Abstract

Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of the same exhibits the preoccupations and limitations of his middle and late periods. It situates Nietzsche in the grand narrative of the history of the misunderstanding of being that Heidegger was striving to map. Yet it thereby neglects the question of the primordiality and insuperability of mood that was a focus of Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. It does not acknowledge the alternative ontological path pursued by Nietzsche’s engagement with a world and time grounded in joy. This article attempts to defend Nietzsche by means of an appeal to the early Heidegger.