This brief piece aims to isolate the central point of contention between Nietzsche and Heidegger, two thinkers unmistakably shaped by the Post-Kantian transformation of philosophy. Both seek to recover the primordial ground of metaphysical questioning in order to rethink the meaning of human freedom. For Nietzsche, this requires driving a wedge beneath the Platonic elevation of Parmenidean Being over Heraclitean becoming, and showing that “Being” is nothing more than an interpretive stamp imposed upon flux by the will to power. The doctrine of eternal return names the necessity of this very illusion: the unavoidable recurrence of life’s creative and life-sustaining fictions. Heidegger acknowledges the profundity of Nietzsche’s diagnosis—he sees in it the final and most radical expression of Western metaphysics, along with its unsettling consequence that reality itself may appear as illusion. In response, Heidegger proposes not another metaphysical reversal but a transformation in our mode of disclosure: a way of letting Being be that frees it from the metaphysical demand to appear as either stable presence or illusory projection, allowing it instead to show itself on its own terms.
An Attitude of Questioning
A common polemical habit today is to dismiss a philosophy by branding it “metaphysical,” and therefore obsolete. This is not Heidegger’s procedure. For Heidegger, the metaphysical question is not an embarrassment to be abolished but a privileged clue: it reveals how an epoch understands its own horizon of intelligibility. Every metaphysical question—any question of Being—already discloses a stance toward that which is being questioned; without some prior access, the question could not even arise.
According to Heidegger, the tacit presupposition guiding the entire Western tradition is that Being has an essence—that Being itself is some kind of being. The guiding question, from the Greeks onward, has therefore been: What is Being? (ti to on). This, for Heidegger, reveals the underlying intention of the West: to seize control of Being’s disclosive power by determining it, by rendering Being conceptually governable (archē), as the highest ground or principle.
The more original and yet unasked question is not “What is Being?” but “How is it with Being?” Heidegger’s project is not to provide a new definition of Being—not to supply a genus and species, a phusis of Being—but to cultivate an attitude of openness in which Being is permitted to show itself from itself. To question the meaning of Being is thus not to impose a determination but to prepare oneself for a letting-be, for a listening that allows Being to “speak” in its own manner.
This attunement shapes Heidegger’s reading of the history of philosophy. He searches in each thinker for the ontological question they take themselves to be answering. A thinker becomes “metaphysical” the moment they pose the question “What is Being?”—regardless of the answer that follows. Whether the reply invokes transcendent forms, rational structures, mechanistic causes, or even a speculative ontology of becoming, the decisive point is the form of the question. If the inquiry seeks to determine an essence of Being so that the whole of beings may be grounded in that essence, the thinker remains within metaphysics.
Nietzsche as Instructive Case
Nietzsche is a particularly illuminating example. He famously portrays himself as an anti-metaphysician, rejecting the Platonic, Christian, and rationalistic determinations of Being. Yet his opposition is directed toward a particular answer, not toward the metaphysical framing of the question itself. By ultimately grounding beings in becoming—through the will to power as the form of becoming and eternal recurrence as its necessity—Nietzsche unwittingly reinstates the very structure he wishes to overcome. His philosophy liberates us from the earlier answers to the question of Being, but not from the question’s metaphysical demand to yield a principle.
For Heidegger, the limitation here is not primarily conceptual but attitudinal. Metaphysics is a speaking-over Being, a refusal to let Being show itself in its own way. Even the critique of metaphysics may perpetuate metaphysics if it dictates in advance what Being “really is.” Nietzsche’s gesture—identifying Being as a life-serving fiction imposed on flux—remains within the metaphysical desire to determine the Being of beings.
Nietzsche and Heidegger agree that representation is the decisive error of Western thought. For Nietzsche, representation is a symptom of reactive life: the will to truth becomes a will to fixity, freezing becoming into stable concepts. His counter-move—perspectivism, becoming, eternal recurrence—is meant to expose all such fixities as fictions. Yet for Heidegger, Nietzsche remains bound to the traditional attitude implicit in the question “What is Being?” For Nietzsche, becoming becomes the new ground. This still represents Being—it still names what Being is. The content of metaphysics is overturned, but its form remains intact.
In Heidegger’s terms, the ground of representation is not becoming but giving: Being gives the clearing in which beings may appear. This giving cannot be conceptualized or grounded in a principle such as “becoming,” because it is prior to any grounding. To think Being as giving is to assume an attitude of openness toward its self-showing, rather than arriving prematurely at a conclusion about what Being must be.
A Word on Nietzsche’s Metaphysics
A common objection to Heidegger’s reading insists that Nietzsche has escaped metaphysics because, for Nietzsche, Being is precisely revealed as an illusion. On this view, Nietzsche’s own account of Being—as a provisional “stamp” imposed on becoming by the will to power—refuses to grant Being any metaphysical privilege. Nietzsche replaces the primacy of Being with a self-consciously fabricated, life-affirming fiction, openly acknowledged as a necessary imaginative construction rather than a metaphysical fact. If Nietzsche treats even his own account as interpretive illusion, how can he still be charged with reversing and thereby preserving metaphysics?
The objection fails, however, on Heidegger’s terms. It correctly notes that Nietzsche denies Being any substantive reality. But this very gesture—reducing Being to a creative illusion—does not free him from metaphysics; it completes it. For Heidegger, metaphysics is not the belief in real essences but the attempt to determine the Being of beings: to explain the totality of what-is through a grounding principle, whether this principle is eidos, substance, consciousness, process, or—here—becoming. Even if Nietzsche calls this principle a fiction, its metaphysical function remains unchanged. Will to power still provides the universal form of becoming; eternal recurrence still gives its necessity; together they articulate an ontological structure meant to account for all beings.
Indeed, Nietzsche’s self-awareness radicalizes the metaphysical impulse. By replacing the Platonic illusion of a stable Being with the cosmic illusion of dynamic becoming, Nietzsche internalizes and dynamizes the metaphysical need for grounding. Becoming receives the dignity of Being even as its “Being” is framed as fiction. Nietzsche inverts Platonism, but inversion is still dependence. His return to the pre-Socratic tension between Heraclitean flux and Parmenidean necessity reproduces the metaphysical structure he seeks to overcome—now in intensified, self-conscious form. What is missing here is the moment where Being is allowed to speak for itself.
To put our finger on the decisive difference between Nietzsche and Heidegger, we must recognize that for Heidegger dunamis—power, ability, the inner articulation of potentiality—is not will, nor any sublimated form of willing. It is receptivity: openness, Geworfenheit (thrownness), Erschlossenheit (disclosedness). Will is a derivative comportment, a taking-a-stand on beings that already presupposes an understanding of Being. Heidegger’s notion of dunamis therefore names a fundamental passibility (the capacity to be affected) rather than a volitional force, distinguishing his account from the voluntarist lineage running from Augustine through Scotus, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, and culminating in Nietzsche. For Heidegger, the will (even as force in the Nietzschean sense) does not generate possibilities but responds to them; possibility is always prior, given, and constitutive of Dasein’s very structure. It is no accident that this formulation bears a Kantian silhouette—Heidegger is recovering, in transformed form, the transcendental insight that conditions of possibility precede any act of willing.1
So in Nietzsche life becomes creative, revealing its power by willing representations—by artistically shaping a world. This is will to power. (One wonders what Alexander the Great would have made of such a claim.) For Heidegger, however, this formulation presupposes a prior intelligibility. Phenomenology discloses something more primordial: that the form of possibility is prior to any act of willful representation. Possibilities are not produced by the will but received in the thrown openness of existence. The will acts, but only within a clearing it did not create.
Conclusion
Nietzsche’s brilliance is on full display in his return to the origin of Western metaphysics in order to overturn the ancient hierarchy that privileges Parmenidean Being over Heraclitean becoming. In doing so, he exposes what is structurally possible within metaphysical thought itself: the reduction of Being to a life-serving illusion. Yet this insight, for all its power, remains a move internal to metaphysics due to its reliance on the attitude of metaphysical questioning. In the everyday conduct of life, Being does not appear as illusion; beings are never encountered as mere “stamps” upon a flux. The claim that Being is illusory arises only within a metaphysical stance that has already abstracted from lived experience. It is not the view of a being-in-the-world oriented by Care.
Once we step outside metaphysical thinking and return to the phenomenological terrain of our own existence, nothing in reality presents itself as illusion. Instead, an entirely different vocabulary and grammar are required—one adequate to the contours of disclosedness, concern, and finitude that shape our primordial encounter with the world. It is in this transformation of attunement, rather than in metaphysical invention or inversion, that Heidegger seeks a more originary freedom.
Appendix: a phenomenological search for Becoming
I question my walking as I walk.
Where do we see Being, and where becoming? The street offers both without contradiction. Cars rush past, dissolving into the horizon—pure appearing and vanishing, the shimmer of becoming in its most literal sense. Beside them, buildings rise and persist, sentinel-like, dwelling with me for a time. Yet they too shift: as I move, they slide from profile to periphery, from presence to behind-me, never quite gone.
And still, neither the cars nor buildings vanish into nothing. They remain as traces—embodied memory folded into the very act of perceiving. I know where the buildings stand even when I no longer see them. I know where the cars are going even after they disappear. This knowing is not an afterthought; it is already latent in the perception itself, a horizon accompanying every step.
I can imaginatively traverse every room in the building behind me; I can populate it with the ordinary mysteries of other lives. I can imagine where the cars are headed as they vanish down the horizon. And I can imagine where I am going—back home, where it is warm. The reality of these imaginations is not illusion but possibility: an ontological potency through which the world continues to show itself beyond what is strictly present.
- An example may help to illustrate Heidegger’s point: Alexander the Great was born a prince. His greatness was already a possibility. He certainly willed it—he pursued it with ferocity—but he did not will the possibility itself into being. The horizon of his potentiality was given before any act of will, disclosed through his birth, world, upbringing, language, and historical situation. His will only operated within that opened clearing. For Heidegger, all willing is like this: it is drawn into possibilities, but it does not generate them. Possibility is the deeper structure. This is why Heidegger can say that our Dasein is the “Being-the-basis for a lack” (BT §58, Macquarrie tr.): our essence is not a storehouse of powers but an openness in which possibilities are disclosed and toward which we must project ourselves. ↩︎