This summer semester 1939 lecture course, published in Nietzsche II, is Heidegger’s third course on Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is an analysis of Nietzsche’s progress toward the question of truth as unconcealment. In Heidegger’s interpretation, Nietzsche’s view of truth as error is the extreme metaphysical transformation of truth as correctness.
Heidegger opens his course with the claim that in Nietzsche’s philosophy we confront the completion of metaphysics in which is decided what entities in the whole are. For Nietzsche the beingness of entities is will to power, which is also the principle of a revaluation of all values. This new valuation should establish the conditions and perspectives for self-preserving, self-enhancing life. In this revaluation, the question of knowledge and truth is addressed, since truth and knowledge are values. For the philosophical tradition, truth is the correctness of assertions about entities; for Nietzsche, truth is an illusion. And yet, this illusion is essential to life. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s thought is a metaphysics of life and, as such, the completion of metaphysics as the science of φύσις. Nietzsche reduces the categories of logic to schemata devised by and for the preservation of human beings. His understanding of the value of truth as holding-to-be-true marks the end of the two-world theory of Platonism. Heidegger points out that, even if life is becoming and not eternal being, Nietzsche retains the concept of correctness, since he claims the truth of Platonism is correct and an illusion.
All valuation interprets the being of entities in the whole as chaos. For Nietzsche, every human being is a body that somehow is alive. In chaos, human beings try to secure stability and permanence. Accordance with each other and reckoning of entities brings about the much-needed stability. This stability is no longer founded upon the eternal ideas; it is brought about by the holding-to-be-true of certain truths that are conditions of the possibility of human life. Heidegger can now take up the theme with which his lecture course on the will to power as art had concluded: Nietzsche’s overturning of Plato’s distinction between the true and the apparent world. Is Nietzsche’s attempt to go beyond metaphysics a liberation from Platonic thought, or did he merely invert Platonic structures?
Heidegger pursues two paths to the extreme moment and uttermost transformation of correctness in Nietzsche’s thought. The first path inquires whether Nietzsche’s holding-to-be-true as the commanding perspective of knowledge can save itself from a collapse into mere arbitrariness. The other paths show that art and knowledge are fixations of horizons and, as such, forms for securing permanence and assimilation to chaos. The raging discordance between truth and art is thus brought to an end. They are now a transfiguration that commands and poetizes, establishes and fixates, different horizons of perspective. Truth and art aim at justice, which is a mode of thinking that constructs, excludes, and annihilates. Justice is the supreme representative of life. Heidegger next asks whether such justice can provide a standard for the commanding and poetizing element in cognition. This seems doubtful, since the will to power does not strive for preservation, but enhancement.
Nietzsche secures the permanence of becoming by means of the eternal recurrence of the willing of the will to power. This eternal recurrence is never-ending presence. Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will expresses the final truth of beingness and is in this sense the completion of metaphysics. Yet, as Heidegger sees it, he still remained blind to the question of truth, that is, the self-revealing-concealing of being. As the last word of metaphysics, his philosophy is bound up with Ereignis and the coming destiny of the other beginning for thinking.