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November 7, 2007
Dale Allen Wilkerson in The Root of Heidegger's Concern for the Earth at the Consummation of Metaphysics: The Nietzsche Lectures in Cosmos and History attempts to situate Heidegger’s critique of modernity’s technological worldview within the conceptual context and time frame of his Nietzsche lectures of the 1930’s.
Heidegger discovers in Nietzsche’s thought the “consummation of metaphysics” and in Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power” an articulation of the world dominating principle reflecting modernity’s comportment with beings as mere resources for consumption.
Wilkinson says that Heidegger in a section entitled, “Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker,” of the Summer 1936 lecture advanced an argument that will be sustained throughout his confrontation with Nietzsche as “the last Metaphysician:”
This argument holds that the will to power is Nietzsche’s name for the basic character of all beings, a name that answers philosophy’s guiding question in a way that is decisive for all of Western metaphysics. Why is Nietzsche’s place in the past, present and future of Western metaphysics so decisive? How is this meditation on Nietzsche situated within the development of Heidegger’s thought concerning the Western world’s technological domination of the earth?
Modernity“completes itself” in the consummation of all metaphysics, expressed in Nietzsche’s “thought-path leading to the will to power,” an expression of “the unimpeded development of all the essential powers of beings.” Moreover, modernity is that age when the human being has developed its powers for thinking in such a way that beings are thought now to have taken complete “priority over Being.”
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