Nietzsche, Metaphysician of the Sensuous

From the 1930s onward, poetry and art occupy a central position in Heidegger's thought, as they were intimately connected to the question of aletheia. The question is: why art in relation to truth? One answer is that Heidegger begins to think of art in response to Nietzsche's claim that ‘art is worth more than truth’, and as a result of a critical examination of the historical trajectory that has led Nietzsche to this position. Heidegger believes that we can only speak of the beginnings of philosophy through the end: we must ‘ponder the former dawn through what is imminent’ (EGT, 18). For Nietzsche the reversal of metaphysical truth happens through art, and so, it is art that Heidegger must ponder. Although Heidegger disagrees with Nietzsche's basic position on art, he follows Nietzsche in maintaining art as a possible way out of the destitution into which philosophy has fallen. Heidegger's examination of Nietzsche is essential for understanding the impetus behind his project of re-conceptualising truth and art. Moreover, we find that Heidegger's concern for articulating a new conception of a people-to-come is also prefigured by Nietzsche, for whom the Overman can be viewed not as an individual figure, but as the pure possibility of a future humanity.

Heidegger's analysis of Nietzsche is circumscribed by the question of Being. Accordingly, Nietzsche's two fundamental ideas, the will to power and the eternal return, must be thought together in relation to the question of Being: eternal recurrence as the supreme determination of Being and will to power as the basic character of all beings. Heidegger's articulation of these thoughts in terms of the question of Being indicates his attempt to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker. The first two volumes of Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures are devoted to explicating these two fundamental thoughts, and they place art at the centre of Nietzsche's thought – as the title of the first volume, The Will to Power as Art, suggests. In this first lecture, Heidegger examines Nietzsche's claim that art means more than truth.