Nietzsche and Heidegger on Nihilism. A Dialogue with Ivo De Gennaro
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
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Prof Ivo De Gennaro and Dr. Johannes Achill Niederhauser discuss the different notions of nihilism formulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger: while for the former nihilism means that „beings amount to nothing“ (i.e. are senseless), for the latter the notion of nihilism implies that „being itself amounts to nothing“ (i.e. stays away), so that Nietzsche’s own thinking, and indeed the entire tradition of metaphysics (the thinking of beings as such), turns out to be - unknowingly - nihilistic. The conversation also establishes a link between nihilism and the presently much discussed „meaning crisis“
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I encountered this confrontation between Heidegger and Nietzsche in Heidegger's Intro to Metaphysics. For more than a decade now it's occupied a place in my mind. Thank you very much for this wonderful discussion.
Yes, especially when Heidegger questions Nietzsche. I paraphrase Heidegger in response to Nietzsche in Introduction to Metaphysics: Being is nothing more than a mere Vapor!?! I think we can agree for Heidegger and those who follow his thought can agree Being is no mere "Vapor."
This is the good corner of the internet. In Heidegger's 'Introduction to Metaphysics' I recall Martin Heidegger writes "The world hangs in between the pincer grasp of the Soviet Union and the United States who viewed metaphysically are the same.' This is one of the lines that stands out for me as very adept at perceiving not the economic or political similarities but that they shared the same spiritual sickness and technological frenzy of a rootless Nihilism. I would also like to add that I have found both philosophers inadequate in addressing the meaning crisis of the 21st century alone and find Professor John Vervaecke who is informed by them but not fully shaped a lot more palatable on the way to discovering and creating self-generating modes of meaningful existence. We do not exist in a vacuum there is a dead end to existentialism that is phenmenolgically agnostic to the vertical opening of the divine and transcendent.
This is a tremendous video. One of the problems that we all face as denizens of “homo economicus”, to use that appellation in our present epoch, is that the basic problem of survival is continually one of income/money, and that some implicit endorsement of this valuation is necessary in order to not be unemployed and problematised by the base issues of food/shelter/security, all of which is at least some preconsideration of the capacity to even live an “examined life” and philosophise (unless one wants to be a Zarathustrian “superman” living hermit-like in a cave!). Additionally, as part of this instrumental turn, nearly all formal education also orients along this perspective, such that it becomes the ceaseless journey of either credential-accumulation or publishing recognition. In other words, education becomes entirely focused on its economically-productive utility (and hence standardised metrics of “assessment”), rather than be towards an orientation of learning and “bringing forth” from the individual. From then on, we are then stuck in a world of work where the operation of work itself is transvalued as the highest end in itself (Weberian/Calvinist work ethic). In other words, the current world we live in is self-reinforcing or self-amplifying in its tendency towards alienation and nihilism, and as stated, the first step out of this bind, is to learn by becoming aware of this hidden-ness of being, and through recognition that the *consumption* of “experiences” or explicit substitution of some type of “cognitive framework”, or new mode of representation, is not the solution since it is of the wrong modality and is in fact a further perpetuation of the very same bind we are in effect trying to free ourselves from.
The “solution” must at least start with something that leaves us more *space* freed from technological-reductive-instrumental ends, so perhaps, following Heidegger, as a first step, it means more of us learning to be content with solitude and quietude. This is why good, deep books, and unhurried careful discourses of discovery like in this is video, are so valuable. Reflection rather than rushing. Depth rather than multiplied surplus.
Yours is a great finding, "...the operation of work itself is transvalued as the highest end in itself (Weberian/Calvinist work ethic)": Marxism would have been completely different if Marx had had any notion like this to better construct his notion of labor. I grew up a Marxist in the Seventies, and the fall of the Soviet Union took me to do a deep deconstruction of free-market Capitalism all the way to Calvinism, and particularly Adam Smith's "invisible hand of Market," which is nothing but a hypostasis. This, in turn, justifies that which the excellent political writer Mike Lofgren ("The Deep State," page 54), and before him the Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, have asserted: neoliberalism is nothing but a secular (materialistic) religion. Incidentally, the two also assert that Marxism is itself also a secular religion, the advantage of Marxism being that it implies dialectical thinking, thus in my view is not reactionary as neoliberalism. Also, your "...more space freed from technological-reductive-instrumental ends" is very relevant because what we hear and read in and from the mainstream media is all fake news, as dealt with in the book, "Impossible exchange," by Jean Baudrillard. Thanks for taking time to post like it.
Great share. 2 distinctions I make ongoingly, Bring myself forth, and creating space.
The respected guest spoke and explained very nicely. About his opening remarks on Nietzsche Nihilism. Can I say something humble as a common peasant from India 🇮🇳
Just a few years after Nietzsche spoke and asserted Nihilism and the falling of Human values, we all saw just in a few years a Nan like Gandhi stood up in India and made the British to bow down to his values. And further more people in general or human beings in general stood up after the WWI and WWII and build up their nations and survived.
So in short nothing like the Nihilism happened so far.
" You cannot but learn, every hour of everyday, never go back to where I was an hour ago, as always with learning, there is a learning of what it means to learn, this microscopic shift is so huge, the implications are so huge, that the sense of learning also becomes a new one"
We can only learn from true sources like here, not from the mainstream media at all. If you take a deep look, this matter of nihilism takes us to Nazism. Nazism usurped, misused, and fundamentally twisted Nietzsche's thinking. Essentially, Nazism was, and as neo-Nazism is, radical nihilism, not the affirmation of life as in Nietzsche, but the affirmation of death, violence and destructivity as ends. Thus the danger of seeing absolutely no neo-Nazism in today's Ukraine, what about if there is neo-Nazism there? Only because Russia asserts it we must deny it as a possibility?
Excellent! Thank you!
Excellent
About an hour in and finding a sense of depth in this that I’m sure will continue to show itself as I sit with what I’m hearing here. Thank you both
Jean-Paul Sartre's quintessential critique to the American culture was, he argued, that the social sciences have replaced philosophy in American (and now European) thinking. So one reads a critique like this: "What’s interesting about the concept of “values” is that it’s so totally subjective. If I “value” something, all that means is that I personally like it." There is no philosophy in one such a comment, and yet in the media is used all the time supposedly to criticize politicians, but it is an empty critique, watching this video one realizes.
20:00 reducing our need for sense
Such are the ways of the last man.
Superb content. Thanks. I think Nietzsche had a complicated take on Christianity or monotheism and what it meant to him, particularly as his father was a pastor. It seems that while he could disparage Christianity, he could also admire it in a begrudging kind of way.
He also had good comments for Judaism. I guess that one has to read Nietzsche while keeping Kant in mind, Kant's antinomies: a statement which means one thing but it also means the opposite. Carl G. Jung thoroughly explains how antinomies are applicable to his analytical psychology.
How interesting that Nietzsche is here portrayed as diagnosing philosophical problems. This because his two greatest intellectual disciples, in case Heidegger may not be one, were two medical doctors, Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung. Jung calling Nietzsche a psychologist, whereas Freud always acknowledged how relevant to his psychology was Nietzsche.
Nihilism is a key to breaking starchy creations that press the human mind into corners of flat limitation and stops the weeds which grow into repetitive language, so imagination can exalt its owner.
I invite to the Church of Bagelism where we practice the concept that everything is a bagel, everything is empty inside. Our logic and reasoning has limitation and is empty inside and operates in circles. Our desires and dreams are empty inside and we chases in circles, never truly satisfied. All hail the might Bagel .
I am not a philosopher. I have enjoyed the entire analysis about Nietzsche, and learned a lot. But when it comes to Heidegger, I have learned nothing. I know it is unfair to Heidegger to remember that he was a member of the Nazi Party, which not at all favored passive nihilism but a most destructive, and auto-destructive, version of it, or what was it? Was it Nietzsche the true representative of extreme nihilism, or the Nazis as an instrumental Dionysian set of forces? In what sense through a "fertility" of nihilism was there a way out of nihilism? Was there? What has the West become ever Heidegger died, but as said in the video, a culture where there is a "strange fetishism for the body" and its corresponding devaluation of the soul? Take a look at what is happening today, October, 2022, the United States of America spending over 80 billion dollars for war in Ukraine, would not such be one more moralistic adaptation which is not life-affirming at all? In a sense, as in the video, it is one more outbreak of power, but it is not life-affirming, but death affirming, a Manichean take in history, the demonization of the Other, the "bad Russians" as the philosophical Other which the West must "weaken", as President Biden says. So, why did Russia invade Ukraine, because it is the new Evil Empire, as the mainstream media and politicians now put it, or because of its own will to power as a nation?
Putin's will to power! ha ha Russia felt threatened as it witnessed old Soviet Union country's being swallowed up by NATO, Russia warned NATO to stop, NATO did not, Russia attacked Ukraine to set an example for any other country thinking to join NATO. the Soviet Union itself was like NATO, a union of countries united for protection, Russia seeing old allies move to NATO could be seen as a threat or even a betrayal.
Fantastic. Thank you!
BSYMKR thank you!