Heidegger on Nietzsche’s Political Ontology and Technoscientific Animalism

The following short essay was written as a supplement to an essay published in 2018^[1] which provided an analytic description of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s political philosophy and vindicated Heidegger’s view of this philosophy as fundamentally technological in nature, representing the final stage of Western metaphysics. As Heidegger put it, ‘in the thought of will to power, Nietzsche anticipates the metaphysical ground of the consummation of the modern age’, making him the ‘last metaphysician of the West’.^[2]

Heidegger classified Nietzsche’s politics under the headings of Machiavelli and Roman Culture (Caesar), technique and imperium. These terms illustrate how the overman (Übermensch), who represents subjectivism at its peak, challenges the subjectivism of the ‘last man’, who also seeks dominion over the earth. Heidegger claims that by the time Nietzsche wrote Twilight of the Idols, he ‘had clear knowledge of the fact that the metaphysics of the will to power conforms only to Roman culture and Machiavelli’s The Prince’.^[3] For Nietzsche, Roman culture signified Caesar, political genius and organization, autocracy, and imperium, while Machiavelli signified political realism, the political subjectivity of the Renaissance (virtù), and technique (technē)—the manipulation of appearance for political ends, the the state as a work of art, or manufactured politics.

Heidegger argues that a Machiavellian cloud hangs over the end of metaphysics since ‘there belongs to it the ubiquitous, continual […] investigation of means, grounds, hindrances, the […] plotting of goals, deceptiveness and maneuvers, the inquisitorial, as a consequence of which the will to will is distrustful and devious toward itself, and thinks of nothing else than the guaranteeing of itself as power itself’.^[4] Heidegger’s situation of Nietzsche’s politics within the metaphysical purview of Machiavelli’s Prince indicates that he views modern politics as fundamentally subjective (self-legislating), technical, or manufactured, an expression of a technological will to power which deploys itself as machination viewing the human being instrumentally, as calculable and manipulable. The only difference between the configuration of domination of the last man, who ‘set[s] up a glittering deception which is then agreed upon as true and valid’,^[5] and that of the overman is that the latter, who has declared war on the democratic masses, knows, or should know, that what he has constructed is merely semblance or simulation.

Thus all modern ideologies (including Nietzschean ideology), to the extent that they are determined by the development of modern metaphysics, must inevitably share certain salient characteristics and thus must be considered formally the same. In the age of technology, the final stage of metaphysics, there is produced a ‘power-based’ truth replaced by aggressive justification, propaganda—or the ‘production of semblance for the preservation and enhancement of power’—and a guiltless brutality which ‘posits what is to be considered right and wrong from the viewpoint of its own power’. Heidegger illustrates this modern power-based truth with the following example: ‘when the British recently blew to smithereens the French fleet docked at Oran it was from their point of view “justified”; for “justified” merely means what serves the enhancement of power’.^[6] A power-based truth represents the destruction of the critical distinction between truth and falsehood, where truth and untruth both constantly prove to be useful;^[7] where the distinction between the ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world’ is abolished and there are only interpretations.^[8]

Heidegger recognizes that Nietzsche, given the context in which he found himself, was forced to elevate his language to a higher intensity—which he did, populating it with symbols, images, and emblems. Nietzsche treats language, including images and symbols, as an instrument, simultaneously justifying the right to lie, to simulate and dissimulate, that all power structures since Plato have consistently claimed.^[9] This trait is an essential aspect of Nietzsche’s description of the artist-philosopher who, like the actor, takes a pronounced ‘delight in simulation […] the inner craving for a role and a mask, for appearance’.^[10]

In this essay, I continue to outline Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s political ontology—which may be defined as a description of the properties common to the being of the political—with a preliminary focus on the Nietzschean notions of animality, cruelty, guilt, and the morality of pity. It should be said for the sake of clarity that Nietzsche’s political thought includes a political ontology (eg of the will to power) but one which is meaningful only in an oppositional framework. Heidegger, by contrast, takes up fundamental elements of Nietzsche’s political thought and political psychology and formulates them into a descriptive political ontology of the technological age, without the oppositional demarcations codified by Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian ideology and its chain of equivalences. The implications of this investigation transcend the Nietzschean corpus and apply to our current place in history.

1. The Nietzschean Credo

Nietzsche’s political thought, in its both antithetically negative and tragically affirmative expression, in its opposition to ‘notions of justice that derive from Christian, humanistic, Enlightenment […] and socialist moralities’,^[11] which we can properly call its ideology, in its Dionysian and radically aristocratic projection, constitutes the political ontology of the contemporary technological age, forming one unified system, internally conflicted. This system may be defined by a metaphysical orientation towards subjectivism, or the supposed necessity of Caesarism and charismatic leadership, strength of will, that must prescribe;^[12] values, agonistically divided into those that are ascending and those that are in decline, and whereby each ‘subjects the opposing activity to the standard of a universal […] morality’,^[13] in Nietzsche’s case appealing to health or to the instinct of life;^[14] ‘man’, self-designated ‘as the creature that measures values’;^[15] force and will to power, whereby power becomes the ultimate explanatory, determinative principle—‘on every side there is the struggle for power’^[16]— claiming the ‘essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions’;^[17] a power-based truth, characterized by aggressive, polemical justification, propaganda,^[18] and guiltless brutality,^[19] with the ensuing critical destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood; a ‘mission’ assigned by ‘fate’, or ‘destiny’, and invented for the purpose of self-legitimation);^[20] and globalism, the closure of the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘international’^[21], with a struggle for the dominion of the earth, for world government or imperium.^[22] This is the general framework of Nietzsche’s political thought which, in the Heideggerian reading, sheds its superficial ideological aspect and is converted into the political ontology of the technological age.

Another salient feature of Nietzsche’s political thought and the political ontology of the technological age, as critically engaged by Heidegger, is the extent to which psychology dominates this era.^[23] Nietzsche takes deep-rooted psychological structures as his object, primarily instincts and the animal—sometimes referred to as the ‘blond beast’ or, more frequently, as the ‘beast of prey’. As Nietzsche portrays it,

one cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.^[24]

This is the regenerative imperative which comes to reveal itself in a technoscientific context with a premodern revaluating orientation, favouring the ancient, aristocratic Greek and Roman cultures^[25] which produced ‘noble and autocratic men, in whom the animal in man felt deified and did not lacerate itself’.^[26] Nietzsche recounts that during these flourishing ancient times, ‘in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful’,^[27] but laments that the inherently aristocratic character of these cultures was eventually extinguished by both the moralism of Platonic philosophy, which converted all values into moral values, and the Christian slave rebellion. The result of the former transformation was the ‘superfetation of the logical’,^[28] and the pitting of rationality against the instincts and the unconscious, an idealistic philosophical imperative which Nietzsche prosopopoeically animates in Twilight of the Idols: ‘One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards’.^[29] The latter momentous, ressentiment-driven transformation led in turn to the ‘morbid softening and moralization through which the animal “man” finally learn[ed] to be ashamed of all of his instincts’,^[30] his natural instincts, the body, sexuality, the passions.^[31] But, as Nietzsche insists, in effect defining the dogma of his own philosophical countermovement, to ‘have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one’.^[32]

This is the credo of a naturalistic morality which considers it imperative to establish the means to channel and cultivate the animal in the human being in ways that are neither self-destructive nor socially destructive (at least to the extent that a social structure remains). How Nietzsche intends to accomplish this for the radically aristocratic order he envisions, in his ‘attempt to raise humanity higher’,^[33] is not comprehensively clear. Yet every society must ultimately confront this potentially dangerous problem. Christianity confronted it by loathing, obstructing, and repressing the animal in the human being—‘the ancient animal self’^[34]—leading to a culturally venerated self-lacerating guilt and self-denial, and a final ‘forcible sundering from his [man’s] animal past’.^[35]

An animal, Nietzsche says, ‘loses its instincts […] when it prefers what is harmful to it’.^[36] But it may be asked: what is lost exactly when an animal ‘loses its instincts’? The answer is the ability to maximize, enhance, overcome, or even preserve itself. This is because

Every animal […] instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors […] instinctively and with a subtlety of discernment that is ‘higher than all reason’ every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum.^[37]

To make this maximization possible, at least this much is clear: the sense of guilt, the guilty conscience, and the morality of pity must be diminished. As Nietzsche writes: ‘the overcoming of pity I count among the noble virtues’.^[38] This assertion might appear rather anaemic if Nietzsche also did not elevate the instinct of cruelty to the degree that he does, as overcoming pity and increasing cruelty are one and the same. There can be no reluctance in acknowledging that the aggressive instinct of cruelty possesses a philosophical status higher than all of the other healthy and natural instincts Nietzsche identifies, insofar as it constitutes, as the ultimate ‘form-giving’ force that imparts ‘new interpretations and directions’,^[39] the condition for their activation (in forming a culture or in simply overcoming the ‘anarchy among the instincts’), such as the ‘instinct for self-preservation’ or ‘self-defense’ or ‘those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows’, which the ‘entire West has lost’—the instincts (or drives) for authority, organization, or durability.^[40]

The argument that the instinct of cruelty possesses for Nietzsche an elevated philosophical status is fivefold. First, Nietzsche associates the ‘masters’ with ‘beasts of prey’ who are, without question, cruel, as they forcibly shape reality.^[41] Second, via reference to ‘men of prey’ and ‘barbarians in every terrible sense of the word’, Nietzsche suggests that cruelty lies at the ‘origins of an aristocratic society’ where human beings could be found ‘whose nature was still natural’.^[42] Third, in Ecce Homo, commenting on the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche points to the originality of his conclusion stating that it is in this essay that cruelty is ‘exposed for the first time as one of the most ancient and basic substratum of culture that simply cannot be imagined away’.^[43] Fourth, in what may be read as a development of the previous notion, Nietzsche declares that ‘higher culture is based on the spiritualization [or sublimation] of cruelty’.^[44] Fifth and finally, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche expresses the general rule that all ‘instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward’,^[45] while specifying that it was cruelty that was repressed in the ‘animal-man’ after it could no longer discharge itself externally when ‘the more natural vent for this desire to hurt had been blocked’.^[46] Once this occurs and the ‘bad conscience’ is formed the ‘animal-man’ only hurts himself.

If cruelty is the ‘most ancient and basic substratum of culture’, in a sense it is what is most real,^[47] likely ‘the basic text of homo natura [that] must again be recognized’.^[48] If ‘higher culture is based on the spiritualization of cruelty’, then cruelty must be discharged externally before being ‘spiritualized’ (or sublimated), for pure and endless spiritualization would be nihilism. The problem for Nietzsche is to press this basic instinct into service, just as it was the essential psychological problem for the ascetic priest, who ‘pressed into his service […] the whole pack of savage hounds in man […] under cover of a religious interpretation’.^[49] This problem was also later solved in Wilhelmine Germany, as Gustave Le Bon comments: ‘Germany did a really remarkable thing when she harmonized the evangelical ideal of charity, mildness and protection of the oppressed—stigmatized as slave morality by Nietzsche—with an ideal of force, brutality, and conquest so utterly foreign to Christian teachings’.^[50] During World War II, the Wehrmacht found their solution in the drug Pervitin.

Nietzsche’s solution should be similar. It will mean the recovery of realist culture, the world of Thucydides and Machiavelli, of the spirit expressed in the ‘Funeral Oration’ of Pericles, where it is written: ‘our boldness has gained access to every land and sea, everywhere raising imperishable monuments to its goodness and wickedness’, with scorn for ‘security [and] comfort’,^[51] since the ‘diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger’.^[52] However Nietzsche’s solution is explained, the sense of guilt and the morality of pity will have to be diminished, mutatis mutandis, corresponding to a calibrated increase in cruelty and its complement, suffering (which makes noble). As such, the Nietzschean revaluation of all values will be initiated through desublimation but will not lack a spiritualizing aspect. With it we will witness a real rupturing of social constraints and the breaking of contracts our naturalization permitting us more than, merely, the ‘bestiality of thought’.^[53] The explanation must also, necessarily, dwell reflectively on the meaning of Napoleon Bonaparte, since he represents the ‘synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman’, the political limit Nietzsche does not exceed, warfare spiritualized, and conquest made more artistic.^[54] Nietzsche’s writing is replete with tension and obstructed paths, and cruelty empowered is the key to release.

2. The Heideggerian Conversion

The above description, with its intimations regarding the limits of Nietzsche’s political philosophy and political ontology—defining the final stage of metaphysics and the technological age—vindicates Heidegger’s assertion regarding Nietzsche’s figure of the ‘overman’: that the ‘overman’ is ‘extreme rationalitas in the empowering of animalitas’, ‘the animal rationale that is fulfilled in brutalitas’ (cruelty and guiltless brutality),^[55] indicating that in the final stage of metaphysics ‘[s]ubhumanity and superhumanity are the same thing. They belong together, just as the “below” of animality and the “above” of the ratio are indissolubly coupled in correspondence in the metaphysical animal rationale’.^[56] In other words, as Heidegger clarifies this statement, the ‘complete release of subhumanity corresponds to the conditionless empowering of superhumanity. The drive of animality and the ratio of humanity become identical’.^[57]

One factor in reading Nietzsche that had previously obscured the close link between rationality and animality in his work was, according to Heidegger, the ‘artistic aura’ imposed on Nietzsche’s philosophy by the ‘Wagnerian cult’, who made a ‘literary phenomenon out of it’, privileging its ecstatic Dionysian dimension. Heidegger explains that this was made possible

[b]ecause no one realized how, according to Nietzsche’s doctrine, the representational-calculative […] guarantee of stability [or preservation] is just as essential for ‘life’ [as will to power] as ‘increase’ [or enhancement] and escalation. Escalation [was] taken only in the aspect of the intoxicating, but not in the decisive aspect of at the same time giving to the guarantee of stability […] the justification for escalation. Hence it is the unconditional rule of calculating reason which belongs to the will to power, and not the fog and confusion of an opaque chaos of life.^[58]

Securing permanence and providing the guarantee of stability is achieved through desublimation (brutalitas) and sublimation (the set of justifications for enhancement and overcoming)—through technology^[59] capable of producing the ‘radiant dream-creation of Olympus’.^[60]

The indissoluble link, or even equivalence, that Heidegger sees between ratio and animality (or the ‘complete release of subhumanity’) in Nietzsche’s philosophy is justified on the grounds that Nietzsche describes ‘instinct’ as a higher form of intelligence: ‘instinct’, Nietzsche writes, ‘is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent’.^[61] When Nietzsche exhibits his ‘sensitivity’ in Ecce Homo he is alluding to an instinctual capability, one that makes it possible for him to discern ‘all signs of healthy instincts’.^[62] It constitutes a kind of artistry or active, constructivist, shaping power at work in his project of the reversal or revaluation of all values. To instinctive activity, Nietzsche typically suggests, belongs ‘a subtlety of discernment that is ‘higher than all reason’^[63]—‘higher than all reason’ yet a kind of reason nonetheless.

According to Heidegger, when Nietzsche utilizes the term ‘instinct’ he is referring to an intellectual ability ‘which transcends the limited understanding’, superescalating the term to coincide with ‘superhumanity’ (the Übermensch).^[64] Two immediate implications follow from this ‘superescalation’. The first is that the legitimation of the course of action (the necessity of the revaluation of all values, the technique to reverse perspectives) is entirely based on the ‘assured instincts’ of the philosopher legislators’.^[65] The second is that, since animality or subhumanity is an intrinsic property of superhumanity, it may be concluded that superhumanity, as Nietzsche conceives of this type, is master of what is ‘elemental’—‘in such a way that precisely the animal element is […] subjugated in each of its forms to calculation and planning (health plans, breeding) […] [with] man [as] the most important raw material’ or resource.^[66] The mastery of what is elemental is first and foremost a psychological (technoscientific) mastery of the—especially aggressive—instincts and emotions. This must rely on linguistic encoding as well as ‘protective measures’ and ‘hygienic regulations’. Nietzsche takes his exemplary model of breeding and social control from Hindu morality, which reveals such intensive applications in its calculating attempt to achieve an ‘automatism of instinct’ between all of the castes,^[67] as well as from his study of the array of techniques employed by the ascetic priest, described most notably in the Genealogy.^[68]

Nietzsche’s political ontology of the will to power is technological in character because of the ordered use of human beings it proposes and justifies, so as to bring about a stability that makes possible further escalations. When Heidegger states that ‘[t]heir use is employed for the utility of armaments’^[69] or war (in an age where physics and technology are militarised), it is entirely in accord with Nietzsche’s supreme example of the channeled fusion of subhumanity (cruelty, animality) and superhumanity. This fusion is made flesh in Napoleon, who represents the limit of Nietzsche’s political thinking, and whose life and history is a significant source of Nietzsche’s political ontology, which, in Heidegger’s words, as the ‘ground for the planetary manner of thinking, gives the scaffolding for an order of the earth which will supposedly last for a long time’.^[70]

To read Heidegger on Nietzsche opens a portal to what is rarely, if at all, discussed in contemporary Nietzsche studies, and permits entry into a new range of studies explored by Nietzsche in the area of control and manipulation: the technological subjugation of human beings (their reduction to resources). It is this refusal to read, in the interests of privileging style or imposing upon Nietzsche’s thought a democratic politics, that makes it impossible for contemporary readers of Nietzsche to decode passages such as the following:

From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of domination. […] The possibility has been established for […] a new tremendous aristocracy […] in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist tyrants will be made to endure for millennia […] who [will] employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon ‘man’ himself.^[71]

It may be argued that Nietzsche was, in addition to that of the Wagnerian cult, obscured by another sort of artistic aura in the Deleuzian reading, which neglected the energy of preservation in the will to power, as if Nietzsche had no interest in Apollo, no interest in stability and rational planning. Such a reading cannot dismantle the scaffold we mount simply because it does not associate Nietzsche, as Heidegger does, with technique, let alone with a power-based truth or guiltless brutality. Yet Nietzsche has a technological approach to symbolic systems and the reversal of values, as he indicates in Ecce Homo: ‘Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives’.^[72]

In the final stage of metaphysics, subjectivity necessarily develops as the brutalitas of bestialitas, fulfilled by violence and warfare in an age of highly sophisticated lethal weaponry and military equipment. For Nietzsche considered war as possessing a ‘curative power’,^[73] and in Heidegger’s treatment of Nietzsche this idea attains an ontological status, while providing a more exacting set of terms to analyse our contemporary locus with respect to both the war industry and information systems.

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Don Dombowsky

Don Dombowsky is a Professor of Political Studies and Philosophy at Bishop’s University in Canada. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics (2004) and Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy (2014), and co-editor of Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Edited Anthology (2008).

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^[1] Don Dombowsky, ‘“The Last Metaphysician”: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s Politics’ (2018) 23(5-6) The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 628-42.

^[2] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics (Harper & Row 1987) 8.

^[3] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism (Harper & Row 1982) 165.

^[4] Martin Heidegger, ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’ in The End of Philosophy (The University of Chicago Press 2003) 100-1.

^[5] Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking (Harper Perennial 1976) 74.

^[6] Heidegger (n 3) 144.

^[7] See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Vintage Books 1974) §344

^[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Penguin 1968) ‘Real World’ §6.

^[9] See ibid ‘Improvers’ §5.

^[10] Nietzsche (n 7) §361.

^[11] Heidegger (n 2) 243-4.

^[12] Nietzsche argues for the necessity of leadership during a period of decadence: ‘We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value […] at some time new types of philosophers and commanders [must appear] […] It is the image [and necessity] of such leaders that we envisage’, ‘commanders and legislators [who] reach for the future’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Vintage Books 1966) §§203, 211. Heidegger, likely with Nietzsche’s philosophical legislators in mind, refers to ‘the leaders [who] had presumed everything of their own accord in the blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will’. Heidegger (n 4) 105.

^[13] Heidegger (n 3) 145. The ‘greatest of all value-antitheses’ being ‘Christian values—noble values’. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (Penguin 1968) §37.

^[14] These self-legitimating terms occur, for example, here: ‘all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life’. Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Morality’ §4. And, in another permutation, here: ‘A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general […] would be a principle hostile to life […] an attempt to assassinate the future of man’. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage Books 1969) II §11.

^[15] Nietzsche (n 14) II §9. This is taken as a self-evident function with an implicit difference between the Christian and noble modes of experiencing value-legislation: ‘The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values […] it is value-creating’. Nietzsche (n 12) §260. Conversely, the priestly type ‘used morality to raise itself mendaciously to the position of determining human values—finding in Christian morality the means to come to power’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (Vintage Books 1969) ‘Destiny’ §7.

^[16] Heidegger (n 4) 102.

^[17] Nietzsche (n 14) II §12. To this effect, Nietzsche writes: ‘life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation […] exploitation’. Then, more metaphysically condensed: ‘The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else’. Nietzsche (n 12) §§259, 36.

^[18] As Nietzsche from his own epochal context realizes, in an age of propaganda ‘it is in itself a matter of absolute indifference whether a thing be true, but a matter of the highest importance to what extent it is believed to be true’. Nietzsche (n 13) §23.

^[19] Or, as Heidegger writes in ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’: ‘What is in acordance with its will is correct and in order, because the will to will itself is the only order’. Heidegger (n 4) 100.

^[20] Heidegger (n 4) 102.

^[21] ibid 107.

^[22] Heidegger (n 2) 191.

^[23] Nietzsche writes that ‘psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems’. Nietzsche (n 12) §23. Heidegger rightly observes that Nietzsche’s philosophy was ‘grounded in the predominance of ‘psychology’ in the concept of power and force’. Heidegger (n 4) 93.

^[24] Nietzsche (n 14) I §2.

^[25] Nietzsche links ‘the salvation and future of the human race with them unconditional dominance of aristocratic values, Roman values’. ibid I §16.

^[26] ibid II §23.

^[27] ibid I §17.

^[28] Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Socrates’ §4.

^[29] ibid ‘Socrates’ §10.

^[30] Nietzsche (n 14) I §7.

^[31] See Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Morality’ §1: ‘to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life’.

^[32] ibid ‘Socrates’ §11.

^[33] Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Birth of Tragedy’ §4

^[34] Nietzsche (n 14) II §18.

^[35] ibid II §16. Nietzsche says it succinctly: ‘Christianity desires to dominate beast of prey’. Nietzsche (n 13) §22.

^[36] Nietzsche (n 13) §6.

^[37] Nietzsche (n 14) III §7.

^[38] Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Wise’ §4.

^[39] Nietzsche (n 14) II §12.

^[40] Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Expeditions’ §39.

^[41] Nietzsche (n 14) III §18.

^[42] Nietzsche (n 12) §257. The ‘beasts of prey’ who lie at the origin of the the state which was ‘carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence’ are described by Nietzsche as ‘the most unconscious artists there are […] They do not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration are, these born organizers; they exemplify that terrible artists’ egoism that has the look of bronze and knows itself justified to all eternity’. Nietzsche (n 14) §II 17. A superlative historical ‘beast of prey’ is the Renaissance figure, Cesare Borgia. Nietzsche situates him among the ‘healthiest of all tropical monsters’. Nietzsche (n 12) §197.

^[43] Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Genealogy of Morals’.

^[44] Nietzsche (n 12) §229.

^[45] Nietzsche (n 14) II §16.

^[46] ibid II §22.

^[47] As Heidegger recognizes: ‘We should not forget that Nietzsche gives the name beast of prey to the highest form of man’. Heidegger (n 2) 39. And Nietzsche reminds us that the ‘Superhuman type […] conceives reality as it is […] is not estranged or removed from reality but is reality itself’. Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Destiny’ §5.

^[48] Nietzsche (n 12) §230.

^[49] Nietzsche (n 14) III §20.

^[50] See Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of the Great War (T. Fisher Unwin 1916) 116.

^[51] Nietzsche (n 14) I §11.

^[52] ibid I §12.

^[53] ibid II §22.

^[54] Ibid I §16.

^[55] Heidegger (n 2) 177.

^[56] Heidegger (n 4) 103.

^[57] ibid 106.

^[58] ibid 94. Or it may be said: ‘Forming horizons belongs to the inner essence of living beings themselves’; ‘Securing permanence […] is a condition of life’. Heidegger (n 2) 86, 101. In this respect, also, a goal is crucial: ‘Formula of my happiness: A yes, a No, a straight line, a goal’. Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Maxims’ §44.

^[59] See Heidegger (n 4) 99.

^[60] Heidegger maintains that ‘Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power is prefigured in the sentence [from The Birth of Tragedy]: “the Greek knew and sensed the terrors and horrors of existence: In order to be able to live at all, he had to set up the radiant dream-creation of Olympus above them”’. He elaborates: ‘The opposition of […] the “barbaric” […] is put here on one side, and beautiful, sublime appearance on the other […] the idea is prefigured here that the “will” needs at the same time the guarantee of stability and escalation’. This means that technology encompasses both desublimation and sublimation, since the will to will employs both energies at the same time. ibid 95.

^[61] Nietzsche (n 12) §218.

^[62] Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Clever’ §10.

^[63] Nietzsche (n 14) III §7.

^[64] Heidegger (n 4) 105-6.

^[65] ibid 107.

^[66] ibid 106. A crucial question for Nietzsche concerned the ‘type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future’. Nietzsche (n 13) §3.

^[67] Nietzsche (n 13) §57.

^[68] An experiential reflection that situates Nietzsche within the school of mass psychologists following Hippolyte Taine and Guy de Maupassant and preceding Scipio Sighele, Gustave Le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde.

^[69] Heidegger (n 4) 103.

^[70] ibid 95.

^[71] From Nietzsche’s notes of 1885-86, note 2[57] at <http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,2[57]>.

^[72] Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Wise’ §1.

^[73] Nietzsche (n 8) Foreword.