The Bitter End of Western Metaphysics:
Heidegger on Nietzsche, Part Two

5,500 words

1. The Metaphysics of Presence

In the last installment, we introduced Heidegger’s claim that Western metaphysics ends with Nietzsche. For Heidegger, metaphysics is the expression of an anthropocentrism that culminates in the meaninglessness and inhumanity of modern technological civilization. With Nietzsche, metaphysics comes full circle and “reverses” Platonism. Nietzsche prepares the ground for the ultimate result of metaphysics, which is not actually a work of philosophy. It is modern technological civilization itself.

We also introduced Heidegger’s claim that the history of metaphysics is the history of the “forgottenness of being.” However, what Heidegger comes to mean by this is the forgottenness of “the clearing” (Lichtung). The clearing is what “gives” being. In order for the being of an object to become present, there must exist a prior sort of openness, within which the being of something makes itself known. The clearing is a metaphorical “space.” In addition to the measurable, physical space I experience myself as inhabiting, it is as if I also inhabit a “space” of being or meaning.

But how did the clearing come to be forgotten? And how can this forgottenness explain our civilizational decline? I have dealt with these questions in quite a few essays already, but in the present essay we must revisit them. We must discuss how and why metaphysics forgets the clearing, and how this process reaches its conclusion with Nietzsche.

First of all, it must be noted that the clearing is actually quite easy to forget, because Heidegger maintains that it is “intrinsically hidden.” For things to be present to us in their being, the clearing must be absent. Heidegger understands the clearing as “withdrawing itself” so that beings may presence themselves to us within it. As we discussed in the last essay, the clearing is not itself a being but that within which beings display themselves in their being.

On my way through the Black Forest to Heidegger’s hut, I may pass through a literal clearing or two. The phenomenological clearing, however, is definitely not one of the things I encounter. Nevertheless, the entire walk takes place within that clearing, for it is only within it that things show up to me as meaningful or as intelligible. On my walk, I am not occupied with the clearing but rather with the things illuminated within it. It is only on reflection, and phenomenological description, that I become aware that there is a clearing.

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Keep in mind that the clearing is a “space” or an “openness.” It is effectively absent, except when we consider our experience and its conditions. The non-appearing of the clearing, its absence or hiddenness, is precisely what allows everything within it to be present in its being. Thus, it is easy to be completely oblivious to the fact that there is a clearing at all. Heidegger holds that the Western metaphysical tradition, beginning with the pre-Socratics, systematically forgets it.

Notice the dynamic of presence and absence here: the clearing is a special kind of absence that allows beings to be present in their being. It “absents itself” (to use Heidegger’s metaphorical language) so that beings can be. In turn, for us to become intellectually aware of the clearing, for the clearing to be present to us, we must prescind from any concern with specific beings. In other words, to accomplish the intellectual achievement of becoming aware of the clearing, beings must become “absent” to us. They do not become absent to our senses, but the intellect momentarily becomes disinterested in them so that we can become aware of that in virtue of which they become present.

In addition, there is also a dynamic of presence and absence within the clearing. Last time I quoted from Heidegger’s essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964), in which he says the following: “The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent.”^[1] Within the clearing, beings come forth out of absence and make themselves present.

Walking to the hut, something darts out onto the path ahead of me. I register it as a squirrel. Then it darts away, absenting itself. Not long after this, I arrive at Heidegger’s hut. The front of the hut is present to me, but the back must remain absent. I know that it is private property, so I don’t approach closer. I gaze at the front of the hut for a while then walk on. A little later, I turn and look behind me. The hut is now absent again. It has disappeared into the forest.

Our experience of beings always involves this dynamic of presence and absence, or revealing and concealing. What cannot be overemphasized is that the being of beings always unfolds or emerges out of a prior concealment or absence. The being of beings always presences itself from out of a concomitant absence or concealment.

Heidegger tells us that early Greek, pre-metaphysical thinking affirmed this dynamic of presence and absence. It recognized that there is an ineluctable element of absence or concealment to phusis (“nature,” or, as Heidegger argues, the Greek conception of being). Not all is revealed to us. What is revealed always emerges out of hiddenness, and then returns into hiddenness again.

In other words, early Greek thinking affirmed mystery. In so doing, it affirmed that there are limits to our knowing; to our ability to make what is fully present and intelligible. Heidegger tells us that the Greek response to being was “wonder” (θαῦμα). In Contributions to Philosophy, he says, “The basic disposition of the first beginning [i.e., of the early Greeks] is wonder [Er-staunen]: wonder that beings are and that humans themselves are and are in the midst of that which they are not.”[2]

Beginning with some of the pre-Socratic thinkers, however, a fundamental intellectual transformation takes place. Thinkers begin to demand, implicitly, that what is be constantly present, in the sense of fully available and intelligible. (A demand which does not become explicit until the modern period.) This transformation is often referred to by Heidegger scholars as a movement toward “the metaphysics of presence” (a term coined by Jacques Derrida).

Heidegger writes in What is Called Thinking?, “Since in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing ‘now.’”[3] Effectively, absence or concealment—which, as we have seen, are inherent in the nature of being—come to be denied, discounted, or “forgotten.” For Heidegger, this is the concealed spirit behind all of Western metaphysics. The metaphysics of presence just is metaphysics.

2. The Spirit of Revenge

In essence, the metaphysics of presence is an attempt to accommodate being to a particular aspect of our nature. It is the part of us that is deeply uncomfortable with mystery. It despises the darkness, as if it were a reproach to the power of our intelligence. It regards the darkness merely as a temporary impediment to the mind’s understanding. It believes we can cancel darkness altogether and bring everything into the light.

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Of course, the ultimate mystery is the clearing, and so it too is denied—or never discovered. Heidegger explicitly refers to the clearing as a “mystery” (Geheimnis).^[4] As we have said, it is a special sort of absence that makes presence possible. And as I argued in the last installment, the clearing is not something subjective. We moderns have a very strong tendency to see it as something that must be “in me” or “mine” because it does not appear as an object in the world. But this would be phenomenologically untrue. I experience myself as within the clearing; I do not experience it as within me. All beings, including me and all aspects of me, appear within the clearing. It is the condition for all presence and all intelligibility.

Heidegger argues, controversially, that early Greek thinking displayed some awareness of the clearing, but that by the time of Plato (and the birth of the metaphysical tradition) the clearing had been forgotten—or Western man had been abandoned by it. Heidegger makes this argument largely on the basis of rather tendentious readings of a few pre-Socratic fragments. A more plausible case could perhaps be made on the basis of what we know of Greek religion and mythology—but we can only sketch such a case here.

For example, we could point to the Fates—over whom even the gods have no power—as indicating an awareness of the fact that meaning, and the destiny it makes for us, is not under our control. We could also cite the many myths concerning the punishment of hubris, as an affirmation of mystery and a warning to those who would seek to cancel it. We could also discuss what we know of the Greek mystery cults, which seemed to provide a corrective to the rationalist, Apollonian side to Greek thinking, which aims to remove darkness and to bring everything into the light.

The early Greeks would most definitely have seen the denial of absence and mystery as hubris, an overweening arrogance that seeks to transcend natural limits, in particular the boundary between the human and the divine. It is this hubris that asserts itself in the Western metaphysical tradition from Platonism (in which it first truly becomes clear) to Nietzsche.

This point is crucial to understanding how Heidegger views the history of metaphysics. Throughout that history, in one way or another, thinkers attempt to understand being in terms of human subjectivity. This is the “anthropocentrism” I referred to earlier. Often this tendency is concealed. In modern philosophy, especially in nineteenth-century German philosophy, it becomes open and unconcealed. In Nietzsche it is carried to its ultimate extreme.

Since 2020, I have been writing about Heidegger’s history of metaphysics and tracing the different incarnations of the metaphysics of presence within that history. My account began with Platonism, then treated the Middle Ages, the emergence of modernity, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (with several essays devoted to some of these topics). Of course, I cannot repeat that entire account here, so let us briefly treat Platonism as a paradigm case of the metaphysics of presence. This seems highly appropriate, since Heidegger believed that the metaphysics of presence really gets off the ground with Platonism—and because Nietzsche saw his own philosophy as the reversal of Platonism (a topic we will discuss in another installment).

In Platonism, we find the insistence that being, true being, is identical with “the forms.” The Greek term translated as “form” is eidos (εἶδος) which literally meant the “look” of a thing, in the sense of its appearance, its phainomenon. Thus, in actual fact, being is here defined as presence to a human knower. “Idea” (ἰδέα) has a similar etymology. Heidegger writes that “An ἰδέα is what-is-sighted. What-is-sighted is sighted only in and for an act of seeing. . . . We finally have to get serious about the fact that Plato gave the name ‘ideas’ to being [das Sein].” ^[5]

Unlike the being wondered at by the early Greeks, however, the presence of the form comes without any accompanying absence, for the eidos presents itself to the intellect of man, and is fully intelligible by intellect. The form has no side that conceals itself from us, no mystery. It is fully intelligible because it is fully present; it hides nothing. Moreover, it remains always available to intellect, for it is eternal and unchanging. Things are intelligible to me insofar as my intellect “sees” the forms that they “partake of” (to use the Platonic language).

Unlike things, however, forms never change nor can they cease to exist. The thing resists the intellect’s efforts to understand it. Its form, by contrast, presents itself as firm and constant; it is fully knowable and fully available. As a result, Platonism declares that the form is what truly is, precisely because it reveals itself to intellect as permanent, unchanging, and fully intelligible. The sensible particulars that partake of forms either are not, or they have, at best, a kind of derived being. Thus, Platonism rejects the physical, sensible world as fundamentally “unreal,” and declares the intelligible world, the world of forms accessible to human intellect, as true reality.

In the Nietzsche Lectures Heidegger writes of Platonism’s metaphysics,

We say something is of that which we always and in advance encounter as always already at hand; what is always present and has constant stability in this presence. What really is, is what already in advance can never be removed, what stands fast and resists any attack, survives any accident. The beingness of beings signifies permanent presence. What is thus in being is the true, the “truth” one can always and truly hold on to as what is stable and does not withdraw, on the basis of which one can gain a foothold.[6]

Effectively, Platonism narrows the understanding of being down to what satisfies human needs and preferences—specifically the preference for the knowable over the unknowable, the present over the absent, the predictable over the unpredictable. Just like magic, a world of forms is discovered; a world of objects that are knowable, forever present, and predictable. A world of true being. And it is a world that is only accessible to the philosophers, the new elite. The lesser beings of sense and physicality are seen in the light of the higher, truer beings of intelligibility—and inevitably found wanting. The urge to try and transform sensible being to bring it closer to the ideal, to intelligible being, becomes almost impossible to resist.

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Heidegger has adopted an interpretation of Platonism that could be described as quasi-Nietzschean: Platonism stems from a “world denying” or “life denying” impulse; it damns this world in favor of an invented world that never disappoints. For Nietzsche, Platonism arises out of the “spirit of revenge,” and Heidegger essentially endorses this idea. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche states, “Thus, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the will’s ill will toward time and its ‘It was.’”[7] All subsequent metaphysics exhibits essentially the same spirit. Heidegger writes, “For Nietzsche, revenge is the fundamental characteristic of all thoughts so far. That is to say: revenge marks the manner in which man so far relates himself to what is.”[8]

Heidegger seems to agree with Nietzsche on this point. For Heidegger, the metaphysics of presence exhibits the spirit of revenge because it denies, negates, or reacts against what frustrates human knowledge and control. In essence, metaphysics is a revenge against the gods. For both thinkers, furthermore, all subsequent metaphysics is a development of, or reaction to, Platonism. Heidegger writes, “Metaphysics, idealism, and Platonism mean essentially the same thing.”[9]

Note above that in discussing revenge, Nietzsche describes it as “the will’s ill will.” The spirit of revenge is an expression of will to power (Wille zur Macht), one of the key concepts in Nietzsche which we shall discuss much more fully in a later installment. Thus, metaphysics is an expression of will to power, though in a concealed form. Again, this is a point on which Heidegger seems to agree with Nietzsche. The demand that beings be constantly present is the same thing as the demand that they be fully transparent, and hence manipulable.

Otto Pöggeler writes, explaining Heidegger,

When pushed to extremes, the thought that being is constant presence requires the thought of will to power. If being is thought of as constantly presencing and thus as always present, it then comes to be at the disposal of the thinking corresponding to it. Indeed, being is perhaps thought of only as constant presence because thinking as representing something permanent has always been the guide for the projection of being, even if it is concealed at first. Being is thought of as constant presence in order that it be at thinking’s disposal.^[10]

Will is a very important concept in the later Heidegger. One scholar states that “Heidegger’s reflections through the thirties lead to an understanding of the history of philosophy as a history of the will.”[11] And Heidegger links will to evil. Still another scholar states that in the later Heidegger “the problem of evil is rethought as the problem of the will itself.”^[12] For example, in Heidegger’s posthumously published dialogue “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man” (1945), the younger man says, “Perhaps in general the will itself is what is evil.”^[13]

As noted, I have already devoted numerous essays to how the will’s metaphysics of presence plays itself out in the history of philosophy from Plato to Hegel. But in order to see how Nietzsche completes Western metaphysics, we have to at least sketch out how the history of modern philosophy is an expression of will. We can do this by focusing on Heidegger’s account of Cartesian representationalism.

3. From Descartes to Nietzsche

As we have seen, for Heidegger the history of metaphysics is animated by a concealed will to power. One of the things that makes modern philosophy different from earlier philosophy is its increasing recognition of the role of the will. This begins with a recognition that will is at work in perception, and culminates in will coming to be explicitly identified as being itself. This latter development occurs principally in three thinkers: Schelling, Schopenhauer (a thinker Heidegger did not take very seriously and says little about), and Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, being is will to power, and thus metaphysics itself (just like everything else) is an expression of will to power.

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However, Heidegger argues that will is tacitly identified with being throughout the entire history of modern philosophy. In the Nietzsche Lectures he writes, “from the metaphysics of Schelling and Hegel, back beyond Kant and Leibniz to Descartes, being as such is at bottom experienced as will.”[14] In the later lecture course What is Called Thinking? Heidegger makes the same point, saying of modern philosophy that “the Being of beings appears here invariably and always as will.”[15]

This signals a turn in modernity to a virulent form of anthropocentrism (though Heidegger argues, as we have seen, that the roots of this are in Platonism). For to make will into being is to anthropomorphize being; to make the human, metaphysically, the literal be all and end all. Heidegger writes, “Western history has now begun to enter into the completion of that period we call the modern, and which is defined by the fact that man becomes the measure and the center of beings. Man is what lies at the bottom of all beings; that is, in modern times, at the bottom of all objectification and representability.”[16]

In discussing this modern subjectification of being, Heidegger makes much of the change in meaning that the Latin term subiectum undergoes in the modern period. The use of the term “subject” to refer to a human knower is actually not very old. It first begins to enter regularly into philosophical prose in the early 1700s and then, much later, trickles down into everyday speech. Subiectum was originally a translation of the Greek hypokeimonen (ὑποκείμενον). Aristotle used this term to refer to the “substrate” underlying properties. For example, Socrates is the hypokeimenon in which various properties “inhere,” such as being white, snub-nosed, and mortal.

Subiectum, in just this sense, was an important concept for the medieval scholastics. It finds its way into discussions of Aristotelian logic, for example: every proposition has a subiectum and a praedicatum (a subject and predicate; e.g., “Socrates is snub-nosed”). With Descartes, however, a change takes place. In order to find a foundation (a kind of “substrate,” if you will) for all knowledge, Descartes engages in methodical doubt. He doubts every type of knowledge claim until he finds the one thing that cannot be doubted. That one thing is, of course, the ego: the “I” whose existence is proved in the very attempt to deny it.

The ego becomes the one subiectum that cannot be doubted (though Descartes does not explicitly use the term subiectum in the sense of “human subject” or “knower”—that comes later). The result of Cartesian philosophy is that the subiectum stops being any “underlying thing” and becomes the human “I” as the ground of representation (it thus continues to be an “underlying thing” of a sort, but in the sense of that which founds knowledge and to which all must be referred).

In “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) Heidegger writes, “When . . . man becomes the primary and genuine subiectum, this means that he becomes that being upon which every being, in its way of being and its truth, is founded. Man becomes the referential center of beings as such. But this is only possible when there is a transformation in the understanding of beings as a whole.”[17]

As noted, it takes a while for “subject” to come to be used in the sense of the “I.” One of the earliest instances in English is in Berkeley’s 1710 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in which he refers to “the perceiving subject.” In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant uses Subjekt to refer to the human knower. The use of “subject” in this sense becomes ubiquitous in the nineteenth century.

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When man becomes the subiectum, the world simultaneously becomes obiectum, and we have the familiar subject-object opposition. Heidegger hyphenates this word as ob-iectum to emphasize its literal meaning, which is “towards” or “against” (ob-) + “to throw” or “hurl” (-iectum; from iacio). In other words, obiectum is something “throw against.” Thrown against what? Thrown against the subiectum.

For Cartesian representationalism (a position that is still very much with us), knowledge is “oppositional.” The subject, which exists in a kind of interior, confronts objects “thrown against” it in a world “external” to it (and, by the way, our knowledge of these objects is said to be “indirect”; the only world we are directly aware of is the interior world of the subject). From this, a new conception of being arises. Beings are what is “set before” or “thrown against” the subject. To be is just to be an ob-ject that opposes the subject.

The German Heidegger uses for “representation” is Vorstellen which is a nominalization of the verb vorstellen. Vor– means “before” and stellen means “to put, or place,” so that vorstellen literally means “to put before.” The literal meaning of English “representation” is exactly the same. To represent means essentially the same thing as to “objectify.” For beings to be objectified means for them to be reduced simply to that which has been “set before” us. Heidegger writes:

In distinction from the Greek apprehension, modern representing, whose signification is first expressed by the word repraesentatio, means something quite different. Representation [Vor-stellen] here means: to bring the present-at-hand before one as something standing over-and-against, to relate it to oneself, the representer, and, in this relation, to force it back to oneself as the norm-giving domain.[18]

Here we see clearly the highly “subjective” character of modern “objectivity.” For modernity, to be is to be a representable object for a subject that measures, categorizes, e-valuates (assesses according to “values”), and utilizes or transforms objects according to its agendas. The subject confers meaning and “value” upon the object, which waits upon it to do so: “[Man] sets himself forth as the scene in which, henceforth, beings must set-themselves-before, present themselves . . . . Man becomes the representative [Repräsentant] of beings in the sense of the objective.”[19]

Heidegger sees this oppositional understanding of knowledge as issuing ultimately in the conception of being that he believes is dominant in modern technological civilization: to be is to be raw material for human use. Representationalism see the object as standing in opposition to the subject, and thus as, in effect, challenging the subject. It is seen as challenging us to represent it and to manipulate it. To use Heidegger’s language, in modernity beings are “challenged forth” and “requisitioned.” We “force [them] back” to ourselves “as the norm-giving domain”—meaning, it is we who decide what this being, this raw material, shall be.[20]

Heidegger writes in the Nietzsche Lectures that being as representedness

is the first resolute step through which modern machine technology, and along with it the modern world and modern mankind, become metaphysically possible for the first time. . . . The essential decision about what can be established as a being now rests with man as subiectum. . . . The relationship to beings is a domineering proceeding into the conquest and domination of the world.[21]

This mindset has bequeathed to us the ugliness of the modern industrial and commercial landscape, environmental depredations of all kinds, and the carnage of “social planning” (for man, too, is a raw material).

For Heidegger, the concepts of representation (Vor-stellen) and production (Her-stellen) are intimately connected.[22] It is only because we have conceived ourselves as subjects abstracted from the world, facing “ob-jects” standing opposed “out there,” that we see those objects as material to be overcome—to be tortured for their secrets, and transformed according to our desires.

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Indeed, Heidegger puts the point very strongly: representation is not just connected with the will to mastery of nature, representation “is in itself, not extrinsically, a striving.”[23] We strive “outward” to seize the object in our representation, and we aim to know it so thoroughly that we can manipulate and transform it in order to maximize our own power and control.

Essentially, modern representation is nothing other than what Nietzsche will later call “will to power.” Heidegger writes in the Nietzsche Lectures that “Descartes’ Metaphysics is indeed a metaphysics of will to power, albeit an unwitting one.”[24] And in “The Age of the World Picture” he writes, “The whole of modern metaphysics, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of being and of truth opened up by Descartes [i.e., the position that to be is to be an object for a subject].”[25] And he notes that the metaphysical position inaugurated by Descartes “initiates the history of its completion through Nietzsche’s metaphysics.”[26]

“We must grasp Nietzsche’s philosophy,” Heidegger tells us, further, “as the metaphysics of subjectivity.”[27] And he regards this statement as so important that he italicizes the entire sentence. Modern philosophy is often said to exhibit a “subjective turn” and Descartes is identified as decisive in this turning. Both these claims are correct. Nietzsche represents, for Heidegger, the ultimate “radicalization” of the subjective turn. Heidegger writes that, “Nietzsche’s doctrine, which makes everything that is, and as it is, into the ‘property and product of man,’ merely carries out the final development of Descartes’ doctrine, according to which truth is grounded on the self-certainty of the human subject.”[28]

Now, all of this would have come as a complete surprise to Nietzsche, who was a sharp critic of Descartes. Nietzsche regarded Descartes as a shallow thinker and considered his “I” to be a fiction. We are no “thinking thing,” Nietzsche claims. Instead, we are ruled by unconscious drives. We do not even direct our own thoughts, they direct us. And reason is not a path to truth, but a tool of will to power.

Heidegger argues, however, that Nietzsche has much more in common with Descartes than he realizes. He states that “behind Nietzsche’s exceedingly sharp rejection of the Cartesian cogito [“I think”] stands an even more rigorous commitment to the subjectivity posited by Descartes.”[29] And consider also the following passage, which is extraordinarily important for our discussion:

No matter how sharply Nietzsche pits himself time and again against Descartes, whose philosophy grounds modern metaphysics, he turns against Descartes only because the latter still does not posit man as subiectum in a way that is complete and decisive enough. The representation of the subiectum as ego, the I, thus the “egoistic” interpretation of the subiectum, is still not subjectivistic enough for Nietzsche. Modern metaphysics first comes to the full and final determination of its essence in the doctrine of the Overman, the doctrine of man’s absolute preeminence among beings. In that doctrine, Descartes celebrates his supreme triumph.[30]

As we have seen, in Descartes’s philosophy the ego becomes the ground, since it is only the subject (the “I”) of which we are certain, and thus the “I” becomes the foundation of all knowledge. Effectively, for Descartes, things are beings only insofar as they are represented by the subject. Subiectum stops meaning the objective substratum that underlies things and begins to refer to the human knower. Everything is referred back to the “I.” Man becomes the measure, the center. Nietzsche radicalizes this.

In place of Descartes’s subject that aims to faithfully represent objects, Nietzsche’s subject creates truth. It “posits values” and “wills” whatever aggrandizes its own power. In Descartes, the human subject still answers to God, to reason, and to objective truth. In Nietzsche, these are eliminated. God is dead, and with him die reason and truth. The subject now explicitly wills itself as ground of all being. Humanity, in the person of the Overman, becomes absolute master and lawgiver, who creates values and truth. Isn’t obvious that in Nietzsche subjectivity remains the ground—indeed, that Nietzsche’s philosophy devolves into subjectivism?

With Nietzsche, the concealed anthropocentrism in metaphysics is now explicitly revealed and affirmed. There is no more radical direction in which this subject-centered metaphysics could go. Hence, metaphysics ends with Nietzsche. All the current relativistic flapdoodle about “living your truth,” as well as moral relativism, cultural relativism, the “social construction” of reality, and the voluntaristic insanity of transgender (“I’m a woman if I believe I am”) is simply a development of the radical subjectivism ushered in by Nietzsche. All reality is regarded as raw material for human manipulation and exploitation. Everything becomes a replaceable, recyclable “commodity”—and this includes human beings themselves.

* * *

The foregoing gives the reader a kind of bird’s eye view of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. But we have omitted much. In the next installment, we will go into more detail concerning will to power, which constitutes one of the “three axes” of Nietzsche’s philosophy, according to Heidegger. The others are the eternal return and the revaluation of all values.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 384-385. This essay was translated by Joan Stambaugh; italics added.

[2] Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 37.

[3] Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968), 102 (henceforth WCT).

[4] See Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 75-76, 226.

^[5] See Sheehan, 84 fn. 85.

[6] The bibliographical information for the Nietzsche Lectures is as follows: Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes Three and Four, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Reference is to volume number, so that a reference to “Vol. 4” refers to the latter half of the second text just cited. Each of the four volumes has its own pagination. The Nietzsche Lectures will be referred to as “NL” in all endnotes. This quotation is from NL, Vol. 3, 59-60.

[7] Quoted in NL Vol. 2, 223. See Nietzche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Viking Press / Penguin editions), 251.

[8] WCT, 97. On the spirit of revenge see also NL Vol. 2, 222-224.

[9] NL, Vol. 4, 164.

[10] Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987), 102-103

[11] Andrew Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 11.

[12] Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 121.

[13] Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 134.

[14] NL, Vol. 4, 205. Italics in original.

[15] WCT, 91.

[16] NL, Vol. 4, 28.

[17] Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 66-67.

[18] Off the Beaten Track, 69.

[19] Off the Beaten Track, 69.

[20] These quotations are from Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 26-27.

[21] NL, Vol. 4, 116-121.

[22] Herstellen = her (a prefix impossible to translate, but conveying the idea of motion or change) + stellen (to put). So, Herstellen, as a noun, means literally “the (act of) putting to change or motion.” It is used to mean “to fashion” or “to manufacture,” and is often translated as “production.” “Production” does, in fact, express roughly the same idea as Herstellen taken literally: “production” comes from Latin prōdūcō from prō– (“forth”) + dūcō (“to bring, to lead”). So that production is “bringing forth” in the sense of putting something to a process of change, so as to fashion a result.

[23] NL, Vol. 3, 221.

[24] NL, Vol. 4, 179.

[25] Off the Beaten Track, 66.

[26] NL, Vol. 4, 103.

[27] NL, Vol. 4, 147.

[28] NL, Vol. 4, 86.

[29] Quoted in Davis, 167.

[30] NL, Vol. 4, 28.