Abstract

My dissertation develops and defends an account of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's theory of value, which Heidegger critiques in order to explain what it means to be human in the present age. Valuation--the positing of values--is the distinctively modern form of rationality. Nietzsche characterizes the significance of the present age as a crisis in our moral and religious values, which, we have realized, have a solely human origin. Nietzsche's response to this problem--termed 'nihilism'--is not to reject our values outright, but to affirm their human origin, by reinterpreting the nature of valuation. Heidegger finds Nietzsche's diagnosis of the present age accurate, but thinks the terms of his criticism bind him to the philosophical tradition from which he sought to free himself. For Nietzsche, all thinking, including philosophical thinking, amounts to evaluating ourselves and the world from the perspective of human life alone: this makes valuation radically autonomous. By taking human life as the exclusive standard of all valuation, Heidegger argues, Nietzsche rules out the possibility of a philosophical appraisal of what it means to understand life in these terms. Heidegger shows that Nietzsche therefore cannot understand how his thinking lies within the tradition which it brings to an end, and hence cannot understand what it uncovers about the present age