Babette Babich - Heidegger on Nietzsche’s ‘Rediscovery’ of the Greeks: Machenschaft and Seynsgeschichte in the Black Notebooks

<p>We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a keynote presentation from Babette Babich (Fordham University and University of Winchester). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.</p> <p> </p> <p>ABSTRACT: One of the outcomes of the publication of the Black Notebooks has been to invite scholars to rethink their understanding of Heidegger’s thinking, including what is named Heidegger’s ‘world-historical anti-Semitism’, his relation to war and politics, via Schmitt and Jünger, as well as Heidegger’s thinking on machination/motorisation/calculation. Other possibilities include the university (education) in addition to Heidegger’s anxieties regarding the reception of Being and Time in the framework of the history of Beyng/Seyn. Echoing Heidegger’s lecture courses, we read that Nietzsche adumbrates “the end of metaphysics” yet remains nonetheless entangled in metaphysics. Heidegger’s reflections on the beginning of Western thought with Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides are matched here with his insistence that it is a “fable that Nietzsche rediscovered ‘pre-Platonic philosophy’”, destined one day “to be revealed in all its fabulosity [Fabelhaftigkeit]”. For Heidegger, “Nietzsche thinks purely in the Roman way” whereby Nietzsche’s “own metaphysics could never grasp the Greek beginning of Western thinking”. Inasmuch as Nietzsche “plays out the essence of being to a combat of power positions and power relations”, as Heidegger invokes typically bellicose interpretations of will to power, this powerplay consummates the “abandonment of beings by being, the abandonment that gained sovereignty in the history of metaphysics”. Given the contrast between historiology and history in Nietzsche’s meditation on history (apt and inapt) for life, as this bears on Machenschaft and the whole of Nietzsche’s