Between nihilism and nothingness: Heidegger's 'Auseinandersetzung' with Nietzsche

The thesis attempts to explain and defend Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche. Specifically, it responds to the charge that the reading is hermeneutically violent. My argument proceeds from two basic premises presented and developed in the Introduction. The first is that the confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) between Heidegger and Nietzsche--the violence itself--stems from Heidegger's attempt to come to terms with the phenomenon of contemporary nihilism, and, specifically, to distinguish between nihilism and genuine nothingness. The second is that his explicit critique of Nietzschean thought as the consummation of metaphysics--decried by critics as self-serving and reductive--is but a single dimension of this violence, like one voice in a contrapuntal composition. On this view, Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche aims neither at refutation nor at correction. Rather, it attempts to think, in concert with Nietzsche, a single matter (Sache) which is itself confrontational--the Auseinandersetzung of nihilism and nothingness.;For Heidegger, nihilism is nothingness in disguise. Its thoroughgoing negativity conceals the more original relation of nothingness to Being and human being (Dasein). At the same time, he argues that nothingness bodies forth in this deceptive form. The difference between nihilism and nothingness comes to pass, accordingly, in the advent of nihilism--an approach which itself conceals the withdrawal of nothingness. Nietzsche is decisive, in the task of thinking this subtle and complex difference--this Auseinandersetzung--both because he is the first to experience the advent of nihilism as such and because he too succumbs to it.;The body of the thesis explores the structure of this fundamental ambiguity--that uncanny distance, in Nietzschean thought, between revolutionary insight and victimization. Specifically, it reviews and evaluates Heidegger's treatment of three of Nietzsche's most basic philosophical concepts: nihilism (Chapter One), eternal recurrence (Chapters Two and Three) and will to power (Chapters Four, Five and Six). In the final chapter (Seven) I argue that, for Heidegger, Nietzsche's victimization by nihilism is itself the point of departure for a deeper experience of the difference between nihilism and nothingness, and that this experience remains crucial in responding to the challenge of contemporary nihilism.