Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation

Martin Heidegger, Ullrich Haase, Mark Sinclair

• Verlag: Indiana University Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253023155
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Philosophers

A "readable and fluent" translation of a work that demonstrates a crucial shift in Heidegger's approach to Nietzsche in the late 1930s ( Phenomenological Reviews ). In Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation, Martin Heidegger offers a radically different reading of a text that he had read decades earlier. This evolution in his relationship with Nietzsche has a significant impact on his understandings of the differences between animals and humans, temporality and history, and the Western philosophical tradition developed. With his new reading, Heidegger delineates three Nietzschean modes of history, which should be understood as grounded in the structure of temporality or historicity. He also offers a metaphysical determination of life and the essence of humankind. Despite the fragmentary and disjointed quality of the original lecture notes that comprise this text, Ullrich Hasse and Mark Sinclair deliver a clear and accessible translation.

C. SECTION II

The Three Modes of Historiology
1. Monumental Historiology

§28. The Question of the Essence of “the Historical,” That Is, of the Essence of Historiology

Because the historical, according to Nietzsche, goes hand in hand with “remembering,” that is, in some way with representing that which is past as such (that which has been as such), because knowledge of having-been and the past belongs to this representing, and because this knowledge is proper only to the human being, the question of the essence of historiology has to be raised in the horizon of the essence of the human being. (“Relation between life and history” (p. 310)).

1. What does historiology mean as such (indication of its essence)?

2. On what is the inner possibility of this essence grounded?
To 1. For the characterization of history [Historie] the following two points are to be noted:

a) Nietzsche discusses various modes of history. Both the manifoldness of the essence of history and its thoroughgoing unity ought to become visible here; and we should also gain an indication as to what its inner possibility is grounded on (Way).

b) Nietzsche accounts for history—according to advantages and disadvantages—in a calculative fashion. History is something that can be calculated and that has to be calculated in such a way. With this we gain an indication as to what it is that demands such a calculative account, what is it that exists as calculating and which is therefore directed toward settling accounts [Abrechnung] (result) and toward goals and the setting of goals (Manner).

Accounting for oneself and including oneself in the calculation—(ratio)

“Value—nonvalue” as condition of the intensification and diminishment of life. “Life,” “happiness” (what stabilizes and drives on), “victory” of life (relation of the “historical” in the sense of the past to the “present”). (The historical: (1) the past, (2) the relation to it.)

“The present”—not merely currently present “life,” anything that occurs and is brought about, but rather the explicit or implicit settling of accounts on the part of “life” with itself that has in each case come to be and that sets the standard—but reckoned up with what aim? Where does the [70] right to take history into account in one way or another derive from? What enables this right to avouch temporarily for history? Power!

c) Nietzsche treats (a) and (b) together, and first of all in the structuring of sections II and III. According to the three modes of the “historical” relation (constituting history) to the past, the latter (what has been) is related to:

1. choosing an exemplar 2. conserving 3. judging

Here what is past (has been) is in each case related to:

1. striving-power 2. venerating 3. suffering (being bound)

(Remembering)

This relation to the past is in each case such that what relates itself to it is affected by it (by what has been), therefore a “remembering” [Erinnern] (and yet it is not a having been alongside with, but rather a being concerned by it, a belonging to it, a being motivated by it, descending from it, and being bound to it.) Remembering is a relation that transposes into what has been as such, in the mode of a confrontation.

(The Present)

The relation to the past from the position of a present, in direction to that present. The concept of “the present” (cf. 2.), not what is in each case present-at-hand, but what is “present day”; life, and this with regard to how it has fixed itself and to the direction in which it settles its accounts—essentially, the in each case (present-day) dominant settling of accounts of life with itself and the directions of this calculation, the remit of this calculation (cf. above (1)–(3)), how “life” takes and enacts itself, and what it projects itself onto—“future.”

(Past—present—future). “Temporality.”

§29. Section II: Structure (Seven Paragraphs)

1.	Threefold characterization of life—(with a view to what?) according to which three modes of history belong to it, and [71] from this it follows that life is in need of history in these respects. What is “life” such that it is in need of history? An unhistorical power? Or history? (monumental, antiquarian, and critical historiology). Here “historiology” not as “science,” but? Representing and producing of the past for the “present.”
2.–6.	Monumental historiology.
7.	Back to (1)—on all three modes as growths (of life), which each need their own particular soil and climate (“life”!). (Not every “truth” is for everyone.) If transplanted then weeds are produced. The advantages and disadvantages are principally clarified by an anticipatory projection (cf. sec. II, para. 2 and para. 7; also sec. IV, para. 1).
2.	What monumental historiology is (see below, the concept of the monumental). The thinking back into what was once present (looking behind oneself), which here searches for and divines the summits of human life, and which originates from the understanding of life as harboring greatness and as what ought to harbor greatness again and again. Faith in humanity: faith in the persistent heights of humanity. Enlarging the concept of the “human being,” and thus an interpretation of human life, but what sort of interpretation? Activity—struggle—striving on the part of the powerful, “those who become,” “those who will,” who want “to create great things”! Monogram of their essence (that is, those who “genuinely” “live,” “those asserting themselves” by means of formative action and creation—but how, what for, and why?).

The Monumental

(Moneo) that which remembers—monu-ment—a sign of commemoration. That which makes us remember, the past in the sense of something exhorting us, motivating us, urging us on to “great” and essential things; what concerns the present and brings it to a decision.

The monumental—for that reason always something already past, that is, [72] belonging to the past and standing in it like a statue, lifted out of “becoming.”

The “not yet monumental” = that which is present (p. 301).

The “monumental” = that which is “already there” (p. 302).

The “monumental” in the sense of the gigantic, the colossal, therefore also “in the present,” and this precisely when the present already wants to secure itself as a future past and calculates accordingly (propaganda for what, one day, will have taken place).

And therefore:

1. One strives for what is the most impressive and overwhelming, and consequently for something that, in the eyes of the present, has never existed in these dimensions before, and that will later allow the past to ground itself as something “great.”

2. And this in such a way that there is constant reference to it, while everything else is suppressed and eliminated.

The “monumental” aspect of an architectural work is, then, a monumentality [Denkmalhaftigkeit] that is calculated beforehand and willed in advance by focusing on the exceptional and thus also on what has not yet been attained in such dimensions.

The mode of history—from the kind of position toward life (“happiness”).

History	• a making something present? of that which is merely past?
	• Or a re-membering? of that which was present as such? Remembering—but of humankind concerning human possibilities—related to “oneself” as the one remembering, as what already stands, is statuelike, exemplary, and thus binding.

* * *

3. The “advantage” of this (monumental) historiology for human life. The advantage of the “classical,” of the “rare” in former times for the present human being. There is encouragement and confidence in the possibility of greatness; it addresses itself to the present as present-day human being, and is thus remembrance of a past humanity, which addresses itself to him. [73]

Remembrance as exhortation, provocation, motivation! “strengthening effect” (p. 16). Remembering [Sich-er-innern] as placing oneself into the greatness that has been and that is still present.

4. The truthfulness and truth of this mode of history.

This history is possible only as long as its previously mentioned effect is secured; its “truth” conforms to the advantage demanded. It is supposed to motivate. But it can do this...