What is decisive in this formulation is that the notion of "all men together," which is of course a thought, not a reality, was immediately construed on the model of "man," of a "subject" that could serve as a noun for all kinds of activities expressed in verbs. This concept was not a metaphor, properly speaking; it was a full-fledged personification such as we find in the allegories of Renaissance narratives. In other words, Progress became the project of Mankind, acting behind the backs of real men—a personified force that we find somewhat later in Adam Smith's "invisible hand," in Kant's "ruse of nature," Hegel's "cunning of Reason," and Marx's "dialectical materialism." To be sure, the historian of ideas will see in these notions nothing more than the secularization of divine Providence, an interpretation that is all the more questionable since we find the personification of Mankind in Pascal, who would certainly have been the last to desire a secular replacement for God as the true ruler of the world.
However that may be, the interconnected ideas of Mankind and Progress came to the foreground of philosophical speculations only after the French Revolution had demonstrated to die minds of its most thoughtful spectators the possible actualization of such invisibles as liberté, fraternité, égalité, and thus seemed to constitute a tangible refutation of the oldest conviction of thinking men, to wit, that the ups and downs of history and the ever-changing affairs of men are not worth serious consideration. (To contemporary ears Plato's famous dictum in the Laws that a serious man keeps his seriousness for serious things and "does not waste it on trifles"9 such as human affairs may sound extreme; in fact, it was never challenged before Vico, and Vico had no influence or echo till the nineteenth century.) The event of the French Revolution, the climax in many respects of the modern age, changed "the pale cast of thought" for almost a century; philosophers, a notoriously melancholy tribe of men, became cheerful and optimistic. They now believed in the Future and left the age-old lamentations over the course of the world to the historians. What centuries of scientific advances, fully grasped only by the participants in the great enterprise yet by no means beyond the general comprehension of the philosopher, had been unable to achieve was now brought about in a matter of a few decades: philosophers were converted to a faith in the progress not only of knowledge but also of human affairs generally.
And while they began to reflect, with a commitment never before witnessed, on the course of History, they could not help becoming aware almost immediately of the greatest riddle presented to them by their new subject matter. That was the simple fact that no action ever attains its intended goal and that Progress—or any other fixed meaningfulness in the historical process—arises out of a senseless "mixture of error and violence" (Goethe), out of a "melancholy haphazardness" in the "meaningless course of human affairs" (Kant). What sense there is can be detected only by the wisdom of hindsight, when men no longer act but begin to tell the story of what has happened; then it seems as though men, while pursuing their aims at cross-purposes, without rhyme and reason, had been led by an "intention of nature," by the "guiding thread of reason."10 I have quoted Kant and Goethe, both of whom, as it were, stopped at the threshold of the new generation, that of the German Idealists for whom the events of the French Revolution were the decisive experiences of their lives. But that "the facts of known history" taken by themselves "possess neither a common basis nor continuity nor coherence" was already known to Vico, and Hegel, long after, was still insisting that "passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are ... the most effective springs of action." Hence, not the record of past events but only the story makes sense, and what is so striking in Kant's remarks at the end of his life is that he immediately understood that the subject of History's action would have to be Mankind, rather than man or any verifiable human community. Striking, too, is the fact that he was able to realize the great flaw in History's project: 'It will always remain bewildering that the earlier generations seem to carry on their burdensome business only for the sake of the later ... and that only the last should have the good fortune to dwell in the [completed] building."11
Probably it was sheer coincidence that the generation that grew to maturity under the impact of the eighteenth-century revolutions was also mentally formed by Kant's liberation of thought, by his resolution of the old dilemma between dogmatism and skepticism through the introduction of a self-critique of Reason. And as the revolution encouraged them to transfer the notion of Progress from scientific advancement to the realm of human affairs and understand it as the progress of History, it was only natural that their attention should be directed toward the Will as the spring of action and the organ of the Future. The result was that "the thought of making freedom the sum and substance of philosophy emancipated the human spirit in all its relationships," emancipated the thinking ego for free speculation in thought-trains whose ultimate goal was to "prove ... that not only is the Ego all, but contrariwise too, all is Ego."12
What had appeared in a restrictive, tentative way in Pascal's personified concept of Mankind now began to proliferate to an incredible degree. The activities of men, whether thinking or acting, were all transformed into activities of personified concepts—which made philosophy both infinitely more difficult (the chief difficulty in Hegel's philosophy is its abstractness, its only occasional hints at the actual data and phenomena he has in mind) and incredibly more alive. It was a veritable orgy of sheer speculation, which, in sharp contrast with Kant's critical reason, was brimful of historical data in a disguised state of radical abstraction. Since the personified concept itself is supposed to act, it looks as though (in Schelling's words) philosophy has "raised itself to a higher standpoint," to a "higher realism" in which mere thought-things, Kant's noumena, dematerialized products of the thinking ego's reflection on actual data—historical data in Hegel, mythological or religious in Schelling—begin their curious disembodied ghostly dance whose steps and rhythms are neither regulated nor limited by any idea of reason.
It was in this region of pure speculation that the Will appeared during the short period of German Idealism. "In the final and highest instance," declared Schelling, "there is no other Being than Will. Will is primordial Being, and all predicates apply to it alone—groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation! All philosophy strives only to find this highest expression."13 And quoting this passage in his What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger at once adds: "The predicates, then, which metaphysical thought has since antiquity attributed to Being, Schelling finds in their final, highest ... most perfected form in willing. The Will in this willing does not mean here a capacity of the human soul, however; the word 'willing' here designates the Being of beings as a whole" (italics added).14 No doubt Heidegger is right; Schelling's Will is a metaphysical entity but, unlike the more common and older metaphysical fallacies, it is personified. In a different context and more precisely, Heidegger himself sums up the meaning of this personified Concept: the false "opinion [easily] arises that the human will is the origin of the will-to-will, while on the contrary, man is being willed by the Will-to-will without even experiencing the essence of such willing."15
With these words Heidegger resolutely turns against the subjectivism of the modern age as well as against phenomenological analyses, whose chief aim has always been to "save the phenomena" as given in consciousness. And what he turns to while entering on the "rainbow bridge of concepts" is German Idealism and its ingenuous exclusion of man and man's faculties in favor of personified concepts.
Nietzsche diagnosed the inspiration behind this post-Kantian German philosophy with unsurpassed clarity; he knew that philosophy only too well and finally went a similar, perhaps even more extreme way himself.
[German philosophy, said Nietzsche] is the most fundamental form of ... homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that has ever existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home: the Greek world! But it is in precisely that directi
on that all bridges are broken—except the rainbow-bridges of concepts....To be sure, one must be very light, very subtle, very thin to step across these bridges! But what happiness there is already in this will to spirituality, to ghostliness [Geisterhaftigkeit] almost!...One wants to go back, through the Church Fathers to the Greeks.... German philosophy is a piece of ... will to Renaissance, will to go on with the discovery of antiquity, the digging up of ancient philosophy, above all of the pre-Socratics—the most deeply buried of all Greek temples! A few centuries hence, perhaps, one will judge that all German philosophy derives its real dignity from being a gradual reclamation of the soil of antiquity ... we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were....16
No doubt the personified concept had its root in verifiable experience, but the pseudo-kingdom of disembodied spirits working behind men's backs was built out of homesickness for another world, in which man's spirit could feel at home.
This, then, is my justification for having omitted from our considerations that body of thought, German Idealism, in which sheer speculation in the realm of metaphysics perhaps reached its climax together with its end. I did not want to cross the "rainbow-bridge of concepts," perhaps because I am not homesick enough, in any event because I do not believe in a world, be it a past world or a future world, in which man's mind, equipped for withdrawing from the world of appearances, could or should ever be comfortably at home. Moreover, at least in the cases of Nietzsche and Heidegger, it was precisely a confrontation with the Will as a human faculty and not as an ontological category that prompted them first to repudiate the faculty and then turn about to put their confidence in this ghostly home of personified concepts which so obviously was "built" and decorated by the thinking, as opposed to the willing, ego.
14. Nietzsche's repudiation of the Will
In my discussion of the Will I have repeatedly mentioned two altogether different ways of understanding the faculty: as a faculty of choice between objects or goals, the liberum arbitrium, which acts as arbiter between given ends and deliberates freely about means to reach them; and, on the other hand, as our "faculty for beginning spontaneously a series in time" (Kant)17 or Augustine's "initium ut esset homo creatus est" man's capacity for beginning because he himself is a beginning. With the modern age's concept of Progress and its inherent shift from understanding the future as that which approaches us to that which we determine by the Will's projects, the instigating power of the Will was bound to come to the foreground. And so indeed it did, as far as we can tell from the common opinion of the time.
On the other hand, nothing is more characteristic of the beginnings of what we now call "existentialism" than the absence of any such optimistic overtones. According to Nietzsche, only "lack of historical sense," a lack that for him is "the original error of all philosophers,"18 can explain that optimism: "Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward; we'd like to believe that everything that is in it also marches forward—that the development is one that moves forward." And as to Progress' correlate, the idea of mankind: "'Mankind' does not advance; it does not even exist."19
In other words, though the universal suspicion at the beginning of the modern age had been powerfully neutralized, held in check, first by the very notion of Progress and then by its seeming embodiment and apogee in the French Revolution, this had proved to be only a delaying action, whose force eventually exhausted itself. If one wants to look on this development historically, one can only say that Nietzsche's thought-experiments—"such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism"20 —at last completed what had begun with Descartes and Pascal in the seventeenth century.
Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future—with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals—have a worse record to show in these "sciences" than in almost any other scientific endeavor. Still, if it were a matter of honest competition between futurologists in respect to our own time, the prize might well go to John Donne, a poet without any scientific ambitions, who in 1611 wrote in immediate reaction to what he knew was going on in the sciences (which for a long time would still be operating under the name of "natural philosophy"). He did not have to wait for Descartes, or Pascal, to draw all the conclusions from what he perceived.
And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to looke for it....
'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot....
And he ends with lamentations that needed roughly three hundred years to be heard again: "when thou knowst this, Thou knowst how ugly a monster ... how wan a Ghost ... how drie a Cinder this world is."21
It is against this historical background that we shall have to consider the last two thinkers still close enough to the West's philosophical heritage to recognize in the Will one of the mind's important faculties. We start with Nietzsche and remember that he never wrote any book with the title "Will to Power," that the collection of fragments, notes, and aphorisms bearing this title was published posthumously, selected from a chaos of unconnected and often contradictory sayings. Each one of them is what all Nietzsche's mature writings actually are, namely, a thought-experiment, a literary genre surprisingly rare in our recorded history. The most obvious analogy is Pascal's Pensées, which share with Nietzsche's Will to Power a haphazardness of arrangement that has led later editors to try to rearrange them, with the rather annoying result that the reader has a good deal of trouble identifying and dating them.
We shall consider first a number of simple descriptive statements without metaphysical or general philosophical connotations. Most of them will sound rather familiar, but it will be better not to jump to the conclusion that we may be confronted here with bookish influences. To draw such inferences is especially tempting in the case of Heidegger because of his profound knowledge of medieval philosophy, on the one hand, and his insistence on the primacy of the future tense in Being and Time (which I have already spoken of), on the other. It is all the more noteworthy that in his discussion of the Will, which chiefly takes the form of an interpretation of Nietzsche, he nowhere mentions Augustine's discoveries in the Confessions. Hence what will sound familiar in the following is best ascribed to the peculiar characteristics of the willing faculty; even Schopenhauer's influence on the young Nietzsche we may disregard without great scruples. Nietzsche knew that "Schopenhauer spoke of the 'will'; but nothing is more characteristic of his philosophy than the absence of all genuine willing,"22 and he saw correctly that the reason for this lay in a "basic misunderstanding of the will (as if craving, instinct, drive were the essence of the will)" whereas "the will is precisely that which treats cravings as their master and appoints to them their way and measure."23
For "to will is not the same as to desire, to strive for, to want: from all these it is distinguished through the element of Command.... That something is commanded, this is inherent in willing."24 Heidegger comments: "No characteristic phrase occurs more frequently in Nietzsche than ... to will is to command; inherent in Will is the commanding thought."25 It is no less characteristic that this commanding thought is directed only very rarely toward dominating others: command and obedience both occur in the mind—in a fashion strangely similar to Augustine's conception, of which Nietzsche certainly knew nothing.
He explains at some length in Beyond Good and Evil:
Somebody who wills gives orders to something in him that obeys.... The strangest aspect of this multiple phenomenon we call 'Will' is that we have but one word for it, and especially only one word for the fact that we are in every given case at the same time those who issue the orders and those who obey them; insofar as we obey, we experience
the feelings of coercion, urging, pressing, resisting, which usually begin to manifest themselves immediately after the act of willing; insofar however ... as we are in command ... we experience a sensation of pleasure, and this all the more strongly as we are used to overcoming the dichotomy through the notion of the I, the Ego, and this in such a way that we take the obedience in ourselves for granted and therefore identify willing and performing, willing and acting [italics added].
This willing operation existing only in our minds overcomes the mental duality of the two-in-one that has become a battle between one who commands and one who is supposed to obey by identifying the "I" as a whole with the commanding part and anticipating that the other, the resisting part, will obey and do as it is told. "What is called 'freedom of the will' is essentially a passionate superiority toward a someone who must obey. 'I am free; "he" must obey'—the consciousness of this is the very willing."26
The Life of the Mind Page 43
