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March 10, 2005
In Chapter 8 of Nihilism (entitled 'The New Valuation') Heidegger continues to comment on and elucidate para 12 (B) in Bk I ('European Nihilism') of Nietzsche's The Will to Power. Nietzsche ends that paragraph thus:
"All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world--all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination--and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naivete of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things."
Heidegger comments:
'Nietzsche is saying that the essence of values has its ground in "constructs of domination." Values are essentially related to "domination". Dominance is the being in power of power. Values are bound to the will to power; they depend on it as the proper essence of power.'
Heidegger then makes an interesting comment. He says that for Nietzsche what is untrue and untenable about the highest values hitherto is not their content or meaning; it is that these values have been mistakenly dispatched to a realm existing it in itself, where they supposedly acquire absolute validity. It is mistaken because these values really have their origin and authority from a certain kind of will to power.
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