Heidegger's Platonism by Ralkowski Mark

Author:Ralkowski, Mark.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2009-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Understanding Heidegger’s Crisis: Nietzsche

We might think of Heidegger as the second coming of Nietzsche’s madman, who lights a lantern on a bright morning and announces the death of God in the marketplace, only to be greeted with laughter and derision.15 God is no longer relevant, the madman insisted. We have killed him. There “may still be caves for millennia in which [God’s] shadow is displayed” (GS §108), but at the most basic level the world isn’t what it used to be. The West’s center of gravity has shifted. Today people do things for money that they used to do for God (D §204).

But how could we have done this? How could we have drunk up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to erase the whole horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the Earth from its sun? Now where is it going? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Aren’t we falling constantly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in every direction? Is there still an above and a below? Aren’t we wandering as if through an endless nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing upon us? Hasn’t it gotten colder? Isn’t night and more night continuously coming upon us? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? (GS §125)

The madman’s message falls on deaf ears. His audience laughs at him because they aren’t ready to accept his message or its implications, namely, the dark, continuous night of nihilism and the weight of existential responsibility it entails. They don’t want to admit to themselves that they invented their metaphysical comforts in order to give meaning to their suffering. Man’s problem “was not suffering itself,” Nietzsche says, “but that there was no answer to the crying question, ‘why do I suffer?’” (GM III §28) The madman’s message, therefore, couldn’t be darker. His announcement, in short, is that “‘why?’ finds no answer” (WP §2). The search for meaning in all events must go unfulfilled, and so “the seeker must eventually [become] discouraged” (WP §12). If the madman’s audience listened to him, they would have to face the “fearful void” alone. But that would produce “a kind of suicidal nihilism” (GM III §28), so they don’t. They prefer to be victims and passive recipients of a meaning that is “put up” and “demanded from outside—by some superhuman authority” (WP §20) rather than assertive creators who legislate their own purposes and create their own values (BGE §211). Frustrated, the madman throws his lantern on the ground and claims that he has come too early. The colossal event that he has seen so clearly is “still farther from them than the farthest stars—even though they were the ones that did it!” (GS §125).

Nietzsche was concerned that the West had lost its “center of gravity,” what Max Weber later called its enchanted garden. The sciences had replaced religion and metaphysics as the West’s guiding light for developing its self-understanding and worldview, and it had left us in a cold, pitiless universe that lacked the intrinsic meaning and moral structure of the Greeks’ teleological, intelligently designed cosmos.

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