Nietzsche by Martin Heidegger, and: Martin Heidegger by George Steiner (review)

334 BOOK REVIEWS spectrum of approaches to the problem. For both these reasons it can also be useful in graduate seminars on the topic. University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia M. JAMIE FERREIRA Nietzsche. By MARTIN HEIDEGGER. Volume I," The Will to Power as Art." Translated by David F. Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Pp. 263. $12.95. Martin Heidegger. By GEORGE STEINER. New York: Penguin, 1980. Pp. 173. $3.95. The first of these books continues the Harper and Row series of translations ; the second is a study of Heidegger by a distinguished writer and interpreter of culture. The translation is one of three volumes presenting in English the two large German books published by Verlag Neske, Nietzsche/Heidegger. Some of the final sections of this German text have appeared in other collections of Heidegger's writings in English; a further essay on Nietzsche from Holzwege is available separately in English. David Krell's first book of translation gives us approximately half of the first German volume. But nothing about Heidegger is simple. Originally the material in the Nietzsche books came from four lecture courses delivered at Freiburg im Breisgau. Aclded to this were essays and sketches of articles written on the great nineteenth century philosopher. In the early 1950s Heidegger worked these drafts into publishable form, and the collected, refined sections appeared in 1961. This new translation presents the section on" Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst," deriving from a lecture course in 1936/37 and revised for publication. Heidegger's approach to a great philosopher is, of course, to retrieve him out of both the glory and the obfuscation of Western metaphysics. He accomplishes the philosopher's survival by selecting passages and then interpreting them. Nietzsche's voluminous but unpolished Der Will zur Macht impressed the young Heidegger. That book, like Heidegger's commentary, is aphoristic and unfocused. From Heidegger then we receive essays on what he considers to be worthy of attention in Nietzsche and on the deeper impact of Nietzsche's words (or meaningy for the history and issue (Being) of philosophy. The book is ultimately about Heidegger, for we find the enduring question of Being and being, the interest in recurrence and eschatological historicity, the critique of Platonism and of subsequent Christian philosophy. The reader soon sees that Heidegger is not interested in either BOOK REVIEWS 335 what Nietzsche actually held or in the solution of the Heideggerian problematic . Nietzsche is a Denkweg, a path for thinking, a clearing where thinking can take place. We are struck, from the point of view of the history of philosophy, by two interesting confrontations with the past. First, Heidegger explores Nietzsche's ancestry in German idealism and argues that it was not Schopenhauer (a parasite on the tree of idealism) who fostered Nietzsche but Hegel and, above all, Schelling. In Schelling the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Fichte broke through into the abyss of the absolute-which abyss was not lucid reason but seething will. With Schelling the philosophy of the will began-a will which was more than intellectual appetite, spirit itself. Second, there is a lengthy discussion of Plato and of certain Platonic writings through whose genius and torpor in Western metaphysics Heidegger ranges. If the book is a study of Heidegger rather than Nietzsche, it is also a study of the entire history of Western philosophy and not of a single philosopher . What Heidegger is doing here and elsewhere is elucidating the historical and cultural context of a form of philosophical inquiry. The approach intrigues the reader but does not satisfy. Professor Krell's translation is bright and readable; his background material is valuable, and the " Analysis " will be of special help to students both of the reception of Nietzsche after 1900 and of the milieu of Heidegger 's thought in the 1930s. Sometimes there is an Anglo-Saxon brittleness in the translation: a translator needs to remember that, while Heidegger is neological and dense, he is not as abstract as one has been led to believe. A translation should produce not only his thought but something of a language which is both poetic and tough. English translators of Heidegger often seem to...