The Body and the Completion of Metaphysics: A Critical Analysis of Heidegger’s Nietzsche

Incorporation (Einverleibung)

It is strangely common, in Nietzsche and Heidegger literature, to find objections to Heidegger’s attempt to turn Nietzsche’s thought into a metaphysical system, with little to no sustained consideration of the lynchpin of that alleged system, namely, the Nietzschean body, der Leib. This is especially true of the earliest influential French attempts to reclaim Nietzsche as a disrupter of the subject, of logocentrism, and of metaphysical thinking generally, in the work, for example, of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This lack of attention to the Leib may at times have had something to do with the lenses through which these thinkers chose to read Nietzsche, but chronology may also have played an important role. The Nietzsche lectures (1936–46), where the centrality of the body becomes clear in a way that it was not in other Heidegger works on Nietzsche, were not published in German until 1961 and appeared in French only ten years later, with Pierre Klossowski’s translation. Whatever the reasons, this tendency seems to have stuck, and many scholars who refer to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche do so without seriously reflecting on the question I intend to pose here, namely, how should we evaluate the merits of Heidegger’s understanding of “the body” in Nietzsche?

This question can be addressed by scrutinizing Heidegger’s use of the word Einverleibung, “incorporation,” in the Nietzsche lectures. By comparing Heidegger’s sense of the Nietzschean body’s process of incorporation with the way the notion of incorporation actually appears in Nietzsche’s texts, I will argue that we can identify in Nietzsche an emphasis on human finitude – and that this breaks apart Heidegger’s historical picture of the all-powerful body as the culmination of the Western subject. In some ways, a correction of Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzsche’s body pushes Nietzsche closer to Heidegger.

Before we turn in earnest to Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche and the role of the Nietzschean body in that interpretation, I would like to make a few preliminary clarifications about the way the term “body,” Leib, will be used in this article, both when discussing Heidegger’s Nietzsche, and then as I propose a revised reading of the Nietzschean body. Nietzsche’s corpus offers a diverse array of insights regarding the human body and the importance of considering its role when investigating human psychology or society. Corporal punishment (GM II 1–6) and orgiastic festival (BT 2) are spotlighted as crucial moments in local cultural development or general human development; the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition in Socrates is understood in physiological terms (TI, Socrates, and EH, BT 1–2), as is Nietzsche’s own thought, in Ecce homo (1888), when he reflects on his own intellectual development through frequent reference to diet and climate (EH, Clever 10). If we survey twentieth-century philosophy, social theory, and gender studies, we can see echoes of Nietzsche’s contextualized body – distant ones, at least – in the fundamentally embodied consciousness of Edmund Husserl’s Ideen (1913),^[1] or in the power dynamics of the inscribed or surveilled body of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975),^[2] or in the questioning of the essentiality of certain physiological configurations that takes place in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990).^[3] If these twentieth-century meditations on the body are reflective of ways in which that century reads Nietzsche, then it must be said that they represent possibilities in Nietzsche’s thought that Heidegger ignores.^[4] For Heidegger, the Nietzschean body is not so much an empirically existent, situated entity found in a social context – rather, it founds anything and everything that could ever be called a “context” of any kind. As the descendant of Descartes’s ego, the body furnishes all beings in their being, representing them through its willing as will to power. The name for this process by which beings receive their being through the willing of the body is called “incorporation,” which is thus the key word of Heidegger’s interpretation of the body in Nietzsche. My reading of the body in Nietzsche’s thought, in the rest of the essay, will focus on this word, “incorporation,” as it functions in Heidegger’s reading, and then I will provide an alternative interpretation of what this word means, for Nietzsche. This focus is not intended to be taken as a rejection of the aforementioned ways of reading Nietzsche’s physiology, but it is the result of the conviction, which I share with Heidegger, that the notion of incorporation, while it does not exhaust Nietzsche’s thinking regarding the body, is nevertheless its heart and soul.^[5]

The word “incorporation,” in turn, requires its own preliminary contextual definition, since its use in the Nietzsche corpus, though remarkably consistent, is also importantly distinct from other ways in which the word is sometimes used – in psychoanalysis, for instance. Incorporation, for Nietzsche, who uses the word more often than is appreciated, is the hierarchizing and marshalling of forces, their enlistment or impressment into the hierarchy that the body itself is. In Nietzsche studies, the word so emphasized by Heidegger has more recently returned to the fore in a diverse array of contexts. Robert Pippin and Keith Ansell-Pearson have turned attention to the word in the context of Nietzsche’s recurrent theme of “the incorporation of truth” or fully “embodied” knowledge.^[6] Vanessa Lemm offers a broader analysis of the uses of the word Einverleibung in the Nietzsche corpus, honing in on the ways in which incorporation can mean a simultaneous strengthening and weakening of the whole in different respects, a theme which I will explore here as well, although with more focus on the individual human body than on the social body, which is Lemm’s main focus.^[7] French monographs dedicated to the body in Nietzsche, such as those by Didier Franck, to a certain degree, and then, to a greater degree, Barbara Stiegler, have shared Heidegger’s view of the term’s fundamental importance.^[8] Stiegler, though – against Heidegger, we might say – emphasizes the fundamentally limited nature of any given body’s powers of incorporation (we will see how exactly this is an anti-Heideggerian stance).^[9] She is right in this regard, but in observing the body primarily as unified “flesh,” she grounds this limited power in a different way than I will in this article, as I scrutinize the well-recognized multiplicity of the body in Nietzsche’s thought. I wish to emphasize two crucial points about the incorporating body’s dynamics, which, as we shall see, are crucial to understanding why the body’s power must be finite: first, that incorporation is a kind of foundational act of the body, an act through which the body becomes body; and, second, that incorporation is an intra-relational activity taking place among drives within the body, and not only an inter-relational species of confrontation between a body and an outside world. Nietzsche’s concept of the body is relational.

The substantiation of these claims regarding the dynamics of incorporation is one of the goals of the remainder of this article. My other intention is to turn this analysis of incorporation in Nietzsche into a critical engagement with the focal point of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche – namely, his own interpretation of the word Einverleibung.

Einverleibung for Heidegger’s Nietzsche

Heidegger claims that the Nietzschean body is the centerpiece of a subjectivist onto-theology. This onto-theology is the culmination (Vollendung) of Western metaphysics, as Heidegger often says, which is also the realization of nihilism as the forgetting of Being.^[10] “The grounding feature of metaphysics,” he says in The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics (1957), “is onto-theo-logy.”^[11] When I refer to “metaphysics” in this article, I am referring to metaphysics as understood by Heidegger. Perhaps thinking of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in which Aristotle’s inquiry alternatively proceeds, at different times, either through an investigation of the most general being or of the highest being, Heidegger defines onto-theology this way: “Metaphysics thinks the Being of beings […] in the fathoming [ergründenden] unity of the most general, in other words, of the indifferent [des Gleich-Gültigen], as well as in the grounding unity of the all, of the highest, above all.”^[12] The supreme being (τὸ θεῖον) grounds the totality of beings (τὰ ὄντα [singular: τὸ ὄν]) as their source, and in turn the most general being (τὸ ὄν) grounds the supreme being by providing it with its beinghood as a being. The Nietzschean body is the last θεῖον,^[13] the one that finally claims the outermost possible authority for itself in a hubristic quest for absolute power, as it furnishes all other beings in its willing and asserts itself as the absolute legislator of truth.^[14]

That the body can in this sense be said to be divine does not mean, though, that Heidegger thinks that this body is a static one. The Leib, the Nietzschean subject, has an ecstatic configuration, although its ekstasis is not that of Dasein. “The bodying of life [Das Leiben des Lebens] is not some entity existing separately for itself, encapsulated into the object in space [Körper]^[15] that the body [Leib] can appear as;” to the contrary, Heidegger says, the body is “Durchlaß und Durchgang zugleich,”^[16] both in-road and out-road, primordially in engagement with other beings. This transcendence is at the heart of the “physiological,” for Nietzsche. “The physiological, the sensual-bodily [das Sinnlich-Leibliche],” is characterized by a movement of “Über-sich-hinaus,”^[17] which we might clumsily translate as “over-and-out-of-itself.” Always seeking mastery, the body confronts other forces that it seeks to dominate – but this domination is not always possible, depending on the strength of the body: “The living is open to other forces, but in such a way that, as it struggles against them, it fixes them according to form and rhythm, in order to appraise them for possible incorporation [Einverleibung] or exclusion [Ausschaltung].”^[18] Over the course of the lectures, it becomes clear that, between Einverleibung and Ausschaltung, Einverleibung is the far more conceptually important word, as it corresponds to success in the body’s quest for domination, to the physiological empowerment so valorized by Nietzsche. Incorporation, though, is not mere conquest, but it is rather the act of taking on that which was previously external to the body, making it a part of the body. The ecstatic Über-sich-hinaus of Nietzsche’s body, then, is not at all like the ecstatic configuration of Dasein’s thrown finitude: in the ideal scenario (the one named by the word Einverleibung), the body projects itself outside of itself only to bring that which is outside of itself into itself.

It is important to see that there is no necessary limit, in the Nietzsche lectures, to how far mastery-via-incorporation can extend itself. The Übermensch, as the being who fully embraces the Eternal Return, is the being whose power of Einverleibung extends over the entirety of beings. In the “incorporation” of the thought of the Eternal Return, the Being of every being is determined in advance by the legislating body-subject. “Incorporation of the thought [of the Eternal Return] means here: to carry out the thinking of the thought in such a way that it becomes in advance the fundamental stance toward beings as a whole and, as such, rules every single thought beforehand.”^[19]

Heidegger’s sense of the Nietzschean body, however, relies on an understanding of incorporation that is under-nuanced in important ways, and it is my sense that, when we confront Heidegger with a more sober reading of incorporation as it appears in Nietzsche’s work, the “body,” as it appears in the Nietzsche lectures, begins to unravel.

Einverleibung in the Nietzsche Corpus

Heidegger is right, I think, to see incorporation as integral to Nietzsche’s body, but he holds this opinion for the wrong reasons. In the Nietzsche lectures, the body tends to appear as a single unified given, which engages with beings outside itself via the process of incorporation. As we have come to recognize since Heidegger, however, Nietzsche’s body is importantly a multiplicity – and, as I will show here, incorporation, while indeed fundamental to the body’s way of being, is not only something that occurs between the body and that which is initially external to it, but it is also a process that is constantly happening within the body itself, as an interaction between its various members. The Leib becomes Leib in Ein-verleibung.

Before proceeding to the latter claim, it is important to specify exactly what we mean when we say that the body is a multiplicity for Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejects the unity of the Schopenhauerian body, but he does not replace this unity with raging anarchy. While Heidegger constantly refers to the body as the “guiding thread” of Nietzsche’s thought, he never, throughout the lectures, cites the 1884 note that is arguably the most important instance of this characterization in Nietzsche’s own work^[20]: “With the guiding thread of the body, we recognize the human as a multiplicity of living beings, which, partly struggling against one another, partly integrating and subordinating each other, unintentionally affirm the whole in the affirmation of their individual beings” (Nachlass 1884, 27[27], KSA 11.282).^[21] The “struggle and victory [Kampf und Sieg]” of these beings against and over each other gives rise to the “totality of the human being.” The body is a hierarchy, then, which harbors potential dissidents, but which holds together as long as some dominant entities assert “victory” over them. Accordingly, Zarathustra calls the body “a multiplicity with one meaning, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd” (Z I, Despisers). These “beings” that stand in conflict, submission, or rulership in relation to one another, Nietzsche suggests elsewhere, are “drives”: “The most general picture of our constitution [unseres Wesens] is a socialization of drives [Vergesellschaftung von Trieben], with constant rivalry and individual alliances amongst themselves” (Nachlass 1883, 7[94], KSA 10.274).

This constitution through “struggle and victory” or “war and peace” can be understood, I argue, as a kind of constant process of incorporation that itself constitutes the body and is at the heart of Nietzsche’s understanding of the physiological. In a later note, Nietzsche counsels us to understand “the individual himself as a struggle [Kampf] between the parts (for nourishment, space, etc.): his development linked to the conquering [Siegen], the dominance of some parts, to the atrophy of other parts, to their ‘becoming-organ’” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[25], KSA 12.304). Kampf here does not name a struggle that ended, in the past, with a conquering [Siegen] that also lies in the (more recent) past; rather, the passage articulates an ongoing subjugation of weaker entities to the more powerful ones, so that these weaker entities are constantly becoming organs of the body apparatus precisely in this process of subjugation, in the establishment of their relation to the whole through their relation to the higher entities. The lower organs of the body are continually being made into organs as they struggle and are conquered, and this process, which forms the body, is the process of incorporation, Einverleibung. The body “bodies,” to borrow Heidegger’s wording, insofar as it constantly incorporates its own members; only then is the “individual himself” possible. If this is right, then it may be that we should take Nietzsche’s memorable line from Beyond Good and Evil (1886) not as hyperbole, but as his literal position: “Life itself is essentially appropriation [Aneignung], injury, overpowering of the alien and the weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of one’s own form, incorporation” (BGE 259, my emphasis).

Nietzsche’s discussions of incorporation are accompanied by three key terms: Aneignung, Assimilieren,^[22] and Mitleid – appropriation, assimilation, and sympathy. Once we understand the dynamics that exist between Einverleibung and these three other terms, we will see that the Nietzschean body is a body that is constantly dogged by the limits of its own powers, that must decide whether to attempt to incorporate or exclude^[23] a foreign entity based on the condition of its own finitude. As I suggested above, this will yield a picture of the Nietzschean body that is very different from that of Heidegger, on whose account Nietzsche holds out hope for the subject-body’s incorporation of all beings.

In a note from 1881, in which he is speaking of simple organisms (such as amoebas), Nietzsche claims that incorporation occurs due to the “drive to appropriation [Aneignungstriebe]” (Nachlass 1881, 11[134], KSA 9.491):

Such a being [a simple organism] assimilates to itself that which is nearest to it [das Nächste] and transforms it into its own property [Eigenthum] (property is, first and foremost, nourishment and the storage of nourishment); it seeks to incorporate as much as possible, not only to compensate for the loss – it is rapacious [habsüchtig] (11[134], KSA 9.490).

The word “appropriation” (Aneignung) can fairly be associated with a (desired) expansion of one’s own domain: “This drive brings [the organism] to the exploitation of the weaker party, and into contention with similarly strong ones” (11[134], KSA 9.491). The passage, however, suggests a tradeoff – a “loss” – that is part of this exchange, for the victorious party, as well as a “fear” that it feels. Recognizing the suggestion of an economic tradeoff involved in the takeover of the alien entity, Didier Franck proposes that we locate this tradeoff specifically in Nietzsche’s notion of “assimilation.”^[24] Franck points out that “assimilation” is not a top-down measure imposed on the conquering entity on that which is conquered, but it is actually a two-way engagement whereby, as the subjugated entity is forced to undergo a change in order to be assimilated, the conqueror also adjusts its own way of being in order to take on that which it is incorporating. Franck points us to a note in which Nietzsche tells us that “the drive to assimilation, that fundamental organic function upon which all growth rests, also adapts itself to that which it appropriates in its proximity” (Nachlass 1885, 40[7], KSA 11.631). “If the drive to assimilation is cruel,” Franck argues, “then it must also exert this cruelty and this tyranny upon itself. To assimilate is consequently to reduce the distance inherent to commanding by weakening the power that exerts it and by turning the will to power back against itself: to decline.”^[25] In this way, both the incorporating and the incorporated entity adapt to each other. Referring to the famous section of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) in which Nietzsche differentiates between “active” and “reactive” forces, Franck reminds us that “adaptation” is, for Nietzsche, only ever “an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity” (GM II 12, KSA 5.316).^[26]

All of this suggests, in opposition to Heidegger’s reading, that incorporation necessitates a lowering and weakening of the incorporating being. It is not just that there are some acts of incorporation for which this or that body might not be strong enough; rather, the actual performance of any incorporation involves a kind of self-compromise. We can see a similar dynamic if we trace Nietzsche’s observations on communication between the parts of the body, and between the incorporating and incorporated entities.

To see why communication between parts of the body requires a self-compromise on the part of the higher, stronger forces of the body, we must first briefly recall a far more general principle of Nietzsche’s thought. As Nietzsche often makes clear throughout his work, human beings are not physiologically equipped to face the unvarnished reality of the “sovereign Becoming” (UM II, HL 9, KSA 1.319)^[27] that is, for him, the ultimate reality underlying our world.^[28] The organic, Nietzsche says in 1881, simply cannot process the reality of Becoming: “the ultimate truth [die letzte Wahrheit] of the flow of things does not tolerate incorporation; our organs (in order to live) are configured for error” (Nachlass 1881, 11[162], KSA 9.504). This sentiment is echoed in The Gay Science (1882–87), where Nietzsche asks: “To what extent does truth tolerate incorporation [Einverleibung]? – that is the question” (GS 110). It is not surprising, then, to read that “simplification is the primary requirement of the organic” (Nachlass 1881, 11[315], KSA 9.563) – the organic confronts the multiple as unitary, the different as similar, etc.

As Nietzsche presses this case, however, it becomes clear that this concern for simplification has to do not only with how a body engages the external world of Becoming, but also with how varying members of the struggling unity that make up the body communicate, internally, amongst themselves. Since Nietzsche believes that falsification of the real takes place under the influence of the perceived self-interest of the falsifier, differently positioned members of the organic collective called “the body” will develop different false ways of understanding the world they encounter. In a note from 1885, Nietzsche emphasizes the difficulty of holding together a being as variegated as the human body, saying:

In the human being, there are as many “consciousnesses” as there are beings [Wesen] – in every moment of his existence – that constitute his body. Following the guiding thread of the body^[29] […] we learn that our life is only possible through an interaction between many intelligences that are highly unequal in value, and thus only through a permanent thousandfold obeying and commanding [Gehorchen und Befehlen] (Nachlass 1885, 37[4], KSA 11.577–8).

The goal of the task of finding a means to communication, for a higher, more dominant “intelligence” in the body, as it communicates with a “lower,” subjugated “intelligence,” is the continued imposition of command (Befehlen):

Originally, all communication [Mittheilen] is really a wanting-to-take-on, a grasping and (mechanically) a willing-to-appropriate [Aneignen-wollen]. To incorporate the other [Den Anderen sich einverleiben] – later, to incorporate the will of the other – to appropriate it, is a matter of the conquest of the other. To communicate oneself is thus, originally, to extend one’s sway over the other: at the foundations of this drive lies an old sign language – the sign is the (often painful) stamping of one will onto another will (Nachlass 1883, 7[173], KSA 10.298).

Yet for this command to be successful, intelligibility must be mutual; because they are weak, the lower members, once incorporated, must be able to communicate distress, and the higher members must be able to hear such a distress cry for what it is. In this sense, the higher members must develop sympathy, Mitleid, for those below them: “To understand quickly, easily becomes very advisable (to receive as few blows as possible). The fastest mutual understanding is the least painful relationship to one another: for this reason it is striven for. Negative sympathy [Mitleid]” (Nachlass 1883, 7[173], KSA 10.298). Similarly, Nietzsche asks “whether, in the human organism, there is ‘sympathy’ between the different organs? Certainly, in the highest degree. A certain lingering and escalation of pain: a promulgation of pain, although not of the same pain” (Nachlass 1884, 25[431], KSA 11.126). The feudal relationship between the higher and lower elements in the body involves not only the presumption of command at the top; it also involves the demand, by the lower members of the hierarchy, of a unified response to pain, whenever the need arises. For this, a common language of distress signals is needed, and this language necessitates sympathy. For Nietzsche, as is well known, once we are talking about sympathy, we are talking about enervation.^[30] Nietzsche thus links 1) sympathy, 2) the ability to communicate, and 3) a kind of a leveling effect that arises from the sympathetic connection that establishes the mutual ability to communicate.

This is reflective of a more general tendency in Nietzsche’s thought: apart from the question of the body, this connection between sympathy, communication, and leveling is made by Nietzsche in BGE 268. Social coalescence, Nietzsche explains there, requires sympathetic communication and the leveling of the “rank order” (Rangordnung) – to use a Nietzschean phrase – that exists between individuals. This may be necessary for human life, but it is regrettable, for Nietzsche, as he makes clear in his well-known passage from On the Genealogy of Morality: “the higher should not denigrate themselves to become the instrument of the lower; the pathos of distance should for all eternity keep their functions separate, as well!” He warns against the “plague” of “sympathy [Mitleid] with humanity” (GM III 14, KSA 5.371–2), which works to close the distance between high and low, bringing them together in baseness.

I have been suggesting that what is true for the coming-together of the social body holds for the coming-together of the human body as well. In the process of incorporation, whereby the body continually makes itself a body, a certain dissipation of power is necessary. Incorporation (Einverleibung) begins in the attempt at appropriation (Aneignung), but this appropriation can only be successful if the dominant forces in the body lower themselves in two-way assimilation (Assimilieren). The establishment of an ongoing relationship between higher and lower members (“organs”) requires an established mode of communication that must be based in sympathy (Mitleid), which requires a lowering of the body’s dominant forces, as they seek to make themselves open to the communications (e. g. of pain) of the subjugated forces. It is precisely the movement of empowerment, incorporation, that is also inevitably a movement of enervation, as “pathos of distance” and “rank order” deteriorate in this process. Didier Franck, whose work has guided me here, has already recognized that there is, on the one hand, a necessary, built-in tradeoff between the command that stabilizes the body’s hierarchy, and, on the other hand, a certain loss of power that flattens this hierarchy – ironically, we might say – in the act of the assertion of hierarchy. The mutual understanding that must be accomplished between higher and lower entities in the body “implies,” he says, “an equalization and leveling of the intellects or forces that arrive at this understanding.”^[31] He goes on to say that the “perfecting of communication between the multiple wills of the body, a perfection that is but a form of pity [we have been using “sympathy” as our English word for “Mitleid”], has the same consequence as the death of God: the weakening, even the dispersion, of the body and the individual.”^[32] What I wish to emphasize, in addition to Franck’s insight, is that the dynamics of this tradeoff are the dynamics of Einverleibung, incorporation.

This picture of the organic, it should be clear, is incompatible with Heidegger’s picture. The dream that Heidegger ascribes to Nietzsche, the dream of a body that would rule over the cosmos, swallowing it up in incorporation, is not viable. To sum up the difference between the reality of the Nietzsche text and the Heidegger interpretation, we can say that the disparity is between an all-powerful body that can consume without regret, in the case of the Heidegger reading, and a body whose very foundational self-expression always diminishes that body as it empowers it, making a limitless outward expansion of power impossible.^[33]

The Nietzsche Lectures, Truth, and the End of Metaphysics

The fact that the body cannot be all-powerful, however, is, first and foremost, an observation about the organic, whereas, in an assessment of Heidegger’s history of metaphysics and of Nietzsche’s role as the culminating figure of that history, what ultimately matters is the status of truth, and not the status of the body. The body becomes important, in Heidegger’s history of the West, only because, in Nietzsche’s thought, it is the final name of the subject, and the subject is the representative of a certain fallen or deteriorated relationship with truth. Our above analysis of the body, on Heidegger’s reading and in Nietzsche’s actual thought, has paved the way for an explanation as to why it is that Nietzsche cannot stand as the culminating figure in the history of metaphysics as onto-theology, as Heidegger wishes him to.

In The Will to Power as Knowledge, the third installment in Heidegger’s lecture courses on Nietzsche at Freiburg, delivered in the summer semester of 1939, Heidegger claims that the body is the source, master, and benefactor of “truth,” in Nietzsche’s thinking. The unity and singularity of the body as τὸ θεῖον in Heidegger’s onto-theological framework corresponds to its status as the producer and the lynchpin of univocal truth that can furnish the All of Being, which is to say, in the oblivion of ontological difference, all beings. This structure is what metaphysics is, for Heidegger – a structure wherein Being emanates from a being. The body, for Heidegger’s Nietzsche, legislates truth and thereby gives beings their Being. In asserting this understanding of Nietzsche’s sense of truth, Heidegger relies upon well-known proclamations of Nietzsche’s, such as his assertion that “[t]ruth is the kind of error without which a certain sort of living being could not live. The value for life decides, in the end” (Nachlass 1885, 34[253], KSA 11.506).^[34] Whereas most readers simply read “a certain sort of living being” as “the human being,” for Heidegger, “living being” and “life” importantly refer specifically to the organic, to the body. The Darwinist rhetoric of another Nachlass passage he cites in the same context illustrates his point: “The valuation ‘I believe that this or that is such and such’ as the essence of ‘truth.’ In the valuation conditions of preservation and growth express themselves” (Nachlass 1887, 9[38], KSA 12.352).^[35] Nietzsche, Heidegger tells us, provides a “biological” interpretation of knowledge and of truth. With breathtaking speed, Heidegger places metaphysical history from Aristotle to Nietzsche on a single, linear, easily summarized continuum. He claims that “Western ‘metaphysics’ is ‘logic,’”^[36] a “logic” whose foundation is Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. In Nietzsche’s truth as justice, the law of non-contradiction is not rejected, but is instead asserted to be biologically necessary. The “command” or “imperative”^[37] implied by Aristotle’s law becomes the command of the legislating body, the body that disallows contradiction for the sake of its own empowerment. Nietzsche’s sense of truth thus succeeds in the Western task of submitting Being to thought by making the truth of Being subservient to and dependent upon a subject whose name is “body.”

There is a strange moment in the Will to Power as Knowledge course in which Heidegger seems, for a moment, to open up precisely the line of thinking about Nietzschean truth that would complicate his interpretation as articulated above. Having described Nietzsche’s “truth” as a valuation emanating entirely from the subject-body, Heidegger acknowledges that Nietzsche sometimes talks of the realm of Becoming as the domain of truth. He observes, with italics and an exclamation point that perhaps indicate amused irony, that for Nietzsche “The world is – in truth! – a becoming world.”^[38] On Heidegger’s reading, it is truth as justice that “stamps Becoming with the character of Being” (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[54], KSA 12.312).^[39] In other words, once there is “truth,” Becoming has been ossified into Being. The acknowledgment of a “true becoming world” would violate the Heideggerian reading, according to which “truth” is precisely the coercion of Becoming into static beinghood. Heidegger almost immediately defuses the danger of his own observation by asserting that, in speaking of a world that is “in truth” a becoming world, Nietzsche “clearly sets one value against the other,”^[40] namely, the value of Becoming over the value of Being. In other words, the extent to which Nietzsche calls the becoming world “true” is just the extent to which he values it more highly than the world of Being. This allows Heidegger to continue maintaining that valuation, ultimately grounded in physiology, is the self-conscious basis of Nietzsche’s assertion of Becoming as the “truth.” Truth still emanates from, and is governed by, the body – a higher body, Heidegger seems to think, one that is capable of valuing Becoming over Being.^[41]

The problem with this reading is that Nietzsche unambiguously asserts an “ultimate truth” that outstrips the power of the body: “the ultimate truth of the flow of things does not tolerate incorporation; our organs (in order to live) are configured for error.” We observed how, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes clear that there is a limit to the degree to which “truth [can] tolerate incorporation” – indicating beyond doubt that there is, for him, a sense of truth that is exterior to the body’s sovereignty. These passages very directly refute Heidegger’s claim that the Nietzschean subject-body controls and legislates truth as the all-powerful onto-theological θεῖον. It is not the case that, through the Nietzschean sense of truth, Being is finally and conclusively submitted to the onto-theological thought that emanates from a dominant subject, as Heidegger maintains. There are passages that allow Heidegger to maintain such a stance, if he quotes selectively. I am not certain that “truth as error” and “ultimate truth” as it appears in the passage above can be absolutely reconciled in Nietzsche. But the presence of the latter in the Nietzsche text indicates that, far from being the site of humanity’s utter control over truth, the specifically Nietzschean body is the site at which humanity’s limited, finite ability to grasp the truth – in a higher, “ultimate” sense – is exposed.^[42]

In short, the unitary, all-powerful Leib of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures makes possible an interpretation of Nietzsche under which humanity’s power to legislate truth marks the final victory of metaphysical thought. The reality of the Nietzsche text, however, resists this interpretation.

The Ascetic Body

If Heidegger’s sense of incorporation and the understanding of the body that develops out of it are so contrary to the textual reality of Nietzsche’s work, why does Heidegger push the Nietzschean body into the direction he does? To answer this question exhaustively would pull us too far away from Nietzsche, but we can mention here that it has been argued many times (of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche in general, not necessarily of his take on the Nietzschean body) that Heidegger forces Nietzsche into metaphysics in order to save for himself the distinction of being the one to overcome metaphysics.^[43] The configuration of the body in such a way as to make it a viable centerpiece for Nietzsche’s alleged subjectivist metaphysics could be seen as serving this purpose.

The Nietzschean Leib, then, may be acting as a strategic foil for the orientation of Dasein that would successfully break free of metaphysical thinking. Since we cannot here take a deep textual dive into Heidegger, I will take the more efficient route of referring to some distillations of Heidegger’s stance in relation to Nietzsche (or Nietzschean concepts) in recent Heidegger scholarship. Taken together, these articulations of Heidegger through the “turn” can give us an indication as to why the Leib of Nietzsche’s work ends up looking the way it does, for Heidegger.

Metaphysics appears as a kind of human hubris in the middle and late work of Heidegger: Western humanity, thinking metaphysically, asserts its claim to rule against and over Being. In Nietzsche, the culminating figure of this tradition of hubris, the self-imposition of metaphysical thought reaches its hyperbolic outer limit as “bestial” “brutality”: “in Nietzsche’s metaphysics, animalitas (Tierheit) becomes the guiding thread […]. The unconditional essence of subjectivity unfurls […] necessarily as the brutalitas of bestialitas. At the end of metaphysics stands the sentence: Homo est brutum bestiale.”^[44] Ryan Coyne traces how Heidegger, renouncing the overweening self-assertion of Western humanity in metaphysics, opposes it with a “self-renouncing” stance to be taken up by Dasein: Heidegger “characterize[s] Being as ‘that which retracts’ from beings, and […] rethink[s] Dasein in the form of a self-renunciation that mirrors this self-withholding.”^[45] Coyne explains how Nietzsche’s power-valorizing position, allegedly championing “the ‘over-reaching’ of subjectity, the volitional will of the subject that secures its own self-certitude by means of a fiat,” becomes a natural foil for this project.^[46] Not speaking of the Nietzsche-Heidegger relationship, but invoking the key Nietzsche word “asceticism,” Noreen Khawaja ascribes to Heidegger a “new form of asceticism,”^[47] a claim in which we might find some affinity with Coyne’s “self-renouncing” Dasein. The ascetic philosophical task is now an unending “transformative labor” that involves seeking to turn toward the “enowning” of Being, by which we are “encompassed […] as an island is by the sea.”^[48] This ascetic labor, we might say (although Khawaja does not speak of Nietzsche in this context), reverses the dynamics of acquisition and ownership of the Nietzschean body that conquers in incorporation.

The notion of incorporation as we have followed it here, though, implies a body that is more “self-renouncing,” and perhaps even more “ascetic,” than Heidegger wants to acknowledge. The body is always simultaneously passive as it is active, is always undergoing or suffering the action of another upon itself as it itself acts.^[49] If by “asceticism” we mean, to speak with Khawaja, a “transformative labor,”^[50] that is constitutively unending and is necessitated by “the idea of humanity as fallen,”^[51] that involves sacrifice for the sake of a higher self, then it may be that “ascetic” is a word properly applied to the Nietzschean body. Admittedly, this suggestion depends upon our agreement with Khawaja’s definition of asceticism, and we cannot engage in an extended scrutiny of that definition here. The broader point is that a kind of self-renunciation can be read into that body as we have analyzed it here, as the Leib constituted in perpetual Einverleibung. The holding-together of the body in incorporation depends on the constant self-renunciation of each of its members, high or low, as they give themselves up in adaptation, which is required of both the subjugated and dominant forces in the process of incorporation. Self-constitution in incorporation and self-renunciation in adaptation (Anpassung) name different aspects of the same dynamic; wherever there is one, there is the other, as well. Heideggerian “self-renunciation” or “asceticism,” to use the terms of the scholars above, finds a false foil in Nietzschean “over-reaching” and radically active willing. We might, then, against the Heideggerian reading, borrow Peter Sloterdijk’s phrase for his own work in You Must Change Your Life (2009), and identify a “general ascetology” in Nietzsche’s thought: all life is in some sense ascetic.^[52] Nietzsche offers us a picture of human finitude, where this word does not imply, as it does by Heidegger, an invitation to consider our mortality, but rather emphasizes the constitutively delimited magnitude of human power.

In conclusion, the body’s forces are always losing as they are gaining, always falling into adaptation as they rise into the ostensible position of power called incorporation, for Nietzsche. This points to a constitutively, eternally unsatisfied body and to the rejection of any hope of an utter empowerment that would finally terminate the outward propulsion of the questing drives.