Commanding the earth and Ruling Religion: Nietzsche's Dionysian Apocalypse of Man
Nietzsche's classic work, unfinished and unpublished when he collapsed into insanity, is the most controversial of his works. Some avoid using it as the basis of their Nietzsche studies because they cannot be sure if these thoughts are genuinely Niietzsch's, a question that is largely a question of the way Nietzsche's legacy was handled by his sister. However, some who have interpreted Nietzsche, most notably Heidegger, tend to emphasize this work above his other works, especially with respect to clarifying the question of Nietzsche's thought and its relationship to metaphysics. I sympathize with this approach to Nietzsche, for Heidegger was a philosopher interpreting a philosopher, and his judgement can, perhaps, be considered valuable for that reason, but not for that reason alone: I think Heidegger reads Nietzsche in a way that allows him to best see how the various parts of Nietzsche's philosophy can be conjoined so as to facilitate its proper interpretation: the will-to-power has a central relationship, Heidegger asserts, to all of the other parts of Nietzsche's thought, so he tends to read Nietszsche to some degree as a systematic thinker, which in another sense, cannot be further from the truth: Heidegger and Nietzsche both seek to do justice to the complexities or oversimplicities of modernity, but they also seek to found a discourse that is faithful to the almost infinite perspectives that are existentially possible.
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