342 Epilogue
man who is engrossed in value assessment. Existence, in which man
engages and which man embodies, was being appraised as nothing but a
"value." Nietzsche wanted man to be emboldened and to stand up for
himself. Heidegger contended that the process of rising up had escalat-
ed into uprising, an uprising of technology and the masses, whose mas-
tery of technology was now turning them into what Nietzsche had
called the "last men." These "last men" were "blinkingly" settling into
their litde dwellings and their mundane pleasures and defending them-
selves with utter brutality against any threat to their safety and posses-
sions. "Man enters into insurrection," Heidegger claimed, with an eye to
the current situation in Germany. 'The world changes into object...
The earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault
that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification.
Nature appears everywhere—because willed from out of the essence of
Being—as the object of technology" (Heidegger, 'Word of Nietzsche"
100). According to Heidegger, Nietzsche had set the stage for these
developments because his philosophy portrayed Being solely from the
perspective of aesthetic, theoretical, ethical, and practical assessment,
and therefore missed the mark. For the will to power, the wodd winds
up as nothing more than the quintessence of "conditions of preserva-
tion and enhancement"
Heidegger wondered, however: "Can Being possibly be more highly
esteemed than through being expressly raised to a value?" His answer
was as follows: "In that Being is accorded worth as a value, it is already
degraded to a condition posited by the will to power itself.... When the
Being of whatever is, is stamped as a value and its essence is thereby
sealed off, then within this metaphysics—and that means continually
within the truth of what is as such during this age—every way to the
experience of Being itself is obliterated" (Heidegger, "Word of
Nietzsche" 103).
Heidegger was not speaking of a higher wodd when using the expres-
sion "experience of Being." He was referring to man's experience of the
inexhaustibility of reality and astonishment at finding a clearing in which