The Politics of Knowledge: Nietzsche Within Heidegger’s History of Truth

Abstract

Beginning and end, end and beginning — within the Western tradition from the Hebrew scholiast’s emendations of Genesis to Spengler’s sibylline narrative of decline, each has implied the other in some determinative sense, guided by a metaphysical thread of purpose, direction, totality. Even within the circumscribed sphere of the history of philosophy, the very notions of beginning and end have determined the narrative structure of a history that binds the tradition together and provides a framework within which to initiate philosophical questioning. From Aristotle’s account of philosophical development in the Metaphysics through Hegel’s history of unfolding spirit, philosophy has been shaped by a (sometimes unspoken, sometimes programmatic) sense of its own history. With the coming of the modern era, the practice of philosophy itself has been fashioned by an awareness of the limits and burdens of that history — and by no philosopher more intensely than Nietzsche. What marks Nietzsche’ s unique relationship to that history is his genealogical attempt to initiate an other kind of philosophy, against philosophy as it were, by reversing the very structures of that history. For him the history of philosophy coincides with what in The Twilight of the Idols he calls “the history of an error” (TI, 40/KSA 6, 80). He names this error “Platonism” and confects an alternative genealogy of metaphysics built not on the singular foundation of truth as idea, but undermined and de-structured by the polytropic play of art and tragedy.