is that it fails to explain the difference between
saying that the painting really is a work of art, not kitsch, for instance, and
that it really is a painting, not, for instance, an illusion or hallucination.
Nietzsche would reply, however, that this distinction has no systematic appli-cation; it concerns only specific cases of deception, and any perspective can
be criticized from the standpoint of another.
Nagel points to a parallel contrast between a sense that what you are doing
is . . . important to you . . . [and that it is] important in a larger sense: impor-
tant, period.20 Such a larger meaning is not only synoptic and final, as
40 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
17/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 41
Nagel indicates: it seems also to have dramatic unity and heightening or ten-
sion, together with qualitative or emotional richness and depth. Thus for a
romantic or pantheist, a landscape, for instance, can seem to convey a mes-
sage that does not quite form itself into words, having what might be calleda quasi-literal symbolic meaning somewhat like a printed page, as distinct
from metaphorical meaning whether as frost patterns look like leaves, for
instance, or as when we say it is as if the landscape has meaning. For
Nietzsche, on the other hand, the world is a disorderly will that surges up in
us as a superabundant energy and feeling of health or wholeness. The narra-
tives we subsequently invent have internal unity and give a deceptive sense
of truth but, as merely perspectival, have no systematic application. Heidegger,
unlike Nietzsche, connects such a feeling of wholeness with intimations of
universal rather than perspectival significance. At the same time, he followed
Nietzsches noncognitivism; whether such meaning should instead be under-
stood cognitively, as romantics, for instance, assume, is a wider question that
cannot be investigated here. Will to power, then, is meaning for Nietzsche
not only in this specialized sense but also in the senses in which we speak
variously of the meaning of art, religion, science, politics, morality, and
the self, as well as of knowledge, language, being or objectivity, and truth.
HEIDEGGER
The theory of meaning that we have attributed to Nietzsche was made more
explicit by Heidegger. We need not, however, examine his debt or expound
his theory in more detail than is required to show where his view of tech-
nology diverges in general from Nietzsches theory of will to power, as the
background to his more specific criticisms.
According to Heidegger, I lack reason to exist in the sense of actualizinga preconceived end, yet try to meet such contingency by actualizing one
(das Man), that is, by acting as anyone would in my circumstances; however,
I am authentic or genuinely myself only so far as I interpret and choose pos-
sibilities particular to myself. So far he and Nietzsche agree, but where
Nietzsche demands solitude, Heidegger assumes social interaction. I cannot
perceive my possibilities except against a background of universal everyday
concerns, so that I have little option but to remain mostly inauthentic. He ties
this notion of self-interpretation to interpretation in general.21 To exist as a
thing is to stand out or emerge into disclosure, through interpretation; to exist
as a human being is to stand out from oneself as interpreter to receive and
express the existence of particular things. Man is being-in-the-world since
subject and object are united in him before they are distinguished (BT, 33).
Heideggers metaphor for the mind is a forest clearing, where light enters
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
18/30
unhindered and surrounding trees and other objects are disclosed; the dis-
closure of things, and of man to whom they are disclosed, are co-original.
Self-interpretation is thus tied to interpretation of things as instruments to
felt concerns; Heidegger calls concern in general care (Sorge). Aristotleattributed Being only by analogy in the various categories of thing, relation,
and so forth,22 but care lets us make a project of ourselves in which every-
thing has its meaning, so unifying the meaning of Being.
We cannot be said simply to believe (or desire, think, and so on) but must,
logically, believe something or other; hence phenomena can have no under-
lying unintended reality. Objects are in the first instance available or handy
for projects (zuhanden), not simply occurrent (vorhanden): judgments ascrib-
ing physical properties depend for their meaning on certain sorts of relational
judgments, and these on interpretative coping skills, that is, on technology.
The term technology might suggest only bridges, computers, and so on,
but Heidegger has in mind techne in general, that is, art or skill as a form of
knowing. Here knowing is not conceived simply as an act of reading off that
is complete at any moment, but as implying a degree of understanding that
can be greater or less, depending as it does on a dynamic process of first
interpreting potentialities instrumentally, then interpreting these instruments
as having their own potentialities for further uses, and so on in a kind of pro-
gressive loop. Experience has a fivefold structure that depends on art andthus on technology (BT, 97104). Tools form a context, such as a factory, to
which products give unity; nature yields material and power that are before
us in leading to their uses; science aims at a theoretical understanding of
material objects; and intersubjectivity, that is, the social organization of labor,
means that there is always someone who knows what a particular tool is for.
This structure concerns production and utility, and lets us cope by distin-
guishing what is and is not serviceable, and the human from the nonhuman
or natural. Thus it provides a spatiotemporal context: objects are near if
available and serviceable, distant if not; they have a past as already mat-tering to us, a future as ahead of us in roles, and are present as disclosed
in tasks. What is initially indeterminate is assigned a role: how things such
as leather or shoes are depends on our interest in there being such things,
that is, as Heidegger says, on the meaning of their Being.
Technology lets things be as instruments, much as will to power does
for Nietzsche; but for Heidegger, unlike Nietzsche, things are not reducible
to instrumentality. Our tendency to reduce things to mere means is itself an
expression of will to power, and we need to rescue a sense of the being ofthings from this tendency. For instance, most of us do not know how com-
puters work, and so we have power without relating to them as objects over
against us. The premodern view, derived from Aristotle, was less subject to
this tendency. Artifacts such as tools were only means to ends determined
independently; for instance, money has no value inherently but only as a
42 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
19/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 43
means to other goods.23 Thus preindustrial technology could reveal the struc-
ture of means and ends. The danger is now that the distinction between means
and ends disappears in technological systems.24 Technology has become self-
referential, having a role only for rational organization, so that ends are sub-sumed to means and instrumentality. The problem is control with a view not
to utility but to power. Nietzsche failed to see that such control presents a
problem. Technology enframes or gathers together and arranges nature
while rejecting the deviant and recalcitrant. This involves a will to mastery
that thwarts and conceals rather than discloses the Being of things and of
human beings (QT, 300ff.): Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by
[as] standing-reserve [and] no longer stands over against us as an object [but]
disappears into objectlessness (QT, 298300). For example, the system of
air travel is from the technological standpoint a process of control. Aircraft
are not objects in their own right; similarly, the passengers merely so to speak
fuel the system and are not subjects in their own right. One may perhaps
enjoy the sort of happiness that consumption and control can yield, but one
has no basis for a goal or narrative that could give a sense of oneself.
Technological control is, in other words, overbearing. We are at our most vul-
nerable nowadays, encountering ourselves as essentially meaningless and
merely anxious about what we are. Nowhere does man today any longer
encounter himself, that is, his essence (QT, Krell, 308). Yet this anxiety isour saving power since it indicates our plight, and we can counteract will
to mastery by reflecting on our role in technology. We are not mere means
within a technological process but have a hand in it; conversely, we can inter-
pret wood, for instance, as supplying cellulose to make paper (299300), yet
it is not down to us that wood has this potentiality. Further, it is not simply
down to us if we interpret nature for our purposes, but also a potentiality in
us to do so. Thus we can be open to the meaning of things and of human exis-
tence, which are then illuminated and articulated, and we are enlightened.
The problem with technology is psychological, and only indirectly philo-sophical, in that we are disposed by the history of Western philosophy since
Socrates to think of things simply as instruments (QT; also OWA, 16266).
Plato explained changeable ordinary things as copying their eternally pres-
ent Forms; for an object to be depends on an unintended realm of Being. This
tendency to objectify Being as inert presence was modified by Descartes
so that for something to be means for it to be present to the human subject.25
For scientists, the role of the human subject was then to extend knowledge
in order to win benign control of nature. In this way we come to reduce Beingand knowledge to instrumentality; Platos defense of Being led to its aboli-
tion. Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche is right to see Western philosophy as
finally nihilistic, but wrong to see Platos aim of defending Being as mis-
guided.26 Nietzsches perspectives merely express psychological attitudes,
whether concerning worldviews (Weltanschauungen) such as a particular
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
20/30
Dasein might assume, or systems of particular historical epochs such as
Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, and so forth. That is, philosophi-
cal systems as perspectives are what Heidegger calls ontic, not as Nietzsche
supposes ontologies to which his reduction could apply. We escapeNietzsches nihilism by providing an alternative foundational account of
Being to Platos,27 namely, that technology provides not only control but also
truth in the sense of phenomenological disclosure of Being (aletheia). Thus,
for instance, water is experienced as wet, even though this experience is
inseparable from its instrumentality as thirst-quenching, lubricating, and so
forth. Such a notion of truth as disclosure contrasts with truth as independ-
ent of the human subject.28
We saw that for Nietzsche will to power and eternal recurrence have no
telos, but subsume ends as mere means, and are in this nihilistic sense cir-
cular. Yet willing eternal recurrence makes truthfulness or integrity, creativ-
ity and joy, possible, and thus the annihilation of nihilism. If his theory of
will to power is applied consistently, however, these ends also are subsumed
as mere means, and in this respect their claim to overcome such nihilism
is not sustained. Heideggers reading therefore fits better than Nietzsches
insistence on integrity and creativity might seem to suggest. Heidegger agrees
that things are means, but not that they are mere means. Nietzsche reduces
talk of the Being of things to instrumentality, but we cannot talk about a worldat all, even to say as Nietzsche does that it is metaphor and illusion, without
an interpretative structure of ends, and in general of things, in so to speak
their own right. Nietzsche does not reduce Being and truth to interpreted
meaning but to meaninglessness.
Five detailed comments on Nietzsche arise from Heideggers discussion
of technology. These concern truth, the categories, existence, and choice.
First, the process of interpretation connects us to things as intentional objects
and lets us say what it means for them and us to exist. For both writers, such
a process implies Becoming as distinct from Being. But for Nietzsche,Becoming is prior to Being: the process of interpretation makes talk of objects
provisionally possible, but finally impossible. For Heidegger, on the other
hand, the process of Becoming does not make Being only provisionally pos-
sible, but lets beings or things finally be. In Aristotles terminology, but revers-
ing his direction of explanation, the potentiality to be a thing makes its
actualization possible. Nietzsche tried to reduce Being-talk to a mythopoeic
psychological and physiological process; but if each particular thing is merely
a phase, so to speak, in a process of control, nothing can be said to exist inits own right, and true-or-false judgments about things are impossible. Thus
will to mastery has no grasp of Being or truth. What Nietzsche thinks is mere
talk formed by felt interests, for Heidegger concerns what there is, namely,
the Being of objects disclosed in a world not simply of our making. Mind
and world clarify each other in a hermeneutic circle of what he calls objec-
44 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
21/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 45
tive subjectivity.29 For instance, it is not down to us that a stone is service-
able as a makeshift hammer, though it is not a hammer unless we so inter-
pret it. How we read the world is not how it is, like interpreting a Rorschach
inkblot. Tautologically, the hammer cannot be said to exist as a hammer beforeit so exists; yet we do not bring hammers and computers into existence out
of nothing. Thus Heidegger is not an idealist who holds that to be is to be
perceived, and that the notion or narrative of the world is simply a yarn
spun as it were from nothing by the mind and wrongly credited with truth. 30
There must be something to interpret prior to our interpreting, a potentiality
not of our making and not fully under our control. Nietzsche fails to draw
this distinction: will to power has two aspects at once, that which we inter-
pret and the activity of interpreting it. For Heidegger, on the other hand, we
free something that is a potential tool to become an actual tool, and products,
nature, theory, and social organization for their actualization.
Up to a point, Heideggers argument follows roughly Nietzschean lines.
Aristotle held that the actuality of a thing is its end (telos), fulfilling and thus
explaining the potentiality to be that thing. For Heidegger as for Nietzsche,
the reverse is the case: potentiality, not actuality, explains the thing. We can
understand things by means of the art (techne) of interpreting and so dis-
closing their possibility or potentiality. What it is for a tree to be is explained
by potentialities for, say, food, shelter, and fuel; their actualization as fruit,planks, and firewood derives from these (speaking logically rather than
causally). We do not first picture, as it were, or reproduce symbolically, the
fact that this is a tree in the judgment, This is a tree, and then investigate
the potentialities for fruit and so on. Rather, by interpreting a certain set of
potentialities as instrumental we give meaning to judgments concerning the
actual tree. Hence producing meaning is prior to reproducing facts in judg-
ments. For Heidegger, however, such an account leads to a notion of irre-
ducible truth, whereas Nietzsche understands truth reductively and finally
eliminates it; thus his theory is incomplete. Indeed any argument that mean-ing is prior to truth has to fail, since these are equiprimordial. In other words,
even if Nietzsche explains the sense in which a particular hammer, for instance,
might really be an artwork in some genre, this is not what is meant by say-
ing that it really is an object as distinct from an illusion. Heidegger in effect
escapes this sort of charge since, on his view, how a stone can be a hammer
for certain purposes is not as for Nietzsche simply down to us but, as he puts
it, withdrawn from us.
Similarly, Heidegger broadly agrees that truth in the case of occurrent mate-rial objects is a property of judgments that correspond with fact. For this test
to apply, such judgments must already have a meaning, disclosed in under-
standing objects as available. For instance, I do not need to thematize a cer-
tain hammer as an object unless it breaks and needs to be repaired. Its felt
meaning, as meeting needs, is a prior condition of rational assumptions and
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
22/30
procedures concerning the fit of judgments about it with fact. The pointing-
out which assertion does is performed on the basis of what has already been
disclosed (BT, 199). This is not to say that the reverse does not hold in an
oblique way: if we are to understandp, for instance, the statement This isa hammer, there must be a degree of agreement as to whetherp is true.
(Wittgenstein makes this sort of point in Philosophical Investigations, 24142.)
But the same statement may then function both as a judgment and as an inter-
pretation, and it is misleading to ask what the thing is in itself, and whether
it also exists in itself, aside from appearances.31 But Heidegger goes on to
maintain in effect that Nietzsche wrongly confuses the question of how a
judgment such as This coat is yellow is formed, that is, of the conditions
of its having meaning, with the question whether it is true or false. Nietzsches
reductive theory implies that the perception of color, for instance, is illusory
because it relies on interpretation, and the distinction between truth and illu-
sion applies to specific cases, not systematically. Heidegger contends in reply
that the fact that I can experience an illusion, such that it is false to say that
I see a yellow coat, does not mean that it is ultimately false, a fiction or mere
convention to speak of yellow coats, or generally of colored three-dimen-
sional objects.
The second comment concerns categorial structure. For Nietzsche, will
to power is inherently undifferentiated, and objects as natural units derivefrom it, just as they reduce to it. A difficulty he faces is that unity or self-
identity seems to be underived and irreducible. As Heidegger puts it, Over
against appearance being is the enduring . . . the always identical (IM,
202). On Heideggers theory, by contrast, interpretation discloses the mean-
ing of an orange, say, as a natural unit that is also edible, but does not make
it either edible or a unit. Thus the unity is underived, and interpretation lets
us understand the underived identity of individual things. In Heideggers
terms, the categories of availability and occurrence are equiprimordial with
such identity, so that it is interdependent with but not derived from them.Heidegger therefore explains the structure that experience must have if it
is to be intelligible, in accordance with the categories of thing, prop-
erty, relation and so on. As he says, The goal of all ontology is a doc-
trine of categories (IM, 187). He does not aim to provide a complete list
of categories, but simply to establish an irreducible categorial structure.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, explains categorial structure provisionally
but finally undermines it.
Third, one could also extrapolate from Heideggers theory to reply in asimilar way to Nietzsches treatment of existence or Being. Nietzsche explains
the existence of things by their origin in the process of Becoming, that is,
will to power. A difficulty is that existence seems underived and irreducible.
In Heideggers words, Over against becoming being is permanence . . . the
already-there (IM, 202). This problem is compounded for Nietzsche if he
46 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
23/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 47
assumes that the process of will to power exists, since its being is then log-
ically prior to its becoming: Art as will to semblance is the supreme con-
figuration of will to power. But the latter, as the basic character of beings, as
the essence of reality, is in itself that Being which wills itself to be Becoming.32
Thus Nietzsches account of things as fictions may or may not tell us some-
thing about what is meantby saying that things exist, but it fails to explain
what it is for them to exist, so far as that concerns what we must necessar-
ily, not simply conventionally, say if we are to say anything at all.
Heidegger makes these points concerning truth, the categories, and exis-
tence without offering extended supporting argument, at least in their imme-
diate context. One might wonder whether in that case his own doctrine of
unified meaning escapes Nietzsches reduction. Further, Nietzsche replaces
a nihilistic response to contingency with an affirmative response, so sus-
taining his reduction. Thus his strategy for dealing with a nihilistic attitude
is also an attitude, that is, the same kind of thing, on the principle that it takes
a thief to catch one, so to speak. In these terms, Heideggers strategy seems
less effective: he adds a different sort of thing, namely, a doctrine of cate-
gories, in order to avoid Nietzsches reduction (on the ground that we can-
not conceive of a world, even as contingent, without them).
If all of this suggests a standoff, however, the dispute does not quite end here:there are also doubts about the reductive form of Nietzsches argument. For
Nietzsche, our ascribing objective authority to morality is caused by debil-
ity; hence any such authority is illusory. Similarly, the belief that things are
independent of us is an illusion explained by our need for order and control.
These claims assume that a causal explanation for a belief invalidates it by
reducing the explanandum to the explanans. In some such way, a mans claim
that whisky is good for him might be redefined as no more than an expres-
sion of his desire to drink, that is, as an oblique comment on himself, not the
comment on whisky it might seem. But a difficulty with this is that a correctcausal explanation need not either invalidate or validate a belief; in that case,
there is no ground for reducing the belief to its explanation. Being motivated
by a desire to drink does not make a mans belief that whisky is good for him
either fanciful, if, for example, alcohol assists tired heart muscles, or alter-
natively true, if, for instance, he is an alcoholic. Indeed reductionism as a
form of argument is self-defeating, since eliminating the explanandum also
by implication eliminates the explanans, there being nothing then that does
any explaining. Whether or not these objections are conclusive, there does
seem to be a residual problem between Nietzsche and Heidegger that is wider
than their stated arguments.
We conclude with the fourth comment, which concerns choice. Disclosure
depends on intentional acts, and Heidegger seems to have inferred wrongly
inBeing and Time that this involves the will or choice. He went on to regard
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
24/30
disclosure as instead an event or occurrence (Ereignis), unlike an action that
is willed or chosen.33 His account of meaning here is often described as non-
voluntarist, but Heidegger does not mean that choice determines character
without labor so much as that choice is now uncontrolling. We do not seizethe meaning of Being and wrest it from everyday prattle as inBeing and
Time; instead, we wait with docility and listen attentively to Being. His
declaration that Only a god can save us is not religious but metaphorical:
in some such way, Plato did not will his profound effect but was inspired.34
Heidegger concludes that Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shep-
herd of Being (LH, 221). We can become less controlling by using the pre-
Socratics and poets such as Hlderlin to illuminate the world and bring the
meaning of Being into resolution (Entschlossenheit) in the sense perhaps of
optical focus; though the fine arts and similar activities are marginal and
cannot easily become the focus of attention in a technological age. Thus
Heidegger distanced himself further from the controlling will to power that
he found in Nietzsche.
Heidegger assumed that his general theory is connected somehow with his
social and political beliefs, and some commentators look between the lines
throughout his writings for the National Socialist agenda that is explicit in
places (such asIM, 42, 50). We need now to look at these beliefs as the back-
ground to his turn (Kehre) toward an uncontrolling account of technology.One early anxiety about technology was that factory workers were in effect
an extension of machines; today employees are often defined as human
resources, for instance, and thus by implication treated like resources such
as raw materials and equipment. Heidegger thought that in such ways our
humanity or, as he said, our spirituality is distorted, marginalized, and ignored.
A fuller discussion of his view might well consider whether there is one prob-
lem here or various sorts of problems, some perhaps more theoretical than
others. Some questions might well be political, concerning pay and condi-
tions of work, for instance, or the right not to be dismissed unfairly; othersmanagerial, concerning, for instance, damage to an employee in her relations
with colleagues and clients by arbitrarily changing her role. Heidegger, how-
ever, assumed that there is one general kind of problem and, initially, that it
is political, though having to do with what we now call moral education rather
than with rights and the like in employment. He upheld the folk values of
crafted implements and rustic cosiness (Gemtlichkeit), suggesting that indus-
trial rationalization destroys the sense of an enduring community and place
with a common language and history.
35
He meant that ethnic Germans couldlead mankind back to true spirituality. (Ironically, this folksy reaction soon
found itself industrializing ways of killing people, in battle and camps.)
Human meaning is in any case essentially historical, not Archimedean; accord-
ingly, a certain nostalgia is true to civilized values and conserves the best in
us. Indeed in harking back to the pre-Socratics he went beyond nostalgia;
48 DAVID CAMPBELL
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
25/30
NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, AND MEANING 49
and his attempts to ground such meaning historically in language were often
weakened by overstretched etymology, as he liked to call it.
National Socialism replaced the conservative aim of humanity with the
reactionary means of a deceptively comforting, in fact heartless, nostalgiafor German values. But having sought a third way (or ThirdReich)
between the technological cultures of capitalism and communism (3739,
4546), Heidegger distanced himself from this project. It is not clear whether
he did so because it brought out the least truthful and worst in many people,
contrary to his intention. In any event, he now wrote about bridges, for exam-
ple, without bias either against the motorway sort or in favor of the rustic
sort (BDT, 330). Technological progress cannot be undone, and improves the
human lot in many ways. He accepted also that folk values are not easily
recovered, given the dominance of economic thinking, with its lucrative will
to mastery. (Even nostalgia is now sold as heritage.) If high-rise flats delete
a sense of place and community, the Black Forest farmhouse was not a suit-
able model for postwar reconstruction, and he focused on the homelessness
not of Germans but of man as interpreter standing out from things in the
world (339). The problem of sustaining our humanity in the face of technol-
ogy now had an apolitical, uncontrolling solution.
Heidegger might seem ambivalent in favoring first preindustrial but later
industrial technology, and first a political but later an apolitical solution. Heremains unequivocal, however, in believing, like Nietzsche, that technolog-
ical interests, powers, and processes are fundamental to knowledge, and,
unlike Nietzsche, that what is known on this basis cannot be reduced to them.
His attempt to reaffirm the unity of interpretative meaning included, for a
time at least, a reaction against cultural diversity in line with National Socialist
repression of dissent, which contrasts with Nietzsches perspectivism; at the
same time, if we assume that National Socialism assimilates truth to politi-
cal power, Heidegger could not have supported this movement consistently
with denying in this way (as I suggest he did) that truth is in general reducibleto power. For present purposes therefore, I shall assume that his political
tastes and character do not ultimately affect his general theory, while recog-
nizing that this is disputed.36
Being and Time distinguished five elements in experience that give it an
instrumental structure: tools, products, nature, theory, and intersubjectivity.
Heideggers later work, however, speaks of a noninstrumental fourfold
structure.37 The formal art of engineering, for instance, lets us build a bridge
as a means to cross a river, but also points to the informal arts by which weset up the bridge as a landmark. As Heidegger says, the bridge gathers
places in a region, so disclosing the surrounding world in which we find
our orientation. This gathering explains the unity implied in the notion of
a world, not simply the metric separation and layout of objects. He describes
these four corners poetically: the bridge gathers together the rivers banks;
8/3/2019 Nietzsche, Heidegger And Meaning
26/30
the heavens from which the water comes; men to whom it gives passage;
and gods, sometimes supposedly there in effigy, for instance, at a road-
side calvary (323ff.). These four elements indicate related foci of meaning
that concern us aside from consumption and control. The bridge also has arole more fundamental than to mark a point in geometric space, namely, as
a landmark that opens a place and apportions space by orientation to var-
ious ends that are not merely quantitative (143ff.). Indeed space, as mere geo-
metric extension, contains no spaces and no places. We never find in it any
locations, that is, things of the kind the bridge is (333).
The fourfold does not simply supersede the fivefold: Heidegger does not
now deny a role for instrumental thinking. But our relation to the world is
primarily a matter of what he calls dwelling. Knowing is the art by which
one orientates oneself, and this was a matter inBeing and Time of interpret-
ing instruments, but now of dwelling (OWA, 16266). Such dwelling, or
sense of place, is an event of opening (Ereignis); a free gift, not an aim of
action, regulatory ideal, reward, or seal of approval. Here meaning is not
willed and controlling, but thinking is thanking: we can be grateful for our
potentiality for interpreting things and for their potential for interpretation,
not merely active in so interpreting them as Nietzsche supposes. A sense of
place depends on art but lacks the will to mastery that accompanies arts.
Dwelling cannot be reduced to the function of buildings within, say, a com-mercial framework, or to architectural styles or other cultural forms. Rather,
it involves various sorts of interest or end: social and economic ends such as
accommodation; topography, which determines, for instance, where a bridge
is to cross a river; historical community, to which the universal notion of
man is now central, not simply the local and ethnic nation; and religion,
even when unspecific, or pushed wholly aside (331).
An account of such religion would require further discussion, but Heidegger
evidently has in mind some notion of divinity, that is, something more specif-
ically religious than, say, contemplation of nature. This divinity could not beequated with Being as a sort of general, immaterial object, a notion that he
rejects. For those who believe that man is Gods image, however, his account
of the human subject as tied intentionally to objects, rather than detached
from them on Cartesian lines, is perhaps a guide.
A sense of place thus implies a single environment linking physical, social,
historical, and religious concerns, aside from control and consumption. Such
holism does not make Heidegger totalitarian since it concerns dwelling, not
control in the context of either political dissent or moral responsibility.Heideggers point