The fourth and final volume in Heidegger's Nietzsche focuses on the exhausting subject of nihilism. If you are looking for a better understanding Nietzsche's philosophy, this is by far the least interesting volume in the series. Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy has by this point ossified into the form we saw take shape in volume 3. He sees Eternal Return as the Being of Becoming, the Will to Power as a pure overpowering, and the Overman as the supreme representative of the will to power, "who is prepared to embark on the absolute domination of the globe." (H.4.9). In short, he see Nietzsche's philosophy as "classical nihilism" in which might makes the right ... to make more might. We become machines for self-positing and self-transcendence with no goal beyond constantly lapping ourselves, so to speak.
The real goal of this lecture series has nothing to do with interpreting Nietzsche, and everything to do with fitting a sadly diminished version of him into Heidegger's history of metaphysics. Nietzsche is meant to be the final stop on the metaphysical train that began with Parmenides and Plato, first took a modern form in Descartes, and arrives at its ultimate destination with the nihilistic idea of the will to power. While it's interesting to think about the problem Heidegger lays out through this history -- essentially the problem of what should count as the ultimate ground or beginning of philosophy -- his interpretation of the particular philosophers he chooses as signposts is entirely forced and unconvincing. After Heidegger's exceedingly liberal "translations", these men end up saying things that are completely different than what at first seems to come out of their mouths. While I love a good reinterpretation of a philosopher, these seem arbitrary and even violent. In fact, it's closer to the truth to say that Heidegger simply invents the lines they need to speak to fit into his metaphysical play, and then attributes these pronouncements to them as if they were characters. We've seen in detail how this happened with Nietzsche, and here we see the same technique applied to Parmenides, Plato, and Descartes.
So, if Heidegger's interpretations have become forced, what can we get out of this lecture series? The most interesting way to proceed is to skip to the final third of the class, where Heidegger actually lays out the problem that he wrestles with. The goal of philosophy, for Martin Heidegger at least, always seems to be to find the deepest ground, the most basic starting principle of ... well, of everything -- of Being. As far as I can tell, at least up to this point in his philosophy, Heidegger sees this quest as a failure. He hasn't failed because he's not smart enough to solve the problem though. It's more like he's (so far) failed because he hasn't worked out quite the right way to pose the problem to begin with. In his view, merely seeing this problem of grounding as a problem is a major improvement on prior philosophy. In fact, the whole history of metaphysics he outlines in this lecture series is essentially one long attempt to solve the problem of establishing some fundamental ground. Protagoras said that man was the measure of all things. Plato claimed everything derived from the Forms. Descartes founded the whole works on his own thinking. And finally, Nietzsche decided that everything, including us, was will to power and nothing besides. Heidegger claims that all of them were working on the same problem that interests him, but that in 'dominating' that problem with their solution, in providing some particular theory that grounds life, the universe, and everything, each thinker fails to appreciate the full extent of what's problematic about grounding. In other words, offering a solution seeks to close the question rather than open it up.
But wait, what exactly is the problem? The real root of the problem seems to be our attempt to understand things in general. How can one finite being called 'human being' understand everything that 'is'?
Metaphysics speaks of beings as such and as a whole, thus of the Being of beings; consequently, a relationship of man to the Being of beings reigns in it. Nonetheless, still unasked is the question of whether and how man comports himself to the Being of beings, not merely to beings, not simply to this or that thing. One imagines that the relation to "Being" has already been sufficiently defined by the explanation of man's relations with beings. One takes both the relations with beings and the relationship to Being as the "selfsame," and indeed with some justification. The fundamental trait of metaphysical thought is intimated in such an equivalence. (H.4.151)
Although unexpressed and at first perhaps even inexpressible, the one-and-the-same is already experienced and claimed in advance in the four guidelines [of metaphysics]: the relationship of man to Being. (H.4.152)
Meta-physics begins when we go beyond the 'physics' of the beings immediately around us. We begin to postulate some principle that would account for the 'Being' of all those beings, including our own being. The idea that there is and must be such a principle is for Heidegger the core idea that defines metaphysics. What exactly this principle is varies from era to era. But in every case, metaphysics presumes that there is some principle of Being behind or prior to beings that we can come to know. By presuming this, metaphysics overlooks the most questionable thing of all, namely the assumption that there is such a principle, that there is a difference between Being and beings, that there is more beyond what "meets the eye", so to speak.
As Heidegger tells it, the history of metaphysics is the history of taking Being for granted and transforming it into the most a priori and universal category. All beings 'are'. While this appears to attribute a central role to Being, it actually leads us not being able to say much at all about it. Being retreats into a universal abstraction, the unquestionable given that is the condition of possibility of all beings and all thinking. Meanwhile, this Being is always presumed to be given to some particular hairless chimp type beings. So the trend of metaphysics is towards exalting Being as the most fundamental principle while simultaneously emptying it of any content and replacing the missing center with the subjectivity of man. This at least is Heidegger's understanding of the trajectory that moves between Plato, where the Form of the Good is the light that illuminates all other Forms, to Descartes, where human thinking directly guarantees our being. Nietzsche is the culmination of this history precisely because he denies the reality of Being entirely, claims that "truth is an error", and tells us that all of the principles or values we use to organize and totalize the world are merely things we made up for the benefit of enhancing our own purposeless animal power. Heidegger's idea is that with the nihilism of the will to power, all Being is reinterpreted as merely a projection of beings, so it withdrawals completely and we can no longer formulate the question of whether there could be anything beyond or different from beings. In fact, in this reading of Nietzsche, there really 'is' nothing other than us, constantly projecting ourselves onto the world.
Final conclusion: All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world—all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination—and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things. (WP #12)
Heidegger imagines that Nietzsche claims this constant invention and projection of ourselves is simply part of human nature insofar as we, like everything, want more power. And since we only ever find ourselves reflected back to us, we can no longer discover any Being different from beings. All we see is a carnival funhouse mirror of beings.
In my mind this is a terrible reading of Nietzsche, but the idea of an important "ontological difference" between Beings and beings is an interesting one. It's easy to pinpoint why this is a terrible reading of Nietzsche because Heidegger points it out himself (while thinking that he's critiquing Nietzsche).
What we have just been examining in an indeterminate way, the relations of man with beings, is at bottom nothing other than the differentiation of Being and beings, which belongs to man's natural disposition. Only because man differentiates in such a way can he comport himself toward beings in the light of differentiated Being; that is, sustain relations with beings; which is to say, be metaphysically determined and defined by metaphysics.
However, is the differentiation of Being and beings the natural disposition - indeed the core of the natural disposition - of man? But what is man? In what does human "nature" consist? What does "nature" mean here, and what does "man" mean? Whence and in what way should human nature be defined? (H.4.184)
This question, "but what is man?" is core to all Nietzsche's ideas in a way that Heidegger just can't seem to see. For some reason he constantly imagines that Nietzsche simply defines man as nothing but a power hungry beast. In fact, Nietzsche's nihilism goes much deeper than that. Which is not to deny that we are in some sense just power hungry beasts, but to ask the obvious follow-up questions: what is a beast and what does power mean? And why do humans think they are so different from beasts and think they have access to some privileged ontological difference? What makes the truth of Being such a temptingly obvious question for us even if we can never seem to do more than push it back into the background as we reassert our being? Heidegger approaches these questions in his final lecture without any intention of answering them. In asking about the relation of the being man to Being we are asking a question in which neither side nor their relation are defined. Which perhaps pushes the question towards something beyond the "classical nihilism" Heidegger attributes to Nietzsche and into something more like a true nihil-ism where we are asked to believe in the nothing, in its un-differentiation into either Being or beings, and to make everything out of it.
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