New Left Review 86, March-April 2014

ANTI-NIETZSCHE
Nihilism and the paradoxes of egalitarianism are at the heart of Malcolm Bulls Anti-Nietzsche (Verso,
2011 and newly out in paperback). The Friedrich Nietzsche of this study is a figure in and for political
theory, and his thought is the limit-philosophy of the modern imaginary, to be resisted in more than
the conventional terms of philosophical disagreement and disapproval. Bulls approach is
characteristically disarming. Where the earlier Seeing Things Hidden (1999) centred its consideration
of apocalypse on the value of hiddenness, and The Mirror of the Gods (2005) wittily profaned the
significance of classical mythology in Renaissance art, here his philosophical counter-strategy sets out
from the commitment to reading like a loser, in the interest of a negative ecology of value and an
indefinitely sustained practice of social levelling out or permanent revolution. In the following pages,
three critics from contrasting philosophical backgrounds engage with key arguments in Anti-Nietzsche,
each striking different emphases. Peter Dews begins with reflections on the characteristic critical
dynamics of European philosophy since Kant, then moves to an assessment of one of the main
philosophical issues at stakethe role of transcendental argument in the thesis of will to powerand a
detailed discussion of Heideggers relation to Nietzsche and nihilism. The question of transcendental
claims recurs in Raymond Geusss contribution, along with the matter, much debated, of the philosophers
perspectivism and the problems of egalitarianism, with particular reference to Marx. The last of these
problem-areas is the special focus of Kenta Tsudas critique, in which distributive justice is the framing
concern and a theory of needs the crux. Malcolm Bull brings the symposium to a close with his reply to
critics.
PETER DEWS
NIETZSCHE FOR LOSERS?
Over the last two or three decades, the transformations in the modus operandi of European
philosophy that followed after Kant have begun to receive renewed attentionand some
long-overdue respectin the Anglophone world. This revival of interest has not been evenly
spread, however. One feature of the post-Kantian revolution that has been less well
explored is the changed dynamic of philosophical succession: the manner in which major
European thinkers, over the last two centuries, have responded to, and tried to outdo, the
work of their predecessors. Thus, in the two decades of the 1790s and the 1800s, we find a
range of procedures through which the successor to a major thinker tried not to refute his
predecessor, in any straightforward sense, but to push that forerunners
thought beyond itself. Fichte, for example, was convinced not that Kant was wrong, but that
he had been insufficiently radical in the grounding of true philosophy (which was no longer
to be mere love of wisdom, but a theory of systematic knowledge, a Wissenschaftslehre).
Schelling did not dispute Fichtes demand for an absolute originating principle, but thought
that the Fichtean version was hopelessly one-sided; it needed to be driven beyond
subjective idealism towards the ultimate identity of subject and object. Hegel made use of
Schellings theorization of the absolute in his earliest publications, but then turned against
it, arguing for a more complex conception of identity, which consisted in the immanent
unfolding and reintegrating of difference. [1]
These genres of pushing beyond, and others like them, applied by one European thinker to
another, have been repeated numerous times over the subsequent two centuries of post-
Kantian thought. Successful philosophizing ceased to bein fact, as Kant himself
appreciated, had never beensimply a matter of who could marshal the most cogent
arguments. After Kant, the majority of leading European philosophers (the same does not
apply to the Anglophone analytical tradition) realized that no thinker was ever going to
carry off the prize of truth, or even some small fragment of it, simply by being extremely
clever. There would always be a counter-argument lurking around the next corner.
Philosophy would never progress by pitting case against case, contention against
contention. And this view was reinforced by the tendency of post-Kantian thinkers to invoke
the imprimatur of history, to claim that the basic philosophical quest had terminated in their
workthat there was nowhere else to go. Faced with such pretensions, later thinkers had
no choice but to discover ways of immanently subvertingnot merely arguing withtheir
predecessors.
These historical considerations are, I believe, highly relevant for understanding the strategy
of Malcolm Bulls mesmerizing Anti-Nietzsche. For they can help to make sense of a work
that might otherwise be dismissed as an oddity, in the context of current Nietzsche
interpretation. After all, Bull is not much concerned with Nietzsche as a profound intuitive
psychologist, as the bane of universalistic moral codes (whether deontological or
consequentialist), as the pioneer of genealogy as a critical method, or as the prophet of
fashionable relativisms. All these foci of interest take Nietzsche to be an important
contributor to the contemporary philosophical conversation. But for Bull he is something
much, much more. Since it is hard to imagine what could supersede the complete
evacuation of meaning from our inherited beliefs and practices, which is what Nietzsche
announces, his nihilism functions, according to Bull, as the limit-philosophy of the modern
imaginary. [2] Does anything, could anything, lie beyond it?
At the limit
Bulls answer begins, rather unexpectedly, with a discussion of the history of atheism and
philistinism; the point being that, just asfor our ancestorsatheism was unintelligible, and
just asfor us right-thinking, cultivated modernsphilistinism is destructive nonsense, so
anyone who opposes Nietzsche, perhaps on political grounds, will have to come up with
something that disrupts the common sense of nihilism. This cannot be a
philosophical theory, since any such theory will be ripe for psychological unpicking, or
genealogical undoing. Rather, Bull suggests, it must be a stance towards Nietzsche: that of
reading like a loser. This type of reading, he argues, is both novel and potentially
subversive, since in the past even the disadvantaged groups [Nietzsche] went out of his
way to denigrate colluded by reading for victory, struggling to wrest success from the text
by making themselves the heroes of Nietzsches narrative. [3]The book then goes on to
explore what reading like a loser entails, and exactly why it might throw grit in the cogs of
Nietzsches project. Along the way, Bull is forced into a subtle confrontation with Martin
Heideggers interpretation of Nietzsche. Indeed, Heidegger is, in a sense, the only serious
rival Bull needs to see off, since he concurs that Nietzsche holds centre stage, that with
Nietzsches metaphysics, philosophy is completed. That means: it has gone through the
sphere of prefigured possibilities. [4] But if Nietzsche is the last metaphysician of the
West, [5] and if the consequences of his thought areas Heidegger believesdisastrous,
then the requirement must be to exceed philosophy as such, to twist free of the
metaphysical assumptions deeply embedded in Western culture. Bull, however, contends
that this attempt fails, and that Heidegger ends up reproducing the political syndrome
central to Nietzsches thought itself.
In the concluding chapters of Anti-Nietzsche, Bull seeks first to establish the very possibility
of being the kind of loser who could resist the allure of Nietzsches rhetoric, shrug at his
triumphalism. Crucially, this would involve a dissolution of the barrier between the human
and the animal, which even Heideggerto the detriment of his effort to overcome his
predecessorsought to uphold. Finally, Bull explores the politics of egalitarianism and anti-
egalitarianism, arguing that mainstream modern conceptions of human and social equality
are not up to the task of confronting Nietzsches visions of the base and the noble. Instead,
drawing inspiration from thinkers as diverse as Vincenzo Cuoco, Babeuf and Marx, Bull
contends that what is needed is an extra-egalitarianism that constantly seeks a new, lower
equilibrium at the level of the inferior and currently excluded. Such a process would extend
the desert of nihilism beyond even Nietzsches wildest imaginings, effectively making his
own faith in the remedial powers of hierarchy, and his conviction that fatigue is the shortest
path to equality and fraternity boomerang against him. [6]
In short, Bull well understands the post-Kantian gameand he is playing it for high stakes.
Just as Hegel, concluding his lectures on the history of the discipline with his own system,
announced that Herewith, this history of philosophy comes to a close, [7] just as
Wittgenstein believed hisTractatus had despatched all the soluble problems of philosophy
(he then went off to be a schoolteacher), and just as Sartre once declared Marxism to be
the unsurpassable philosophy of our time, [8] so for Bullas we have seenNietzsches
nihilism fully occupies the philosophical horizon. Given this assumption, if one wishes to be
anti-Nietzsche, it is no good merely struggling to come up with sound counter-arguments.
Any such excogitations will simply be folded back into Nietzsches limit-philosophy. Thinkers
opposed to Nietzsche will find themselves being held up as examples of ressentiment, of the
envy that the enfeebled and existentially weary direct against those who are boisterous and
brimming with a conquering energy; or as models of what happens when intellectuals
delude themselvesfor Nietzsche, Socrates was the first culpritthat logic-chopping could
ever dam the force of life. More generally, if we accept Nietzsches demolition of meaning,
as a precondition of opposing him, as Bull thinks we must, it seems that any expressions
of bien-pensant horror at his nostrums for a decadent modernityhierarchy, exploitation,
slavery, racial domination, selective breeding and, if required, exterminationwill end up
striving vainly to restore what he has shown to be discredited: the notion of an intrinsic
value or significance of the world, or at least the human part of it. Such anti-Nietzscheans
(Nietzsche called them the last men) probably imagine that Article 1 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights expresses some kind of objective truth.
So there is no point wringing our hands at the cruelty and brutality of Nietzsches
solutionsand Bulls deadpan recounting of the philosophers remedies makes this clear.
Nietzsche knows as well as Walter Benjamin that there is no document of civilization that is
not at the same time a document of barbarism. [9] It is just that he thinks the pact is well
worth it. He would have laughed at Benjamins weak messianic powermocking it,
perhaps, as the messianic power of the weak. Is it not obvious that life itself is essentially a
process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being
harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and, at the least, the very least, exploiting .
. .? [10]
What is to be done in this situation? Following in the line of thinkers that runs from Kant to
Hegel (and indeed from Feuerbach and Marx to Adorno and Derrida), Bull wants to push his
opponents thought beyond itself. Like his predecessors, he aims to demonstrate that what
a foregoing philosophy defined as the limit of thought (and probably of the epoch) can be
surpassed by exploiting a process that this philosophy itself sets in motion. But Bull does
not carry out this operation on Nietzsche alone. In the key chapters of his book he tackles
Nietzsches most potent interpreter, Martin Heideggerwho had already attempted his own
subversion of the Nietzschean limit, back in the 1930s and 1940s, as the repression, terror
and world war foretold by his predecessor raged all around him. Pushing Nietzsche beyond
himself involves also pushing him beyond Heidegger, whose thinking will turn outso Bull
claimsto be constrained by its own version of the Nietzschean boundary.
Forms of nihilism
Perhaps Nietzsches most concise definition of a nihilist is: the human being who judges
that the world as it exists should not be, and judges that the world as it should be does not
exist. [11]Ringing the changes on this, in one of the illuminating taxonomies scattered
through his book, Bull lists four sub-divisions in Nietzsches use of the term nihilism:
incomplete passive, incomplete active, complete passive and completed activethe last of
these being in fact the limit, the hour of the Superman, the point at which nihilism negates
itself and turns into a new affirmation. More specifically, Christianity is the version of
incomplete passive nihilism that has shaped the West. It is a form of passive nihilism
because it expresses what Nietzsche calls a decline and recession of the power of the
spirit; [12] it is incomplete because it posits a phantasy system of transcendent realities as
its way of rejecting the here-and-now. Buddhism, by contrast, is complete passive nihilism,
since it speaks not about sina condition from which we can supposedly be redeemedbut
about the intrinsic suffering of life; in this sense, it is already beyond good and evil,
preaching not a moralized anti-world, but the extinction of the will as such. For Nietzsche,
the bomb-throwers and Tsar-assassins who caused such moral panic in his own day were
active nihilists. But they were incomplete ones, inverting the claim that God is truth into
the destructive and self-destructive faith that all is false. Finally, completed active nihilism
denies all intrinsic meaning and valueand thereby discloses that the only fundamental
value is valuation as such. For the capacity to instil value, to project meaning, is the prime
expression of the will to power, the sole underlying motive force of the world.
For Nietzsche, as Bull recounts, this final form of nihilism is the point of transition, the
moment of metamorphosis into a new, comprehensive yes to the world. The objective
correlative of this collapse of the deception of immanent meaning and value is what
Nietzsche calls the eternal return of the same. He envisages the world as a monster of
energy, without beginning, without end . . . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together,
eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an
ebb and a flood of its forms. The thought of the eternal return is a testand, for Nietzsche,
only a handful can make the grade. For it is a measure of the degree of strength of will to
what extent one can do without meaning in things.[13] Furthermore, this moral and spiritual
watershed corresponds to a feature of Nietzsches thinking which Bull makes absolutely
central, but whichas he rightly stressesthe philosophers liberal sympathizers prefer to
ignore. The activity of valuationas the only ultimate valuedepends on what he calls an
ecology of value, in which the debilitated herd slaves to support an aristocracy of valuers.
The pop-existentialist reading of Nietzsche, widespread in the immediate post-1945 period,
which portrayed the sage of Sils Maria as encouraging us all to decree our lifes meaning,
conveniently ignored his conviction that, as Bull puts it, Valuing is will to power, which
means power over, and hence there can be no value where there is no power over . . .
Those who value valuation are the new aristocracy, but the value of their valuation of
valuation lies not in that valuation itself but in the social arrangements it effects. Or, in
Nietzsches own words, Value is essentially the standpoint for the increase or decrease of
these dominating centres.[14]
One crucial consequence of this outlook is that Nietzsches strategic relation to his
readership differs strikingly from the usual connection that philosophers seek to forge with
their audience. Philosophers have long ascribed to human beings in general, and hence to
their readers, common rational capacities. Just think of the opening declaration of
Aristotles Metaphysics: All human beings by nature desire to know. [15] By contrast,
Nietzsche does not characterize or interpellate his audience in universalistic terms. On the
contrary, his texts are intended to drive a wedgeto select certain readers (and certain
readings) and to repel others. In political terms, this means that Nietzsche wants to be
understood by those with the strength and resolution to head up the future structures of
domination (Herrschaftsgebilde), not by the stupefied massby the socialists, the feminists,
the egalitarians. As he declares in the foreword to The Anti-Christ, This book belongs to the
very few. He intends it for those who in spiritual matters are honest to the point of
hardness: These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what
do the rest matter?The rest are merely mankind.One must be superior to mankind in
force, in loftiness of soulin contempt. [16]
The point about all this, as Bull explains in his second chapter, is that, when we read
Nietzsche, we are almost irresistibly tempted to read for victoryto read as if we counted
ourselves amongst the existential aristocracy, just as Calvinistson pain of a nervous
breakdowncan scarcely avoid considering themselves as members of the elect rather than
the damned. But is this self-classification plausible or likely? We thrill to Nietzsches wild
declaration in Ecce Homo, I am not a human being, I am dynamitewe want to be
dynamite, too. [17] But what if we were to react to this statement as if we had suddenly
found ourselves standing next to a suicide bomber? This is what Bull calls reading like a
loser, and it is the key to his strategy for becoming a post-Nietzschean anti-Nietzschean.
As he states, if opposition comes from within the preexisting traditions, it will do little to
dislodge Nietzsche from the position he chose for himselfthe philosopher of the future who
writes for a species of man that does not yet exist. After all,
[Nietzsche] would not be displeased if his revaluation of all values were to be indefinitely rejected by
those who continued to adhere to the values he despised. He would live forever as their eschatological
nemesis, the limit-philosopher of a modernity that never ends, waiting to be born posthumously on the
day after tomorrow. [18]
What is required, then, is a critique of Nietzsche that takes the same retrospective position
that Nietzsche adopted with regard to Christianity. In other words, a critique that makes no
appeal to the threadbare, exhausted, Christian-Platonic values that covertly saturate
modernitys political and ethical life. But how to avoid such appeals? How does one read
Nietzsche like a loser?
Reading for defeat?
At the start of the third and final essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche writes:
Thatthe ascetic ideal has meant so much to man reveals a basic fact of human will,
its horror vacui: it needs an aim, and it prefers to will nothingness rather
than not will. [19] Buddhism, or complete passive nihilism, is a prime example of such willing
of total negation, and Nietzsche fears that some variant of Buddhism will be the cultural fate
of Europe. But he also hopes that it may function as the tipping point: the destruction of
any positive value, any predetermined aim of the will, can clear the way for the realization
that value is not out there in the world, but is generated by valuation. What remains a
human constant, then, is willing as such, which strives first for value, then for nothingness,
and finallyif things go rightfor its own pure assertion as will to power (for which posited
meaning or value will function more as a pretext than a goal). At two or three points in his
book Bull calls this Nietzsches transcendental argument. But the description does not
seem quite apt.
The idea of a transcendental philosophy, concerned not directly with the nature of the world
but with the conditions of possibility of our experience of a world, begins with Kant.
Although Kant did not talk about transcendental argumentsthese are the modern,
somewhat diluted equivalents of his own transcendental deductionsthe concern of such
arguments with conditions of possibility clearly indicates their origin in the Critical
Philosophy. Starting from a mode of thought, activity or world-encounter that is an
incontestable feature of human existence, transcendental arguments work their way back to
what they claim to be its strictly necessary (and for Kantians a priorinot empirically
encountered) conditions of possibility. The discovery of these conditions then throws new
light on the character and status of the original starting point. For our purposes, the crucial
aspect of this procedure is its distinctive reflexivityin other words, the fact that objections
to the validity of a transcendental argument, if it is a viable one, themselves tacitly rely on
the conditions that the argument stipulates, so generating what Habermas calls a
performative contradiction. [20]
Measured against this criterion, however, Nietzsches claim for the ubiquity of the will to
power (denials of which are, for him, merely sickly expressions of this will) seems to be not
transcendental, but metaphysical. Transcendental arguments are supposed to rule out
alternatives to the conditions they discover as self-contradictory or unintelligible. But there
seems to be no such constraint on thinking of human thought and activity as driven by
forces other than a putative will to power. Nonetheless, Bull argues that we cannot outwit
Nietzsche, push him beyond himself, by proposing an alternative account of human
motivation, but only by dropping below the degree zero of a supposedly ineluctable willing.
As he states, reading like a loser is not a counter-ethic like that of Christianity, nor a will to
destruction like that of the Buddhist. Neither value-positing, nor annihilationist, it is a failure
beyond death, a staying alive in order to grow weaker. Or, put more succinctly, it is a
nihilism that spreads without nihilists, a nihilism that cannot articulate its own
scepticism. [21]
If this represents a triumph over Nietzsche (a victory which consists in refusing to read for
victory), then one might be forgiven for regarding it as a distinctly Pyrrhic one. Pyrrhic not
in the sense that the price of winning is a kind of defeatreading like a loser is meant to be
Pyrrhic in that waybut that the cost looks very much like a lapse into intellectual
incoherence. To prove that this really is the way we have to go, Bull needs to tackle head-
on Heideggers grandsome might say, grandioseinterpretation of Nietzsche, elaborated
in lecture courses and in one-off lectures, essays and unpublished scripts throughout the
late 1930s and 1940s. In his 193637 lecture series, The Will to Power as Art, Heidegger
had proposed a reading that struggled to align Nietzsches conception of art with his own
basic concern with the concealment and disclosure of Being. Rapidly, however, under the
influence of Ernst Jngers visions of remorseless mechanization and total mobilization, he
came to see Nietzsches philosophy as the culminating expression of a theory of the
dominating will with profound roots in the Western metaphysical tradition. Far from being
the turning point, the beginning of world-historical healing, Nietzsches thinking, with its
utter tone-deafness to the question of Being (for Nietzsche Being was no more than a
vapid philosophers abstraction), represented the nec plus ultra of European nihilism.
However, as Bull explains, in a fascinating and intricate discussion, Heidegger also thought
he had a trump card to play against his towering forerunner. Since, according to Heidegger,
it lies in Beings own essence . . . that Being remains unthought because it
withdraws, [22] the nihilism that obliterates meaning (and hence obliterates Being, since
ultimatelyit is only Being that speaks through all meaning) is in fact the doing of Being
itself. Being plays out its ownprogressive and intensifying forgetting in the history of
metaphysics, now co-extensive with the history of nihilism. But this entails that to
encounter Being in its default as such, as Heidegger puts it, is to become aware that
even in extremis, in our modern forgetting of that very forgettingThe default of Being is
Being itself as this default. [23]
This, according to Bull, is Heideggers transcendental argumentand it certainly appears a
more plausible candidate for the description than the argument he attributes to Nietzsche.
For there is no compelling reason to accept the later Nietzsches claim that everything is will
to power. Indeed, Nietzsche himself, in a canny sawing-through of the branch he is sitting
on, concedes that the notion of all-pervasive will to power is yet another
interpretation. [24] But a much stronger case can be made that some vestigial connection of
the human being to Being must remain even in the depths of Beings absence; orto deploy
the transcendental tu quoquethat to argue that there is no ineliminable human relation to
Being already reveals what Heidegger calls a pre-understanding Being. This, after all, must
surely be a distinguishing mark of the human: the awareness not just of what things are,
but that they are. We can wonder why there is something rather than nothingeven though
the technological world may do everything it can to stifle this wonder.
In effect, Bull concedes this. For the conclusion he draws in the final chapters of Anti-
Nietzscheis that the only way to avoid what he regards as Heideggers reactive piety, his
attempt to turn the nihilistic tide by retrieving the truth not of things, but of Being itself,
and hence the only way to push Nietzsche beyond himself, is to sink below the level of the
human. But how could we do thishow could we become both human and subhuman? Here
Bull makes ingenious use of Heideggers meditations on the difference between animal and
human modes of being, in his 192930 lecture course on The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics.
Dusk in the forest
Animals, Heidegger argues, are not world-less, like a rock or a river, but they are poor-in-
world (weltarm). [25] Only human beings are open to the world as world, and to the things
of the worldas things. Two years earlier, in Being and Time, Heidegger had stressed that the
ontic inexplicitness of this as should not lead us to overlook it as the a priori existential
constitution of understanding. [26] A lizard may touch the stone on which it restsbut it
does not experience the stone as a stone, and hence its contact is entirely different, argues
Heidegger, from the touch which we experience when we rest our hand on the head of
another human being. [27] It is at this point that Bull makes his crucial intervention.
Heidegger insists there is a qualitative distinction between the animals world-poverty
and Daseins (let us say, roughly, the human beings) having a world. Nihilism, the
darkening of the world (Weltverdsterung), may be going viralbut it can occur only
within what Heidegger calls the clearing of Being. Drawing on the shared etymology of the
German words for a forest clearing (die Lichtung) and for light (das Licht), Heidegger uses
this term as one of his metaphors for that openness, unique to humans, to the play of
concealment and unconcealment which characterizes Being as sheer Being. But what ifBull
enquiresthe distinction between having a world and being world-poor were a matter of
degree, and not of kind? In this case, we could drop below the point of no return. Dusk
could be drawing near not just in the clearing, but amidst the trees, in the depths of the
forest. There might be a nightfall that was a pure blank, that was not even experienced as
nothingnessthat nothingness which, according to Heideggers transcendental argument,
must hint at some as yet unimaginable return of the experience of Being.
We can now better understand why Anti-Nietzsche begins so obliquely, regaling the reader
with a history of atheism and philistinism. Just as the atheist was at first inconceivable, then
a nonexistent bogey, and finally a character on the historical stage, disproving the
indispensability of religion, and just as philistinism, when it dares to show itself, puts paid to
the interminable internal dialectic of art, so the subhuman can be envisaged as undermining
Nietzsches transfiguration of the human, even though no one yet occupies the space of
being called and unchosen. [28] But even if readers-like-losers were to appear en masse,
would that really challenge Heideggers account of the self-cancelling dynamic of nihilism?
We may seriously doubt it, because of the deep disanalogy between Nietzsches account of
the remedy for nihilism and that of Heidegger. Bulls readers-like-losers, the inheritors of
atheism and philistinism, are going to undermine Nietzsches positive ecology with what Bull
calls a negative ecology of value; [29]subhumanism as an anti-humanism, in its blankness
and lethargy, its refusal even to negate, its indifference to Nietzsches passionate,
sometimes even pathetic commitment to the life-enhancing function of art, will gradually
expand, swamping the valuing capacity of the strong.
But this will only work precisely because Nietzsche advocates a hierarchy, a rank-ordering
of human beings, whose foundations can be sapped. Try as he might, Bull does not succeed
in persuading us that a comparable political ecology is implicit in Heidegger. It is true, as he
says, that, in the notorious Introduction to Metaphysics (denounced by a 24-year-old Jrgen
Habermas in his first publication, in 1953), Heidegger links the darkening of the world to
the geopolitical plight of the German people in 1935 . . . caught in a pincers between Russia
and America. [30]But if it is the historical mission of the Germans to keep alive the question
of Being, this does not mean that the darkness looming from East and West could ever be
more than opacity within the clearing. It is not the case, therefore, as Bull contends, that
for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, nihilism comes to an end in the ecology of the
human. [31] Heidegger does not dismiss Soviets and capitalists as inferior, animal-like
versions of the human, fit only to toil for an elevated Volkdevoted to tending the embers of
Being in anticipation of some future reignition. It is Western metaphysics, not human
corruption or debility, which has led to the catastrophe of our technologically objectified
world. This is not to deny that, in many speeches and lectures of the early 1930s, Heidegger
exhorts his audience to embrace the National Socialist revolution. But in the vast majority of
his philosophical texts he does not seek to drive a wedge, to distinguish between human
types, or to woo only the bold confronters of nothingness. [32] Indeed, in his lecture courses
of the later 1930s, he struggled to wrest Nietzsche from the clutches of Nazi biologismand
was attacked by Party ideologues for his pains.
The upshot of all this is that the attempt to fall out of the obscurity of the clearing into what
Bull calls outer darkness cannot blot out the human relation to (the default of) Being, in
the way it might contaminate and debilitate Nietzsches oligarchy of superior valuers,
exponents of the unadorned will to power. Heidegger may have fallen head over heels for
the Volksgemeinschaft, but it is simply not true that in their response to nihilism both
Nietzsche and Heidegger rely on what is perhaps the central tenet of fascism in all its forms:
the idea that particular human ecologies are the ultimate source of meaning. [33] The avant-
garde of Bulls subhumanism, therefore, would not be able to undermine Heideggers
position. Rather, they would simply find themselves excluded from the conversation, like the
denier of the law of non-contradiction in Aristotles Metaphysics: For if he wants to go to
Megara, why does he go there instead of staying where he is? Why doesnt he, as soon as
he gets up in the morning, wander into any well or fall into any abyss that happens to be
there, instead of carefully avoiding it, if he really thinks falling in equally good and not
good? Not even subversively subhuman, then, but vegetable: in what respect, asks the
philosopher, does his condition differ from that of a plant? [34]
This is not to say that we should rest content with Heideggers pushing of Nietzsche beyond
himself (even if persuaded that it is indeed such a pushing, and not a relapse into pious
delusions of meaning, as Bull implies). Heidegger was correct to convict Nietzsche of
rampant subjectivism, to see him as part of the problem rather than the solution. The truth
is, a meaning or value that we wilfully posit is no meaning or value at all. To stamp
becoming with the character of being may beas Nietzsche claimsthe supreme will to
power. [35] But it is not going to fool anyone, if we know all along that we are doing the
stamping. Nietzsche went down that quasi-solipsistic road in the first place partly because of
his innate solitariness, reflected in his absurdly dogmatic claim that one furthers ones ego
always at the expense of others; [36] but largely because, in the philosophy of his day and
ours, the thought of the categorial distinctness of the subject-to-subject relation still plays
Cinderella to those domineering stepsisters known as Subject and Object. Only in the sub-
tradition that runs from Fichte, via Hegel and Feuerbach, to Levinas and contemporary
Critical Theory, does the encounter with the human other feature as sui generis, and as the
primordial locus of meaning and value. Given the convergence of this subaltern tradition
with what I take to be common human experience, Heidegger was right to interpret the
history of metaphysics as the history of an occlusionand Levinas was right to respond that
what has been blanked out, in the first instance, is not Being, but the face of the Other.
Bull steels himself against this thought: Becoming world-poor opens up the possibility for a
degree of anomie beyond that possible within purely human interaction. You cannot fully
experience anomie within the species; you have to go outside. The human world is never
dark enough. [37] The genuine and admirable achievement of Anti-Nietzsche is to give the
lie to both the boorish analytical naturalists and the insouciant postmodern pluralists who, in
recent decades, have tried to carve up the terrain of Nietzsche studies between them. Both
camps, though deeply hostile to each other, have largely repressed the Nietzsche that Bull
so vividly portrays: the political ecologist, the thinker who wants to drive a wedge through
humanity, who rejoices in domination and exploitation as the invaluable preconditions for
positing value. But I see no reason why we should want to follow Bull into the outer
darkness. That would not be a new contribution to the philosophical endeavour of pushing
beyond, of breaking through the carapace of a worn-out shape of spirit, to use Hegels
term. It would be simply giving up the ghost.



[1] For an excellent recent reconstruction of this development from Kant to Hegel, see Eckart
Frster,The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA 2012.
[2] Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche, London and New York 2011, p. viii (hereafter AN).
[3] AN, p. 34.
[4] Martin Heidegger, Overcoming Metaphysics, in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh,
New York 1973, p. 95.
[5] Heidegger, Nietzsche, vols 34, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi, San
Francisco 1987, vol. 3, p. 8.
[6] AN, p. 175; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, vol. II, Part Two, in Human, All
Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge 1996, 263, p. 273; T (indicates my alteration of the
translation).
[7] G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Geschichte der Philosophie III, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden,
Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, eds, Frankfurt am Main 1986, vol. 20, p. 461: Hiermit ist
diese Geschichte der Philosophie beschlossen.
[8] Jean-Paul Sartre, Questions de mthode, Paris 1960, p. 44.
[9] Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, London 1973, p. 258.
[10] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge 2002, 259, p. 152.
[11] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York 1968, 585,
p. 318; T.
[12] Will to Power, 22, p. 17.
[13] Will to Power, 1067, p. 550; 585, p. 318.
[14] AN, p. 72; Will to Power, 715, p. 380. The prudishness about the political implications of
Nietzsches relentless, caustic attacks on any notion of democracy or equal human moral worth has
continued up to the present. Brian Leiter, for example, a leading proponent of the analytically oriented,
mainly North American, naturalist/empiricist tendency in Nietzsche interpretation manages to reduce
Nietzsches ferocious anti-egalitarianism to the anodyne thought that it would be good to allow more
Beethovens and Goethes to flourish. The issue of who Nietzsches lower men are, he suggests, can be
left pleasantly vague (Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, London 2002, p. 124). Pleasant for whom?
one might askthe obvious Nietzschean question. So much for hard-headed naturalism. At the other
extreme, Gilles Deleuze, who inspired a whole wave of post-structuralist Nietzsche interpretation, once
claimed, citing Nasser, Castro and Giap, that Nietzsches imperatives imply an artistic joy that comes
to coincide with historical struggle (Nietzsches Burst of Laughter [1967], inDesert Islands and Other
Texts, Cambridge, MA and London 2004, p. 130). To complete the triptych, Robert Pippin,
in Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy, Chicago and London 2010, argues that materialist or
naturalist bloody-mindedness (p. 74) cannot accommodate Nietzsches historically shifting psychology
of value, while also contending that respect for the philosophical import of Nietzsches elliptical, image-
laden style, in the Parisian manner, need not preclude attributing any determinate views to him at all.
Pippin, however, is as coy as his exegetical rivals about Nietzsches enthusiasm for a morality of
breeding, of race, of privilege (The Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, The Twilight of
the Idols, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge 2005, p. 185; T), dropping only a few mild hints
concerning his subjects aversion to egalitarian humanism: p. 67.
[15] Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Richard Hope, Ann Arbor 1960, p. 3 (I.1, 980a); T.
[16] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, p. 3; T.
[17] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Why I Am a Destiny, 1, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the
Idols, pp. 14344.
[18] AN, p. 30. The embedded quotation is from Will to Power, 958, p. 503. It continues: for the
masters of the earth.
[19] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge 2007, Third Essay, 1, p.
68.
[20] Although the notion of a transcendental argument is crucial for Bulls overarching train of thought
in Anti-Nietzsche, he spends almost no time explaining what he understands by the expression. The
closest we get is a cryptic statement in the Preface that transcendental arguments turn nonsense
back into sense: AN, p. viii.
[21] AN, pp. 74, 77.
[22] Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead, in The Question Concerning Technology, trans.
W. Lovitt, New York 1977, p. 110.
[23] Heidegger, Nietzsche, vols 34, vol. 4, pp. 225, 214; T.
[24] Beyond Good and Evil, 22, pp. 2223.
[25] The animal both has something and does not have something, i.e. it is deprived of something. We
express this by saying that the animal is poor in world and that it is fundamentally deprived of world.
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill
and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1995, p. 211.
[26] Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford 1980, 32, p.
190; T.
[27] Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 197.
[28] AN, p. 98.
[29] AN, p. 135.
[30] AN, p. 102.
[31] AN, p. 101.
[32] What might be taken as one of the most damning pieces of counter-evidence occurs in a notorious
passage from Heideggers lecture course on The Essence of Truth, from the winter semester of 1933
34. Commenting on Heraclituss dictum that war is the father of all things, Heidegger asserts that the
enemy can implant itself in the innermost root of the Dasein of a people, and stresses the difficulty of
preparing the attack looking far ahead with the aim of total annihilation. There is no racial or
psychological specification of the enemy, however, andin a flash of ingenuousnessHeidegger even
concedes that it may be necessary to create (schaffen) the enemy: Heidegger, Being and Truth,
trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Bloomington 2010, p. 71; T.
[33] AN, p. 101 (my emphasis).
[34] Metaphysics, p. 75 (III.4, 1008b).
[35] Will to Power, 617, p. 330; T.
[36] Will to Power, 369, p. 199.
[37] AN, p. 128.