CHAPTER 11

HEIDEGGER ON NIETZSCHE ON NIHILISM

Robert B. Pippin

The Paradox of Nihilism

The phenomenon that both Nietzsche and Heidegger refer to as “nihilism”
is often understood as a historical event, an episode in late modern Western
culture.1 The event is taken to be a widespread collapse of confidence in
what Nietzsche calls our “highest values,” especially religious and moral
values, at least among the educated classes in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century.These highest values have, according to Nietzsche, somehow
“devalued themselves.”2
Heidegger, however, in his influential series of lectures on Nietzsche in
the 1930s, correctly noted that Nietzsche himself did not treat the phenom-
enon of nihilism as a mere historical event.3 The phrase “the highest values
devalue themselves” (die obersten Werte sich entwerten)4 already indicates that.
Devaluation does not just happen. Heidegger elaborates,

In Nietzsche’s view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some

time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens
in Occidental history [Grundcharakter des Geschehens in der abendländlichen
Geschichte]. Nihilism is at work [am Werk] even—and especially—there where
it is not advocated as doctrine or demand, there where ostensibly its oppo-
site prevails. Nihilism means that the uppermost values devalue themselves.
This means that whatever realities and laws set the standard in Christendom,
in morality since Hellenistic times, and in philosophy since Plato, lose their
binding force [verbindliche Kraft], and for Nietzsche that always means creative
[schöpferische] force.5

As the passage indicates, there is an event (a loss of “binding force”), but

it is not a contingent moment, like the moral disintegration that a plague

T. L. Pangle et al. (eds.), Political Philosophy Cross-Examined

© Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax 2013
174 RO B E RT B . P I P P I N

or disaster can cause. Indeed, the “event” or the fate of Western history as
a whole is itself at issue. That sort of event character is captured in its mag-
nitude by the famous phrase announced in The Gay Science: “God is dead,”
which Heidegger summarizes in an unusual way: “The Christian God has
lost his power [Macht] over beings [über das Seiende] and over the destiny
[Bestimmung] of man.”6 He puts it this way:

“Christian God” also stands for the “transcendent” [Übersinnliche] in general

in its various meanings—for “ideals” and “norms,” “principles” and “rules,”
“ends” and “values,” which are set “above” beings, in order to give being as
a whole a purpose, an order, and—as it is succinctly expressed—“meaning.”
[Sinn] Nihilism is that historical process whereby the dominance of the “tran-
scendent” becomes null and void, so that all being loses its worth and meaning.
Nihilism is the history of beings [die Geschichte des Seienden], through which
the death of the Christian God comes slowly but inexorably to light.7

However, Nietzsche and Heidegger do not treat the crisis of nihilism as

primarily an intellectual crisis, a problem of credible belief (although it is
clearly also that). The situation is not described as analogous to a scientific
crisis, for example, the result of anomalies, experimental inconsistencies,
effective refutations, and arguments that generate skepticism about, and
finally, rejection of a scientific claim. In Nietzsche’s case, he often treats the
phenomenon of nihilism not as a crisis of belief or will, but as some sort
of pathology of human desire; a collapse of desire altogether, or a growing
self-deceit about what it is we really desire, or a self-abasing reduction in the
ambition of what is wanted. A frequent image here is of “bows” that have
lost their “tension,” as in, from Zarathustra, “Alas, the time approaches when
man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond the human, and
the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir,”8 and the striking
claim from The Gay Science that “neediness is needed!” (Not ist nötig.)9 That
is, we now find nothing truly needful, nothing important worth wanting,
worth sacrificing for.
In Heidegger’s case, there are already indications of a similar character-
ization when he says that the highest values have lost their “binding force,”
and that being loses worth and “meaning.” In Heidegger and in general,
meaningfulness (in the sense of what he calls Bedeutsamkeit) is not sus-
tained by beliefs about what is or should be meaningful. (Meaning, in a
sense we need to consider more closely, is found, present, experienced, or
not.) A crisis in “meaning” is thus relatively independent of, deeper than,
and presupposed, by arguments, evidence, and so forth. A practice that had
made sense comes to seem senseless, something that can happen without
a critique or an attack. And Heidegger had already said something strik-
ing about Nietzsche on nihilism that is relevant to this point. It slides by