Whither Is God? Specters of Nihilism in 20th Century Continental Thinking

A Philosophy Honors Thesis

Dedicated to the ‘Turin Horse,’ whose brutal whipping by his master — as legend has it — ultimately drove Nietzsche insane.

“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.… Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!”

— Arthur Rimbaud, 1871

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche published The Gay Science, and with a single utterance, irrevocably altered the meaning and trajectory of the Western philosophical tradition. “God is dead,” Nietzsche writes, “and we have killed him.” The announcement of this cataclysmic event — the murder of God at the hands of humanity — marks one of the earliest articulations of what has since become known as “nihilism,” a radical and persistent self-undoing in the very fabric of Western thought. Colloquially, of course, nihilism remains a common enough element of our cultural vernacular. Hurled as an epithet at self-serving politicians and surly teenagers, or deployed for comic effect in films such as the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” nihilism has come to be used as little more than a linguistic foil. It has become a way of exaggerating, pointing towards an extreme valuelessness in order to highlight its relation to a reality. In this way, we frequently disregard or forget the more complex philosophical paths which nihilism has traveled since Nietzsche’s pronouncement, neglecting the extent to which it has inflected contemporary discourses, both within the rarefied and dusty corners of philosophy departments, and far beyond them.

Although nihilism constitutes a philosophical problem which has been predominantly traced back to Nietzsche, this is not to say that its epistemic problems and existential anguishes are only articulable in reference to him. Nihilism can invite an intoxicating skepticism, arising in those moments when we wonder about what is real or true, when the world shakes off our tenuous grip on what we thought was a pre-given, stable and fully articulated system of meaning. What makes any of our actions right, or true, or moral, or meaningful at all? Why are we here, stranded in a place that seems to persistently refuse, reject, or remain wholly indifferent to our ways of understanding it? Why is the world any way at all? Why this world and not some other? Experiences which confront us with these questions also confront us with a choice: will we hear the questions in all their complexity? Or will we turn aside from them back towards the world we think we know?

In this project, it will be my goal to listen to questions like these — like the ones posed by Nietzsche’s utterance — in order to better understand the radical consequences his words entail. The alleged death of god, an event Nietzsche believed to signal the demise of metaphysics and the end of divinely ordered truth and morality, fails to be sufficiently understood when we ignore the grave problems presented by Nietzsche’s claim. How are we to move through the world if we do not know how to find a transcendent truth or meaning in our experiences? If we do not know how to objectively determine how we ought to behave towards one another? If there is no cosmologically ordained or natural reason for being at all? Nietzsche felt and thought such questions with an astonishing intensity, and for those of us willing to engage with them today, his words ring poignantly in our ears. As he writes in The Gay Science, “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? … Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?” The answers to these questions are hardly forthcoming: as poet Rainer Maria Rilke emphasizes, the angels will not heed our cries, and the human on its own finds that the promises of Christian morality and Western metaphysics can no longer be counted upon to ground a transcendent sense of meaning. We cannot give ourselves our own ground, re-chain the earth to the sun, or resurrect God from the grave. We can try, yet our attempts are short-lived, contingent, and persistently fail to be binding.

Nietzsche presents these concerns desperately, frequently, and in ever-shifting form throughout the myriad texts he produced in his lifetime. As the thinker who spoke most forcefully in opposition to the metaphysical delusions of the Western philosophical tradition, and who thereby laid bare the possibility for the contemporary terrains of poststructural and postmodern thought, Nietzsche is indispensable to any historical-philosophical investigation which asks after the long shadow nihilism has cast over the West. In this inquiry, it will be my goal to ask after precisely this shadow, wondering how we might seek to know, find meaning, and act ethically without appealing to transcendent ideals. Turning first to Nietzsche, then to Martin Heidegger, and finally to Emmanuel Levinas, I will track nihilism’s evolution through these thinkers and into the era in which we find ourselves. This is also already to say, of course, that nihilism hardly limits itself to the work of a few writers, to an ideological posture, or even to the temporal boundedness of a single experience. Nihilism fulfills that which was latent in the metaphysical tradition from its beginning, and as such constitutes the ongoing phenomenon of our inability to ground meaning, to locate God, and to get beyond metaphysics in order to develop an ethics that is not itself haunted by the contingency of nihilism. Nietzsche alone describes nihilism as variously as “a psychologically necessary stage,” a “convalescence,” “the great liberation,” “our kind of laziness,” a “catharsis,” a “hermeneutical disease,” a “turning point,” a “great sickness,” and a “great health.”

It is worth noting that this project deploys a liberal interpretive method which draws broadly from the works of these three thinkers. In selecting material for this project, I have tried to work from a wide array of Nietzschean, Heideggerian, and Levinasian texts in order to most effectively illustrate nihilism’s pervasive and ongoing influence. Although my analysis attends minimally to chronology, historical circumstance, and the overall cohesion of each thinker’s philosophy, I have selected this approach with the intention of focusing on the specific struggle of each of these thinkers to situate meaning, truth, and ethics in the absence of transcendent, Archimedean, or divinely ordered grounds. Thus, the versions of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas made use of in this project in no way exhaust the infinite richness to be found in their original texts and in the worldly events that governed their production. Instead, this project seeks to identify the through-lines which allow us to understand these thinkers as moments and as interlocutors in the enigmatic unfolding of an intellectual history, whose trajectory can be seen to move (for the time being) towards an immanent and anti-foundationalist approach to ethics, epistemology, and ontology.

Although Nietzsche, in The Will To Power, characterizes himself as “the first perfect nihilist of Europe,” and the first to “leav[e] it behind, outside himself,” from our historical vantage point, we can readily see that nihilism is not so easily left behind. Martin Heidegger’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s nihilism carried its radical negativity forward into the twentieth century where it continued to be appropriated by French poststructural thinking in particular, and postmodern thinking more broadly. This process of appropriation and transformation — beginning in the aftermath of the profoundly nihilistic events of World War II — continues to this day. Nihilism’s contemporary forms (Trumpism, technological alienation, postmodern anomie, and a kind of pre-apocalyptic cultural climate, to name a few), distant though they may seem from Nietzsche’s writing, nevertheless articulate those same traces and forces identified almost a century and a half ago. But this inquiry already goes ahead of itself. In order to understand these contemporary forms, it will be necessary to first delve into Nietzsche’s works, attempting to grasp the meaning of God’s death as he understood it before we can ask about what it might mean for us to kill God.

In asking the question ‘whither is God?’, rather than aim to recuperate what is essentially irrecuperable, I instead intend to wonder about what it might mean for humanity to be capable of killing God, as Nietzsche claims. Insofar as God constitutes an access onto truth, morality, and meaning, to suggest that we might be capable of killing God would already be to posit beings as contextualizing Being. That is, to paraphrase Heidegger, Nietzsche already claims that beings — all existing beings — determine, generate, and produce actuality itself by themselves. This project however, seeks to preserve possibilities beyond this formulation. Might it be that Being — all of existence itself — stands in excess of beings, generating actuality both in itself and out from itself? Or, to complicate matters further, might it be that each being in fact bears the trace of an uncontainable infinity in excess even of Being? To put these same questions differently, might God not be dead after all but instead in an as yet indeterminate state? Has God abandoned us? Absconded with transcendent value itself and left us to our immanence? What would it mean for us to find God? Might it not destroy us to ultimately know God? Or, is God (or are gods) already here, surrounding us now, moving in the air we breath? I have no quick answers for these questions, but have allowed them to guide my thinking in this project. They provide an aporetic defense against the dangers of acquiescing too quickly to any one way of thinking in the face of nihilism.

In Part I of the first section, I discuss the immediate implications of Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead in terms of the end of the Christian interpretation of the world. In Part II, I turn to Nietzsche’s affirmation of life as an aesthetic phenomenon, and the problems that our wholly immanent access to truth presents for interpreting our experience. In Part III, I undergo a close reading of passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, elucidating Nietzsche’s concepts of the Superman (Übermensch), the will to power, and the eternal recurrence of the same in order to lay the ground for Martin Heidegger’s response to Nietzsche.

I: Friedrich Nietzsche

Part I: Truthfulness, Mendaciousness, and the Death of God

With the publications of The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, and The Gay Science one decade later, Nietzsche secured for himself a prominent and antagonistic place in philosophical history. Styling himself in opposition to the rigidity and aridity of Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche fell in love with the pessimistic philosophies of Schopenhauer and Wagner before breaking from his teachers and from the norms of philosophical thought and method in order to speak the words which would make him famous: “God is dead…and we have killed him.” Though Nietzsche discusses the meaning of these words in — arguably — all of his texts, in few other passages is their radicality and subversiveness as apparent as in the parable of the madman. Putting his philosophy in the mouth of an ostensible lunatic, Nietzsche illustrates the phenomena of God’s death and our resistance to its comprehension:

‘How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.’ Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I have come too early,’ he said then; ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.’

This madman, who speaks of the murder of God and who fails to be understood by his listeners because he has ‘come too early,’ already resembles Nietzsche. During his lifetime, few thinkers ever responded to Nietzsche’s works, and his proclamation of God’s death would fail to be sufficiently heard for decades. But what does it mean to speak of such a deed “still more distant from [humanity] than the most distant stars — and yet [humanity has] done it themselves”? What does it mean for Nietzsche himself to be out on the edge of this event, undergoing it as a “convalescence”?

Nietzsche understood this deed, this divine murder, to consist in a newfound untenability of belief in the Christian moral interpretation of the world. Crucially, this untenability does not arise from an unconsidered skepticism of religion, or an unwillingness to believe, but from precisely its opposite. He writes “we outgrew Christianity, not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close, even more because we grew [i.e. developed] out of it. It is our strict and over-indulged piety itself that today forbids us still to be Christians.” Paradoxical though this may seem, Christianity’s interpretation of the world fails for Nietzsche because it turns against itself, because its drive for piety, honesty, and truthfulness no longer allows it to believe in itself. It is because Christianity values truthfulness and the pursuit of truth that the devoted Christian ultimately subjects his own faith to a critical gaze, “discover[ing] its teleology, its partial perspective.” This recognition, that Christianity and the interpretations it has spawned rest on decidedly shaky human grounds rather than on the solidity and substantiality of God becomes “a stimulant” to nihilism. That is, an awareness arises of the extent to which all that we should like to consider true and all that has been carefully cultivated as true cannot possibly hold up to scrutiny. We make the “pathological generalization” from our suspicion that the Christian interpretation has failed that all interpretations of the world are false, “that there is no truth, that there is no absolute nature of things,” morality, or reason for being at all. We enter into nihilism.

Devastating though this may be, perhaps one of the most insidious effects of the newfound vacuity of Christian interpretations consists in the extent to which the impossibility of truth affronts our long-cultivated need for it. If we had not had this need ‘bred’ into us, this realization of the “inveterate mendaciousness” of Christian morality would not cut as deeply, would not be quite so heartbreaking. Nietzsche insists that “the development of mankind has made us so delicate, sensitive, and ailing that we need the most potent kinds of cures and comforts – hence arises the danger that man might bleed to death from the truth he has recognized.” Here, Nietzsche’s use of the word “truth” demands clarification. Although we have just seen that nihilism constitutes the impossibility of truth, what would it mean to recognize nihilism as a truth? It would mean to recognize it as holding sway, as a non-orientation in which ‘truth’ (in the metaphysical and Christian sense) cannot emerge. Nevertheless, honesty still bears meaning for us. It means “that you are strict with your heart, that you look down on ‘beautiful feelings,’ that you make your conscience from every yes and no!” If our conscience can no longer bear to say yes to the Christian interpretation, however, how are we to find an orientation we can affirm? What could possibly offer up a cure or comfort after we have undermined Christian morality and murdered God? How can we possibly hope to heal ourselves, emerging from our convalescence in order that we might know the truth, and know the difference between right and wrong? Nietzsche is clear that Christian morality “cannot be replaced,” that humanity cannot resurrect God after his murder. So what are we to do?

Here, it becomes important to remember that although humanity has murdered God, the news of this event has not yet reached our ears. This is to say, even Nietzsche acknowledges that despite his recognition of God’s death and all that this entails he too remains trapped in the enduring historical thrall of Christian hermeneutics and Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics.  By way of an example, although Nietzsche writes in praise of “physics” in The Gay Science, in the sense of a science of “necessity” which grasps what is necessary in the world we live in without reference to a divine order, Nietzsche suggests that even “the question ‘Why science?’ leads back to the problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are ‘not moral’?” If the scientist finds the drive towards their work in a desire to know the truth, in a “will to truth,” wouldn’t the ‘truths’ produced by this scientist still fail the litmus test provided by what it means for God to be dead? That is, these ‘truths’ necessarily “affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this ‘other world’ — look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?” Nietzsche seems torn here. On the one hand, he wants to affirm his “total character[ization]” of this de-deified world as “in all eternity chaos — in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.” On the other hand, he wants to say that “physics” — as a practice which asks after what is necessary in order to inform an intellectual conscience “behind your ‘conscience’” — is practicable in order that we “become the best learners and discoverers of all that is lawful and necessary in the world.”

Despite this seemingly contradictory condemnation of science and appraisal of physics, Nietzsche is crystal clear in situating the source of this tension: “even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.” We can see that although God’s murder means the self-undoing of categories of truth, knowledge is not instantaneously obliterated or annulled by this undoing. Our habits are too ingrained, too firmly attached to be so efficiently severed. Insofar as God stands in for the Aristotelian bulls-eye, for the origin (arche) and purpose (telos) of human life, the death of God does not mean the end of necessity or the advent of a radical indeterminism, but rather the loss of the ground for our orientation in the world. Our most highly adulated mechanism for comprehending necessity and our place in the cosmos has vanished.

Nietzsche’s claim that all transcendent truths can no longer be more than mendaciousness rings more despairingly now. By recognizing in ourselves what now “appear to us as needs for untruth” without being able to rid ourselves of these needs, we enter into the brutal “antagonism” where we are “not to be allowed any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves.” Our knowledge is not gone, but it is fundamentally altered by our realization that it can be little more than “aesthetic anthropomorphism,” that it is in fact no longer fundamental (fundamentum meaning ‘ground,’ or ‘base’) at all. However, Nietzsche cautions against understanding this situation as necessarily desperate, and instead wonders aloud: “‘Either abolish your reverences or — yourselves!’ The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be — nihilism? This is our question mark.” In part, the parodic absurdity of this ultimatum rests in our naive and firm insistence that we live our lives in accordance with a divine truth from which we are barred access. The fact that what we should like to call truths are merely fictions is not necessarily a cause for despair. Elsewhere Nietzsche asks, “But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived?” Deception has installed itself as a basic fact of being, and our previous understanding of deception as somehow ‘bad’ or immoral remains firmly embedded in a Christian interpretation which has been invalidated. Thereby, deception takes on an entirely different meaning, and the question becomes not a matter of how to avoid deception, but of how to exercise our conscience in “every yes and no.” We are tasked with the incredible difficulty of “becom[ing] those we are — human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.” Transcendent truth (in the metaphysical sense which we have just delineated) has ceased to be a valid criterion, even if honesty lingers as the driving force behind our seeking after knowledge.

Part II: Interpretation and Aesthetic Existence

So how are we to begin this process of becoming, of self-making? How shall we hear the voice of our conscience and uphold its evaluations against (or with) our long upbringing in Christian hermeneutics? By abolishing categories of transcendent truth and morality, deception no longer bears an immoral meaning, but instead signals the possibility of our liberation from moral evaluations in general, from the interpretive singularity of the true and the good. This is also to say, of course, that the world makes itself available to an infinity of possible evaluations, to interpretations arising from the constant swirl of semblances presented to each of us in any given moment. Criticizing those who would call themselves ‘realists,’ in The Gay Science Nietzsche writes “That mountain there! That cloud there! What is ‘real’ in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training — all of your humanity and animality. There is no ‘reality’ for us.” Along with God’s death comes the death of ‘reality’: that divine entity which had stabilized the world and rendered it intelligible no longer lends to semblance the metaphysical solidity we had assumed was given and natural. As Nietzsche writes in “How The ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” “The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? … But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one! (Noon; moment of the shortest shadow; end of longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)”  The illusion of the true world, of metaphysics itself, has evaporated in the searing noon heat, and we now we find ourselves loosed into the earth: a world of appearance which appears before us as such (and not as illusion) for the first time.

This process, by which the ‘true world’ ceases to be along with the illusory one, consists in the abolition of the transcendent and heavenly realm thought to stabilize the world. It marks the impossibility of knowing this world completely by reference to a fictitious and untenable story of a divine and perfect one. Because all we have consists in the earth, because there is no other world which could justify this one, Nietzsche writes of fidelity to the earth, of directing our energy and faith towards the earth rather than off into the mendacious ‘beyond’ of Christian morality and Platonic metaphysics. Closely linked to Nietzsche’s notion of the earth is his notion of life, which manifests itself — during the convalescence of nihilism — in active and passive forms. Passive nihilism consigns itself to the vacuity of all interpretations and bemoans activity for its valuelessness. It constitutes “a decline and recession of the power of the spirit.” Active nihilism, on the other hand, discovers this meaninglessness as a catalyst to gorge itself on an excess of life, as an “increased power of the spirit” which “reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction.” For Nietzsche, life on earth consists in this constant and often ambiguous flux of growth and decline, excess and deficit, health and sickness, becoming and passing away. The recognition of this cycle, and of the way in which nihilism — as the devaluation of value itself — does not necessarily bear a negative value, signals the merely temporalized affectivity of our despair. Rather than acquiesce to either a reluctant and apathetic passive nihilism or to a violent and orgiastic active nihilism, we are free to value and assign meaning to the earth as we please, to harness nihilism as a “great liberation” from our grief in God’s passing and to become “masters of the earth.”

Because we are not to be constrained in our interpretations by the spurious categories of true and false, the earth appears before us in all its shifting multiplicity, making itself available for a tremendous plurality of understandings. Nietzsche’s criticism of his “sober friends,” those realists who assert that “reality st[ands] unveiled before [them] only,” marks the impossibility of any kind of factual, Archimedean access to reality. In The Will To Power, Nietzsche further elaborates this criticism, laying out the philosophical implications of a world of appearance: “Against the positivism which halts at phenomena — ‘There are only facts’ — I would say no, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations. We can establish no fact ‘in itself.’” This statement bears radical implications. How are we to communicate with each other, or presume to inhabit a shared reality now that we have done away with factuality? How are we to choose which interpretation to value above another if there is no recourse to a substantiating, grounding truth? Again, although these questions point towards the terror we experience in our confrontation with the vacuum God’s murder has left behind, we ought also to remember that we have accomplished this murder unwittingly. The news is still traveling towards us, not yet reaching our ears. Though the world before us can be no more than appearance, the words we use to describe it do not necessarily reflect this realization. Nietzsche writes, “what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are.” Language operates to give a world which lacks stability ‘in itself’ the appearance of stability. That is, insofar as we can communicate with others (however imperfectly), we imbue language with meaning, and the world with stability. At the same time, of course, this is not to say that the words we use are the correct words, or that any word could carry the true essence of its referent. Rather, words are only as meaningful as they are understood to be by the speaker on one hand and the listener on the other: “So far generally as the word knowledge has meaning, the world is knowable, but it is interpretable otherwise. It has no [one] meaning behind it, rather countless meanings.”

This infinity of possible meanings, what it means for the world to be interpretable otherwise, signals our terrifying freedom in a de-deified world. For Nietzsche, it also constitutes the task at hand for “godless anti-metaphysicians,” for those who are not content simply to have murdered God but who must now “vanquish his shadow, too.” What other possibilities exist for the schematization of realities? For the creation of ‘truths’? What other ways might we wish to organize the world, and why should we wish to undertake this reorganizing at all if it is not done in the name of truth? In order to begin answering these questions, allow me to ventriloquize Nietzsche and pose yet another one: “How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?” Unable to locate truth as the highest good, Nietzsche appeals instead to aesthetics to find this drive towards new meanings and possibilities.

It is worth noting here that in looking to aesthetics, Nietzsche does not seek to install taste as a replacement for truth. Rather, taste is all that remains for us in our attempts to locate meaning after we have abolished truthfulness and its categories of reason. Thus, Nietzsche’s desire to make even the most heinous and ugly “things beautiful, attractive, and desirable” affirms the validity of our taste, even in its radically individualized and temporally fickle sense. He writes, “our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art — for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” This is not to say that a life lived at a remove from what has been considered beautiful within a given historical or cultural horizon lacks dignity, or that it fails to be eternally justified. Instead, Nietzsche wants for each of us to understand ourselves as the work of art: “art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves.” Here, Nietzsche rescues existence from the pervasive meaninglessness of nihilism precisely by suggesting that we ought to be able to (immanently) ‘remove’ ourselves from existence, finding meaning in it as we might find meaning in a painting. That is, we ought to be able to see ourselves as works of art such that we gain reprieve from the tremendous gravity of our lived concerns: “we possess art lest we perish of the truth.”.

Life and existence, then, have not been so easily condemned in the wake of God’s murder. Instead, they have been “eternally justified” as works of art precisely because art and the varied realms of aesthetic experience allow us to creatively locate meaning, even if we cannot locate truth. For this reason, Nietzsche encourages us to learn from artists in order to become “the poets of our life — first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.” Meaning need not be absolute and universal, but only as passing, dynamic, and changeable as the charged glimpse of insight we get from reading a poem, hearing a song, or watching a sunset. The site of our struggle has been relocated: rather than fruitlessly search for an ungraspable and enduring truth to give meaning to our suffering, Nietzsche confronts us with the question of whether or not one can say ‘Yes’ to any experience as an aesthetic phenomenon, to see what is poetic and beautiful in even the most brutal or tragic of circumstances. Nietzsche formulates this sentiment elsewhere as ‘love of fate,’ writing, “Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” It is evident here that even Nietzsche did not yet understand himself to be a successful adherent to this new ethos. What would we need in order to become such ‘Yes-sayers’? What conditions have we not yet met?

Part III: The Arrival of Zarathustra, Will to Power, and Eternal Recurrence

In the months and years that followed the publication of The Gay Science, Nietzsche worked fervently to develop the philosophical tools necessary to answer the question of how to become this ‘Yes-sayer.’ The result, first published in 1885, was Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Though Nietzsche had already departed from the methodological conventions of his time by writing books in aphorisms, Zarathustra represents another kind of innovation entirely. Written in the form of short, abstrusely titled aphorisms spoken by the eponymous prophet himself, and interspersed with poetic narration and storytelling, Thus Spoke Zarathustra marks the beginning of Nietzsche’s efforts to overcome nihilism. Formally speaking, the text works to enact the poetic and aesthetic ethos Nietzsche theorizes and begins to practice towards the end of The Gay Science: he writes, “My bagpipes are waiting, and so is my throat—which may sound a bit rough; but put up with it, after all we are in the mountains. At least what you are about to hear is new; and if you do not understand it, if you misunderstand the singer, what does it matter?” Nietzsche suggests that although the song he is about to sing (Zarathustra) issues from a “rough” voice or may seem confusing, it is of no matter whether or not we understand it in the rigorous sense which might have been possible before God’s death. He explicitly gives his reader license to interpret his words liberally, finding poetic meaning in them even if they can no longer be precisely understood.

From the first pages, Zarathustra is drenched in poetic symbolism and imagery that recalls the history of Western philosophy while parodically subverting it. The prophet Zarathustra “r[ises] with the dawn, step[s] before the sun, and sp[eaks] to it thus: Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine! You have come up here to my cave for ten years: you would have grown weary of your light and of this journey, without myself, my eagle and my serpent.” The sun comes up to greet Zarathustra at the mouth of his cave, and Zarathustra stares fully into it: he has completed the Platonic journey towards the light of knowledge, and now it is no longer he who seeks after knowledge but the sun who seeks after him in order to shine for him. Already, Nietzsche can be seen to be playing with classical conceptions of the relations between the mortal, imperfect human and the divine sun, the light of truth. Rather than stand in for the enlightening force of a single divine truth however, as it did for Plato, Nietzsche understands the sun to be the original and originating site of overflow. The sun comes to Zarathustra’s cave because it needs a receptacle for its own inexhaustible excess, because if Zarathustra were not there to receive its light, this excess would be wasted. Zarathustra compares himself to the sun, saying “like you, I must go down,” descending from his cave to the people in the town in order to bring them his teachings, his own overflow. Upon arriving in town, Zarathustra positions himself in the market square and proceeds to “teach the Superman.”

The Superman, Overman, or Übermensch remains one of Nietzsche’s most ‘misunderstood’ or dispersively interpreted concepts. Although it was maliciously appropriated by Nazi ideologues, for our purposes here we can most efficaciously understand the Superman to be, in part, a further development of Nietzsche’s claim that we ought to “be able also to stand above morality,” to stand above ourselves, laughing and weeping over (über) ourselves. Zarathustra teaches the townspeople the meaning of the Superman, proclaiming, “Man is something that should be overcome. … You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape.” The Superman presents the chance for man to overcome nihilism, to harness nihilism as a “great liberation” and a “turning point” in order to overcome the stale habits and fictions of Christian morality. It stands conceptually opposed to the Ultimate Man, or Last Man, who has fallen prey to an unconsidered and static nihilism, who “blinks” and “can no longer despise himself” for he has rid himself of the desires and longings that make a de-deified world unendurable, and count as “burden[s].” Zarathustra’s words in praise of the Superman fall on deaf ears, however, and the townspeople mock him, saying “make us into this Ultimate Man! You can have the Superman!” He is “not the mouth for these ears,” and, perhaps like the madman, he has “come too early.”

Unlike the madman however, Zarathustra does not simply bear the news of God’s death, but offers a direction for man, even in the directionless and “infinite nothing” in which we are left after the passing of the divine. Using a tight-rope walker to illustrate his point, Zarathustra says, “man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman — a rope over an abyss. A dangerous going-across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying-still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” The language in this passage can readily be seen to emphasize human transience and the whole dynamic range of movements that occur on this “rope.” Rather than positing a universally discoverable truth or a eudaemonia for man to strive towards, Nietzsche demands that we recognize our “going-across” as vital in itself. This is not to say that man cannot “fix his goal,” but simply to say that man himself is not the goal: the Superman is still on the way, and there is still “time for man to plant his highest hope.”

For Nietzsche, these concepts and poetic claims are intimately related to what it means for there to be no fixed, stable sense of being but instead only a dynamic becoming in the wake of God’s death. Because we can no longer disentangle the truth from the constant swirl of semblances we are confronted with, we can derive no stable ontological notion of how things are. What is left in the place of this static, Christian and Platonic conception of being is a conception of becoming that affirms the contingency of truth on the moment of its utterance, on the ever-shifting perspectives of speakers and listeners alike. However, Nietzsche’s use of the word “becoming” already deceives us if we ultimately take it to mean a ‘progress’ or a development. Especially in Nietzsche’s later work, he is quick to disavow any characterization of the world as linearly impelled towards a “higher type,” or a ‘better’ form: “the world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away — it maintains itself in both.” Becoming, then, stands in for this origin-less, ceaseless flux. There can be no static sense of being which can penetrate beyond this shifting to arrive at a complete articulation of what is.

Zarathustra affirms this constant change and nevertheless calls upon us to become the Superman, to reveal and uncover new types and possibilities for humanity, to “become those we are.” Towards this end, Zarathustra speaks to us “Of the Three Metamorphoses” whereby one changes to a camel, to a lion, and ultimately to a child. These transformations already indicate the necessity of change for the birth of the Superman, and that any overcoming of nihilism must affirm becoming. The camel, “the weight-bearing spirit [which] takes upon itself all these heaviest things” and “hurries into its desert” serves to remind us of the spirit of honesty, that Christian virtue which led Nietzsche to nihilism in the first place. The camel, as ‘will to truth,’ provides an impetus for humanity to want to know, to take up heavy loads in the name of seeking a truth. The honesty of the camel offers up a great strength which “longs for the heavy, for the heaviest.” It is after this weight-bearing and honest camel has entered this loneliest desert of the truth that the second metamorphosis occurs. The camel must become the lion in order to “create itself freedom for new creation,” in order to confront “the great dragon … ‘Thou shalt.’” Here, Nietzsche demands that we summon a new kind of strength. Rather than the reverential, respectful and weight-bearing endurance of the camel, the lion is required in order to confront this dragon of Christian morality and Western metaphysics, who says “‘All the values of things — glitter on me. All values have already been created, and all created values — are in me.’” The lion roars back in the face of the ‘Thou shalt’ an irreverent ‘I will,’ and creates a “sacred No even to duty,” seizing the right to new values. But even the lion cannot suffice here. The lion cannot create new values, only uncover their possibility and claim the right to them, and so Zarathustra demands that we make children of ourselves in order that we attain “innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.” We must undertake the extraordinarily difficult task of finding truth and value by the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of our conscience, claim the right to value this truth against the dominance of historically instituted values, and ultimately forget these old values and truths in order that our new ones might become realities.

Obtuse and metaphorical though this may be, these three metamorphoses can be seen to offer a reflection on the experiential trajectory of nihilism and a direction for our overcoming. The camel which bears the difficult truth reminds us of the “antagonism” which our honesty affronts us with, wherein we can no longer esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves. The lion stands for our ability to affirm deception, to practice our “godless anti-metaphysic[s]” and stand above morality. It is the child, however, that Nietzsche now offers us as the final overcoming of nihilism, as the realization of the Superman, and as the will to power. In “Of Self-Overcoming” Zarathustra describes the “the ignorant, to be sure, the people” as a “river” down which floats the boat carrying the “assessments of value.” That is, the river carries the values — whether or not the river desires to — because it must continue flowing: “it is of small account if the breaking wave foams and angrily opposes [the boat’s] keel!” It was the “will to power, the unexhausted, procreating life-will” that enabled such values to be put in the boat, and now Nietzsche offers up the opportunity for us to be creators of new values. He writes, “a mightier power and a new overcoming grow from out of your values …. And he who has to be a creator in good and evil, truly, has first to be a destroyer and break values. … There is many a house still to build.” Because the world is available for other interpretations than the ones put forward by Christian morality, because values are available for destruction and creation, we may will them to be different. We may “let [our] will[s] say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth.”

Though Nietzsche discusses the will to power briefly in Zarathustra, the most complete elaboration of this concept would not be released until after his death in 1900. Despite the myriad historical, philosophical, and interpretive concerns to be noted in any comparison between the Nietzsche that wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Nietzsche that wrote the notes that would later be published by his sister as The Will To Power, for our purposes here, we can understand these theorizations to be more or less coextensive. Nietzsche understood the will to power to be, in part, a drive to life: because “truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live,” the will to power compels us towards truth in order to compel us towards life. Nietzsche writes that truth “according to my way of thinking, does not necessarily denote the antithesis of error, but in the most fundamental cases, only the posture of various errors in relation to one another.” Knowing, therefore, cannot be more than schematizing, or rearranging the configuration of these errors in accordance with “the enhancement of the feeling of power.” Importantly, Nietzsche’s concept of power is not to be confused with physical force. Rather than domination, power consists in something more akin to a feeling of strength in overcoming a resistance. We feel power when we think we recognize a difficult truth, when we feel replete with emotive force, when we feel ourselves to be struggling and nevertheless persisting. When we feel power, we also feel and assert truths and values. Any compulsion towards truth inevitably consists in valuation. That is, by positing something to be true, one necessarily values it as such and upholds it against other valuations. The will to power is necessarily a valuing. This is not to say that valuing is eternal, or that our own truths are not subject to reexamination. Nietzsche writes, “the will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it.”  In other words, the will to power means that our values and truths are constantly challenged, destroyed, created, and reconfigured by the world around us and the people we share it with. Zarathustra says to his disciples “go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you.” This is to suggest that truth does not consist in a unity of knowledge or information which might be teachable or transferable, but in the irreducible singularity of conscience and the collisions between consciences that galvanize transformations in truth. The will to power, as Nietzsche’s sense of truth, does not bear a static, univocal meaning but instead stands for the dynamic, complex, and anti-teleological process of truth-finding itself.

It should be noted here that the will to power is not an individualized property which each being possesses, but rather persists as an underlying principle governing the earth itself and all the beings contained within it. It can be understood as the “necessity” Nietzsche speaks of in The Gay Science, as the governing dynamic which moves through all beings, lending them force with which to play and bounce off each other indefinitely. Despite Nietzsche’s profound skepticism in regard to science, in regard to any interpretation of the world which claims fundamental, grounded certainty, it is here that Nietzsche himself seems to almost fall into the trap he accuses so many others of slipping into. He writes of the world conceived as will to power as a “certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force” from which it follows that “it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times.” Nietzsche claims that this conception of the world does not fall back into a “mechanistic” interpretation for the reason that a mechanistic interpretation would imply a final state towards which all things move. However, radically, Nietzsche does not posit a final state but rather the eternal recurrence of earthly events ad infinitum. That is, time repeats itself for all time as a function of the world being conceived as will to power.

What would it mean for anyone to grasp this as true? What does this mean for the Superman, or for those who would will the Superman to be the meaning of the earth? It means that we are still confronted with this question of how to say ‘Yes,’ but this ‘Yes’ has now emerged bearing eternal implications. The Nietzschean question to be posed in the face of nihilism is this: What would it take to affirm every moment of life as an aesthetic phenomenon, not just once, but over and over and over again for eternity? What would it take to affirm life as worth living not just once, but countless times? The answer, for Nietzsche, is “freedom from morality…the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the ‘will’; abolition of ‘knowledge-in-itself.’” The senses of necessity and will that lead Nietzsche to posit both the eternal recurrence of the same and the will to power themselves must be abolished in order to “create[] the Superman” who can truly speak this radical ‘Yes.’ But here things become murky. How can we understand Nietzsche to be asking us to become the Superman, and at once debunking any possibility for history and the world to attain a “higher type” or “final state”? How does the abolition of necessity and will follow on the heels of the positing of necessity and will in the will to power and eternal recurrence? To conceive of the earth as will to power would mean to do away with any and all ground, even the ground Nietzsche himself deploys in conceptualizing the will to power. Perhaps Nietzsche has failed here, in his inability to unmoor himself entirely from the metaphysical ground he writes so fervently against. Perhaps Nietzsche’s isolation as a thinker and the paucity of resistance his thought met with during his lifetime allowed his philosophy to go unchallenged for too long. Perhaps we have failed to understand Nietzsche’s song. Perhaps, too, nihilism marks our final inability to understand the song, marks the slippage between Nietzsche’s concepts that generates more questions than answers.

II: Martin Heidegger

Nietzsche leaves us here, with the radical claim that “this world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power— and nothing besides!” The thinker who was arguably the first to confront the vast nothingness of nihilism and who understood himself to have emerged on the other side urges us to recognize ourselves as this will to power, urges us to say ‘Yes’ to everything for all time. Are we persuaded? Has nihilism been overcome, contained to its proper historical moment? Already, we can give the answer: no, it has not. At least not quite. By positing the will to power as the end of metaphysics, as the overcoming of nihilism, Nietzsche fails to take into account his own insistence on becoming, on the earth’s persistent ability to shake our grip on its workings. That is, the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the same — while disavowing necessity and the possibility of a final interpretation ex post facto — nonetheless attempt to enclose and explain all possible interpretations of the earth, collapsing all thinking back into its wide-reaching, totalizing schema. Nietzsche’s thinking attempts to anticipate all possibilities for thinking itself, and so can hardly avoid positing an ultimate mechanics for the earth, a final interpretation, even if this interpretation denies not only its own possibility but also that of an attainable higher form, of an end to history. The earth remains “interpretable otherwise,” even beyond the horizon dictated by Nietzsche’s will to power. If it were not, philosophy would have perished long ago, and this project would have been over before it had begun.

In the following section, I will turn to Martin Heidegger’s response to Nietzsche, using Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche as still entangled in metaphysics in order to understand how Heidegger’s own thinking transfigured the questions and problems posed by nihilism into an ontological and phenomenological schema rather than a strictly metaphysical one. In Part I, I discuss what Heidegger means when he calls Nietzschean metaphysics “fulfilled nihilism,” and what is required in order that we move past sheer metaphysical entanglement. In Part II, I turn to Heidegger’s thoughts on the needfulness and needlessness of Being in order to begin elucidating Heideggerian ontology more broadly. In Part III, I lay out the ways in which Heidegger’s thinking moves us away from metaphysics while nonetheless insisting that metaphysics cannot help but rear its head, elucidating Heidegger’s notion of language and his notion of truth as correspondence and event in order to prepare the ground for Levinas’ critique of Heidegger and the failure he shares with Nietzsche: a robust attempt to think the ethical.

Part I: Fulfilled Nihilism and Metaphysical Entanglement

Although we can already see that Nietzsche failed in his attempts to fully overcome all of the problems posed by nihilism, we can understand the vitality of these attempts to consist in the scarcity of thinkers who were prepared to deliver a full response to his thinking until decades after his death. Though his works were increasingly canonized and appropriated by thinkers of every variety through the beginning of the 20th century (often with radically divergent interpretations), it was not until Martin Heidegger’s four-volume study that Nietzsche’s thinking met with serious philosophical resistance. While previous responses were often inclined to overlook the severity of Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead,” Heidegger’s analysis can be seen to undertake the difficult task of attempting to hear this assertion, rendering it a catalyst for his own philosophical explorations. In his 1943 essay “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead’” Heidegger elaborates what it means for Nietzsche to understand himself as bringing an end to metaphysics, and critiques Nietzsche for his inability to fully extricate himself from metaphysics. He writes, “Nietzsche’s countermovement against metaphysics is, as the mere turning upside down of metaphysics, an inextricable entanglement in metaphysics, in such a way, indeed, that metaphysics is cut off from its essence and, as metaphysics, is never able to think its own essence.” In other words, because Nietzsche’s philosophy is “anti-metaphysics,” it remains “held fast in the essence of that over against which it moves” and does not get beyond metaphysics. In fact, it fails to grasp the essence of metaphysics precisely because the will to power is still metaphysical.

Heidegger’s claim that the will to power remains entangled in metaphysics arises from what it means for the will to power be essentially concerned with valuing. By making the will to power the truth of the earth, Nietzsche locates value itself as the highest value and “value-thinking is elevated to a principle.” Heidegger wants to draw our attention to how this way of thinking already acquiesces in a metaphysical conception of the self — the same conception which has driven metaphysics forward since Plato, becoming more explicitly articulated by the Cartesian cogito. Valuing proceeds from the self-certain subject, who wills and thereby values, forcing the earth to bear particular meanings. This whole process is sustained by what it means for the will to power to be the governing principle of the earth. But, Heidegger asks, what would it mean for value to be removed as the highest value? What if “value does not let Being be Being, does not let it be what it is as Being itself”? This would mean that Nietzsche’s “supposed overcoming is above all the consummation of nihilism.” Despite the heft of this accusation, Heidegger is right to point out the extent to which Nietzsche thinks nihilism — the end of metaphysics itself — metaphysically, and so reiterates this mistake in his attempted overcoming.

Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics extends far beyond Nietzsche however. He takes aim at the entire history of Western thought when he writes, “Metaphysics as metaphysics is nihilism proper. The essence of nihilism is historically as metaphysics, and the metaphysics of Plato is no less nihilistic than that of Nietzsche. In the former, the essence of nihilism is merely concealed; in the latter, it comes completely to appearance.” That is, since Plato, insofar as metaphysics consists in a value thinking which rests upon the solidity of the willing subject, metaphysics has always been a system of deceptions, or a latent nihilism. It is in Nietzsche, however, that nihilism comes fully to the surface, recognizing itself as such, and becomes what Heidegger terms “fulfilled nihilism.” It claims nihilism — paradoxically — to be the truth of Being and so “definitively shuts itself off from the possibility of ever being able to think and to know the essence of nihilism.” Again, we can see how Nietzsche’s insistence upon the will to power as the ultimate interpretation of Being contradicts his own assertion that the earth remains “interpretable otherwise.” Insofar as Nietzsche fails to “persever[e] in the question of Being,” to keep open an aporetic space instead of acquiescing to a metaphysics, he remains in “fulfilled nihilism.”

For Heidegger, the failure of metaphysics (Nietzschean and otherwise) to think Being as such means that Being has never yet been thought as such. The history of metaphysics consists in “the omission of Being itself in the thought of beings,” and thereby also constitutes the “history of the secret of the promise of Being itself.” That is, because metaphysics operates to keep this promise secret by way of its attention only to the Being of beings, we have not yet encountered this “promise of Being itself” by virtue of our thinking metaphysically up until now. How might we seek to “encounter Being itself in its self-withdrawal” instead of consistently running up against the omission of Being? Can we and ought we overcome metaphysics in order to facilitate this encounter? Heidegger is clear that any overcoming of metaphysics — and consequently of nihilism — must also be an overcoming of value-thinking itself. Therefore, we cannot value a non-metaphysical interpretation more than a metaphysical one. Arriving at this non-metaphysical interpretation consists precisely in “surrendering the metaphysical interpretation of metaphysics,” in surrendering willfulness and the will to power itself as value-thinking.

But what could it possibly mean to surrender willfulness? To surrender value-thinking and our metaphysically deluded conception of our own subjectivity? It would mean to open the question of Being as if for the first time, relinquished from what Heidegger terms the “granted closure of Being” which occurs in metaphysics. But to put matters this way already makes it seem as if Heidegger has found a way out of metaphysics entirely. This is not the case. The metaphysical and non-metaphysical persist alongside each other, or rather, intersperse and overlap with each other in thinking. We fall back into metaphysics when we “become[] uncertain when confronting [our] own essence, which lingers with Being itself in the withdrawal, without being able to discover the source and essence of [our] uncertainty. Instead, [we] seek[] primal truth and permanence in self-certainty… which [we ourselves] provide[] in the midst of beings.” This is to say, when we can no longer sustain our uncertainty faced with the enigmatic self-withdrawal of Being, we give ourselves a metaphysical (which is to say self-deceiving) ground of self-certainty and thereby enter into a closure of Being which we have granted ourselves. The challenge then, is to resist this grounding act in order to experience the essence — rather than the non-essence grasped by metaphysical thought — of nihilism. Only from out of this uncertain venturing, which is not a wanting to overcome that would already situate nihilism behind us, can we let Being be as Being and begin to grasp it as such.

Part II: Needfulness, Needlessness and the History of Being

What are we to make of this assessment? Where do we find ourselves? Nietzsche thought of himself as bringing an end to metaphysics, and yet Heidegger points towards the ways in which Nietzsche instead only fulfills and brings to light the deceptions latent in metaphysics from their inaugural moment in Greek thought. Heidegger seeks to find what lies beyond or outside of metaphysics, but even he suggests that without this “borrowed staff,” he would find himself lost. What remains for philosophy at this juncture, wherein metaphysics can be no more than a configuration of exhausted meaning which we still cling to — disguised, or latent nihilism — and non-metaphysical thinking can do little more than encounter the enigmatic nature of Being in its self-withdrawal?

For Heidegger, the terrain that opens at this juncture consists in thinking the history of Being. To say that metaphysical thinking is nihilistic, for Heidgger, is precisely to suggest that metaphysical thinking has failed to encounter Being, that it has instead thought — and continues to think — the Being of beings in an unhistorical way. He writes, “because the default of Being is the history of Being and thus is authentically existing history, the being as such, especially in the epoch of the dominance of the nonessence of nihilism, lapses into the unhistorical.” In other words, because Being has been omitted in thinking since Plato and instead continues to be thought metaphysically as the Being of beings, thinking of Being fails to be historical. Metaphysical thinking presumes that it has grasped Being in the Being of the individual being, and so fails to “admi[t] the enigma of the history of Being” itself. In other words, it takes Being as accessible and comprehensible by way of the individual being and sees no need to appeal to the history which already goes ahead of any grasping. In doing so, metaphysical thinking renders truth an eternal — which is to say ahistorical — phenomena, and renders history and its effectuality non-enigmatic. It fails to consider the possibility that the truth of Being has only been “promise[d]” rather than determined in the history of thinking Being.

Heidegger’s claim that Nietzsche persists in this unhistorical way of thinking can be seen in Nietzsche’s will to power. In positing each being as a locus of power and disallowing any sense of Being in excess of the will to power (and its corollary, the eternal recurrence of the same), Nietzsche claims to know Being (through beings) in its final unconcealment and fails to grasp that Being persists in self-concealing withdrawal. He fails to grasp that any articulation of Being remains perennially mediated by historical circumstance. In this sense, Nietzsche may be said to be a nihilist — an ahistorical metaphysician — even as he elucidates his perspectivism as an overcoming of nihilism. For Heidegger, although the metaphysics of Plato may be no less nihilistic than Nietzsche’s, in the will to power, metaphysical thinking itself is made manifest as deceptive and inadequate. That is, Nietzsche’s oppositional logic of ‘anti-metaphysics’ remains merely reactionary, insufficient for moving beyond or overcoming metaphysics. Nonetheless, Heidegger owes Nietzsche a tremendous debt of gratitude. Nietzsche’s relentless skepticism and honesty finally render metaphysics transparent, showing Heidegger how metaphysics has accomplished the omission of Being in the thinking of being. The will to power itself, however, fails to grasp this omission: as fulfilled nihilism and as self-certain, self-justifying, self-valuing perspectivism, the will to power becomes dangerous.

The fulfilled nihilism of the will to power reaches its most dangerous point in revolting against the enigma of Being, in the drive to subdue Being to the exigencies of metaphysical thinking. Nietzsche himself advocated for “dangerous” thinking and living, for immersing oneself in the thrall of the will to power, but Heidegger points towards the ‘dangers’ of such an approach insofar as it remains a primarily metaphysical one. He writes that the will to power “calls for an active nihilism” that neglects to think about “the omission of the need of Being itself” and so amounts to “blindness in the face of needlessness as the essential need of man.” But what is this ‘need’ that Heidegger speaks of? He insists that “[Being] is unrelenting and needful in relating to an abode that essentially occurs as the essence to which man belongs, man being the one who is needed.” In other words, Being calls upon the human to discover their essence in Being. Being needs the human’s essence to be its abode. This ‘essence’ that Heidegger speaks of does not cohere with the older metaphysical sense of the term however. Rather, the “essence to which man belongs” resides in the “secret of the promise of Being itself.” Humanity’s essence remains enigmatic, lingering with Being in its self-withdrawal. Active nihilism as the will to power becomes dangerous precisely because it proceeds from the supposition that humanity has no essence; and insofar as the predominance of this kind of nihilism characterizes the epoch we find ourselves in, Being can only appear as needless. That is, the will to power eliminates the possibility of human essence entirely insofar as it defaults on any consideration of Being. Within this default, the need of Being can only appear as needlessness, and so we remain blind to Being’s essential needfulness.

Heidegger insists that for us to be able to alleviate our blindness, we ought to experience “needlessness for the first time as the essential occurrence of need itself”: we must encounter the omission of the default of Being. Obtuse though this language may be, we can perhaps understand what Heidegger is suggesting by remembering its “simplicity.” The truth of Being rests in this sense of simplicity which arises in “stillness” when we allow ourselves to be stopped rather than continue along in our willful and self-certain metaphysical haste. This sense of truth consists in a reply to the needfulness of Being, in a belonging that tethers the human to their essence as the abode of Being. It takes place within what Heidegger terms “world.” The will to power on the other hand, as blindness in the face of needlessness as the essential need of man, convinces us that Being is in fact needless and that it occurs as the indifferent medium which we move through and act upon with force. It refuses world, for entering into world would require the will to power to surrender the self-certain atomism of its value-thinking. To experience needlessness as need then, as Heidegger suggests we must, would mean to understand Being not as indifferent to us, but as unrelentingly calling upon us, asking us to discover our essence. Metaphysics, our borrowed staff, returns when we inevitably slip from the aporetic space that arises in Being’s calling upon us and end up giving ourselves a certain ground. This ground itself is metaphysics, and consists in little more than the facile impenetrability of the Cartesian subject’s pronouncement: ‘I am, I exist.’ We slip into this metaphysical subjecthood and into metaphysical thinking when we appeal to this self-certain ground, departing from the world and determining our essence for ourselves rather than continuing in our patient waiting for Being’s promised truths.

Part III: Technology, The Thing, and the House of Being

In the epoch of the predominance of nihilism’s non-essence, this patience is difficult to come by. Metaphysics abounds. Nowhere does this fulfilled nihilism become more dangerous than in the essence of modern technology, which takes needlessness as truth and so refuses all needfulness of Being. Heidegger begins to theorize these questions in the Bremen lecture series, in which we can begin to grasp Heidegger’s sense of “what is”: his truth of Being, his own thinking with his borrowed metaphysical staff. In the third lecture he refers to technology’s essence as Ge-stell. Literally translated, Ge-stell names a “gathering of positioning,” and is frequently translated into English as “positionality” (though “enframing” remains another common English translation). Within this gathering of positioning or positionality, presencing — the persistent unconcealment of Being — is already brought into standing reserve, into an indifferent ‘stockpile’ of resources to be drawn upon by technology’s self-sustaining, plundering, and requisitioning drive. In reaping what presences into this ‘stockpile,’ technology produces the needless non-world of the will to power and fulfilled nihilism: that is, technology catalyzes our blindness in the face of Being’s needfulness. It erodes our patience and encourages our collapse into metaphysical subjecthood.

In using the word “technology,” Heidegger refers not only to the radio, the dam, or the other “pieces” of technology we might use, but to representational metaphysics and cognition itself. This kind of technological cognition refuses “join[ing] pliantly and worldingly the world” because it requires that all enigma and all needfulness be suppressed in favor of strict indifference, orderability, and intelligibility. In metaphysical cognition, these goals are accomplished when the self-certain subject assigns each concept its proper place, its final interpretive locale in the broader schema or “positioning” of “pieces.” This willful and “dangerous” way of thinking makes a non-world of the earth by forcing what presences into non-enigmatic orderability: everything follows according to a positioning, as though everything were mere machinery, or fodder for machinery. Heidegger writes, “the machine is nothing that presences separately for itself. … Machines are within a machinery. But this is no piling up of machines. The machinery runs from the plundering of the drive, as which positionality orders the standing reserve.” Positionality, or technological metaphysics, runs from this self-sustaining and plundering drive. By bringing all things into the machinery, into the rigid order of a schema, positionality makes everything a “piece” of the machinery.  The human itself becomes “in the age of technological dominance, … a piece of the standing reserve in the strictest sense of the words ‘piece’ and ‘standing reserve.’” That is, insofar as we are constantly placing ourselves into this vast machinery through our use of machines and metaphysical thinking, we become blind in the face of Being’s needfulness and acquiesce to the standing reserve’s constancy and stability, its self-gratifying self-certainty.

The danger in technology arises insofar as it reduces all things to the standing reserve and effaces the essence of the human which occurs in the world. For Heidegger, this human essence which is elided by metaphysical cognition takes place as mortality. As a piece of standing reserve, the human is blind to the needfulness of Being and so can no longer undergo death as death, but instead only as perishing: “the human is not yet the mortal.” In one particularly controversial passage in the lecture “The Danger,” Heidegger suggests that the victims of the Shoah were not in fact capable of death as death, but — as pieces of the standing reserve drawn upon by the requisitioning of the death machine — were instead “unobtrusively liquidated in annihilation camps.” The horror and danger of technological metaphysics consists in its ability to render genocide as a matter of course, as a merely ordinary functioning of machinery. Heidegger writes that “what is most dangerous in all this lies in the fact that the danger does not show itself as danger.” The danger is hidden insofar as Being appears — in our blindness — as needless. For what could be so dangerous so long as Being persists as an indifferent medium? In the age of the predominance of the non-essence of nihilism, the danger does not appear as dangerous. Instead, it “reaches its culmination when in the midst of this singular danger there is everywhere only the innocuous, proliferating in the form of numerous accidental plights.”

These “accidental plights,” as merely ordinary and innocuous consequences of the self-sustaining, plundering drive of technology and metaphysics, cannot appear as authentically distressing or needful, or as legitimate challenges to the machinery itself. Take, for example, climate change. Temperatures rise, carbon dioxide fills the atmosphere, plastic bags clutter the ocean. Some recognize that these are problems technology has created and that the earth needs our help in order to continue sustaining us. Nonetheless, we set out to solve these problems — if we decide to solve them at all — with technology. Through the machinery of the state, through scientific advances and technological applications, we carry on in the metaphysical constancy and stability of the standing reserve. In other words, within the logic of technological metaphysics, there is nothing to be done about technological metaphysics: we fail to notice “distresslessness [as] the authentic distress,” needlessness as the essential occurrence of need.

All this said, Heidegger insists that he is not criticizing technology. As we have seen, metaphysics are not something we can discard or leave by the wayside. Instead, Heidegger asks us to conceive of Being — more specifically, the sense of Being which lies beyond the metaphysical sense of the Being of beings — as an event (Ereignis). This event takes place as the “lightning flash that comes out of the stillness,” as the glimpse of “insight into that which is” arising from the reply between “that which is” and a particular configuration of historical understanding. Metaphysical consistency and continuity is interrupted by such lightning flash moments, in which — in Heideggerian parlance — the thing things, the world worlds, nearness nears, and the truth of Being takes place. But what do these bizarre formulations actually consist in? What is this thinging thing, or nearing nearness? Once again, we ought to remember what Heidegger refers to as the “simplicity” of such moments. He writes that “the worlding of world is neither explicable by nor grounded upon anything other than itself.” But how can this be? Are we not already concerned about the metaphysical deceit of the ‘thing-in-itself’?

For Heidegger, these events in which the insight into that which is takes place must be elucidated and understood by way of language. His notion of the fourfold, as the “appropriating mirror-play of the single fold of the earth and sky, divinities and mortals” derives from resonances within the German language and from the relationship German bears to the language of ancient Greece. In characterizing the fourfold, Heidegger calls it a “round dance of appropriation,” or “Reigen des Ereignens.” In characterizing the thing, he draws upon the Old High German word ‘dinc’ in order to understand the thing as a kind of gathering. Heidegger insists that “the experience of the essence of the thing” is not grounded upon “the arbitrarity of an etymological game,” but instead, as we have seen, cannot be grounded at all. This ungroundability follows from “the fact that things like causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the worlding of the world.” Causes and grounds, as inextricably tethered to notions of a metaphysical subject, cannot help us to understand the worlding of the world or the thinging of the thing. Nonetheless, we might attempt to understand this ungroundability more thoroughly by pointing towards the slippery and abyssal character of language. Heidegger suggests that “because the word ‘thing’ in the language use of Western metaphysics names something that is in any way at all, the meaning of the noun ‘thing’ changes according to the interpretation of that which is, i.e., of beings.” That is, the word ‘thing’ remains available for a massive number of historical metaphysical interpretations. In order to experience the thing as thing, however, we must resist supplying such a metaphysical interpretation. We must surrender our willfulness, instead “let[ting] the thing in its thinging essence from out of the worlding world.”

Heidegger’s use of the word ‘let’ here opens up a contrast with the willfulness which presides over metaphysics. In letting, “we commemorate the thing as thing,” encountering it without the granted closure of Being that takes place in metaphysical interpretation. Instead, the thing “lets the united four, earth and sky, divinities and mortals, abide in the single fold of their fourfold, united of themselves.” Unlike the object grasped by metaphysical interpretation and cognition, the thing lets the fourfold come into its own, and in doing so “the thing things the world.” But how are we to know that we have successfully stepped back from metaphysics? That we have truly entered into the world, been “met by the thing as thing,” (literally been ‘be-thinged’ or Be-Dingten)? That we have experienced the truth of Being? For Heidegger, this truth of Being is constantly underway. It is the “unrelenting” and affective quality of Being’s needfulness. We can remain blind to this needfulness through our willfulness and our refusal to surrender metaphysics, or, by “step[ping] back,” we can “take up residence in a correspondence that answers this [address by the world’s essence from within it].” In other words, we enter into the free region at the end of metaphysics when we let ourselves be ‘be-thinged,’ when we are addressed by the world and take up residence in a correspondence with it.

Yet questions still remain. If Heidegger elucidates ‘thing,’ ‘world,’ and ‘fourfold’ from out of resonances and connections internal to the German language and its etymological history, would their meanings hold in translation? Would world and the truth of Being take place differently for those who speak languages other than German? For Heidegger, “language is the house of Being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.” More than this, it is “the house of the truth of Being,” wherein the truth of Being may occur as the correspondence between language and the lightning-flash event (Ereignis). Heidegger’s conceptual frame holds through translation for this reason: in any given instance of language, truth takes place as the correspondence between an event and that particular language. In this sense, Heidegger’s sense of truth is evidently quite different from the truth grasped by metaphysics. Whereas metaphysics for the most part takes truth to be an eternal, ahistorical, universal, and transcendent phenomena, Heidegger views truth more temporally and anarchically. Truth rests, as we have seen, in letting the world world, in the historical and contextual specificity of the affect that arises in the relation between event and language.

Importantly however, Heidegger suggests that metaphysics and representational thinking have eroded language’s capacity to convey this truth, to catalyze such correspondence between language and the truth of Being. He writes “if the human is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless….Before he speaks the human being must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.” World, as the nearness of Being, does not first rest upon language but upon the claim of Being. That is, the lightning-flash event which inaugurates the worlding of the world need not be linguistic in character, but only “appease beyng in the essence of the world,” or language. The truth of Being on the other hand, arising in the correspondence between language and event, requires language insofar as language — if it is bestowed with “the pricelessness of [Being’s] essence” — provides “humans a home for dwelling in the truth of Being.” World is not yet the truth of Being, but it nonetheless occurs as the free region at the end of metaphysics wherein the truth of Being may potentially emerge, where this human home might be located. In thinking commemoratively and using language carefully, the human guards this home and guards the thing as thing from the dangers of technology and metaphysics, even if the human cannot dispense with the borrowed staff of metaphysics altogether.

Where does this leave us? Has Heidegger provided us with the resources to radically reorient ourselves after the end of metaphysics and find an ethical bearing? To overcome the active nihilism of the will to power and strive to dwell in the truth of Being? Perhaps not so clearly as we might hope. In a 1966 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Heidegger states

philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang]; for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder.

This foundering, the failure of merely human thought and endeavor to grasp the truth of Being in its final unconcealment, is what remains for us in the absence of such a god. Readiness, as thinking and poetizing, offers us the patience to wait for the god to come (if one is coming), but cannot tell us what to do, how to be, what is right or good. The slippery groundless ground of metaphysics remains our primary mechanism for producing value and making determinations, and we stand in constant risk of the gravest error insofar as we stand on this ground. 

Nonetheless, the senses of readiness and guardianship that Heidegger elucidates provide us with a kind of thinking which moves a step further from the dangers of the will to power, of fulfilled nihilism and uninterrupted metaphysics. The commemorative thinking that Heidegger offers to us by way of the thing and the world — and which expand upon Nietzsche’s sense of poetizing — ask us to authentically think, to allow ourselves to be interrupted rather than continue along in the self-certainty of our metaphysics. Heidegger’s philosophy does not prove itself capable of a final departure from metaphysics but instead preserves the possibility for lightning flash interruptions which might puncture and reorient our thinking. The use of the “borrowed staff” as a metaphor for metaphysics can perhaps make more sense now: we may lean upon the staff, but the staff itself is not sufficient for our walking. We must remain capable of moving without the aid of this metaphysical crutch — this technological aid to our walking — if we are to move upon the earth and beneath the sky, in the single fold of the four: earth and sky, divinities and mortals.

III: Emmanuel Levinas

So here we find ourselves at the end of metaphysics, upon the earth and in the world. Have our questions been answered? Can we be sure of what is right or good or true? Already again, I think we can give the answer: not yet. Nietzsche and Heidegger’s interpretations of the Western metaphysical tradition offer us a way of thinking liberated from the strictures and necessities of metaphysical interpretation, but do not necessarily ground an ethical orientation beyond a sense of strictness with one’s heart and an attunement to the needfulness of Being. It is for this reason that Emmanuel Levinas seems to emerge as the thinker most opportunely situated to provide an ethical response to — and a reconsideration of — the post-Enlightenment philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Born in 1906 in a thriving Jewish community in Lithuania, Levinas would go on to become both one of Heidegger’s best students and one of his strongest critics. He met Heidegger for the first time shortly after the publication of Being and Time in 1928, but could not stay long in Germany due to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments and the first stirrings of National Socialism. Moving to France, he became a French citizen in 1930 before being drafted into the army as a Russian and German interpreter in 1939. Ultimately, Levinas spent most of his time in the war as a POW at a German forced labor camp. It was there that he wrote the notes that would go on to be formulated as his first major work of philosophy, De l’Existence à l’Existant, published in 1947 after his safe return to France in 1945 and the victory of the Allies.

No doubt, Levinas’ first-hand encounters with Nazism and the horrors of World War II inflected his philosophical thinking. His fascination with the ethical and with the way that ethical commands arise pervades his philosophy and gives it its particular relevance to this inquiry. In the sections that follow, I will attempt to shed some light on Levinas’ unique approach to the ethical and his important divergences from Nietzschean and Heideggerian thinking before attempting to point towards confluences in the work of all three thinkers. In Part I, I will contextualize Levinas’ critique of ontology and his movement away from Heidegger. In Part II, I will elucidate Levinas’ notion of the face of the other as the trace of God, and how this divine command without divine authority might aid us in our attempts to think and live ethically. In Part III, I will turn to the provisionality and contingency of Levinas’ philosophy in order to gesture towards its potential limitations and the challenges that nevertheless await us in the absence of a divine or cosmologically ordaining force.

Part I: Ontology and the Other

Levinas begins his philosophical work from the conjuncture of multiple different philosophical movements. As Heidegger’s student, he was well-versed in the ontology Heidegger put forward in Being and Time and attuned to the changes coming in Heidegger’s thinking. As a budding phenomenologist, he was profoundly influenced by the work of Edmund Husserl as well as Henri Bergson. Recent developments in Western philosophy — spurred on by Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson, to name a few — moved thinking away from metaphysical interpretation and towards this new mode of thinking Being, or ontology. It is at this point that Levinas can be seen to offer his first major intervention in the momentum of contemporary thinking. He asks a question which philosophy has turned away from: “Does not all knowledge of relations by which beings are connected or opposed to one another already involve the comprehension of the fact that these relations and these beings exist?” In asking such a question, he brings us back to the Cartesian moment, to the doubt and wonder (the Greek notion of thaumazein) at play in philosophy since Plato. He writes, “to question this fundamental evidence is a reckless undertaking. But to take up philosophy by such questioning is, at least, to return to its source.”

By attempting to return to the source, Levinas is able to reconstruct for his reader the historical-philosophical trajectory out of which he writes and to which he responds. He tells us that ontology, in contrast to the metaphysical fantasy of “a reason freed from temporal contingencies, a soul co-eternal with the Ideas,” reconfigures the relation of time to truth. To exist is to be involved, to be immersed and enthralled such that truth is “not accomplished in the triumph of human beings over their condition but in the very tension where this condition is assumed.” In other words, “it is not because of the human being that there is truth. It is because [B]eing in general is inseparable from its openness, because there is truth, or, if one likes, because [B]eing is intelligible, that there is humanity.” Comprehension and understanding no longer refer to the grasping of eternal and absolute truths stabilized by the otherworldly forms of Plato or transcendent heaven of Christianity, but simply to the grasping of an “affective disposition” in any given moment. To comprehend Being is simply to exist, to be persistently open to Being and what is intelligible about it, even if we cannot understand or grasp it in the more detached, objective, and metaphysical sense of the word.

Here, however, Levinas introduces his doubts about the adequacy of ontology to the historical and worldly concerns of the age. For Levinas, this new mode of understanding Being nevertheless falls prey to the same tendency of Western thought which has persisted since its inaugural moment: the subsumption of every alterity into a logic of unity. He writes, “comprehension, in Heidegger, rejoins the great tradition of Western philosophy: to comprehend the particular being is already to place oneself beyond the particular. To comprehend is to be related to the particular that only exists through knowledge, which is always knowledge of the universal.” Because for Heidegger we must privilege the relation to Being over the metaphysical relation to the Being of beings, every encounter with an other must already simply be an encounter with Being. What Levinas wants to propose in contrast to this way of thinking is a sensibility which remains open to the approach of the other being as other being. He writes, “our relation with the other (Autrui) certainly consists in wanting to comprehend him, but this relation overflows comprehension….he does not affect us in terms of a concept. He is a being (étant) and counts as such.” That is, ontology fails to grasp the other insofar as ontology insists upon collapsing the relation to the other back into the relation to Being. It is determined to relinquish the particularity of the affective relation to the other, to “let beings be, to comprehend them as independent of the perception which discovers and grasps them.” Levinas is clear however: in the relation with the other can it truly be a matter of ‘letting be’ as a means of comprehension? “Not at all,” he says. “The other (autrui) is not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second. The two relations are intertwined.” As interlocutor, the other disrupts the continuity of my relation to Being because I must speak with him in order to comprehend him. My comprehension of him as a being does not exceed my ability to express this comprehension to him: I leave aside the “universal [B]eing that he incarnates in order to remain with the particular being he is.”

If all this seems straightforward enough and far from a fatal challenge to ontology, this is because as with Heidegger and his metaphysical staff, Levinas does not claim to have ultimately overcome or replaced ontology but simply to have pointed towards what possibilities lie beyond or outside it. He insists that the relation with the other is irreducible to comprehension, but not that this kind of narcissistic and inadequate ontological ‘comprehension’ does not regularly occur. He writes, “when I have grasped the other in the opening of [B]eing in general, as an element of the world where I stand, where I have seen him on the horizon, I have not looked at him in the face, I have not encountered his face.” This failure to encounter the other — specifically the face of the other — is also the failure to exceed ontology. It constitutes the failure of reason itself insofar as “the order of reason [is] constituted … in a situation where ‘one chats,’ where the resistance of beings qua beings is not broken but pacified.” In other words, the truth of the other cannot precede my encounter with the other but arises in that very encounter with an alterity that exceeds comprehension. My relation to the other as other — that is, to the face of the other — can only come about in speaking to him and being spoken to: in other words, in discourse, the essence of which Levinas calls “prayer.” Importantly, Levinas does not mean here to blur the lines of theological and philosophical inquiry, but to instead locate religion itself as the interhuman, as the necessarily invocative “relation with a being as a being.” He wants to situate this encounter with the other as the site of a knowledge that is not a domination or a power (e.g. convincing a prisoner to drink hemlock in ancient Greece), but is instead attuned to the irreducibly singular approach of each and every other and the way that this relation always overflows whatever horizon we may hope to establish for its containment and comprehension.

To further elaborate the difference between Levinas’ sense of the other as an uncontainable surplus and Heidegger’s sense of the other as a merely subsidiary facet of Being, it will be important first to point towards an essential point of interpretive disagreement between these two thinkers. As we have seen, Heidegger locates in the Cartesian cogito a transformation of the Western concept of truth from a sense of correspondence to higher forms into a sense of self-certainty which rests upon the solidity of the metaphysical subject. In establishing ‘I am, I exist,’ the Cartesian subject reconfigures the negativity of ‘I cannot doubt that I am doubting’ into the ‘certain’ knowledge of the subject’s existence which, for a moment, can be assured without the knowledge of God’s existence. While Heidegger takes this momentary excision of God in the Meditations to be an early symptom of the murder of God, the end of metaphysics, the impossibility of a positive sense of infinity, and the ultimate immanence (in the metaphysical sense) of the human condition, Levinas finds something else entirely in Descartes’ pronouncement. In the infinite regress Descartes experiences as he attempts to find one certain thing without appealing to presuppositions, Levinas locates this impossible, bottomless searching itself as the possibility of the infinite, as God. While for Heidegger this infinite regress ultimately truncates in a collapse back into metaphysics, Levinas finds “a thought thinking beyond what it is able to contain in the finitude of its cogito….a thought [that] thinks more than it thinks.” It is “a thought of the absolute in which the absolute is not reached as an end,” or a “pure patience” which is not even an anticipation of Being’s promised truths, as it was for Heidegger.

This thought that thinks the infinite in thinking more than it thinks opens up a realm of philosophical inquiry which remained closed for Heidegger. Where Heidegger finds the relentless self-withdrawal of Being as a kind of finite negation that never opens onto the infinite, Levinas — in preserving the possibility of the infinite — is able to search for the moments in which we are confronted with this uncontainable excess. As we have seen, this excess arises in the face of the other. How is it that Descartes’ moment of isolated and solipsistic reflection offers Levinas this opportunity for rethinking the interhuman? Levinas writes “it is as if the face of the other man, who from the first ‘asks for me’ and orders me, were the crux of the very scheme of this surpassing by God, of the idea of God.” The face of the other arrives as the manifestation of this thought of the infinite in me and so exposes me to the finitude and insufficiency of my own experience of time (which is also, ontologically speaking, my experience of truth). The other introduces me to the diachrony of time itself, making possible “the beating of the primordial time” which privileges the ‘for itself’ of the perseverance of beings in their Being.

With this opening up of what Levinas (echoing Plato) calls ‘the good beyond Being,’ a new kind of philosophy is inaugurated which is no longer attuned first and foremost to the order of Being. Instead, in Levinas’ work, ontology and the question of Being are deposed as the most pressing philosophical inquiries and the human other takes on a privileged role, “anterior to every question.” But how can this be? How is it that the face of the other takes on such a potent signification? In the following section, I will turn to Levinas’ analyses of the face and the way in which the infinite — as ethical edict and as the trace of God — signifies in the other.

Part II: The Face and the Wisdom of Love

Though Levinas and Heidegger certainly have their share of differences, it would not be incorrect to characterize both of these thinkers as profoundly invested in philosophy as a way of thinking tethered to intellectual and material history and the inheritance it leaves us. Levinas’ philosophy derives much of its energy and relevance from its timely emergence into post-World War II Europe. Indeed, at the time, Levinas was perhaps the strongest ethical thinker to emerge since the Enlightenment who was not simply reiterating or reproducing a version of metaphysical or deontological ethics. Drawing attention to the promises of Western thinking and the continuing failure of this thinking to achieve peace, Levinas suggests that peace has not yet been sought on the correct terms. He writes that our failure has been to “decide in favor of Greek wisdom such that human peace is awaited on the basis of the True” and upon “the basis of the state, which would be a gathering of humans participating in the same ideal truths.” Yet, despite the two-thousand years which have passed since these aims were first pronounced by Plato, peace on the basis of the True seems to draw no closer. The promised history of the West “does not recognize itself in its millennia of fratricidal, political and bloody struggles, of imperialism, of human hatred and exploitation, up to our century of world wars, genocides, the Holocaust, and terrorism.” Rather than achieve peace, it seems that “truth threatens [B]eing itself” insofar as truth has far less often been the basis for reconciliation and unity than it has been the basis upon which wars, violence, and exploitation are justified in the name of forcing the world to bear a particular meaning, to represent a particular truth (e.g. Nazism, Stalinism, capitalism, colonialism, slavery, and the whole series of epistemological and ontological apparatuses deployed in the actualization of these politics and practices).

To the devastation caused by the failure of the Greek model for peace, Levinas opposes another historical thread, another way of understanding the wisdom of Europe: the wisdom of the Christian and Hebraic traditions. In appealing to this decidedly theological kind of wisdom, Levinas is extraordinarily clear that he does mean to draw upon it an epistemological manner. He writes, “will we not have heard, then, in the vocation of Europe — prior to the message of truth it bears — the ‘You shall not kill’ of the Ten Commandments and the Bible?” In fact, Levinas turns to Genesis precisely in order to circumvent the priority of truth in Greek thinking. Continuing, he describes the scene from which we are to draw an ethical — but not necessarily epistemological — sensibility:

In chapter 32 of Genesis, Jacob is troubled by the news that his brother Esau — friend or foe — is marching to meet him ‘at the head of four hundred men.’ Verse 8 tells us: ‘Jacob was greatly afraid and anxious.’ What is the difference between fright and anxiety? The rabbinic commentator, the celebrated Rashi, makes it clear: he was frightened about his own death but was anxious he might have to kill.

Here, we find the ethical moment that offers up a new way of understanding the task of peace. We might think, loosely in this context, about fright as a modality of Greek wisdom which has — over the centuries — become the dangerousness of the will to power, the brute perseverance of beings in their Being which places fear of death above concern for the other. Anxiety, on the other hand, shows us an entirely different facet of what wisdom might mean in Europe: it shows us that “there is an anxiety of responsibility that is incumbent on everyone in the death or suffering of the other (autrui).” Of course, this claim, if formulated as a universal truth, might be easily undercut. Therefore, instead of asserting this as a truth, Levinas urges us to understand truth itself as subsidiary to peace. He asks whether “one should not understand the very ideal of truth — which no European could refuse — already in terms of an ideal of peace which, more ancient than that of knowledge, only comes to open itself to the call of truth.” He abandons truth as a metric in order to assert precisely the need for peace to precede truth.

Crucially, when Levinas speaks of peace before truth, he asserts that this peace cannot be an assimilation, synthesis, or rendering intelligible of the other. Rather, this peace requires that the other from the first has claimed and commanded me. Where do we find this command speaking loudest? How do we undergo the urgency of this call to peace? Levinas’ notion of the face of the other emerges as precisely that urgency and immediacy, the site of the command which issues from the other. Insisting that in his analysis of the face of the other he moves beyond phenomenology to the “concreteness” in which the command signifies, Levinas writes “the thought that is awake to the face of the other human is not a thought of…, a representation, but straightaway a thought for…, a nonindifference for the other, upsetting the equilibrium of the steady and impassive soul of pure knowledge.” From the first instant, the face of the other cannot appear simply as a “plastic form,” or as a medium of representation, but straightaway calls me to the other. The face does not ‘disclose’ the call to peace to me in an ontological sense, but rather is “exposure” itself as the absolute and im-mediate precariousness of the other: the fact of their vulnerability in the face of death. It is this precariousness which cannot help but upset the equilibrium of a cool and objective knowledge, and which immediately confronts me with accusations and commands. It accuses me because the other is for me “at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill.’” The trace of God — as the thought thinking more than it thinks and as the historical weight of two millennia of theological influence — arises in this moment where I am face-to-face with the other, prohibiting murder.

Levinas terms this relation in which I am face-to-face with the other proximity, and characterizes it as “the responsibility of the ego for an other, the impossibility of letting the other alone faced with the mystery of death. Concretely, this is the susception of dying for the other. Peace with the other (autrui) goes that far.” This is a strong claim, and it is one that many readers of Levinas have had difficulty stomaching. In a discussion at the University of Leyden in March 1975, Levinas answered a question from the audience about the occasional necessity of opposing the other for his benefit by stating “If there was only the other facing me, I would say to the very end: I owe [them] everything. I am for [them]. And this even holds for the harm [they] do me: I am not [their] equal, I am forevermore subject to [them].” We can already readily see the extent to which Levinas has turned the privilege given to the subject (and even to the ‘Da’ of ‘Dasein’) in Western philosophy on its head. While for Hegel, the master is the one to emerge on top from out of the life and death struggle at the end of the dialectic, for Levinas the point would be precisely not to engage in this struggle. In the peace of proximity, I am de-centered, de-positioned, and my identity and being is put utterly in question such that “a veritable abnegation, a substitution for the other, may take on meaning in me.” Peace before truth — as the peace of proximity — requires that I am for the other even to the point of dying for the other. It is only in relation to this radical kind of peace and proximity that Levinas is willing to use the word ‘love,’ which he states is often abused in other contexts.

In elucidating the strength of his claim about the non-reciprocal responsibility I have toward the other, Levinas appeals to the paradigmatic ethical example of suffering. He describes suffering as a passivity, as a “pure undergoing” that is “in-spite-of-consciousness.” In other words, when one suffers, consciousness can do nothing about or with this suffering: “it is useless: ‘for nothing.’” When one encounters the suffering of the other however, this suffering cannot bear a neutral quality. The equilibrium of impassive knowledge has been upset. The suffering of the other calls me to aid them, even if I myself am suffering. Levinas calls this “the suffering of suffering” or “the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other.” Appealing to the history of the 20th century — horrific and bloody as it was — Levinas affirms the historical fact of human attention to the suffering of the other, claiming this “suffering of suffering” to be the “supreme ethical principle — the only one it is impossible to question.” He suggests that even in spite of the extent to which humanity fails to be attentive in this way, the possibility remains in our grasp to prefer this attention to the “world of war” in which I refuse to decenter myself, in which I find myself engaged in Hegel’s life or death struggle for domination over the other and the brute perseverance of my being. Suffering for the other allows us to say “adieu” (or, literally translated, ‘unto God’) to this world of war, leaving behind the “preferential affirmation of the I” for a world of proximity and love for the other.

Does all this talk of God seem to chafe against the words which inaugurated this project? How can it be that Nietzsche claims God to be dead even as Levinas insists upon the reality of God’s trace in the human other? In short, we ought to remember two things: first, that humanity has killed God unwittingly, that this news is still on its way, and second, that Levinas refuses to offer his analyses on the same grounds as Nietzsche. Nietzsche, the anti-metaphysician who remains entangled in metaphysics, sought to shake confidence in the purportedly absolute and totalizing knowledge of the West. Levinas, by his own admission, does not seek to rekindle this foolhardy faith in metaphysical truth but simply to recover the theme of love in European wisdom, seemingly lost in the innumerable atrocities of the 20th century. Has Levinas succeeded? Has he found a philosophy from out of which we might hope to comport ourselves as ethical beings? In the next section, I will turn to Levinas’ concept of the third party in order to elucidate his notion of justice and in order to see where even Levinas fails to offer us an ethical guardrail to which to cling.

Part III: The Third Party and the Contingency of Justice

Levinas’ emphasis upon the face-to-face encounter and the interdiction against killing which the trace of God in the other imparts to me makes up the better part of his life’s work. Yet in the face-to-face relation, I am not yet in a community, not yet immersed in a world full of numerous alterities. I am absolutely commanded by the other to the point of dying for them, but I am commanded by that other alone. Here, Levinas’ notion of the third party comes into play. He asks, “How does responsibility obligate if a third party troubles this exteriority of two where subjection of the subject is subjection to the neighbor?” In other words, what am I to do when I am confronted with yet another face, with the approach of another other who is also my neighbor? Levinas calls this moment precisely “the birth of the question,” and provides us with no simple or immediate answers. This first question is the question of justice, and for this question Levinas insists that it is “necessary to know, to become consciousness.”

Here, we ought to remember that my nonreciprocal responsibility for the other takes place before consciousness. The other is anterior to every question, and the command which issues from them is not available for question until consciousness enters into this scene. He states that “consciousness is born as the presence of the third party in the proximity of one for the other and, consequently, it is to the extent that it proceeds from this that it can become dis-inter-estedness. The foundation of consciousness is justice and not the reverse.” Justice, then, becomes the question that founds the realm of the interhuman, governing all pursuits that take place within this realm. Nonetheless, justice is not an unproblematic concept. Levinas writes that the question of justice means that “a weighing, a thinking, a calculation, the comparison of incomparables, and, consequently, the neutrality — presence or representation — of [B]eing” must be achieved in order for this question to be answered and consciousness founded. In this light, we can see more clearly how Levinas considers his project to be anterior to the question of Being but certainly not a replacement for that question. Presence (as ontology) or representation (as metaphysics) are necessary for justice (and accordingly consciousness) to take place.

However, this concession to the necessity of ontology and metaphysics does not return us to the place we found ourselves before Levinas’ contributions to philosophy. Rather, truth has become a subsidiary (if necessary) component in the project of peace. Here, with the introduction of the third party, Levinas opens the door for all of the metaphysical and ontological thinking in the Western tradition to make an appearance in this difficult ethical work, to contribute to the weighing, measuring, and comparing of incomparables that justice necessarily entails. The question of justice, as the question which founds consciousness, permits us to return to the horizonal outlook of ontological thinking but only after we have looked the other and the third party in the face. The slippery question remains however, what could justice mean for the person who does not grasp the anteriority of the other, who fails to see the face because they look out from the horizon? What is justice for the person who fails to greet the other as other? Levinas’ philosophy, as with Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s, reads in a somewhat dualistic way. Reductively speaking, Nietzsche opposes anti-metaphysics to metaphysics, the Superman to the Last Man; Heidegger opposes thinking Being and its history to metaphysics, world to technology; Levinas opposes the precariousness of the other, their vulnerability in the face of death to the passive indifference of a knowledge which fails to recognize the other as other. He opposes “the wisdom of love” to the love of wisdom as the meaning of philosophy itself. 

So what about this person who fails to encounter the face? Who refuses to see or cannot see the other as other? Who harms the other? Levinas offers us little to go on in determining what counts as justice for this person. But he does give us this: “It is the third party who is the source of justice, and thereby of justified repression; it is the violence suffered by the third party that justifies stopping the violence of the other with violence.” For those who remain oblivious to the vulnerability of the other, Levinas offers us “justified repression” by way of a substitution for the other. He writes that “the idea of substitution signifies that I (je) substitute myself for another, but that no one can substitute himself for me as me.” The nonreciprocal character of the responsibility I have toward the other means that I am never relieved of my responsibility by someone else substituting themselves for me: that is, I am absolutely commanded by the other even unto the point of dying for them. I cannot claim justice for myself, which would be the same as substituting my ‘I’ for my ‘me’ and thereby acquiescing to the metaphysical dangers of willfulness and subjecthood. Levinas writes that when one posits oneself for oneself in this way, “the moment at which [one] is substance is not far away; the moment at which [one] is pride, at which [one] is imperialist, at which [one] has the other like an object.” Rather, I can only substitute my ‘I’ for the third party in order to undergo a just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other. I can never presume that someone will or should substitute themselves for me. Levinas writes, “when one begins to say that someone can substitute himself for me, immorality begins.” One lets oneself off the hook, relieves their absolute responsibility for the other in their precariousness when one asks for the other to substitute themselves for me.

For Levinas, this notion of substitution marks precisely the impossibility of letting oneself off the hook even when one “slips away empirically” and allows the other to suffer. It means that I am always absolutely responsible for the suffering of the other, even if I turn away from this responsibility: even in “the ultimate shelter of myself, [I do] not feel myself innocent, even for the harm another does.” Levinas locates this irremissible responsibility in what he calls the ‘ipseity’ of the I, a concept which echoes Heidegger’s usage of Jemeinigkeit or ‘mineness.’ It is that quality by which I am always I, the sense in which I have been thrown into being and cannot “declin[e] this adventure” or remove myself from it. It is precisely because of — and not in spite of — this unmistakable solitude that I am not only able to substitute myself for another but that I am called to substitute myself. If I do not obey this summons I refuse consciousness itself (not to mention self-consciousness), for in Western thinking since Hegel, the other has always played an indispensable role in the constitution of any identity. It is only by obeying this summons to substitute myself for the other, to undergo the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other, that consciousness can arise. Here, it is important to note that the French word for ‘consciousness’ is the same as the English word ‘conscience.’ Levinas mobilizes this dual meaning to suggest that only someone with a conscience (as the asking of the first question, or justice) can possibly be conscious.

Justice then, is irreducible to any set of metaphysical or ontological schematics or laws which might dictate eternally and objectively the correct course of action. Instead, in Levinas, justice becomes the comparison of incomparables, necessary in each situation where a third party challenges the peace of proximity between one and the other. For this reason, it is always contingent, and always necessarily a violence: there is no way to compare incomparables that does not do harm to the absolutely singular and particular being of every other. And here, we can perhaps answer, or at least give more shape to, one of the earliest questions of this thesis. There is no way for us to ultimately know the right course of action when we are confronted with more than one other. There is only our continuing struggle to weigh, compare, and measure in accordance with our consciousness (conscience) in order to make the perennially difficult choices that constitute interhuman justice. Nonetheless, we can see that Levinas has given us a powerful ethical tool: the absolute passivity and pure patience of the man who suffers for the other, who bids adieu to the world of war as often as he is able, and who understands that the other remains anterior to every question.

Conclusion

So, once again, where do we find ourselves? Between the beginning of this inquiry and the present juncture, we have traversed more than a century of philosophical history and thought and have seen the ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas belong to both common and divergent traditions. We have drawn a thread connecting Nietzsche’s pronouncement with the rise of the metaphysical subject, technology, genocide, and narcissism, but also with the critique of these contemporary phenomena. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas have offered radical reconsiderations of the task of philosophy, undermining and abolishing the validity of the kinds of knowledge we might have hoped to possess even as they have liberated thinking from the strictures of metaphysical schemas and ontological horizons. So where do we find ourselves in this moment? At the end of “Peace and Proximity,” the last essay Levinas wrote before he died in 1998, Levinas states that “it is not without importance to know…if the egalitarian and just State in which the European is accomplished…proceeds from a war of all against all — or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other, and if it can ignore the unicity of the face and love.” This question, with its demand for a particular kind of knowledge, echoes the questions posed at this inquiry’s beginning. It also presents us with this project’s final difficulty and seems to demand that we ultimately provide an answer to this inquiry’s eponymous question: whither is God? How can we be sure of our answer when this question asks not just about history and the past, but about the future? How can we be sure who to believe, when Nietzsche claims God to be dead, Heidegger claims God to be absent, and Levinas claims God to have left his trace in the face of the other?

Here, I would suggest that it is perhaps not a matter of knowing so much as it is a matter of believing. The philosophies which have flowed throughout the West for so many millennia have conferred an undeniable privilege upon the subject such that the war of all against all has become a reality. A cult of the subject, of the will to power, of the brute perseverance of beings in their Being has risen up in response to the power of these philosophies. But might we not hear Nietzsche again when he asks us “but why not deceive? But why not be deceived?” Could we not simply choose to say adieu to the world of war and the cult of the subject? To affirm the anteriority of the other to all inquiry into Being, making our conscience from every ‘yes’ and ‘no’?

Perhaps. And yet this answer seems to fall short. It twists around upon itself, affirms an uncertain knowledge with the metaphysical self-certainty of a belief. It affirms Levinas’ notion of the infinite and the trace of God by way of the self-deceivingly attained certainty of the subject who has no need for God. The question ‘whither is God?’ asks us to orient ourselves, to find some certain points (arche and telos) from which and at which we might be able to aim our arrow. Yet even the discovery of this directional demand within the question is questionable: Levinas reminds us that “priority and ultimacy are terms of Greek philosophy,” and thus to associate God with these concepts is already to delimit and define God according to a Greek model, thus potentially overlooking wherever or whatever else God may be. But then again, Nietzsche reminds us that “even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by… that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.” In all of this inquiry, have we truly found our way out from under this thousand-year metaphysical mantle? Even Levinas, who contests not only the notion of priority but the priority of truth itself, states that “there is nothing to be done: philosophy is spoken in Greek.”

So where are we to look, heavy-laden as we are with the weight of Greek thinking, for this God? How can we hope to find ourselves on surer, more ethical footing? Perhaps we are still searching in the wrong places. But perhaps, most likely, we are searching for something we still desperately hope to find while neglecting that it is not to be found but in that searching itself. Levinas tells us that in questioning, “the question can be posed beyond that which is ensured a response,” and that it is not so much “a situation in which one poses the question; it is the question that takes hold of you: there you are brought into question.” Heidegger also tells us that every answer is internally related to the question posed. In this sense, we can understand that not only can a question contain an infinite number of possible answers corresponding to its terms, but that in the scene of questioning, we often do not even choose these terms. We are called up, summoned into our search by the question, brought into question. Whether it be the face of a friend, the threat of violence, the anxiety of solitude, or the simple beauty of afternoon shadows fading into the softness of evening, to once again quote Rilke: “life here compels us…everything here/ seems to need us, all this fleetingness/ that strangely entreats us. Us, the most fleeting.”

We can speak of this summons, this being overwhelmed, as the constant colliding of centers of forces at play in Nietzsche’s will to power. Or we can conceptualize it as Heidegger’s lightning flash out of the stillness in which I am called upon and needed by Being. Or we can consider it the trace of God’s command, a holy relic lingering on from an immemorial past. The point is not to acquiesce to any of these ways of thinking. The point is to keep questioning, to keep unearthing the infinity of possible answers to be found, to scratch at the margins of what has been thought. It is perhaps not even out of a sense of what is left to uncover that this task is so important, not a matter of promises or gods waiting in the wings of history and thought. Rather, it is because without questioning, we become the Last Men, the delusionally self-certain and isolated subjects of our own non-worlds, languishing as history rends itself from time and sputters to an abortive and premature stall-out. So, with this last echo of Nietzsche, let me bring this inquiry to an end (which can never truly be an end) by paraphrasing Levinas: it is only in God sought that God may ever be found.

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