The Metaphysical Nietzsche?

Abstract

In his influential series of lectures on Nietzsche in the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties, Heidegger claimed that Nietzsche had failed to escape metaphysical thinking and had remained a metaphysician despite his own self-understanding. At the center of Heidegger’s charge is his interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of “the will to power.” The argument in this paper is that Heidegger has misinterpreted what Nietzsche means by a “philosophy of the future,” and that Nietzsche’s revolution in philosophy is, somewhat ironically, much closer to Heidegger’s own attempt to recover the question of the meaning of being.

Keywords

• metaphysics
• being
• will to power
• meaning
• significance
• Nietzsche