Nietzsche vs. Heidegger on “The Will to Power” vs. “Meditative Thinking”

foreign [Music] versus Heidegger on the will to power versus meditative thinking kindergarten Nichi are usually regarded as the twin founders of existentialism in one sense this is right and in one sense it is radically wrong it is right for three reasons first they both see philosophy as something to live to exist in rather than merely to think it is concrete individual human existence not abstract Universal Essences that they both focus on they have similar personalities quirky non-conformist controversial misunderstood and above all passionate they are both All or Nothing philosophers in that sense they are both

deeply religious even though Nietzsche is an atheist in fact perhaps the most complete atheist who ever lived for atheism is a religion for Nietzsche third they have a common enemy Modern Man halfway to Brave New World passionless conformist laodicean lukewarm without what Kierkegaard calls the infinite passion and what Nietzsche calls the dionysian if the two of them met I think they would understand each other though they would not understand each other's philosophies fourth they both see Socrates and Jesus as the two most important men who ever lived the Twin Star around which all of Western

Civilization orbits Nicole Kierkegaard and Nietzsche twins is also radically wrong for three reasons first they are Polar Opposites about both Socrates and Jesus who are nietzschees two villains he opposes Socrates almost as much as he opposes Jesus and regards to Heroes second they disagree one hundred percent on the single most important divisive issue in human life Kierkegaard says that everything he ever wrote is about only one thing what it is to become a Christian not just in thought but in person Nietzsche on the other hand saw and lived the consequences of atheism of what he

famously called God's death and he lived that as completely as Kierkegaard lived the opposite third they also differ as radically as any two philosophers have ever differed about ethics or morality Nietzsche taught what he called a trans valuation of all values and attacked all Christian values as dehumanizing and life denying and weakness let's consider some examples of this difference in Morality first unselfishness benevolence charity love kindness compassion Mercy forgiveness and peacemaking Nishi hated them all he glorified war and cruelty and violence pity was for him the greatest sin it was an act of pity for

a horse that he saw being beaten in the street that triggered Nietzsche's Insanity which put him in an asylum for the last decade of his life second Justice equality democracy and the value of ordinary human beings for Nietzsche man is nothing but an embarrassment to the Superman or over man or new man the new Man Without a conscience and without a god third Detachment from the world and faith hope and love in another world in the soul in its spirituality in its immortality and in The God Who offered these myths and distractions fourth even honesty

or the will to truth Nietzsche was the first philosopher to raise what he called the most dangerous of all questions why truth why not rather untruth it is a question that is literally impossible to answer at least with the mind since all claims of the Mind are claims to truth it can only be answered with the will of a heart the fundamental option as Carl ronder called it between light and darkness Christ said essentially the same thing in John 3 verse 19 the King James version has it this way this is the condemnation that light

has come into the world and Men love Darkness rather than light that is probably the meaning of the sin against the holy spirit that cannot be forgiven Truth for Nietzsche was just another name for God the god without a face actually Kierkegaard I think would profoundly agree with that identification since he believed that the man who said I am the truth was God The God Who Nichi said was unendurable because he knew all truth including Nietzsche's own dark side Nietzsche's ultimate value was for him not truth or the will to truth but power and the

will to power which he called the innermost essence of being power was for Nietzsche not a neutral means but the ultimate end the power that Christ renounced the power that the devil offered him in three Temptations in the wilderness was Nietzsche's God Nichi was not kidding or exaggerating when he deliberately called himself the Antichrist Nietzsche taught that the origin of morality was the clever Jewish plot to declaw the Paws Of The Lions the pagans who were their natural superiors by inventing guilt in the idea of a real objective Universal moral law thus bringing all men

down to the same level the level of the Jews Nietzsche was not a biological racist like the Nazis but he did blame the Jews for inventing morality and for inventing the religion that bolstered morality and then Nietzsche blamed the Christians even more for exacerbating it he called Christianity the greatest of all imaginable Corruptions a perversion of everything the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed the most repugnant kind of degeneracy that civilizations ever brought into existence the sole greatest inner perversion the only unquenchable infamy of mankind this was a deeper and more

passionate anti-Semitism and anti-christianity than Hitler's because it was spiritual not just biological for Nichi the Jews were responsible for what he called the genealogy of morals the Genesis of the LIE of morality and he taught that we must become over Men by going Beyond good and evil as such not to a better good but beyond the very essence of moral good and evil beyond the binary beyond the distinction between good and evil and the will to goodness just as he also said that we must go beyond the distinction between truth and untruth or light and

darkness and the will to truth which he also wanted to overcome we must Embrace what he called the will to power instead of the will to truth or the will to goodness that is by the way the essential motivation of all satanic cults Nietzsche argued that moral guilt made men spineless and weak Hamlet implied this nietzschean idea about conscience and guilt in his famous Soliloquy when he said conscience doth make cowards of us all for religion Saints are heroes for Nietzsche Saints or cowards Dostoyevsky showed us Unforgettable portraits of nietzschean characters who tried to become

Superman by killing their conscience raskolnikov in crime and punishment and Ivan karavazov in the brothers karamazov it never works the result is not the triumphant Pagan joy in Conquest that Nietzsche idealized but insanity literally both in those two literary figures and in Nietzsche himself conscience did not die it took its revenge Nietzsche signed his last letters from the insane asylum the crucified one unlike today's shallow and comfortable atheists Nishi saw the necessary consequences of the death of God the following prophetic sermon by the madman who announces the death of God is one of the most

terrifying passages in world literature Nietzsche wrote where has God gone I shall tell you we have killed him you and I we are all his murderers but how have we done this how were we able to drink up the sea who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire Horizon what did we do when we Unchained this Earth from its son wither is it moving now wither are we moving now away from All Sons are we not perpetually falling backward sideward forward in all directions is there any up or down left are we not

wandering as through an infinite nothing do we not feel the breath of empty space has it not become colder is more and more night not coming on all the time God is dead God remains dead and we have killed him how shall we the murderers of all murderers console ourselves is not the greatness of this deed too great for us must we not ourselves become Gods simply to seem worthy of it there has never been a greater deed and whoever shall be born after us for the sake of this deed he shall be a part

of a higher history than all history of their Jew Jean-Paul Sartre also saw the uncomfortable consequences of atheism when he wrote with nietzscheon perspicacity and prophecy but without Nichi and poetry God does not exist and we have to face all the consequences of this the existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular immoralism which would like to abolish god with the least possible expense something like this God is a useless and costly hypothesis we are discarding it but meanwhile in order for there to be an Ethics a society a civilization it is essential

that certain values should be taken seriously and that they be considered as having an a priori existence it must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest not to lie not to beat your wife to have children etc etc so we're going to try a little device which will make it possible to show that values exist all the same inscribed in some Heaven of ideas even though God does not exist we shall find ourselves with the same Norms of honesty progress and humanism and we shall have made of God an outdated hypothesis which will peacefully

die off by itself the existentialist on the contrary finds it very distressing that God does not exist because all possibility of finding values disappears along with him there can no longer be an a priori good since there is no infinite and perfect Consciousness to think it because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men Dostoevsky said if God didn't exist everything would be permissible that is the very starting point of existentialism indeed everything is permissible if God does not exist and as a result man is forlorn Heidegger tries to

dig his way out of the ruins of this nietzschean catastrophe he too like Nietzsche and Sartre is an atheist he definitely disbelieves in the judeo-christian god but unlike Nietzsche and Sartre he believes there is something a priori something absolute he calls it Zion or being being itself and he distinguishes it from both Zion Des beings entities objects on the one hand and design or being there or being present or Consciousness and Care human subjectivity awareness of being bacon posited a dualism between man and nature Descartes posited a dualism between mind and matter mind and body

sartra posited a dualism between being for itself or human subjectivity and being in itself or the objects of human subjectivity and Consciousness whether physical or mental but for Sartre as for Nietzsche there is no being no being itself no absolute to negotiate and explain the relative no Oneness Behind The Duality for Heidegger there is being in fact being is Heidegger's one Quest his one question he described his thinking as to confine oneself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world sky is Heidegger's answer to Nishi what is the

being of beings why are there beings at all rather than nothing he writes that is the question what is the being of beings everything we mentioned is yet after all if we want to lay hold of being it is always as if we are reaching towards a void so it seems that Nietzsche is entirely right when he calls the highest Concepts such as being the final wisp of evaporating reality the error of being does nature speak the truth or is he himself only the final victim of a long-standing error in neglect what if it were

possible that human beings that people in their greatest machinations and exploits still have a relation to beings but have long since fallen out of being without knowing it and what if this were the innermost and most profound ground of their decline now if we substitute the word God for the word being this becomes a profound diagnosis and that is what a prophet like sajanitsin did but substitute the word being for the word God as Heidegger did and it becomes what Sartre criticizes as comfortable humanism it is like substituting morality or responsibility or democracy or inclusivity

and diversity or Community or some other comfortable and Toothless abstraction for the Living God yet heydrich can be helpful and show us some genuine insights if we look he says there are three roads to being the first and most natural is through beings this is the classical Road first look at things then ask what is the being they all have in common that makes them real and this leads to God the source of all being the second approach the modern approach is to begin with design Consciousness subjective being what you find in yourself Heidecker tried

to map that road in his first and most famous book being in time Zion site but he left it unfinished and he admitted that it was a failure even though it explored the being of dazine or Consciousness with many deep psychological insights such as the Insight that our being at every moment from the beginning is a being towards death Heidegger turned to a third approach in his later writings which is a kind of direct mystical or poetic approach the turn was so dramatic that Scholars often speak of Heidegger 1 versus Heidegger II Heidegger 2 tortures

and stretches and plays with language like a poet and some Scholars praise this as unorderably profound While others say it is a monstrous and meaningless fake what is clear in all of heideker is the need for a kind of thinking that is very different from calculative or scientific thinking since this point is fairly clear and fairly practical and not dependent on understanding the rest of Heidegger's notoriously difficult philosophy it behooves us to look at that thought fearfully the simplest source is the memorial address that Heidegger gave to a public crowd of Ordinary People which can

be found at the beginning of Heidegger's short dialogue called discourse on thinking the German title is galassenheit which means literally releasement or detachment Heidegger wants to describe a very different kind of thinking than the one we are increasingly familiar with and increasingly good at scientific and technological thinking he describes that thinking as whenever we plan research and organize we always reckon with conditions that are given we take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes thus we can count on definite results that is why our technology is so successful it is

calculative thinking that computes Heidegger wrote this before the computer Revolution but it was prophetic what Heidegger calls for in contrast is a meditative thinking that demands effort and patience and Care like a plant rather than a machine but which is open to anyone because there is a power in human nature but we're ignoring it we are living more and more in the artificial world of our own creations and in our own media Heidegger wrote this in 1944 and it is far trueer today than it was then if Heidegger were alive today he would say that

we are living Our Lives within the Matrix preferring virtual reality to the reality of beings that have real being he calls this the illusion of a world that is no world Heidegger prophetically predicted that we can and will make of our own nature a superior machine that we consummate our scientific and technological conquest of nature by conquering human nature and making it into a biological and chemical Superman rather than Nietzsche's spiritual Superman Heidegger writes the hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize split

and change living substance at will he wrote this many decades before the Genome Project mastered the entire genetic code he writes an attack is being prepared with technological means upon the life and nature of man himself compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb appears a trifle his solution is not alludite retreat for he says modern technology determines the relation of man to all that exists it rules the whole earth it will move faster and faster and it can never be stopped these forces have moved long since Beyond man's will and have outgrown his

capacity for decision well if this is true what is Heidegger's solution it consists of two parts what he calls releasement toward things or Detachment toward technology and openness to the mystery the first part of this is not clear but mysterious the second part is not mysterious but clear the mystery is being itself an openness to it is not described positively but only negatively thinking without calculation without will by the renunciation of Nietzsche's Will To Power and by a return to the will of Truth not just truth about things or even just truth about ourselves but

truth about being releasedment means Detachment a Detachment from our own technology parallel to the Detachment all the saints teach from everything that is less than God less than being and that includes Detachment from ourselves on our own will and our own clear calculating successful kind of thinking we can be detached from this world even while we live in this world and use it and we can do the same with our own technology Heidegger writes we can use technical devices yet also keep ourselves so free of them that we may let them go at any time

is this naive the answer to that question is to observe how easy this is for teenagers with smartphones today is not naive he is more aware of the danger than most of us are what danger what C.S Lewis called the abolition of man not physically but spiritually for Lewis this meant the death of moral conscience for Heidegger it meant the death of meditative thinking Heidegger wrote man finds himself in a perilous situation why because a third world war might bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth no in This Dawning

atomic age a far greater danger threatens that the technological revolution could so Captivate Bewitched Dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking May someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking the issue is the saving of man's essential nature sauron's ring exists will we be golems and lose our very nature or will we be frodos and save it Heidegger is not a theist but perhaps he is still a prophet as is nature although a dark one we have put Nietzsche into relation with Kierkegaard and with Heidegger and with Socrates and Jesus

now let's add a fifth name to the conversation Adolf Hitler Nichi and Heidegger have also a very enlightening relationship with Hitler it is shocking to find as profound and sensitive a Philosophers Heidegger joining the Nazi party not protesting when Hitler fired his Professor Edmond usural the founder of phenomenology and a great philosopher himself simply because he was Jewish taking usual's job and writing the following things about Hitler these are heidecker's words the National Socialist Revolution is not simply The Taking of power in the state by one party from another but brings a complete Revolution to

our German existence Doctrine and ideas shall no longer govern your existence through our national socialist State our entire German reality has been altered and that means altering all our previous ideas and thinking the words knowledge and scholarship have acquired a different meaning the funeral himself and only he is the current and future reality of Germany and his word is your law now there is a sharp battle to be fought in the spirit of national socialism which must stifle humanistic Christian Notions that still hold us down the public burning of Jewish Marxist writings on May 10

1933 served as a symbol of this fight Germans rallied to this fight make your participation public too from the Publishers and bookstores send us all books and writings that deserve burning has any great philosopher ever written anything more anti-philosophical than this a contrast between Heidegger's philosophical profundity and his Nazi passion is almost unbelievable what lesson does this astonishing contrast teach us is it merely that profound philosophers can be politically naive this is not just terrible politics this is terrible philosophy is it that Heidegger is simply a fake and not a profound philosopher at all that's

too simple and that ignores the other half of the data is it that profound philosophy alone cannot save us from moral idiocy and even Insanity well yes but we learned that already in meeting Nietzsche is it that when one stops worshiping the true God one is tempted to worship a very dark false god that when God dies His Image in human nature dies as well yes but we learned that already in reading the Old Testament is it that we are now living in the short time between the death of God and the death of man

alas I fear that that may be the lesson that Heidegger and Nietzsche both teach us it is significant that Hitler who was certainly no philosopher admired Nietzsche as did Mussolini who actually wrote some philosophy defending Nazism as The Logical upshot of moral relativism Nietzsche though German hated Germans as well as Jews and he was no racist nor did he make politics Central as Hitler did but he would not have been scandalized by the violence of the Nazis nor of their Will To Power and militarism he wrote many things that the Nazis conveniently used especially his

glorification of war and violence and elitism and his despising of equality and compassion and Christian love both Nietzsche and Hitler taught a return to Pagan pre-christian morality and that is to erase the fundamental lesson of human history [Music] [Applause] [Music]