Reports artasiapacific.com^31One on One
Nearly 30 years ago, I seriously
began to question the origins and
ideological assumptions of the West.
What does it mean to be Western?
What does it mean to be modern?
These inquiries led me to Martin
Heidegger and his fundamental
question: “Why are there beings
rather than nothing?”
From Heidegger, I learned
that my original questions were
actually metaphysical in nature,
and that the modern Western
world expressed a particular
understanding of what things are,
of what it means to be, of what
has meaning, of being itself. I would
then discover Heidegger’s short
1941 essay, “Sketches for a History
of Being as Metaphysics,” in which
he outlines the historical stages
of the Western understanding of
being. This schema would become
essential to my understanding of
my own work, as every film I made
early in my career used Heidegger’s
sketch as an historico-philosophical
framework (see my 2006 video
Suprematist Kapital). Here is the
schema “Being,” as a Heideggerian
medley of ancient Greek, Latin and
English, based on Joan Stambaugh’s
translation in the 1973 volume The
End of Philosophy:“Aletheia” (apeiron, logos, hen- arche). Revealing as the order
at the start. “Physis,” emergence
(going back to itself). “Ousia,”
Considering the last metaphysician of the West
Image of the gravesite of FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE in Röcken, Germany.
Courtesy James T. Hong.
James T. Hong on Friedrich Nietzsche
presencing, unconcealedness.
“Idea,” perceivability (agathon),
causality. “Energeia,” workness,
assembly, en-echesia to telos.
“Hypokeimenon,” lie present
(from ousia), ergon. (Presence- stability – constancy – aei.)
“Hyparchein,” presencing
which rules from what is
already present. “Subiectum.”
“Actualitas”: beings – the
real – reality, creator – ens
creatum, causa prima (ens a
se). “Certitudo” – res cogitans.
“Vis” – monas (perceptio –
appetitus), exigentia essentiae.
“Objectivity.” “Freedom,” will - representedness, practical
reason. “Will” – as absolute
knowledge: Hegel. “As will of
love”: Schelling. “Will to power”:
eternal recurrence: Nietzsche.
Each stage in this philosophical
story leads necessarily to the next,
so that, according to Heidegger, if
one begins with the ancient Greek
philosophical inquiry into truth
that is beyond everyday reality
(for example, the sun outside
Plato’s cave), one will inexorably
arrive at our current technological
understanding of being, exemplified
by the pragmatic, American view of
getting things under control,
of technological mastery over the
environment, and of planetary
domination. In other words,
Nietzsche becomes the logical
conclusion to over 2,000 years of
metaphysics, and the result is the
technological nihilism of today. But
who was this Nietzsche?
I had already been acquainted
with Nietzsche’s works before
delving into Heidegger, but I had
been confused by his contradictions
and poetic embellishments. I could
not find a consistent philosophical
system. Moreover, I was, at the time,
put off by Nietzsche’s flourishes of
biologism. (I have since returned
to Nietzsche’s preoccupations with
blood and digestion.)
Heidegger’s Nietzsche was
different. His was a Nietzsche
devoid of 19th-century Europeanidiosyncrasies (and incipient
Nazism): biological racism, Wagner,
aestheticism and “blond beasts.”
For Heidegger, Nietzsche was a
metaphysician who had attempted
to overcome metaphysics as a way
of overcoming nihilism. He had
claimed, according to Heidegger,
that God was dead because the
supersensible was no longer a
viable basis for the creation and
upholding of values. Instead, human
values only made sense as self-
constituting perspectives designed
to enhance life. Only the will to
power, expressed in quanta and
differentials, creates values. After
centuries of attempting to find
absolute philosophical certainty—in
substance, in eternal ideas, in logic,
in God—in the end, we can only be
certain about our own desires. Does
this overcome metaphysics?
Heidegger says no. The
will to power as a vision of self-
affirmation and self-formation
remains trapped within the
metaphysics of subjectivity, and
despite the doctrine of eternal
recurrence, Nietzsche remains
guilty of the “forgetfulness of
being.” So Nietzsche did not truly
overcome metaphysics; he merely
inverted it by substituting the
Platonic forms with the will
to power.
However, Heidegger’s Nietzsche
—the last metaphysician of the
West—gives us the opportunity
to confront the “modern essence
of the West,” which for Heidegger
and Nietzsche is nihilism. If
Heidegger’s schematic history of
being as metaphysics is convincing,
then Nietzsche’s thought was both
an expression and consequence
of hundreds of years of Western
philosophical assumptions and,
more importantly, mistakes.
Thinking with and against this
Nietzsche is also pondering about
and critiquing the West. Overcoming
metaphysics is the triumph over
nihilism and also, perhaps, the
overcoming of the Occident.
As Nietzsche warned, “The
wasteland grows . . ”