Europe Discovers Nietzsche 343human nature opens its eyes and realizes that it is there. Man discovers
that he has a bit of latitude. He is not caught or trapped in what exists.
Amid all of the things, he has "play" in the way that a wheel needs to
have "play" at its hub in order to be able to move. The problem of
Being, according to Heidegger, is ultimately a problem of freedom.
In Heidegger's view, the thinking of Being was precisely that "play-
ful" movement of holding open for the immense horizon of Being in
which all that exists can appear. In his essay 'The Word of Nietzsche:
'God is Dead,' " Heidegger used the following statement to avoid
answering the question of Being: ^eing has nothing to it" (Heidegger,
"Word of Nietzsche" 104).^2 He meant that Being is nothing to cling to.
In contrast to the ways of seeing the wodd that are fixed and grant secu-
rity, it is the ultimate dissolution. Inquiry into Being is designed to pre-
vent the world from becoming a worldview. For Heidegger, Nietzsche
was still a philosopher of the worldview.
Nietzsche's thinking certainly came across with exceptional pictorial
plasticity in his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. The idea
of recurrence effaced the dimension of time by rounding it into a circle,
although Nietzsche, taking up the "becoming" of Heraclitus, had actu-
ally hoped to think out into time. The heart of the contrast between
Nietzsche and Heidegger is most likely right here. Nietzsche thought of
time in his dynamic of the will to power and rounded it back into Being
with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, whereas Heidegger tried to stay
with the idea that the meaning of Being is time. Nietzsche turned time
into Being; Heidegger turned Being into time.
However, as Kad Löwith pointed out in a critique of Heidegger's lec-
tures on Nietzsche, it is debatable which of the two, Heidegger or
Nietzsche, pushed his thought out into the open more radically and
(^2) William Lovitt renders the German phrase "Mit dem Sein ist es nichts" as
(^4) 'Nothing is happening to Being." The context makes it clear, however, that
the elusive essence of Being is at issue. —Translator