Abstract

When Nietzsche asks in his Second Untimely Consideration about the benefits and disadvantages of history for life, he assumes - as Heidegger shows in his interpretation of this work in the seminar in the winter semester of 1938/39 - an ambiguous concept of life. "Life" here means, on the one hand, beings as a whole as all-life and, on the other hand, in an emphatic sense, human life. Against this background, Nietzsche compares man's historical relationship to the past with the animal's relationship to the present. The benchmark here is life in the broader sense, by which the significance of history for human life is to be assessed.But - that is the basic question that Heidegger then asks: Can history be reckoned with life as such in this way? Who or what is man? Is he - as Nietzsche later says - the "as yet unidentified animal" who can both enhance and elevate as well as weaken his life through the various types of history (monumental, antiquarian, critical)? Or isn't he rather the being that "relates" to life through remembering and forgetting, precisely because he is not (only) as an animal rationale a "predator" looking for limitless increase in power and life, but a being that is deeply in the truth of being, and in which "life" in its ambiguity as world, human being, nature, ie as "beings as a whole" is first historically disclosed? As Heidegger suggests, this question is of central importance, not least for the historical examination of the "will to power" of the late Nietzsche. [Publisher's synopsis].