Heidegger’s Nietzsche

Abstract

ABSTRACTHeidegger maintained that Nietzsche was a metaphysical thinker. What did he mean by that? Not that Nietzsche advanced purely theoretical doctrines that might be perfected or refuted by rational argument. Instead, he meant that Nietzsche’s thinking is a ‘representational thinking’ (vorstellendes Denken) that preserves a commitment to a conception of truth as correctness (Richtigkeit). Nietzsche’s apparent denials of the intelligibility of truth, Heidegger argues, are in fact expressions of our growing insensitivity to truth understood as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). Nietzsche’s thinking is thus deeply attuned to metaphysics as Heidegger came to understand it in the late 1930s, namely as a forgetting of being (Seinsvergessnheit), beginning with Plato. His interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, particularly the idea of eternal recurrence, changed less because he changed his mind about Nietzsche than because he reconceived the philosophical tradition since Plato as metaphysical, and so reframed his own project as an attempt to think beyond metaphysics.