Cont Philos Rev (2013) 46:395–411

DOI 10.1007/s11007-013-9269-6

The coming of history: Heidegger and Nietzsche against

the present

Andrew J. Mitchell

Published online: 14 August 2013

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract Heidegger’s 1938–1939 seminar on Nietzsche’s On the Utility and

Liability of History for Life continues Heidegger’s grand interpretation of Nietzsche
as a metaphysical thinker of presence. Nietzsche’s conceptions forgetting, memory,
and even life itself, according to Heidegger, are all complicit in the privileging of
presence. Simultaneous with his seminar, Heidegger is also compiling the notebook,
Die Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Beyng), 1938–1940, wherein he sketches
his own conception of history. Examining Heidegger’s criticisms of Nietzsche in the
light of his contemporaneous notebook allows us to articulate Heidegger’s concern
for history and for ‘‘what has-been’’ (das Gewesene) as a thinking of the ‘‘coming’’
of being. For Heidegger, to exist historically is to exist as something sent, something
arriving, as something that ‘‘comes’’ to us. This coming of history is an ontological
determination of all that is, no longer construed as present-at-hand objects, but as
always arriving, relational beings. After presenting Heidegger’s view of the coming
of history, I return to Nietzsche’s Utility and Liability of History to draw attention to
an aspect of his text that is neglected by Heidegger, that of the political. The
concluding sections of Nietzsche’s text confront the politics of the present, in both
senses of the genitive, in order to rally against the closure of society. In the con-
clusion to the paper, I turn to the political dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking of
history with an eye to how it might elude Heidegger’s interpretation.

Keywords Nietzsche Heidegger History Memory Forgetting

Heidegger’s monumental reading of Nietzsche in the late thirties and early forties is
largely a dispute concerning the nature of presence, with Heidegger endeavoring to

A. J. Mitchell (&)
Department of Philosophy, Emory University, 561 South Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
e-mail: andrew.j.mitchell@emory.edu

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show that Nietzsche, the seemingly anti-metaphysical philosopher par excellence, is

himself still wedded to a metaphysical notion of presence, despite (or even on
account of) all his efforts to overturn that same metaphysical tradition. The issue
where presence and the present are explicitly at stake is that of history, so it would
seem obvious that Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche must address his understanding
of history as well. While a lengthy treatment is missing from the lecture courses of
the time, Heidegger does take up Nietzsche’s views on history in his 1938–1939
seminar concerning Nietzsche’s On the Utility and Liability of History for Life (first
published in 2003). At the time of this seminar, Heidegger is simultaneously
formulating his own views on history in his notebook, Die Geschichte des Seyns
(The History of Beyng). Looking at these two texts together not only shows us
another facet of the Heidegger-Nietzsche relationship, long overdue, but also grants
us greater insight into Heidegger’s own attempts to think apart from presence via a
thinking of history.1 For it is at this time that Heidegger articulates the thought of
the ‘‘coming of beyng,’’ a thought of existence as given and sent.2 What comes in
this manner is nothing present and self-contained, but essentially opened and spread
out in relationships that compose the world. This thinking of non-presence is also at
play in Heidegger’s reinterpretation of one of Nietzsche’s central concerns in his
text, the role of memory and forgetting for life. While both Nietzsche and Heidegger
associate history with a call for the transformation of the human, for Nietzsche it is a
call towards greater assertion and appropriative accrual, a call to life, for Heidegger
it is a call to become poor in the receipt of what comes, a call to what he terms the
‘‘guardianship of beyng.’’ Despite Heidegger’s attempts to show Nietzsche’s failure
to extricate himself from a thinking of presence, there is an aspect of Nietzsche’s
text where he would seem to be thinking explicitly against the presence of the
present, an aspect that Heidegger overlooks, that of the political. The concluding
sections of Nietzsche’s text confront the politics of the present, in both senses of the

1
There is not a wealth of commentary (yet) on either Heidegger’s seminar or his notebook of
1938–1939. Insofar as Die Geschichte des Seyns can be considered the third of a trilogy of notebooks
including the Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) of 1936–1938 and Mindfulness of
1938–1939, discussions of history in these earlier works are relevant to the topic at hand, though none
touches explicitly on the ‘‘comingness’’ of history as this is most prominently a concern of Die
Geschichte des Seyns. Among these, I wish only to note the discussions in Polt’s (2006, pp. 81–82,
161–162), Vallega-Neu’s (2003, pp. 40–41, 65), and the essays in the volume Companion to Heidegger’s
Contributions to Philosophy by Vallega (2001, pp. 48–65), von Herrmann (2001, pp. 105–126), and Maly
(2001, pp. 150–170). For Heidegger’s conception of history in the period immediately preceding these,
i.e., the early thirties, see von Herrmann’s (2002, pp. 124–134). For a sweeping, provocative, and not
entirely unproblematic account of history in the period following these (late forties and fifties), see the
conclusion of Michel Haar’s Heidegger and the Essence of Man, in particular the closing pages entitled
‘‘The Historiality and Nonhistoriality of Man’’ (1993, pp. 176–187). For an ontological reading of
Nietzsche’s history essay, see Charles Bambach, ‘‘History and Ontology: A Reading of Nietzsche’s
Second ‘Untimely Meditation.’’’ For Bambach, ‘‘what Nietzsche seeks to do…is to interpret time from
within the horizon of being.’’ Bambach (1990, p. 269).
2
I will render Seyn as ‘‘beyng’’ to distinguish it from Sein (‘‘being’’), the distinction between these is
prominent in the work of the late thirties. Beyng names being as not only distinct from particular beings,
but distinct even from traditional conceptions of ‘‘being’’ itself, as beyng is the withdrawal which grants
beings in the first place (and metaphysical notions of ‘‘being’’ only the abstraction from these abandoned
beings). ‘‘Beyng,’’ in other words, is tied to a thinking of existence as given, as coming (as we shall see),
rather than as a matter of stable presences (the domain of reified ‘‘being’’).

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genitive, in order to rally against the closure of society. After presenting

Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche in his seminar, with special attention to the role
of memory and forgetting, and sketching Heidegger’s own thinking of history in the
notebooks of the time, I will turn to the political dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking
of history with an eye to how it might elude Heidegger’s interpretation.

1 Nietzsche and the present

‘‘Observe the herd as it grazes past you,’’ so begins Nietzsche’s discussion of the
perils of historical knowledge and their projected remedy in a blissful forgetting.3
These cattle not only forget, they forget that they forget and as such ‘‘the animal
lives ahistorically: for it disappears entirely into the present, like a number that
leaves no remainder’’.4 The human is far from this. For us, the past is an assault on
our integrity, the self-contained completeness we would celebrate of ourselves.
Lacking this, we remain unresolved fractions. This past proves human existence to
be a ‘‘never to be perfected imperfect’’.5 These blurred edges of existence blend
away without achieving the chiseled cuts of crystalline form. Or so would be the
case if not for the human’s amazing ‘‘shaping power,’’ which responds to this in two
ways.6 First, the human is capable, in accordance with its strength, of coiling this
trailing tail of a past back into itself and subduing it: ‘‘The stronger the roots of a
human being’s innermost nature, the more of the past he will assimilate or forcibly
appropriate’’.7 But there is simply too much past for anyone to ingest it all (how
could we swallow that sea?). The form giving shaping power of life applies its
second tool at this point, forgetting: ‘‘Such a nature knows how to forget whatever it
does not subdue; these things no longer exist. Its horizon is closed and complete,
and nothing is capable of reminding it that beyond this horizon there are human
beings, passions, doctrines, goals’’.8 Life draws a line as far as its reach will allow.
What falls within the scope of this line, it makes its own, what stands outside the
line is to be forgotten, to disappear without a trace. The horizon is the limit of the
self, one that delineates all that matters for the self. What lies within it, the self has
assimilated. What lies without, the self has forgotten. The line is a barricade,
binding the human within itself ahistorically, as Nietzsche explains the word: ‘‘With
the term ‘the ahistorical’ I designate the art and power to be able to forget and to
enclose oneself in a limited horizon’’.9
3
I will cite the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger in both German and English pagination (where
applicable), separated by a slash. Where no translation is cited, translations are my own. Nietzsche (1988,
p. 248/1995, p. 87).
4
Nietzsche (1988, p. 249/1995, pp. 87–88).
5
Nietzsche (1988, p. 249/1995, p. 88).
6
Nietzsche (1988, p. 251/1995, p. 89).
7
Nietzsche (1988, p. 251/1995, p. 90).
8
Nietzsche (1988, p. 251/1995, p. 90, translation modified).
9
Nietzsche (1988, p. 330/1995, p. 163). Wolfgang Müller-Lauter finds this emphasis on the
‘‘unhistorical’’ to be something that remains with Nietzsche throughout his later works (while the text’s
emphasis on the ‘‘suprahistorical’’ is a relic of the period). Müller-Lauter (1999, p. 30).

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Life requires such a controlled atmosphere if it is to thrive. Historical science

breaks the windows of our greenhouse and floods us with facts, knowledge, science.
Historical science ‘‘hates forgetting, the death of knowledge; it seeks to suspend all
the limitations placed on horizons and to catapult the human being into an infinite,
unlimited lightwave sea of known becoming’’.10 In the face of this, we grow old
prematurely, wither, and die. Life for Nietzsche becomes a matter of enclosing
oneself within a boundary of one’s own construction.11
In Nietzsche’s expressed admiration of the animal, Heidegger sees something
more than a piece of irony on the part of Nietzsche, he sees an effective idealization
of presence. Nietzsche describes the animal as an unhistorical life form, ‘‘it does not
know how to dissemble, conceals nothing, and appears in each and every moment as
exactly what it is’’.12 The animal presents an ideal of pure presence, overcoming the
appearance/reality distinction (it does not know how to dissimulate), completely
available without concealment (it conceals nothing), and entirely self-present (at
every instant appearing wholly as what it is). For Heidegger this conception of a
pure presence that is already found in Nietzsche’s opening image of the animal is
determinative for Nietzsche’s thinking of the past as well. This conception of
presence shapes Nietzsche’s views on history.13

10
Nietzsche (1988, p. 330/1995, p. 164, translation modified).
11
‘‘And this is a universal law: every living thing can become healthy, strong and fruitful only within a
defined horizon.’’ Nietzsche (1988, p. 251/1995, p. 90).
12
Nietzsche (1988, p. 249/1995, p. 88).
13
Andrea Orsucci argues that Heidegger neglects ‘‘the ‘untimeliness’ of Nietzsche’s treatments of
historical questions,’’ claiming ‘‘Heidegger simply ignores the wealth of detailed historical studies which
Nietzsche’s texts provide, and expressly excludes both the ‘philosophy of culture’ and the ‘philosophy of
history’ from his study of Nietzsche, on the grounds that the former is irredeemably compromised by the
Renaissance and by modernity and the latter is fatally undermined by its dependence on certain
‘misleading constructions’’’ (2008, p. 31). The references that she supplies in support of this claim,
however, are slightly misleading. The passage she cites from the Contributions to Philosophy—
Heidegger (1994, p. 154/2012, p. 120)—is from a discussion where Heidegger endeavors to distinguish
between the historian, the philosopher, and the thinker of history. Nietzsche does not seem to be the target
here (no one in particular is named), but rather figures like Herder. In the Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics course, a diatribe against culture criticism is cited—Heidegger (1992, pp. 113–116/1995,
pp. 75–77)—but here the targets are explicitly Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages (as well as Max
Scheler and Leopold Ziegler) and Heidegger is opposing a culture philosophy that ‘‘at most sets out what
is contemporary about our situation, but does not take hold of us.’’ Heidegger (1992, p. 115/1995, p. 77).
It is again unclear that Heidegger would consider Nietzsche as someone whose diagnoses did not ‘‘take
hold of’’ us, especially given the publication of the Utility and Liability of History seminar. Finally,
Orsucci cites Heidegger’s contention that ‘‘culture’’ would be a creation of the Renaissance wherein the
Ancient Greek conception of the true, the beautiful, and the good become values and cultural values.
Heidegger’s claim is that in whichever way one then further determines these values—and within a long
list of their various determinations, by German Idealism, positivism, a fourth or fifth humanism,
Heidegger includes those ‘‘following on Nietzsche’’ [im Gefolge Nietzsches]—these determinations
remain part of an ‘‘ungrasped metaphysics on the way to ‘world-view.’’’ Heidegger (1999, p. 118). Again
the targets are more Spengler and Klages than Nietzsche himself. If there is a sense in which Heidegger
neglects the treatment of historical questions in Nietzsche, i.e. Nietzsche’s role as historian, it is because
he reads Nietzsche’s histories as always histories of morals. See the chapter ‘‘Nietzsche’s ‘moral’
interpretation of history’’ in the fourth of his Nietzsche lecture courses. Heidegger (1997a, b, pp. 102–111/
1991b, pp. 76–84).

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Guided by his thinking of presence, Nietzsche can only think the past as what has
gone by (das Vergangene), Heidegger claims. What has gone by is tied to a thinking
of time as the presence of the present moment where das Vergangene names a
simple absence of that presence. In thinking through history in terms of these
discrete categories of presence and absence, or present and past, what is lost is the
relation of that past to ourselves. When everything is contained and defined,
bounded within its horizon, as it were, there is no way for a relationship to be
extended of any meaningful nature. We cannot be touched by such a delimited and
absent past. In fact, by this very conception of the past as Vergangene we are
precisely protected against this challenging touch of the past. When presence is the
standard, anything less than presence is absence and, as such, completely devoid of
meaning for us. In fact, we might go so far as to claim that such a past is never really
past, for two reasons: (1) it is always thought in terms of a present, even when it has
gone by, it is construed in terms of a present moment that is now past; in other
words, what this past thing is and remains is a present moment, one that has suffered
this accident of passing (2) this past is never really past because it severs all ties to
the present moment and is detached from it, relationless. If the past is to be the past,
it must be past, and this means be past for us (the past is no meaningless oblivion).
The relationless past of what has passed by cannot concern us, it is always
something outside of ourselves, something over the line.
Further, since Nietzsche thinks the past in terms of what has gone by as a past
present moment, so Heidegger, his conception of memory and the remembering of
the past remains a concern for making something present. Remembrance for him
becomes a matter of retaining (Behalten) and containing the present, in order to then
re-present it: ‘‘re-tention (and that means above all a holding-before-oneself and a
re-presenting)’’.14 Remembering is both an objectification (Vergegenständigung)
and a presentification (Vergegenwärtigung) of the past. By such acts, as the names
makes clear, the pastness of the past is lost and the purity of the present retained.

2 Heidegger and what-has-been

Against such a hegemony of presence (a hegemony whose predominance is most

apparent exactly where the past is at stake), Heidegger proposes his sense of having-
been (das Gewesene).15 What is essential here is the nature of the relation that what
has-been maintains with us. In fact, it is only what has-been that can be forgotten,
and thus only what has-been that can be remembered, for only what has-been
remains in contact with us. The holding of these relationships is what allows for an
event to matter to us. Only when events matter to us can their forgetting be of
import, only where there is a connection like this are events able to be remembered
at all, despite all the distances between us and them (and if not despite, then because
of these distances).

14
Heidegger (2003, p. 39).
15
For an extended presentation and treatment of the nuances and subtleties of ‘‘Gewesen,’’ see Sheehan
(1995).

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The relation of what has-been arises from the intensity of our belonging together
in a world. We are not subjects extractable from a world without remainder. We are
deeply entangled in this world, our stance within the world is precisely composed of
the relationships we bear, that we support and which, in turn, support us as well.
Heidegger’s conception of what has-been rests on this thought of our being
embedded in this world of relations. We have no relation in this sense, Heidegger
claims, to a mathematical formula, it lacks a meaningful concretion when isolated
on its own.16 Instead the Gewesene is something that we have-been with:
To remember what has-been and indeed in its being having-been [sein
Gewesensein]; remembering a ‘‘teacher,’’ him, and that is to say remembering
the relation that has-been of the teacher to me, remembering the scope of these
relations. Remembering as having-been-together in what has been [als
mitgewesen in das Gewesene] as just such a transposition there and back, thus
precisely not a taking up into an ‘‘interior’’ as with a making present…Mere
making present and remembering [are] fundamentally different.17
Recalling what has-been is thus not a making present, even less a re-presentation,
because what has-been is no extractable and delimited content that can simply be
transported into a new container in the present. What has-been, das Gewesene, is a
relationship. Recalling what has-been is thus a tending to that same relation once
again. It is a way of holding open. A relationship is nothing that can be contained or
possessed (and it can come as no surprise that a model of memory based on
retention and making present will likewise entail a conception of the subject as one
who possesses what it has in an interior—it should come as no surprise, in other
words, that the animality of the human advocated by Nietzsche proves that human to
be a zôon logon echon, with the emphasis now falling on the echon or ‘‘having’’ of
the animal having reason). What is remembered is a co-belonging, an openness and
a bond found therein. The relationship of remembering, then, as Heidegger
construes it, is more originary than that of representative retention, it is one that
‘‘each time holds a being as such in the open’’.18 This open realm is nothing other
than the realm of relation, the space allowing relations to run through it, joining
beings together in the various ways that compose the world.
But this is not to laud remembering as a privileged relationship over forgetting.19
Both are relations and they are no longer oppositionally posed to one another.
Forgetting is not relationlessness, as Nietzsche would have it for Heidegger, but a
16
See Heidegger (2003, p. 42).
17
Heidegger (2003, p. 40).
18
Heidegger (2003, p. 44).
19
In her provocative book, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, Vanessa Lemm situates her reading of
Nietzsche’s second Unfashionable Observation against commentators who proceed by ‘‘contrasting the
animal’s forgetfulness and a-historicity with the human being’s memory and historicity,’’ citing
Heidegger’s 1938–1939 seminar as an example of this. Lemm (2009, p. 86, 190n2). For her reading,
‘‘forgetfulness is not a force that inhibits memory, but is actively involved in the becoming of memory.
Conversely, memory…stands for an involvement with forgetfulness.’’ Lemm (2009, 94). It is just this
‘‘involvement’’ of memory and forgetfulness that Heidegger renders ontological in his reading of the
Observation. Indeed, as we shall see, Heidegger will give greater pride of place to forgetfulness than even
Lemm herself, though he will dissociate it from Nietzsche’s conception of the animal in so doing.

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particular type of relation, a non-relation, ‘‘Forgetting is a non-relation of the

retaining…and commemorative relation; a particular non-relation, the ‘no longer’
and not-yet-again’’.20 Forgetting renounces the oppositional character of presence
(vs. the past, vs. absence) and attends to the shades of relation between us and our
memory, between us and what is in fact ‘‘no longer’’ here qua past, but all the same
with us now relationally, and precisely without being ‘‘yet-again’’ here as present.
Forgetting is no mere absence of a presumed content, but the distension of a
relationship. It names the way things are away from us, and Heidegger says nothing
less then this: ‘‘Forgetting,’’ he writes, ‘‘fundamental manner in which the being is
away for the human; how he himself is away from beings (being-away)—despite
being in the midst of them’’.21 Forgetting is a relation to what is not present. But,
and this is one of Heidegger’s deftest moves in the seminar, what is least present of
all is being! The deepest forgetting concerns that which ‘‘precisely will not be made
present’’.22 Forgetting names our stance in the midst of beings that show themselves
around us without being purely present, ‘‘Forgetting as the essencing of Da-sein!’’
Heidegger exclaims. Rather than a failure of retention (Behalten), forgetting thus
becomes a ‘‘holding oneself to – being! [das Sichhalten daran – das Sein!]’’23
Forgetting names our relationship to what is not present, to what is as non-
present, to what is when considered apart from the presence/absence distinction.
Heidegger draws our attention to the etymological connection between the Greek
‘‘forgetting’’ epi-lanthanesthai, and the concealment (lêthe) endemic to truth
(alêtheia).24 Forgetting becomes an attentiveness to this concealment, to the
existence of the thing in a mode that is not purely present and available. Heidegger
asks ‘‘What are we to take away from this elucidation of words?’’ and enters a list of
synonyms for that which is forgotten, culminating in ‘‘that which absences [das Ab-
wesende] – and indeed for what? – for this: having-before-(oneself) – re-presenting,
immediate disposal’’.25 Forgetting is a way of holding a relationship with that which
is not respresentably and disposably present. The example immediately following
illustrates the point: ‘‘The professor ‘forgets’ the umbrella, we say: He leaves it
standing. The umbrella is therefore precisely present-at-hand, not wholly vanished;
but the professor: My umbrella is ‘gone,’ i.e. out of the horizon of immediate
disposal, clutching, retention, away from the repository [aus der Behältnis

20
Heidegger (2003, p. 46).
21
Heidegger (2003, p. 45).
22
Heidegger (2003, p. 47).
23
Heidegger (2003, p. 47). Compare the under-studied ‘‘Recollection in Metaphysics’’ (1941), the
concluding essay to Heidegger’s two volume Nietzsche: ‘‘The originary occurs ahead of everything that
comes and comes for that reason, though veiled, as the pure coming, to the historical humans. It never
passes, is never something past [ein Vergangenes]. For this reason, we find what is originary also never in
a historical turning back to what is past, but instead only in commemoration (Andenken), which at the
same time thinks the essencing being (what has-been) [das wesende Sein (das Ge-wesende)] and the sent
truth of being [die geschickte Wahrheit des Seins].’’ Heidegger (1997a, b, p. 439/1973, p. 75, translation
modified).
24
See Heidegger (2003, p. 37).
25
Heidegger (2003, p. 38).

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weg]’’.26 Forgetting becomes a manner of letting something be free from our

eagerness for its deployment in our projects.
Forgetting becomes a way of attending to what has-been (das Gewesene) rather
than what is passed (das Vergangene). The point has repercussions for our thinking
of history as well. Nietzsche viewed forgetting as a way of becoming unhistorical.
Heidegger agrees with Nietzsche that forgetting is tied to the unhistorical, but only
insofar as what is not historical is what is not history (Historie), but rather a matter
of Geschichte, history—‘‘The unhistorical [Das Unhistorische] is (in this sense)
history [Geschichte],’’ the event or occurrence of the truth of being (concealment).27
As we shall see, what occurs (geschieht) in history (Geschichte) is precisely the
opening of a relationship to beings in their non-presence.
Surely these considerations of remembering and forgetting are foreign to
Nietzsche’s texts. Heidegger elaborates so freely on Nietzsche’s basic terms in order
to reveal the ways in which the latter’s thinking reiterates the claims of the
metaphysical tradition. Heidegger’s emphasis is on relationality and how the past
stands in a relation to us. But for this to be the case, we, too, must be open to
relationships with that past, we must be open. For Heidegger, the metaphysical
conception of the object as discrete and self-contained is mirrored in the
corresponding conception of the subject as isolated ego, discrete and self-contained.
One of Heidegger’s boldest claims in the seminar is that Nietzsche himself ascribes
to this conception of subjectivity.
As already suggested, the sense of history and forgetting at work in Nietzsche is
tied to a tradition of metaphysical subjectivity. For Heidegger, the progenitor of
Nietzsche’s basic oppositions is all too clear. A diagram in the text arrays two
columns around ‘‘history’’ as a ‘‘relation to the past [Bezug zum Vergangenen]’’.28
On one side is the ‘‘unhistorical,’’ the ‘‘constant forgetting’’ of the ‘‘animal.’’ On the
other is the ‘‘historical,’’ ‘‘not able to forget’’ of the ‘‘human.’’ The animality of life
is opposed to the science of history, as per Nietzsche’s basic tension. But the
columns come together and point back to the ‘‘animal rationale ? (‘life’ –
history).’’ Heidegger’s concern in the seminar, an unresolved one, is how these two
opposed sides can remain together; what is the connection between them, the ‘‘unity
of this belonging together’’?29 Nietzsche wishes to pass from the more rational form
of the animal rationale to the more animal, but retains the basic poles of the
opposition itself. Even his conception of youth as collapsing the oppositions of
inner/outer, form/content, continues to reaffirm what it would contest.
With the basic opposition of Nietzsche’s thinking of history a restatement of the
millennia old animal rationale (and this without any serious thought to the essence

26
Heidegger (2003, p. 38).
27
Heidegger (2003, p. 95).
28
Heidegger (2003, p. 17).
29
Heidegger (2003, p. 22).

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of animality),30 Nietzsche remains locked in the horizon of subjectivity, his

conception of life merely exacerbates it and brings it to its utter completion:
the determination of the human as I-consciousness is only one particular case
of subjectivism. Subjectivism—the pure revolving of the human about itself as
that being to whom all other beings are related as determined in their
beinghood… Nietzsche had in no way overcome subjectivism…but Nietzsche
only replaces the subjectivism of consciousness with that of life.31
The consequences for Heidegger are quite clear, if polemically stated: ‘‘Nietzsche’s
enmity to Descartes is so fierce and constant for this reason, because Descartes is
still not Cartesian enough for Nietzsche, since he first thinks subjectivism only
superficially as starting from the ‘I,’ instead of from the bodying and life of the
animal human’’.32
The transformation of life that Nietzsche demands is a transformation from the
gray-haired nostalgia of the historians into ignorant, innocent, guileless, youth,
animalistic and capable of further growth and formation. This growth occurs as the
horizon extends itself, where life either assimilates what it encounters or condemns
it to oblivion, forgetting it completely.33 In other words, growth is a matter of
‘‘making same,’’ of homoiôsis. Nietzsche’s conception of truth, too, could not be
more traditional.

3 The coming of history

For Heidegger, concomitant with the thinking of what has-been is a transformation

in subjectivity, whereby the human is brought to a place where this past can reach
it—a move away from the insulated security of the Nietzschean life form to a state
of exposure. This is one of the motivating concerns in Heidegger’s Die Geschichte
des Seyns, his notebook contemporaneous with the Uses and Disadvantages of
History seminar. Schematically stated, forgetting is possible only for a being that
can be reached by other beings, a being that is in a world and in relation with things
that can then pass away from it. This presupposes the openness of this being, its
‘‘standing-in in the midst of beings,’’ as Heidegger explains in the seminar, a

30
As Heidegger endeavors to complexify matters throughout his course, asking ‘‘where is the limit of the
animal – the surface of its ‘body’ [Körpers]? The inside is outside’’ and claiming ‘‘The animal (and the
plant?) takes in ‘more’ space than its bodying body [Leib-körper] fills out.’’ Heidegger (2003, p. 19, 28).
31
Heidegger (2003, p. 165). Heidegger comments on Nietzsche’s adaptation of Descartes in his claim
‘‘vivo, ergo cogito’’ [see Nietzsche (1988, p. 329/1995, p. 162)], noting: ‘‘this all upon the transformed
foundation of modern thinking, despite the enmity to Descartes, which indeed only sets the vivo in place
of the cogito and so simply increases to the ultimate degree the predominance of the subjektum.’’
Heidegger (2003, p. 138).
32
Heidegger (2003, p. 197).
33
Contra this reading, one might consider Michel Haar’s claim that ‘‘There is no unconditional
exaltation of life in Nietzsche’’ (1996, p. 115) in the chapter ‘‘Life and Natural Totality’’ of his Nietzsche
and Metaphysics (1996, pp. 113–130).

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404 A. J. Mitchell

standing-in which is itself grounded in its ‘‘assignment to the truth…of beyng’’.34

The human is delivered over to the truth of being and has the task of safekeeping
(bewahren) that truth (Wahrheit) whose essential feature is precisely concealment
(truth as Un-verborgenheit). Preserving the concealment of a thing, the truth of it, is
a way of not overstepping one’s bounds (horizon) and assimilating the other. Instead
it is a way of letting being arrive. In the notebook of the time, Heidegger thinks this
in terms of ‘‘coming’’ (kommen).
Coming, letting the thing arrive, letting beyng come, is the essence of history for
Heidegger, the essence of the sending of Geschichte. Coming will be a way for
Heidegger to think something that is not fully in place and thus present. Coming
allows Heidegger to express a conception of history and of being (the two now
inseparable) apart from a metaphysics of presence. As we have seen, history as
typically understood (as Historie) precludes this coming from the outset:
History [Die Historie] is the calculating away of the past on the basis of the
present, such that the present remains futureless [zukunftslos], and does not
admit that which could come-to it [zukommen könnte] – touching its essence.
What is admitted as ‘‘future’’ [‘‘Zukunft’’] is the pre-calculated and already
secured, it is thus ‘‘eternity,’’ as per the exaggeration belonging to it.35
What ‘‘could come-to’’ us is not simply the future, but all of the temporal
dimensions. History is thought on the basis of exposure and what we are exposed to
in history is its coming in all dimensions:
History [Geschichte] is the coming of what comes and for this reason first and
also the past of what passes [Vergangenheit des Gehenden] and the having-
been of what has been [die Gewesenheit des Gewesenden] and thereby also the
presence of what is going by [Gegenwart des Vorbeigehenden]. History is this
not by a gluing together of three different ‘‘temporalities,’’ but rather from out
of the essential ground of coming.36
This coming is not to be simply equated with the future, but the past as having-been
and the present, too, are all manifestations of arriving, they all must come to us,
‘‘The ‘coming’ ‘comes’ not from out of the ‘future,’ but rather first grounds the
future’’.37 There is no particular privilege of the future in this thinking of history, a
stark change from Being and Time, instead there is an insistence on our exposure to
what comes. And what comes to us is our historicality: ‘‘The inceptual historicality
[anfängliche Geschichtlichkeit] from out of beyng is that which comes-to us’’.38
This exposure makes up our existence as the historical beings that we are. To be
exposed is to be weathered by time.
As noted, what comes to us as historical are beings themselves. The thought of
beings as sent or as coming frees them from the straight-jacket of presence. They are
34
Heidegger (2003, p. 45).
35
Heidegger (1998, p. 100).
36
Heidegger (1998, p. 93, emphasis modified).
37
Heidegger (1998, p. 163).
38
Heidegger (1998, p. 20).

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The coming of history 405

no longer stable and fixed, neither spatially nor temporally. What comes as coming
is what never arrives, otherwise it would not be ‘‘coming’’ any longer and simply be
‘‘here’’ and ‘‘present.’’ To be coming is to not have arrived. The beings that are
coming (or ‘‘beyngs’’ as Heidegger uses the rare term ‘‘Seyende’’ in the notebook)
are marked by this essential ‘‘incompletion,’’ not as though something was missing
from them, but instead as opened.39 The opened being (the coming being) cannot be
encapsulated as a discrete thing. This is the nature of the ‘‘concealment’’ discussed
in terms of truth and forgetting, not a covering over of some otherwise present-at-
hand part of the being, but an essential non-presence inhabiting the being, opening it
essentially, and allowing for its situational location in a context. In other words,
concealment does not merely name a veiling of the thing, but the fact that what is
here before us is not all there is to the being in question. Instead, this being exists in
relations with other beings, relations that are not containable ‘‘within’’ that being
itself, but which draw that being out into a participation in the world. Only beings
that come are supple enough for this, receptive enough. Heidegger speaks of ‘‘The
opening grounding of the essential suppleness [Fügsamkeit] of the being, which
admits what comes in its singularity’’.40 Coming themselves and admitting and
receiving what comes, these are the beings of the world, the beings of beyng. In
short: ‘‘Coming – as essence of beyng’’.41
Incompletion is thus, paradoxically, constitutive of beings when understood
historically as coming. In Die Geschichte des Seyns, the nature of this coming is
thought in terms of hesitation and refusal. Insofar as beings are given to us, then
these beings cannot ever be fully given. Rather, in the giving of something there is
always something held back. To be given, what is given cannot be simply
appropriated in whole by the recipient. It always maintains a relationship back to the
donor, otherwise there is no sense in speaking of it as a gift, as something given.
This relationship to the donor keeps the gift in question from ever being completely
taken as a possession, i.e. as something containable. Gratitude to the donor for what
is given shows itself precisely in this maintenance of the connection between gift
and giver. But this entails that what is given is never completely given. Otherwise
put, this entails that what is ever only given is always a relationship. This strange
logic of the gift means there is no giving or coming without a holding back. But this
is not to say that there is something somewhere that has been held back and that
what we are given is somehow lacking something. Instead, the holding back
inherent to giving names exactly the stretching of the gift to us, this stretching as a
movement not of something present, but of what comes: ‘‘Vacillation – hesitation –
as the rush of coming’’.42 Similarly, he speak of coming in terms of a shaking, ‘‘the
most extreme and longest shakings [Erschütterungen]’’ and in terms of refusal: ‘‘To
construe coming in its essence from out of the broaching refusal [Verweigerung]’’.43
The proper comportment to this hesitation of being, its coming in fits and starts, and
39
For Seyende, see Heidegger (1998, p. 137, 157).
40
Heidegger (1998, p. 97).
41
Heidegger (1998, p. 105).
42
Heidegger (1998, p. 58).
43
Heidegger (1998, p. 90, 93).

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406 A. J. Mitchell

its stuttering out can only be one that is itself not directed at a completed being, but
inherently incomplete in a corresponding manner. Heidegger names this incomple-
tion of comportment, ‘‘preparation’’: ‘‘The human cannot ‘make’ this history
[Geschichte] and can never intervene in it, he is only able…to prepare the time’’ for
what comes.44 To do so is concomitant with a transformation of the human from out
of the closure and disjunction of the animal rationale into the exposure of Dasein.
The Geschichte des Seyns is full of references to the ‘‘transformation of the
human’’ from out of its status as animal rationale.45 Dasein is to be exposed,
opened, to stand in the midst of the coming world. But we must be careful how we
understand openness here. The openness of exposure is not the openness of a
porthole in an otherwise closed wall. Openness is nothing partial, where one part is
opened in order to permit an exchange between an outside and an otherwise closed
interior. Exposure affects the whole of Dasein. It is so much outside of itself that it
is wholly in the world. Heidegger speaks of this as its ‘‘In-standing for the coming
[Inständigkeit zum Kommen],’’ an ‘‘in-standing in the essence of truth’’.46 The
transformed human is exposed to this world of arriving. To be outside of itself, as
per the understanding of the subject as ecstatic, is not to be nowhere, but instead to
be in a world. But not an inert world through which the ecstatic subject would move
like a ghost, but a world that itself comes to meet the ecstatic one, a world that is
capable of touching us and appealing to us—a world that is arriving and in whose
arriving we are ourselves at stake. A section of the notebooks entitled ‘‘Are we?’’
wonders ‘‘Who are we? […] Who are we?’’47
The notebooks directly address this question of who we are in a thinking of
human transformation, going so far as to speak of ‘‘an other humanity [ein anderes
Menschentum]’’.48 This other humanity will not be thought on the basis of life or of
the living being. For Heidegger, life as understood by Nietzsche, in its appropriative
drive for growth at all costs would remain closed to the relational world of coming,
‘‘Life remains excluded [ausgeschlossen] from the relation to beyng’’.49 As such,
the other humanity will not be thought from the starting point of the animal rationale
or even the zôon logon echon. Instead, Heidegger will speak of a becoming poor
(Verarmung) and thereby target the appropriative drive of life. Being so exposed as
to be standing-in the site of coming, outside of itself, Dasein becomes poor. This
marks a transformation out of the possessive zôon logon echon into a wholly
exposed being without interior. Such a one could never possess anything as its own
(and the notebooks develop the notion of property, Eigentum, at length, one’s own
as well as that of beyng).50 The transformed human is unable to possess something
as wholly, secreted away in an interior. But even the beings that would be so
possessed cannot be so possessed, they themselves are never completely present and
44
Heidegger (1998, p. 115).
45
Heidegger (1998, p. 90).
46
Heidegger (1998, p. 21, 87).
47
Heidegger (1998, p. 8).
48
Heidegger (1998, p. 139).
49
Heidegger (1998, p. 99).
50
Cf. Heidegger (1998, pp. 123–126).

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The coming of history 407

available for the possession, they are always arriving and prohibit us from ever
having them at all. With the exteriority of Dasein and the arriving of the beings,
there is no chance for accrual, only impoverishment. If the coming of being is
likewise a refusal, as we have seen, then impoverishment is a way of remaining true
to (or standing-in the truth of) what does not come (or comes only as the non-given
that first enables any giving at all by providing it with the extent of its reach to us).
While both Nietzsche and Heidegger associate history with a call for the
transformation of the human, for Nietzsche it is a call towards greater assertion
and appropriative accrual, for Heidegger one of becoming poor in the receipt of
what comes.
The seminar on Nietzsche’s Unfashionable Observation draws some of the
consequences of this view for a transformation of the human in the midst of coming
beings:
Geschichte is the in-standing persistence of the truth of beyng in Da-sein,
insofar as beyng as event [Ereignis] is projected and has come to its essence as
refusal. Therefore the essence of Geschichte can neither be determined from
out of ‘‘life’’ on the whole nor from out of human life. Instead,
Geschichtlichkeit (as temporal-spatial guardianship [Wächterschaft] of the
truth of beyng) first stamps the essence of the human on the basis of its
assignment to beyng.51
What comes to us in Geschichte is not merely particular beings, but concealment
and refusal. The transformation of existence that this sending effects is a
transformation of the human into the guardian of that concealing refusal. Only
with refusal is there responsibility. The things that are coming are not fixed and
established presences. They are not already determined by a confining definition. If
they were, they could never reach us. They could never extend beyond themselves
and touch us. They could never appeal to us and call for a response from us. In a
world of discrete beings, there can be no responsibility, everything is already
decided. But the coming beings present us with just this decision of existence. Only
what comes is capable of being decided, can bring us to a point of decision. As such,
the history of beyng makes the human responsible for tending the concealment of
things. Beings cannot come to us if we render them our possessions from the outset,
if we contain them take them as present-at-hand objects to be appropriated by us.
For the world to be a radiant coming world of beings, we, too, must be claimed by
that world and forego the drive to possession. We must become poor to stand-in the
midst of what comes. Only in so doing do we guard (bewahren) the coming of the
being, allowing it to show itself in its truth (Wahrheit) as that which has been
granted (gewährt) to us as the coming being that it is. Our responsibility shows itself
in the decision to continue to hear the appeal of beings.52 Our historical task is to

51
Heidegger (2003, p. 94).
52
As one of the addenda to the notebook makes clear: ‘‘‘Hearing’ – not as another ‘sense,’ but instead as
a consequence of the happening [Er-eignung] of the expectant finding of what comes – i.e. of history
[Geschichte].’’ Heidegger (1998, p. 222).

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408 A. J. Mitchell

keep things from ever becoming ‘‘present’’ (to remain true to the past, to history
itself).
This is the critical point between Heidegger and Nietzsche on the issue of history.
Without a break from the thinking of presence, there can be no belonging to the
world and no responsibility to the things around us. History can only be
meaningless. In a sense, Heidegger shows that even if we accept Nietzsche’s
diagnosis of his times, his projected remedy is really no remedy at all, but can only
lead to a further exacerbation of the symptoms. Only when we break with a thinking
of presence, especially in the case of history, might there be a meaningful change in
our condition, in our world, and in our self-understanding.

4 Nietzsche and the politics of presence

And yet, is it not possible to see in Nietzsche’s text his own attempt to think against
presence? A political approach to the matter that Heidegger never once mentions
across the extent of his commentary (approximately three times as long as
Nietzsche’s original text).53 It would begin with Nietzsche’s objection to any history
that would offer the present as the culmination of a world-historical process. Such a
view ‘‘reverts to naked admiration of success and leads to the idolatry of the
factual’’.54 Nietzsche goes so far as to speak of a ‘‘tyranny of the real,’’ a reality that
is promulgated as the only one imaginable: ‘‘It is still commonly believed that there
is no alternative to our present, extremely distressing reality’’.55 In his struggle
against the historical sense of his time, Nietzsche comes to realize that this actuality
is anything but innocently formed: ‘‘in this struggle we are forced to make an
especially painful observation: that the aberrations of the historical sensibility from
which the present suffers are deliberately promoted, encouraged, and – utilized’’.56
They are deliberately employed for the acquiescence of the masses to rule, to bring
about in each individual the ‘‘total surrender of his personality’’,57 whereby those
‘‘who first learned to kneel down and bow their heads before the ‘power of history’
eventually nod their ‘yes’ as mechanically as a Chinese puppet to every power –
regardless of whether it is a government, a public opinion, or a numerical majority –
and move their limbs in precisely that tempo with which whatever power pulls the

53
Lacoue-Labarthe argues that because Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is expressly philosoph-
ical, it neglects what is ‘‘nonphilosophical’’ or ‘‘merely empirical,’’ and thus political in Nietzsche’s
thought. He also offers his own rationale for the omission, ‘‘This is obviously the case for the political
statements – the very ones that Heidegger, during the thirties, will never want to take directly into
account… (I do not wish to indict the Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche. I am merely suggesting
that Heidegger, who saw very clearly in ‘Nietzscheanism,’ after the episode of 33, the principal enemy,
could nevertheless not take into account Nietzsche’s political statements…because they were ultimately
too close to his own political positions.’’ Lacoue-Labarthe (1990, p. 215).
54
Nietzsche (1988, p. 309/1995, p. 143).
55
Nietzsche (1988, p. 311, 326/1995, p. 145, 160).
56
Nietzsche (1988, p. 323/1995, p. 157).
57
Eduard von Hartmann as cited by Nietzsche towards the end of his text. Nietzsche (1988, p. 316/1995,
p. 150).

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The coming of history 409

strings’’.58 Such passive acquiescence goes hand in hand with a bourgeois self-
interest, or egoism, against which Nietzsche rails and rails. This egoism has become
refined in the interest of survival and is supported by the state: ‘‘the state has a very
special mission in the world system of egoism that is to be founded: it is supposed to
become the patron of all prudent egoisms in order to protect them with the might of
its military and police forces from the horrible eruptions of imprudent egoism’’.59
Nietzsche’s thinking of history would be a struggle against this politically
enforced presence of the state, of property, of ego. What he offers in place of these
isolated and severed egos is the community of life, where life is precisely that which
exceeds its own bounds as existing within an ‘‘atmosphere.’’ Things require an
‘‘atmosphere’’ in which to live, they call for a pious ‘‘illusion’’ in order to survive,
they need ‘‘love’’ to grow and these needs are determinative for what they are,
creatures of association and camaraderie.60 Life requires a ‘‘protective and
enveloping cloud’’ to continue.61 Is it not possible, then, to see life as inherently
existing out beyond itself? Does this necessary atmosphere not blur the edges of
life? A kind of concealment or even non-presence would play a transformative role,
a revolutionary one. It would effect a transformation of what we here must term the
fascist state and the egoists who support it.
Heidegger says nothing of this—not surprising. The happiness that Nietzsche
seeks for life, the happiness of those grazing animals is not to be found there.
Happiness is something that comes to us unbidden, ‘‘Happiness – that which is
given to one, which comes from outside’’.62 Happiness would come not to ‘‘the herd
as it grazes past you,’’ but to the shepherd.63 Heidegger closes the lecture course of
the following semester with a passage from Hölderlin’s hymn ‘‘Der Mutter Erde’’:
Travelers speak much of this,
And the wild animals roam in the ravines,
And the herd sweeps over the heights
But in holy shade
On the green slope the shepherd dwells
and looks up at the peaks.64
The Hellingrath text that Heidegger cites reads ‘‘the herd sweeps over the heights,’’
Beissner’s later edition reads ‘‘the horde sweeps over the heights’’.65 Perhaps a
58
Nietzsche (1988, p. 309/1995, pp. 143–144).
59
Nietzsche (1988, p. 321–322/1995, pp. 155–156).
60
Nietzsche (1988, pp. 295–296/1995, p. 131).
61
Nietzsche (1988, p. 298/1995, p. 134).
62
Heidegger (2003, p. 225).
63
Nietzsche (1988, p. 248/1995, p. 87).
64
Hölderlin (1923, pp. 156–157) cited at Heidegger (1996, pp. 593–594/1991a, pp. 157–158). In David
Farrell Krell’s translation of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, Krell astutely notes that ‘‘Hellingrath’s text has the
word Herde in line 3, rather than the Beissner-Schmidt reading, Horde. Heidegger thus took the third line
to read, ‘And the herd roves over the heights.’ If Beissner–Schmidt are correct, however, it is not a
‘roving herd’ but a ‘horde’ that roams over the mountains. The shadow in which the shepherd dwells
would thus be set in sharper and more dramatic relief.’’ Heidegger (1991a, 158n).
65
Hölderlin (1951, p. 125).

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410 A. J. Mitchell

Nietzschean critique could take as its point of departure this very ambiguity. The
same shepherd who watches the herds, looking up and exposed to what comes, is the
shepherd who merely watches as the hordes roam across the mountain passes, not
interested in any talk of revolution, dismissive of technological society, but
nonetheless its functionary.

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