Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy

Abstract

For us who today read Nietzsche after Heidegger, Nietzsche symbolizes the end of metaphysics (the death not only of “God” but also, as a necessary consequence, of the human “subject”). Whether or not Nietzsche actually succeeded in “overcoming metaphysics”—by means of his inventive myths, his “fictions,” of the Will to Power, theUebermensch, and the Eternal Return—or whether, as Heidegger would have had it, he was simply the “last of the metaphysicians,” his own “last man” in effect, is a question still awaiting an answer. What I wish to reflect on in this chapter is the meaning of what has been and is going on in the wake of Nietzsche’s genealogically deconstructive critique of the Tradition. Where do we stand, where can we stand when the very concept of “ground,” the metaphysical concept par excellence, has been swept away?