Whenever I speak to those who have made their decision to be either discovers or inventors, I’m impressed by the fact that neither of them realizes that they have ever made that decision. Moreover, when challenged to justify their position, a conceptual framework is constructed which itself turns out to be the result of a decision upon an in principle undecidable question.
Heinz von Foerster Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics
Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Heidegger famously represents Nietzsche as the ‘last metaphysician’ by giving him a special niche in the history of philosophy, namely the last and most powerful and yet still failed attempt to overcome metaphysics, which remains itself a metaphysics. Numerous critics have commented on Heidegger’s misrepresentation of Nietzsche, that it misses the unsystematic nature of Nietzsche’s thought, or that it phrases Nietzsche in a way that is closer to what Heidegger wants him to be, i.e., as a thinker baffled by the difference between Being and beings, than Nietzsche himself was, etc. Nevertheless, a more concrete, positive delineation of Nietzsche’s thought is still lacking, that is; an answer to the question of what, then, is Nietzsche, if not a metaphysician. It remains unclear in what way Nietzsche is beyond Heidegger’s grasp besides remarking negatively that it is not a systematic philosophy, or that it is not a treatise on (the oblivion of) the ontological difference, and so forth.
This essay aims at providing precisely this positive delineation contra Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. It does so by borrowing the vocabulary from the study of cybernetics.
Specifically, it frames Nietzsche as a thinker of second-order cybernetics, in contradistinction to the first-order cybernetics which Heidegger takes to be the modern culmination of metaphysics.
Cybernetics for Heidegger is the completion of instrumental rationality. It disobeys the task of thinking by seeking to represent everything in a quantitative fashion and thus having them at its complete disposal. Cybernetics is in this sense in essence for Heidegger a form of Gestell, which shares similarities with metaphysics in that it subjects all ontic entities under a single ontological existence.
This is, however, not an accurate representation of cybernetics after its later development since the 1960s. Cybernetics’ later transformation, I argue, made it much closer to a stance of Nietzsche, and by deploying the language of Cybernetics, Nietzsche can be more clearly explicated specifically in relation to Heidegger’s representation. To demonstrate all this, therefore, this essay will first present Heidegger’s Nietzsche, then introduce the so-called second-order cybernetics, in contrast to Heidegger’s understanding of cybernetics which remains first-order, and Nietzsche’s affinity to it, before finally making the direct (dis)connection between Nietzsche the first cybernetician, and Nietzsche the last metaphysician.
Heidegger’s Nietzsche
Heidegger most famously identified and united three principles of Nietzsche’s thought: revaluation of all values, will to power, and eternal return. Put succinctly in terms of Heidegger’s model of ontotheology, the notion of the will to power stands in the place of the Being, while eternal recurrence occupies structurally the place of the beings. While the former is the essential constitution of things, the latter is the specific ways in which they appear (Nietzsche 205). Let us demonstrate more clearly in relation to Plato’s metaphysics which occupies a central position in both thinkers’ philosophy. Nietzsche claims, as Heidegger often emphasized, that his philosophy is nothing more than an inverted Platonism (Nietzsche 162). Plato, according to the model of ontotheology, has on top the position of Being occupied by the idea, while the beings are instantiations of the idea, physical or otherwise, thereby separating the sensuous from the supersensuous. Nietzsche, on the contrary, declares that there is not this otherworldly beyond.
Therefore, Nietzsche concludes, that any form of a truer or more essential world is a fable directed by a will to power. Therefore, by inversion, the only world is the sensuous world and nothing more.
Heidegger takes this Nietzschean operation to be another form of essentialization. To say any invention of a true world is a working of the will to power, Nietzsche himself, Heidegger claims, still invents a truer world in which the will to power became the explanatory principle of the phenomena of various inventions of the otherworldly beyond. Let us dissect the components of ontotheology schematically: A. A universal explanatory principle (being of beings, theo) B. The things being explained (beings, onto) C. The ways in which A and B are connected (the explanation, logos) For Plato, A is the idea; B is the objects in the sensuous world, and C is some form of instantiation of the idea. For Nietzsche, things are a bit more complicated. He is not simply making standard metaphysical explanations but also explaining the logic behind other metaphysical explanations, as he claims to be inverting Platonism. Therefore, B, for Nietzsche, could be other metaphysical explanations; A is the will to power, and C is the eternal return. It is in this sense that Nietzsche deconstructing the invention of the true world, for Heidegger, is still making a distinction between the sensuous and the true and thus caught up in the world of metaphysics.
Cyber-theo-logic
Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology is exemplified as well in his critique of modern technology. The essence of technology, Heidegger writes, is nothing technological; it is rather en- framing (Ge-stell), which is a transformation of the relationship between humans and their environ in which the latter becomes what he calls the ‘standing-reserve,’ namely that which can be measured, calculated, and substitutively utilized. The problem Heidegger has with both technology and ontotheology is the same––the problem of representation. He makes it clear in the ‘Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics’ that the proper relationship between Being and beings is defied by confusing distinction with difference. Whereas the Being is distinct from beings, ontotheology takes being to be different from beings, which requires being to be represented in the first place. The problem, Heidegger identifies, is precisely that being in no way can be represented positively, which reduces it to a mere term in relation to beings. Indeed, Heidegger made explicit this connection in ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,’ that philosophy has turned into independent sciences which will in their future be “determined and regulated by the new fundamental sciences called cybernetics (Basic Writings, 434).”
The Other Beginning (in Sciences)
Put simply, Cybernetics, according to Heidegger, has destroyed the creative nature by reducing them with the ‘principle of equivalence,’ borrowing a phrase from Adorno. This conception of modern sciences, however, has not been aware of the new development of the field of cybernetics in 1969, the year this essay was written. After the war, like Heidegger himself, a ‘reflexive turn’ happened within the field of cybernetics. The movement of ‘second-order cybernetics’ initiated in the 1960s, aimed to put themselves into the circularities they have invented, or the cybernetics of cybernetics.
One major difference between the first- and the second-order cybernetics is the emphasis on the role of the observer. While first-order cybernetics has taken its object of investigation to be regular in itself, second-order cybernetics realizes how the very act of observation in fact engenders the observant. The shift of focus was on the part affected by the nature of the second-order cybernetics putting itself at the same time in the subject and the object position. This self- referentiality, like the Cartesian cogito, creates an infinite regress that can be divided into two sorts: a tautological self-affirmation and an undecidable oscillation. The Liar’s Paradox “this sentence is a lie,” may perhaps best explain this. While the truth value of this proposition will never be stabilized, oscillating between true and false, the negative of this sentence “this sentence is a truth,” is true without any grounding other than itself; it self-affirms.
In both cases, the very expression of the proposition, by its self-referential nature, determines the content. This characteristic introduces a radical openness in which the very act of enframing takes up utmost importance, in contrast to first-order cybernetics in which the objects are simply there to be reductively represented. The conclusion drawn here goes against Heidegger’s critique of the ‘epistemic closure’ of the sciences, for the knowing subject and its relating to the world are called into question.
Cybernetization of Nietzsche or Vice Versa
How would second-order cybernetics fit into the explanatory schema we posited earlier?
Normal first-order cybernetics would simply cohere with the tripartite explanatory principle-things explained-explanation structure, whereas second-order cybernetics, by its self-referential property, would consider itself recursively. That is to say, it not only has this tripartite structure, but this very structure of explanation is taken back into part B again, becoming things in need of explanation, and so forth ad infinitum.
Similarly, I argue that Nietzsche’s metaphysical system, if it is a system at all, shares the same property. When it is analyzed with Heidegger’s schema of ontotheology, the will to power would not be simply the explanatory principle by which everything can be explained, for simply the fact that Nietzsche rejects the notion of truth. Will to power, as a central concept of Nietzsche, cannot be taken to be the theo of an ontotheology. The will to power of Nietzsche is not immune to being recursively plugged back into the equation and becomes part B, the onto, which is in need of explanation. This is simply another way of expressing the primacy of explanation or that there is nothing to be explained before the act of explanation produces its object. Indeed, the eternal return is the ways in which beings manifest, and the will to power is the constitution of the beings.
However, this model of will to power itself can be seen as an explanatory framework that is part of another eternal return and requires another will to power as the higher being. Nietzsche’s own effort to explain historical processes with the notion of the will to power is nothing but another historical process that can be simply seen as his will to power. Simply put, the will to power is not transcendental to, outside of, the eternal return but something immanent to it; this is exemplified in the emphasis on bias, error, and contradiction everywhere in Nietzsche’s œuvre.
The First Cybernetician
“To stamp Becoming with the character of Being––that is the supreme will to power (WP 617).” We might see this as what is essentially the purpose of ontotheology, and Nietzsche a metaphysician who tries to explain the ever-changing world with an unmoving principle, like all his precursors did. However, looking from the perspective of second-order cybernetics, which by nature recurs infinitely, Nietzsche cannot be simply subsumed under the rubric of ontotheology.
Rather, what the word becoming suggests is not a first-order change in beings that can be explained under Being––with the explanatory principle here being the will to power––but a radical undecidability as the true nature of becoming. To stamp it with the character of Being, then, means not just unifying every changing becoming with a higher being but realizing this higher being is always still susceptible to being destabilized––nature is, by nature, ever-changing. The supreme will to power, then, is understanding all this, i.e., that no supreme being can be the ultimate ground of everything, and affirms the process regardless.
Nietzsche is not so much a philosopher of truth as a philosopher of symptoms. He does not only see there as a truth hiding behind the phenomena but also every such explanation, including his own, as a phenomenon. If to say there is nothing behind is also a proposition of truth, as Heidegger understands Nietzsche’s philosophy to be, then the ultimate position of Nietzsche is that not only is there always a truth behind phenomena, but also that every truth is itself a phenomenon, a symptom to be interpreted.