Nietzsche’s Down Going

Martin Heidegger makes the claim in the essay “Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead” that Nietzsche’s thought is nihilistic. Heidegger understands Nietzsche’s idea of will to power as essentially the same as the Being of Western metaphysics. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger see Occidental thought as fundamentally nihilistic in that it has posited a non-sensuous, other world which is the transcendental basis for existence. I wish to defend Nietzsche by showing that while certain aspects of Nietzsche’s early thought was nihilistic, his later thought overcomes this nihilism through a process called “down going”… (view more)