Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit

6 The Mature Critique of the Will

146 The Mature Critique of the Will Vielleicht ist überhaupt der Wille selbst das Böse. (GA 77:208) It is first the will that arranges itself everywhere in technology, that devours the earth in the exhaustion and consumption and alteration of the artificial. (VA 94/88–89) As we have seen, Heidegger’s path through the 1920s and 1930s can be read as a struggle to find and define the problem of the will. Despite the many foreshadowings that can be found in (or read back into) these texts, the will is first decisively and explicitly problematized beginning in the waning years of the 1930s. We have seen that Contributions to Philosophy still attempts to think in terms of a “most proper will,” albeit one of “reservedness ” rather than self-assertion, without yet seeing the very concept of “will” as inextricably embedded in the metaphysical tradition from which it seeks to twist free. Nevertheless, in Contributions and its sequel volumes many of the key elements of Heidegger’s mature thought begin to take definite shape, including (1) the notion of the “history of being”; (2) the critique of technology or “machination”; and (3) the possibility of a turning to “the other beginning” beyond the end of metaphysics. In the latter two parts of this chapter I focus on the first two elements as they relate to Heidegger’s mature (i.e., post-1939–40) critique of the will. The third element, the question of a turning to an other beginning, will be introduced in the final part of this chapter, in preparation for more detailed discussion in chapter 7 and later chapters. In the first section of this chapter, I discuss the decisive turn from the will which takes place during the course of Heidegger’s prolonged confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power. In the second section, I then show how Heidegger situates the will to power as the penultimate stage in the history of metaphysics. This history is narrated as one of an increasing withdrawal of being and an accompanying escalating prominence of the will. Metaphysically the history 6 of the West completes itself in the will to power, which in turn finally reveals itself as the technological will to will. In the third part of this chapter I examine Heidegger’s critique of the epoch of technology, wherein ultimately humans themselves are threatened with being reduced to “human resources” for the cybernetic drive of the will to will. In the extreme distress of our abandonment into willful manipulation of beings and domination of the earth, however, Heidegger claims that there lies concealed the possibility of a change within human nature corresponding to a turning in the history of being to an other beginning. In the desolateness of this extreme epoch of will lies the possibility for a turning to a way of being other than willing, a turning to non-willing. Yet only by first plumbing the depths of our distressful times can the question of such a turning be raised; it is necessary to first of all meditate on the essence of technology, nihilism, and the will. In this chapter more than elsewhere I shall let Heidegger’s texts speak for themselves, often with an emphasis on explication and clarification rather than on critical interpretation. Heidegger never wrote the magnum opus of his later period, and thus it is necessary to orchestrate and explicate passages here from the many lectures and essays—starting with, but not limited to, those decisive texts gathered in the 1,100 pages of the two Nietzsche volumes—which together present a complexly interwoven critique of the will that lies at the heart of his later thought. The work of condensation and exposition in this chapter will lay the ground for the more interpretive and critical work to be carried out in later chapters. The Critique of Nietzsche’s Will to Power The Nietzsche Volumes as the Site of a Crisis and a Turn Nietzsche hat mich kaputtgemacht.1 Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche was also a confrontation with his own embrace of the will. Confronting Nietzsche’s radical affirmation of the will to power forced Heidegger into a crisis: to will or not to will? But is that the only way to form the question? Might there not be a third, a radically other way—to be? Heidegger’s path of recovery from this dilemma in fact led neither to a Schopenhauerian resignation nor to a...