The Discrepancy between Philosophy and Art: Questions Opened by Heidegger’s Nietzsche

A discrepância entre filosofia e arte: questões abertas pelo Nietzsche de Heidegger

Abstract

The article examines the issue of the discrepancy between art and philosophy, starting from Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, and more specifically from the 1936-37 lecture course The Will to Power as Art. After briefly recalling the importance of Nietzsche for Heidegger’s reflections on art and following Heidegger’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, the focus shifts to what both Nietzsche and Heidegger call Zwiespalt-the discrepancy, precisely, between beauty and truth-an element of tension and interplay between the properly philosophical and the artistic dimensions. In conclusion, the article asks whether and how this insight might still be useful today, beyond Nietzsche and Heidegger, for reinterpreting the relationship between the two spheres and disciplines.

Keywords:
Discrepancy; Heidegger; Nietzsche; Art; Beauty; Truth.

Resumo

O artigo examina a questão da discrepância entre arte e filosofia, partindo da leitura que Heidegger faz de Nietzsche, e mais especificamente do curso de palestras de 1936-37, A Vontade de Poder como Arte. Após recordar brevemente a importância de Nietzsche para as reflexões de Heidegger sobre a arte e seguir a reconstrução heideggeriana da estética de Nietzsche, o foco se desloca para aquilo que tanto Nietzsche quanto Heidegger chamam de Zwiespalt - a discrepância, precisamente, entre beleza e verdade - um elemento de tensão e de interação entre as dimensões propriamente filosófica e artística. Em conclusão, o artigo pergunta se e como essa percepção ainda pode ser útil hoje, para além de Nietzsche e Heidegger, na reinterpretação da relação entre as duas esferas e disciplinas.

Palavras-chave
Discrepância; Heidegger; Nietzsche; Arte; Beleza; Verdade.

Introduction

This paper aims to bring into intersection two classical questions - What is art? and What is philosophy? - beginning from their discrepancy. It will do so by focusing primarily on Heidegger’s 1936-37 lecture course The Will to Power as Art¹, for three reasons, which in some way already mark the articulation of what follows:

• 1. The importance of Nietzsche in Heidegger’s considerations on art

• 2. Theses on art and on the relation between truth and beauty

• 3. The discrepancy between the beautiful and the true in Heidegger and Nietzsche

• 4. Conclusion: The discrepancy between art/the arts and philosophy/philosophies as a legacy to be thought

The importance of Nietzsche in Heidegger’s considerations on art

In the title of this paper I have used a kind of play on words, a sort of reversal. Instead of “Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” I have written “Nietzsche’s Heidegger.” There is a reason for this, on which I will briefly dwell, since it is functional to what follows.

Most Heidegger scholars agree in emphasizing the decisive presence of Nietzsche in the years of the so-called Kehre (the “turn,” between the 1930s and 1940s)². Personally, however, I consider it important to underline that this encounter or confrontation unfolds in stages, passing through several phases. I locate the first decisive encounter between Heidegger and Nietzsche between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, when it takes on distinctly political traits, mediated also by Ernst Jünger: Nietzsche brings Heidegger closer to the decision of the Rectorship, and the Rectorship brings him closer to Nietzsche³.

A first shift can already be placed in 1934, the year of Heidegger’s resignation from the Rectorship. The re-reading that, in those months, Heidegger makes of his own thought and of his own (also political) errors begins again from what he still in 1960 calls the “abyss-Nietzsche”⁴.

There is no single or homogeneous interpretation that Heidegger gives of Nietzsche; rather, as Heidegger’s own thinking turns, modifies itself, retraces or leaps forward, his reading of Nietzsche also changes - a thinker who, in a certain way, always serves him as a mirror: the closest and the most distant, as he will say. A mirror or abyss so deep that Heidegger himself sinks into it, risking his own life: «der Nietzsche hat mich kaputtgemacht» - he will confess toward the end of the 1940s⁵. His re-emergence will correspond also to a distancing from Nietzsche’s philosophy and to a progressive approximation to the poetic thinking of Hölderlin.

Yet I personally believe that the most interesting Auseinandersetzung (confrontation) between our two thinkers is precisely the one found “in the middle,” that is, in the first two Heideggerian lecture courses dedicated to Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art (1936-37) and The Eternal Recurrance of the Same (1937). Here we find a kind of “Nietzscheanization” of Heidegger. Heidegger immerses himself in the Abgrund-Nietzsche and draws from it questions, terms, provocations.

In this sense I use the expression “Nietzsche’s Heidegger.” This is not yet the phase in which Nietzsche will be pressed entirely within the history of metaphysics, like a poisonous insect finally pinned with a nail in a display case (assuming Heidegger ever truly succeeds in settling accounts with Nietzsche). It is still the phase of the Körper-an-Körper, the “hand-to-hand struggle.” And this makes these Heideggerian pages particularly difficult but also fascinating.

In many passages one is truly compelled to stop and ask: who is speaking here - Nietzsche or Heidegger? Perhaps neither of them, if taken in themselves, in the total perspective of their thought. On the one hand, Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is certainly reductive, and no genuine Nietzschean would accept it entirely. But the reverse can also be said: many statements that Heidegger makes in these lectures (which seem very Nietzschean) he himself will no longer endorse, even just a few years later.

We are thus faced with a hybrid position, and precisely for that reason a fascinating one: a stance on art that is neither Nietzsche’s alone nor Heidegger’s alone - and which, for that very reason, unfolds before our eyes as a play of theoretical possibilities rather than a merely historiographical reconstruction⁶ (Nietzsche’s Heidegger).

Having said this, I now turn to the second point, briefly recalling matters that are well known.

Theses on Art and on the Relation between Truth and Beauty

“Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life,” writes Nietzsche in a posthumous fragment (inserted into The Will to Power, aph. 853)⁷. Even this single quotation would suffice to summarize Nietzsche’s position. Heidegger takes it up in his lectures, but within that framework he then adds five further quotations, which he calls “Five Theses of Nietzsche on Art.” The systematization is, of course, Heidegger’s, yet the “theses” are literally composed from Nietzsche’s own words taken from the section of The Will to Power devoted to art.

I) “Art is the most perspicuous and familiar configuration of will to power” (The Will to Power, §797).

Nietzsche literally actually writes as follows in aphorism 797: "The phenomenon 'artist' is still the most transparent." Why? Because it can be scrutinized easily. In a sort of regression toward the origin - from the more distant to the nearer (and immediately familiar) - the first Nietzschean-Heideggerian step moves from the will to power in general to the phenomenon of art; the second, from art to the artist.

It thus becomes necessary to ask: why should the experience of the artist be more easily observable and comprehensible - and In what respect, and in comparison to whom, is art easier? In comparison to the philosopher and philosophy. For the philosopher conceptualizes and abstracts, distancing himself from the world and from concrete existence, whereas the artist remains profoundly anchored in life. The artist does not lose himself in abstractions: he lives by creating, and creates by living. And, as Nietzsche declares, “Life is the form of being most familiar to us” (The Will to Power, aph. 689).

With this, Heidegger can rewind the thread: we immediately understand life by living; art is the transparency of life and thus helps us both to live it better and to understand it better. We are all called to be creators of ourselves, but the artist has one task more: he shows us that it is possible to do and to be so; he shows us the sense of creation in the most powerful and beautiful way.

With this, description becomes prescription, as is evident in the second thesis.

II) “Art must be grasped in terms of the artist".

With this thesis, Heidegger summarizes and refers in particular to aphorism 796 and 811. Here Nietzsche reveals his somewhat misogynistic side, when he writes: “Our aesthetics hitherto has been a woman’s aesthetics to the extent that only the receivers of art have formulated their ex perience of 'what is beautiful?' In all philosophy hitherto the artist is lacking.” But questions of gender do not concern us here. The meaning, stripped of metaphor, of what “Nietzsche’s Heidegger” is saying is clear: one must pass from a receptive posture to an active one, from an aesthetics that seeks the beautiful in the eyes of those who behold to an aesthetics that produces the beautiful from the bodies of those who create.

We thus arrive at the third thesis, which is in fact phrased more in Heidegger’s than in Nietzsche’s lexicon.

III) “Art is the fundamental occurrence of every being”.

What does this mean? Art is creation, as we have said. It is poiesis. Yet, properly speaking, every thing and every living being (what Heidegger calls Seiendes [entity, being-there] and Nietzsche calls “will to power” or “life”) is possibility and potency of creation. Life creates and recreates itself continually. Art in the proper sense is only one aspect - the most powerful and transparent - of this continual, self-creating, poietic, artistic process that is life itself.

If by “art” we mean the phenomenon of creation (Schaffen) - of every Seiendes - then the Third Thesis becomes clear: “Art is the fundamental occurrence of every being.” From here follows also the fourth thesis.

IV) “Art is the distinctive countermovement to nihilism”.

We read already in the framing aphorism 853: “Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life.” Nietzsche adds in the same fragment: “Art as the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life, as that which is anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinihilist par excellence.” Art is against everything that has decadently blocked life’s vitality - the Christian-bourgeois morality, pessimism, the devaluation of values thrown into nothingness so that nothing truly has meaning. Art shows that the beautiful is hidden in every thing and every existence. To live is itself a value. And to this life - our life, every life - we can and must say Yes. Hence, the final thesis.

V) Art is worth more than 'the truth’⁸.

“Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.” (aph. 822). Here Nietzsche clearly refers to the illusory idea of an objective truth - veritas as adaequatio - static, conceptual, truth-as-death. Art surpasses (this kind of) truth precisely because it does not posit or propose itself as an absolute, because it does not aim to fix in concepts something that by definition is living, in becoming, and ungraspable. Philosophical-scientific truth is ugly because it mortifies; art is beautiful because it dances with existence - it dances existence itself.

I have deliberately been concise regarding this well-known part of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures, which I needed primarily to arrive here, at what for me is the central issue: the relation - or rather, the discrepancy - between art and truth.

Let us now attempt to analyze this problem in Heidegger and Nietzsche more closely, and then, in conclusion, we shall try to see what space of questioning this issue leaves open for us.

The Discrepancy between the Beautiful and the True in Heidegger and Nietzsche

Let me begin with a passage from a posthumous fragment of 1888, one on which Heidegger also dwells, in opening the section of his Lecture course on Nietzsche entitled The Raging Discordance between Truth and Art (Heidegger, 1991, pp. 142 ff.). Nietzsche writes:

Über das Verhältniß der Kunst zur Wahrheit bin ich am frühesten ernst geworden: und noch jetzt stehe ich mit einem heiligen Entsetzen (italics mine) vor diesem Zwiespalt (italics mine). Mein erstes Buch <war> ihm geweiht; die Geburt der Tragödie glaubt an die Kunst auf dem Hintergrund eines anderen Glaubens: daß es nicht möglich ist mit der Wahrheit zu leben; daß der 'Wille zur Wahrheit' bereits ein Symptom der Entartung ist (The relation of art to truth was the first thing that struck me as problematic: and even now I stand before this discrepancy with a kind of sacred dread. My first book was dedicated to it: The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief - that it is not possible to live with the truth; that the will to truth is already a symptom of degeneration.): Nachgelassene Fragmente Frühjahr-Sommer 1888, 16 [40].

The translation is mine. Daniel Fidel Ferrer’s version⁹ reads as follows

About the relation of art to truth, I'm the earliest become seriously and yet here I am with a holy horror of this conflict. My first book dedicated to him; the birth of tragedy believes in art against the background of a different faith: that it is not possible to live with the truth: that the "will to truth" is already a symptom of degeneracy is...

Here two terms are crucial. The first is Ent-setzen - literally, the un-grounding, the opening of the abyss, the loss of any place to stand. The term is translated into English with these synonyms terror, horror, consternation, appal, appall, horrify. In my view, the most appropriate translation is consternation: from the Latin root: con- (intensive) + sternĕre (‘to spread’); literally: ‘to throw to the ground,’ ‘to lay flat on the ground.’ It is an emotional tone already characteristic of Hölderlin’s poetry, which Heidegger would later reprise in the 1930s to signal the transition from the end of Metaphysics to the New beginning of the History of Being.

But above all, we find the noun Zwiespalt. The term in the translation of the Nietzschean passage we have examined (edited by Ferrer) is rendered as conflict, whereas in the translation of the Heideggerian passage (edited by Krell) it is rendered as discordance¹⁰. In the official French Heideggerian translation by Pierre Klossowski, the term is rendered as désaccord; in the Italian version by Franco Volpi, as discrepanza; and in the official Nietzschean edition by Colli and Montinari, as dissidio.

Personally, I prefer Volpi’s translation, because - as we will see more clearly later - it preserves the idea of a division/duality and also emphasizes the notion of a crack, which recurs as a metaphor in Heidegger. This is also the reason why I chose Discrepancy for the title of my essay, and I will continue to use this translation.

The term becomes central in Heidegger, while it is not central in Nietzsche. If one searches through the Nietzsche Source database¹¹, one finds Zwiespalt appearing only about fifteen times across Nietzsche’s published works, posthumous fragments, and letters.

Heidegger, however - acutely in my view, focusing on quality rather than quantity - makes it a key notion.

Before returning to Heidegger, it is worth pausing on Nietzsche. In the 1888 posthumous fragment just cited, Nietzsche, rereading himself retrospectively, interprets The Birth of Tragedy as a Zwiespalt. But what are the elements of this discrepancy in Nietzsche’s text?

Proceeding beyond Heidegger and independently of his framework, if we take the youthful Nietzsche's work in hand, we find here the first ever occurrence of the term Zwiespalt, in the opening paragraph, where the word designates the contrast (Gegensatz) between Apollo and Dionysus: “These two very different drives (Triebe),” writes the young Nietzsche, “exist side by side, mostly in open Zwiespalt, stimulating and provoking (reizen) one another to give birth to ever-new, yet ever exciting each other to new, more vigorous births.” (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 14).

Thus, in The Birth of Tragedy, Zwiespalt signifies the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus: two different elements - “side by side,” as we read - whose very coexistence produces "discord", "conflict". It almost seems to be an agon, a kind of amorous struggle, since Nietzsche himself defines it as a reciprocal excitation that produces fruits - literally "Geburten", “births”: “enticing one another to ever new and stronger births” (mit einander und sich gegenseitig zu immer neuen kräftigeren Geburten reizend). We should keep this definition in mind.

Returning now to the 1888 fragment and to Heidegger’s interpretation: Heidegger quotes this passage in which the discord is no longer expressed as the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus but as the discrepancy between art and truth. In doing so, Heidegger makes explicit what in Nietzsche had remained only an implicit intuition, an unspoken insight.

From this point, then, begins not Nietzsche’s thesis but that of Nietzsche’s Heidegger: that the entire history of aesthetics - and, one might say, of metaphysics itself - can be read in the light of this discrepancy.

The first to grasp it (to summarize rather brutally, and thus at Heidegger’s expense) is Plato. Yet he conceives and interprets discrepancy above all as distance (Abstand) and severance (Entzweiung): a division that places truth above art. For Plato, however, this is not yet a problem. Why? Because it is a “a severance which at bottom can be a concordance" (eine Entzweiung, die im Grunde eine Zusammenklang ist), i.e. which still allows truth and art to remain in harmony - like an accord in which there is both a higher and a lower tone, yet precisely this difference enables the harmony to resound (Heidegger, 1991, pp. 188-89).

This is evident in the eros of the Phaedrus: beauty - “the most radiant” (ekphanéstaton) and “the most lovable” (erasmiṓtaton) - transports one into being, accomplishing the same movement that aletheia performs when it unveils being. And “this severance, Zwiespalt in the broad sense, is a felicitous one" (Heidegger, 1991, pp. 198).

Philosophy remains above art, yet the division between beauty and truth, in both the philosopher and the ordinary person, still composes itself harmoniously.

This harmony, however, is lost in the history of the West, in the successive stages of Aesthetics (which, for Heidegger, run parallel to those of Metaphysics). Nietzsche stands at the end of this trajectory, and within this Zwiefalt - a dual-fold that opens as a fissure upon the abyss - he no longer stands calmly or harmoniously. In Nietzsche, the division finally emerges as a Zwiespalt, becoming abscission (Zerrissenheit) (Heidegger, 1991, pp. 188-89). And from here arises the consternation (Entsetzen).

Truth implodes and sinks into nothingness. Humanity too would perish - were it not for art ("We possess art lest we perish of the truth”, aph. 822). The death of God is the death of truth.

Yet there is another possibility: a counter-movement (Gegenbewegung). This movement against decadence, pessimism, and passive nihilism is embodied in the creative possibilities of the artist (as we saw in the previous section).

But is it only possibilities of the artist? Nietzsche himself already answered negatively: “To look at science through the prism of the artist, but also to look at art through the prism of life,” he wrote in his An Attempt at Self-Criticism - his retrospective re-reading of The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 5).

Heidegger, in the conclusion of his 1936-37 Course, takes up this quotation and interprets it in his own way. First, he distances himself from the early twentieth-century “aestheticist” and “vitalist” readings, according to which Nietzsche’s aim would be to transform the sciences into something artistically configured, and thus closer to life. For Heidegger, on the contrary, that Nietzschean statement - together with others - reveals that what is at stake is the relation among Being and Entity: the fundamental question of Heidegger's thinking.

Secondly - and this, to me, is the most interesting and least predictable point - Nietzschean statement, according to Heidegger, compels us to rethink the arena of the relation between art and truth, not in the direction of a jumbling (Vermischung) of art and science (or art and philosophy), nor in that of a weakening, a subjecting (Verharmlosung) of knowledge, nor yet in the servitude (Nützen, Dienen) of art to science, but rather in the direction of the creative force (schaffende Kraft) that characterizes them both and places both beyond “immediate utility and … vacuous eternal significance”. It is the usefulness of the useless - that which characterizes both the arts and philosophy (Heidegger, 1991, pp. 219-220).

Other themes could be drawn from Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche - for example, the centrality of the body, of affective openness, and so on. But let us move now to the final point, the concluding and applicative one.

The Discrepancy between Art/Arts and Philosophy/Philosophies as a Legacy to Be Thought

Let us now take up once again the concept of Zwiespalt in relation to the questions “What is philosophy?” and “What is art?”

For Nietzsche, as we have said, Zwiespalt is a kind of amorous agon, a reciprocal excitement that produces fruits, creations, ever new and stronger “births.” This certainly still applies today to the relation between philosophy and art - but also to the relation between philosophy and the other forms of knowledge.

For Heidegger, instead, what is Zwiespalt? In the 1936-37 lecture course, Heidegger writes: “What does Zwiespalt mean? … We do speak of a "split" (Spalt) in relation to the gap that separates two soaring cliffs”. The discrepancy (Zwiespalt) is the opening of two that are divided, but “they, of themselves, are relate to each other" (Heidegger, 1991, p. 187).

Thus, discrepancy implies a “two”: Zwie, zwei; and these two stand upon a Spalt, a crack, a cleft, an abyss. Yet they are not each upon this abyss separately; rather, they are like two slopes of the same chasm, or, if the metaphor may be allowed, two rocky banks of the same river. They are neither two entities or experiences enclosed within their own monadic isolation, nor two kinds of knowledge mixed together, nor two dynamics subordinated one to the other (as we noted before). The elements of a discrepancy stand in an equal relation to one another: two perspectives upon the same Abgrund. A Gegensätzlichkeit - an opposition, a counter-position - in which there is the “against,” but also the “being-with” in relation to the other. Heidegger writes: “In every opposition, agreement prevails in one respect, whereas in other respects there is variance. But whatever diverges in the same respect in which it agrees slips into discordance” (Heidegger, 1991, p. 189). In one respect concord, in another diversity: that which at once agrees and diverges occurs in reciprocal co-belonging and falls into Zwiespalt. In discrepancy, one is - conjoined yet distinct: together they stand or they fall.

This is, in essence, what Heidegger, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, after the Kehre, will say of the relation between thought and poetry: two parallel lines that relate to one another in a subtle yet clear difference. They are parallel only insofar as they are in relation to each other; but, as parallels, they neither intertwine nor intersect, one does not become the other -the difference safeguards their identity and, conversely, the identity protects their difference¹². The world would be poorer, life diminished, if philosophy were to lose itself in the arts, and vice versa.

Let me conclude with one last remark that, I believe, is interesting both as an internal question within Heidegger and as a perspective beyond Heidegger.

I)Within Heidegger: it is worth noting that, in these same pages, when he speaks of Plato, Heidegger translates diaphorà as Zwiespalt: the diaphorà “between philosophy and poetry, which is to say, between knowledge and art, truth and beauty.” (Heidegger, 1991, p. 190).

This is striking, since - as we know - in later years Heidegger will instead superimpose diaphorà upon Austrag, the “differing/differentiation.”

II)Beyond Heidegger¹³. What if we were to invert the perspective of the later Heidegger? What if we were now called to think difference not so much - or not only - as Austrag, but precisely as Zwiespalt?

Let me attempt to unfold the question beyond the German terminology. Perhaps the task proper to philosophy is not only to think the ontological difference or the differing/deferment (as in the letter of the later Heidegger), but also - and perhaps above all - to think itself in its difference from alterity. In response to the question “What is philosophy?”, the philosopher may certainly answer through an understanding of one’s own work (be it historical or theoretical), but also - and perhaps today more than ever - the philosopher should respond through a confrontation with what is non-philosophy: whether that alterity be common thought, the everyday world, the urgencies of our time, or science, technology, artificial intelligence - or the arts.

Could it be that Heidegger’s legacy paradoxically compels us to lead philosophy out of the narrow enclosures of merely ontological-historical thought, and to venture onto the banks of a thought of co-relational difference, of the dialogue of the self with the other, of the “between,” of the enriching interval? (One might think here of Derrida, Ricoeur, Jullien.)

Of course, this is not the conclusion of Heidegger, nor of Nietzsche, nor of “Heidegger’s Nietzsche”. Yet, in any case, I believe we can apply to both what Heidegger writes of Nietzsche himself: “Whatever is a need in Nietzsche, (…) does not apply to anyone else; for Nietzsche is who he is, and he is unique [and Heidegger is unique]. Yet such singularity (…) becomes fruitful when seen within the basic movement of Western thought.” (Heidegger, 1991, p. 66)

What is art? What is philosophy? They can no longer tell us.

Now, in the dialogue between us, it is up to us to answer.

• How to cite:
  CAPUTO, Annalisa. The Discrepancy between Philosophy and Art: Questions Opened by Heidegger’s Nietzsche. Revista de Filosofia Aurora, Curitiba, v. 38, e202633704, 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/2965-1557.038.e202633704
• 1
  I will refer to the page numbers of David Farrell Krell’s translation, Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I. The translation has been consistently compared with the original German edition, from which the German words or key phrases appearing in the essay are taken.
  For a general reconstruction of this lecture course and of the Heidegger/Nietzsche relationship in connection with art, see at least the following studies that have addressed the issue: Davey 1981; Taminiaux 1999; Drucker 2004; Moretti 2005; Figal 2010; Sinnerbrink 2012; Mäcklin 2017. Other, more specific studies will be mentioned in the course of the essay.
• 2
  In particular, I refer to Krell (1975).
• 3
  See Caputo (2001; 2005); Elkayam (2022).
• 4
  Heidegger writes as follows (1987, p. 320) in a letter to M. Boss, while explaining to his friend the work he is doing on the two volumes of Nietzsche.
• 5
  This remark (which Heidegger often made in conversation with his friends and acquaintances during the period of his Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche) is recalled and commented upon by several prominent figures (Gadamer, von Herrmann, Pöggeler, Müller-Lauter), interviewed on the subject by the philosophical journal Aletheia: Weinfeld, Wischke (1996). See in particular the section entitled Heidegger und Nietzsche, pp. 19-26.
• 6
  A different position is taken by scholars who recover Nietzsche after Heidegger; see Winchester (1994), Colony (2003); Casale (2006).
• 7
  We shall take for granted all that concerns the edition of The Will to Power. It is well known that this book was not edited by Nietzsche himself, but by Peter Gast and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. In the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works edited by Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli, all of Nietzsche’s original fragments are available. However, Heidegger quotes from The Will to Power; for this reason, we too will at times refer to it, quoting from the English edition by Kaufmann and Hollingdale: Nietzsche (1967), while always verifying the German text in the original critical edition-aware that Nietzsche scholars can easily return to that edition themselves.
  In this case, the passage in question is aphorism 853, §II of The Will to Power.
  One final note before proceeding. This aphorism is the last of the section of The Will to Power entitled The Will to Power as Art. For us readers, it is significant and interesting to note that-in this particular “anthology” of Nietzschean thoughts-there is indeed a section with such a title. Nietzsche himself might not have called it that (though who can say?), yet Heidegger clearly titles his lecture course in this way, inspired by the title of this specific section, which runs from aphorism 794 to aphorism 853; it is the fourth section of the third book (recall that The Will to Power was divided into four books).
• 8
  See in particular Magrini (2009); Giacomelli (2018).
• 9
  Nietzsche (2012).
• 10
  On this point, see Krell (1976) and Switzer (2012); the latter (p. 431) is categorical: "Who is Heidegger's Nietzsche? The question hangs over any reading of these texts. One thing Nietzsche first was, and then was not, for Heidegger, was the thinker of raging discord."
• 11
  http://www.nietzschesource.org/
• 12
  Heidegger, 1971, p. 90.
• 13
  See Babich (1989) who speaks of a post-aesthetic perspective.

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• Editors-in-chief:
  Léo Peruzzo Júnior and Jelson Oliveira.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 June 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  01 Nov 2025
• Accepted
  04 Feb 2026