“The thesis of Heidegger’s grand livre [that is, his Nietzsche, published in two volumes in 1961] is much less simple than people have generally tended to say,” writes Jacques Derrida, quite justly.1 In fact, his remark applies to all of Heidegger’s texts on Nietzsche. Sufficient warning that any effort to explicate in a dozen pages die Sache of Heidegger’s prolonged and intense confrontation with Nietzsche remains futile. Let this brief chapter invite and incite efforts that will demand more time and greater solicitude.
It is tempting to compare Heidegger’s confrontation with Nietzsche to his companionship with Hölderlin. Heidegger himself would picture the latter as the proximity and intimacy of two pines rooted in the silent forest earth; the “neighborhood of the chanting poet” constitutes a “wholesome danger” to the thinker. Hölderlin and Heidegger: no cloud ever darkens their sky, a sky that stretches across the expanse of the clearing that is held open by the very distance that separates thinker from poet.
In contrast, Nietzsche, whom Heidegger from the outset acknowledges as Denker rather than Dichter, encroaches on Heidegger’s own space. Nietzsche does not declaim from one distant mountain peak to Heidegger perched on another—an image one might fashion to characterize the conversation between great thinkers—but infiltrates and crowds close, implants doubts and eradicates convictions, whispers Heidegger’s own second thoughts to him, illuminates and confounds at once. Their confrontation is stormy. Late in that Auseinander-setzung Heidegger confesses that he has had to take with utmost seriousness Nietzsche’s message to Georg Brandes: that it is no great trick to find Nietzsche, the challenge being rather to learn how to lose him, that is, to release Nietzsche to his own place in the history of metaphysics. Yet Heidegger never really loses Nietzsche, never “locates” him, never shakes free of him, because Nietzsche never releases his grip on Heidegger. That is fortunate. The tempestuous encounter with Nietzsche prevents Heidegger from becoming what we have only now accused him of being—a bloodless shade of Hegel. The piety of Heidegger’s questioning and the apparent quietism of Gelassenheit are everywhere undercut by the passion of Nietzschean suspicion and the rage of a descensional reflection without cease. To repeat: history of Being is not history of spirit. That is Nietzsche’s primary, decisive incision; that is his deepest cut. And there is no poetic annealing, no restoration of the Absolute in hymns—
if Mozart is (as Heidegger says) “God’s lute-play”;
if Hölderlin plucks the lyre while God withdraws in irreversible retreat;
if Trakl, as we shall see, rescues the lyre as it slips from Hölderlin’s hands and with it sings the palsied deity, the progenitor of a ruined race;
it is nonetheless Nietzsche the thinker who must inter the defunct and toneless divinity with all his instruments, Nietzsche the thinker who must fashion for the philosopher a new lyre. Less companionable than the men of music and hymn, Nietzsche nonetheless accompanies Heidegger early on and to the end.
Precisely when Heidegger first read Nietzsche we do not know.2 But he studied the philosopher’s works during his student years at Freiburg, 1909–14, especially the second, expanded edition of the Nachlass material published as The Will to Power (1906). Two decades later that text served as the source for the topics of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche: the will to power as art and as knowledge, from Book Three, sections I and IV; the eternal recurrence of the same, from Book Four, section III; and nihilism, from Book One. The volume also had an impact on Heidegger’s early writings, not as an explicit theme for investigation, but as an incentive to philosophic inquiry in general. During his venia legendi lecture of 1915, “The Concept of Time in the Discipline of History,” Heidegger alluded to philosophy’s proper “will to power” (FS, 357). By that he meant the need to advance beyond epistemology to metaphysics, that is to say, to interrogation of the goal and purpose of philosophy as such. In his Habilitation thesis (1915–16) Heidegger revealed the influence of Nietzsche when he stressed philosophy’s function “as a value for life” (FS, 137–38). Philosophy as such exists “in tension with the living personality” of the philosopher, “drawing its content and value from the depths and the abundance of life in that personality.” In this regard Heidegger cited Nietzsche’s formula “the drive to philosophize,” and he praised that writer’s “relentlessly austere manner of thought,” a manner enlivened, however, by a gift for “flexible and apt depiction.”
During the decisive Marburg years, 1923–28, Nietzsche appears to have withdrawn completely from Heidegger’s central concerns, making room for Aristotle, Kant, and Husserl. Heidegger apparently wished to distance himself from the Nietzsche adopted by Lebensphilosophie and by the philosophies of culture, worldview, and value. As I noted at the very outset, in chapter one, his rejection of the category “life” and adoption of “existence” for his nascent analyses of Dasein had come to light already in 1919–21, the years of his confrontation with Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews. His spuming of the neo-Kantian value-philosophy of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert undoubtedly delayed Heidegger’s public confrontation with the philosopher who sought the revaluation of all values. Yet throughout the 1920s Nietzsche’s style of thought continued to captivate Heidegger. For example, in the midst of an otherwise dry-as-dust, utterly sober phenomenological account of Husserlian intentionality, categorial intuition, and the a priori, which Heidegger proffered in his 1925 lecture course on “The Concept of Time,” we find the following remarkable avowal:
Philosophical research is and remains atheism; for that reason it can afford “the arrogance of thought.” Not only will it afford such arrogance, but this is the inner necessity and proper force of philosophy, and precisely in such atheism philosophy becomes—as one of the greats once said—“the gay science” [Fröhliche Wissenschaft]. [20, 109–10]
Phenomenology as rigorous science, but with gaiety: neither Husserl nor even Scheler was equal to it!
Yet there is little gaiety in the masterwork that concludes Heidegger’s Marburg period, Being and Time. Only three references to Nietzsche’s thought appear in that text; and only one of them is a substantive reference.3 Nevertheless, as we have seen in chapter six, the “fundamental experience” of Being and Time and Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche are intimately related. At the close of that chapter I cited Heidegger’s essay “Nietzsche’s Proclamation: ‘God is dead,’” to this effect: “The following commentary, in intention and scope, keeps to that one experience on the basis of which Being and Time was thought” (H, 195; cf. NII, 260). If that one experience be the oblivion of Being, which implies forgottenness of the nothing in which Dasein is ever suspended, then we may say that in Being and Time Heidegger brings the question of the death of God home by inquiring into the death of Dasein and the demise of metaphysical discourse. Among the principal motifs of Being and Time are: the finite, ecstatic horizon of the being that is Dasein; the interpretation of Dasein as care or possibility-being, structured temporally as existential, factical, and falling; and the being-a-whole (Ganzsein) of Dasein as being-unto-death (Sein zum Tode). However rarely cited in Being and Time, Nietzsche may well be the regnant genius of that work—Nietzsche, who
exposes the anthropomorphic base of metaphysical projections and the evanescence of Being understood as permanence of presence;
supplies genealogical accounts of time and eternity in such a way that the latter appears as vengeance wreaked on the former;
confronts without subterfuge human existence as irredeemably mortal, bursting with possibility yet bound to fatality;
insists always and everywhere that on this earth thinkers as well as artists must (in Ezra Pound’s words) “make it new.”
In writing these things I approach the core of the Heidegger/Nietzsche confrontation and encounter which dominate the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s in Heidegger’s career of thought.
Let me now try to formulate some of the principal themes of Heidegger’s published works on Nietzsche and to state what I take to be the profound and enduring impact of these themes on Heidegger’s own thought. Although my presentation will not be uncritical, I will at no point ask whether Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is “adequate” or whether Heidegger “represents” Nietzsche fairly: in the first place, Heidegger does not purport to “represent” Nietzsche, and in the second, no matter how “inadequate” his reading of Nietzsche may be, Nietzsche himself, born posthumously, retains his own style and stylo, makes his own counterthrusts, dances his own defence. I offer my aid, he laughs. Nor, alas, do I have the requisite space to indicate the importance of Heidegger’s reading for contemporary confrontations with Nietzsche, especially in France, from Bataille through Deleuze and Klossowski to Foucault and Derrida.
With his announcement of the death of God and the collapse of all worlds “beyond,” Nietzsche becomes the historian and herald of nihilism. The history of nihilism comprises the rise and fall of the highest values hitherto, values such as “purpose,” “unity,” “Being,” and “truth.” But thanks to his insight into the origins of nihilism in the very instauration of otherworldly values, that is, the identity of nihilism and moralistic metaphysics, Nietzsche also becomes the herald of “perfect” or “ecstatic” nihilism. Heidegger shares Nietzsche’s suspicion that nihilism is not a recent, typically modern phenomenon; he accepts Nietzsche’s judgment that the reign of nihilism is coterminous with that of Platonistic metaphysics. This epochal reign reaches its apotheosis when the horizon that once demarcated the “true” from the “merely apparent” world fades, when the true world “becomes a fable.” When he pierces the horizon of “the true”—not satisfied merely to invert the Platonistic hierarchy of the sensuous and supersensuous, Becoming and Being—Nietzsche precipitates the crisis of metaphysics.
At the same time, however, by insisting on a revaluation of values, as though there might be some absolute standard (such as “life” or “will to power”) by which values might be gauged and promulgated, and by treating nihilism ultimately as an affliction of which Occidental history might be cured, Nietzsche remains caught in the orbit of metaphysical thinking, trapped in passive-reactive nihilism. Samson indeed brings down the temple, but on his own head. Thus we attain a first glimpse of the irresolvable ambiguity and even ambivalence of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche: pursuing the question of the horizon of “the true,” Nietzsche nonetheless fails to pose the question of the essence of truth, das Wesen der Wahrheit, and fails to see that his own critique of “the true” presupposes the traditional notion of truth as adaequatio, homoiōsis; conceiving of his philosophy early on as the overcoming of Platonism, Nietzsche nonetheless fails to recognize the fatal kinship of revaluation with the idea tou agathou and thus fails to recover the tradition by means of an originary reading of the early Greek thinkers; subjecting Cartesian subjectivism and intellectualism to a scathing critique, Nietzsche nonetheless fails to draw the full consequences of his discovery that ego volo is but a brainchild of ego cogito and fails to recognize that the mere substitution of “body” for “spirit” cannot overcome representational thought; descrying the origin of nihilism in the pristine establishment of transcendent values, Nietzsche nonetheless believes that some values can be rescued from nihilism; advocating a fully developed, ecstatic nihilism, sprung from the depths of tragic wisdom, Nietzsche nonetheless fails to confront the question of the essence of the nihil and fails to experience the source of nihilism in the happenstance that in Western history Being itself comes to nothing.
The ambiguity—and ambivalence—in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche may best be expressed in two questions. How is it possible that Nietzsche’s philosophy implies nothing less than the end of metaphysics, and yet is itself a metaphysics? How can Nietzsche be called the last metaphysician and yet still be considered one metaphysician among others?
Will to power and eternal recurrence of the same are the crucial poles of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, the other key words—nihilism, revaluation, “justice,” and overman—revolving about them. Heidegger insists that these two thoughts constitute a unity, that they designate what scholastic philosophy called the essentia and existentia of entities. This implies that will to power and eternal recurrence are responses to the ancient ontological question ti to on, in the metaphysical form, “Was ist das Seiende?”, “What is the being?”. They are replies to the guiding question within metaphysics (die Leitfrage) but not to the grounding question concerning metaphysics as such (die Grundfrage). The putative unity of will to power and eternal recurrence, as the essence and existence respectively of all beings, at times assumes a merely schematic, almost syllogistic form in Heidegger’s lectures and treatises: If will to power is a self-willing that brooks no obstacles, then its unconditioned willing can only be a perpetual self-overcoming; any being that is essentially will to power can exist solely as eternal recurrence of the same. This schematic interpretation tends to understand will to power cosmologically (and thus metaphysically) rather than to employ it genealogically; it woefully underestimates the exhilarating and devastating import of Nietzsche’s supreme and most burdensome thought—die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen. In his haste to refute Alfred Baeumler—who embraced a politicized will to power while spuming the “Egypticism” of eternal recurrence, thus proclaiming the lamentable disunity of Nietzsche’s thought—Heidegger at times neglects the multiple perspectives of will to power and the tragic pathos of eternal return. Yet Heidegger shares Jaspers’ conviction that recurrence is Nietzsche’s central thought and he devotes his best interpretive efforts to it, not only during the summer semester of 1937 but also in lectures delivered in the early 1950s. However, before taking up discussion of eternal recurrence, I must elaborate somewhat on Heidegger’s criticism of Nietzsche’s metaphysics.
According to Nietzsche, will to power is “the ultimate fact we come down to.” To Heidegger’s ear das letzte Faktum has an unmistakably metaphysical ring. Just as Heidegger’s own asseverations on the metaphysical Urfaktum of temporality become increasingly suspect to him after the publication of Being and Time, as we saw earlier in the second and third chapters of this volume, so too Nietzsche’s desire to define the very essence of beings seems futile to Heidegger. (Of course, it is Nietzsche, with his genealogy of the causa prima—the “first cause” originating in “laziness,” “weariness”—who helps to make such tendencies suspect!) Nevertheless, Heidegger eschews the genealogical employment of will to power and rejects its cosmological-biological usage. There is little left to be said, other than that will to power seems to derive from Leibnizian vis and appetitus and from the interpretations of “will” in Kant, German Idealism, and Schopenhauer. Heidegger does say all this, in spite of his warning that to trace probable dependencies and influences among thinkers is to forget their universal dependence on Being and its destiny. Only in his first lecture course, “Will to Power as Art,” does will to power receive sympathetic and thought-provoking treatment. There it is seen as nothing less than an ecstatic being-beyond-oneself in the manner of human existentiality or finite transcendence. As perpetual selfovercoming, will to power is another word for epimeleia, Sorge, “care.” As I indicated in chapter six, Hannah Arendt is right when she notes that the later lectures and essays (in volume II of Nietzsche) abandon this positive interpretation of will to power and equate Nietzsche’s doctrine with the will-to-will that inaugurates the reign of planetary technology.4 Whether Heidegger ever truly overcomes the schematic “cosmological” interpretation of will to power—as the essentia of entities—may be doubted; certainly there is no breakthrough here to fundamental problems, as there is in Heidegger’s thinking of eternal recurrence.
The negative balance in Heidegger’s account of the metaphysics of will to power is chiefly due to the role of value thinking (Wertdenken) there. Heidegger’s allergic reaction to Nietzschean “revaluation of all values” derives partly, as I have noted, from his own rebellion as a student and young teacher against the influential neo-Kantian Wertphilosophie of his mentor, Heinrich Rickert. Throughout his career, Heidegger inveighed against the philosophy of value as a debasement of Kant’s philosophy. Although Nietzsche seems to have recognized the necessity of overcoming Platonistic valuation as such, Heidegger faults him for retaining confidence in “values” themselves, indicts him for the unfounded hope that this lame duck of Kantian-Cartesian subjectivism, this insipid residue of secularized Christianized aretē, could rescue Occidental humanity from its own essential history—nihilism. In value thinking Heidegger sees the major obstacle to Nietzsche’s advance beyond metaphysical modes of thought. The project of revaluation deflects and distracts Nietzsche from the questions of Being, truth, and the nothing. Nietzsche comes closest to those questions in his thought of eternal recurrence.
Nietzsche’s sundry communications of eternal recurrence, in The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and various unpublished sketches, convince Heidegger that eternal recurrence is not so much a dogma as an experience in and of thinking. It has to do, not so much with the existentia of beings (as the treatises published in volume II of Nietzsche tend to assume), as with “existence” in both Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s senses. In the summer semester of 1937 Heidegger struggles to confront the full import of Nietzsche’s tragic insight into Becoming and his Dionysian affirmation of it.
The previous semester’s course on will to power as art had focused on the opposition—indeed, the “raging discordance”—between art and truth. Art, the creation of transfigurative semblance, proved to be worth more than truth for the enhancement of life. Such enhancement occurred in what Nietzsche called “the grand style,” the enraptured style that conjoined under one yoke the rule of form-giving law and the anarchy of originary chaos. Nietzsche’s discovery of the yoke, the most life-enhancing thought and most powerful dissemblance, fashioned in the raging discord between art and truth, was given the title “eternal recurrence of the same.” Heidegger insisted that this thought had something—perhaps everything—to do with the question of Being and Time, Time and Being.
Standing in the “gateway of the Moment”—not simply observing the gateway from the side, as does the dwarf, who makes everything too easy for himself—Zarathustra is cast into time. The figure of Zarathustra thus serves as an image of perspicuous, resolutely open Dasein. The “eternity” of eternal recurrence is not that inappropriate nonfinite time which, according to Being and Time section 65, is derived from finite time proper, but the moment (der Augenblick) of insight and decision. On the threshold of the moment of time Zarathustra affirms that all transition (Übergang) toward the overman (Übermensch) ineluctably requires downgoing (Untergang).5 Zarathustra’s contempt for the “last man” and his disgust with humanity in general, his nausea, are confronted and overcome in the thought of recurrence—although what “overcoming” now may mean becomes a capital question, one that cannot be resolved by a polite reference to “self-overcoming.” Zarathustra’s convalescence consists solely in thinking this thought—although the thought itself, as the most powerful dissemblance, at times seems to be a ditty cranked out on a barrel-organ, a child’s entertainment offering sheer distraction from the harsh realities of historical existence. In Heidegger’s view, all depends on the actual work, die Wirk-lichkeit, of the thinking itself. All depends on fashioning the lyre that will sustain the tension of discord, the tension of the Heraclitean bow (Yeats calls it life-in-death, death-in-life), the tension that will hold the melody of mortality.
Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger is unduly optimistic about the success of such work. Nietzsche has Zarathustra describe himself as a cripple on the hither-side of the bridge that leads to redemption from revenge. In his final lectures and essays on Nietzsche, Heidegger persists in posing the crucial question of such redemption. All his earlier preoccupations culminate in the question, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” With a view to the thought of eternal recurrence, this question translates to the query, “What is Called—and What Calls for—Thinking?”
The decisive work—thinking recurrence—takes place, according to Heidegger, in the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled “On Redemption.” There the spirits of vengeance, gravity, and ressentiment, themselves the propitiating spirits of otherworldly metaphysics and morals, are perceived as arising from the frustration of man’s will in the face of time’s irreversibility. Before the facticity of the “it was” the will stands helpless. It is not merely that the ephemeral character of Becoming paralyzes the will, nor that transience gives rise to the castrating nostalgia for the ewige Weibliche. What is truly crippling is
the sheer intransigence of the past,
the intractability of the fait accompli,
the lapidary impassivity of what used to be.
Rather than will nothing at all, the harried will wills the nothing: hence the ennervating delirium of passive nihilism. Rather than affirm the ordinance of time, the will conjures a counterwill to fulminate against time and its “Es war”: hence the movable feast of rancor and revenge.
Redemption from the spirit of vengeance, the transformation of reactive nihilism into ecstatic nihilism, and the transfer of allegiance from the Crucified to Dionysos require that the will declare of the past, “Thus I willed it, I will it so now, and thus shall I will it forever!” Willing the eternal recurrence of the same reconstitutes the “it was” as a “so be it,” dissolves the impassivity of the past in the potent solution of its present willful act. Thus man “administers the proof” that the contingencies of the past conform to what will to power itself wills; thus humanity earns “the right to claim” that the happenstances and hazards of the past are its own doing; thus the past is transmuted into perpetual future by a will that “continually remains presence-to-self.”6
Heidegger doubts the efficacy of such willing to perform the redemptive work of eternal recurrence. “Thus I willed it!” declares the will. What is the source of such a declaration? It asseverates something of the past in the present. Can what it avers of the past be affirmed in the gateway of the Moment, where time looms before me and then recedes over my shoulder to a remote eternity? Or must such a declaration proceed from the side, in the dwarf’s perspective, as a (now) transparent ruse? Reconstituting the “it was” as a “so be it”—is that not to subordinate Sein to Sollen, and not to Wollen, in the manner of the most supine Platonism? To dissolve the impassivity of the past in the activity of a willful present—is that not to embrace the traditional metaphysical preference for activity over passivity? What sort of “proof” would convince the genealogist that contingency has been successfully converted into will? Has not the ditty of proofs been played out? What sort of droit de prétendre will transform the victim of chances into the demiurge of destinies? And when the past is transformed into perpetual future by a will that remains perpetually present to itself, is not the metaphysics of presence, that is to say, the ontology based on the understanding of Being as permanence of presencing (Beständigkeit des Anwesens), merely confirmed in its dominion? The paradoxical assurance that the will’s perpetual presence to self is a perpetual sacrifice of self, an infinite self-overcoming, does not convince: “perpetual sacrifice” offers up the same old lamb over and over again, and it no longer fools gods or men.
All these doubts about “redemption”—about what one might call the decadence of redemption—trouble Heidegger. They culminate in his charge that Zarathustra’s teaching on redemption fails to liberate metaphysical man from the spirit of vengeance:
Does such thinking overcome prior reflection, overcome the spirit of revenge? Or does there not lie concealed in this very stamping [cf. The Will to Power, no. 617]—which takes all Becoming into the protection of eternal recurrence of the same—a form of ill will against sheer transiency and thereby a highly spiritualized spirit of revenge? . . . What is left for us to say, if not this: Zarathustra’s doctrine does not bring redemption from revenge? We do say it. Yet we say it by no means as a misconceived refutation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. We do not even utter it as an objection against Nietzsche’s thinking. But we say it in order to turn our attention to the fact that—and the extent to which—Nietzsche’s thought too is animated by the spirit of prior reflection. [VA, 121–22; Ni 2, 228–29]
Thus Heidegger does not close the question of Nietzsche’s place in the history of metaphysics. Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Zarathustra is the advocate of the circle of life and suffering; redemption from the circle is not his proper brief. Zarathustra espouses the goal of overman; he dare not confuse himself with the goal. Zarathustra recognizes all transition to be a downgoing; he dare not quit the doorway of the moment of time. In short, the work of eternal recurrence, as the work of thinking, remains to be done.
How can Nietzsche be called the last metaphysician and yet still be considered one metaphysician among others? If Nietzsche were wholly absorbed by the “guiding question” of metaphysics, completely oblivious to its “grounding question”; if he had thought purely and simply in terms of values, merely inverting the “above” and “below” of the Platonic hierarchy; if his analysis of nihilism had remained but a phase in the history of nihilistic metaphysics; how then could Nietzsche have exhausted the possibilities of metaphysical inquiry, of representational and valuative thought, and how could he have envisaged the event of metaphysics as nihilism? If the “last name” in the history of metaphysics “is not Kant, and not Hegel, but Nietzsche,”7 then how is Nietzsche able to draw a line under his own name and so call an entire tradition to account?
From the outset of his confrontation with Nietzsche, Heidegger accords him the status of a thinker; that is, one who ponders the essence of metaphysics itself. In “What Calls for Thinking?” Heidegger designates him, not the last metaphysician, but “the last thinker of the West,” der letzte Denker des Abendlandes (WhD? 61; cf. H, 94). The word letzt could mean several things:
Nietzsche the most recent thinker, le dernier cri?
Nietzsche the ultimate, that is, the supreme and superlative thinker?
Nietzsche the final thinker, that is, the thinker of finality, after whom no one is to be expected, after whom the West as such, or thinking itself, or both of these together, can no longer be what they once were?
This third understanding of the word letzt would of course place in jeopardy the claim of any contemporary to be a thinker. . . .
Nietzsche’s impact on Heidegger’s thought is second to none. In “What Calls for Thinking?” Heidegger deliberately couples Nietzsche’s name with that of Aristotle, a telling conjunction when one remembers the cardinal position of Aristotle in awakening the question of Being. The Heidegger/Nietzsche encounter occurs across a long series of shared sites—junctions, crossroads, intersections and interceptions, underpasses and ambuscades. To cite a few:
Nietzsche’s definition of a strong will as one that knows how not to will (SII, 987–89) is an unsung precursor of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit and “commemorative thinking”;
Zarathustra’s cry, “Be true to the earth!” is heard again in Heidegger’s pledge to the earth of the Fourfold and in his initiation of mortals to their mortality (see chapter ten, below);
Nietzsche’s role, assisting Kant, Schiller, Schelling, and Hölderlin in awakening in Heidegger a sense of the primacy of art and the artwork in the question of Being, becomes clearly visible when will to power as art is proclaimed the “necessary point of departure” for Heidegger’s inquiry into Nietzschean thought;
Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics helps to propel Heidegger beyond the incipient “meta-ontological turn” of his own thought—from “ontology of Dasein” to “the metaphysics of truth”—in the years immediately following the publication of Being and Time; and, most generally,
Nietzsche implants the suspicion that an entire epoch of thought and belief has inevitably succumbed, that what we piously call “tradition” is for the most part a product of anxiety in the face of thinking.
Beyond piety, yet still within anxiety, I ask again what Heidegger means when he calls Nietzsche den letzten Denker des Abendlandes. Is Nietzsche (1) the most recent, current, and topical of thinkers; is he (2) the ultimate and superlative thinker; or is he (3) the final thinker of the evening land? The first is too innocent for Heidegger, the second too edifying. Both in any case would actually be said otherwise in German. Only the third (and last) is risky enough, outrageous enough, literal enough, to suit Heidegger’s estimation of Nietzsche. If at times nothing seems new under the sun of Heidegger’s history of Being, it is because he too needs to protect himself from Nietzsche’s newness. Thus Heidegger’s thinking counter to Nietzsche remains always in service to a thinking to encounter him. Auseinandersetzung remains subtended by an Entgegendenken, confrontation by an encounter.
On the eve of his lecture series on Nietzsche, Heidegger defined the task of his own thought as one of bringing Nietzsche’s thought “to a full unfolding” (EM, 28). The confrontation and encounter with Nietzsche, nascent in Heidegger’s student days and still vital in the conversations of his last years, remained crucial for Heidegger—for knowing who he was and what he was to do.
All of which brings us now to the question of the results of Heidegger’s history of Being. Can descensional reflection transcend mere intimations to hard and fast results that would be relevant for the technological age in which we live?