Heidegger’s four-volume Nietzsche undertakes a rigorous, philologically attentive, and architectonically ambitious determination of Nietzsche’s position within the history of Western metaphysics. Its distinctive scholarly stake lies in showing how the triad will to power–eternal recurrence of the same–revaluation of values coheres as a single meta-conceptual decision about beings as a whole, one that consummates metaphysics while revealing the historical structure named nihilism. Heidegger’s contribution is twofold: first, a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s project from the fragmentary plans for a “major work” into an internally ordered problematic; second, a displacement of Nietzsche’s aims through a methodological reorientation toward the question of Being. The volumes’ composition—lectures of 1936–40 reworked into a sequence moving from art to recurrence to knowledge/metaphysics to nihilism—frames an argument in stages whose inner unity is secured textually and whose philosophical completion is avowedly inferential.
The outer frame of the work is crucial to its argumentative force. Heidegger’s path begins with the Freiburg lecture course “The Will to Power as Art” (winter 1936–37), proceeds through “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same,” culminates in the summer 1939 course on “The Will to Power as Knowledge,” and closes with two bridging lectures written in 1939 and a typescript of 1940 entitled “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics.” This composition sequence is recorded in the editor’s preface and establishes that Volume III’s concluding pieces retrospectively conjoin the former courses; it also secures that Volume IV’s Nihilism stands as the historical horizon into which the triad empties itself. Thus, the published order presents an ascent from the artistic valuation of Being to the temporal decision of recurrence, to the epistemic and ontological principles of will to power, and finally to the diagnosis of history as nihilism—an ascent that simultaneously functions as a demonstration of internal displacement, since each station both gathers and outstrips what precedes it. These dating and ordering claims are textually fixed in the preface material and folder notes summarized there.
Heidegger’s entry point is neither biographical nor literary; it is a determination of Nietzsche as the thinker who gives metaphysics its consummate formulation. Nietzsche is named “the thinker of the consummation of metaphysics” because he compels the decisive precedence of beings over Being to achieve its last possibility: beings are understood as becoming stabilized into presence through the principle of will to power, while eternal recurrence grants becoming the stamp of Being by enforcing the sameness of return. That decision is argued as a matter of method rather than opinion. It grows from a strict delimitation: a thinker is identified by one single thought, and Nietzsche’s one thought speaks in the twofold of will to power and recurrence. The textual basis for this framing is laid at the outset of Volume III and in the opening of Volume I, where Heidegger defines metaphysics as the regime in which Being is conceived from beings and for beings; Nietzsche is then situated as the final form of that regime. These claims are repeated programmatically in the courses’ prologues.
The work’s method is problem-driven rather than reportorial. Heidegger does not assemble aphorisms; he reconstructs Nietzsche’s inner architectonics. This reconstruction is constrained by the documentary record concerning Nietzsche’s intended “major work,” the plans for which wavered but consistently sought to integrate will to power, recurrence, and revaluation. Heidegger treats the late notebooks and editorial dossiers as indices of a thinking that never settled into a traditional “system,” and he takes that very non-finality as evidence that the thought demands a different mode of exposition. These matters of compositional evidence—what was drafted, how it was grouped, what remained unpublished—are treated with caution in Volume I’s discussion of “the so-called major work,” where it is argued that to impose the model of a scholastic summa on Nietzsche is to misrecognize the task. The textual security here is strong: the lectures name the archival situation, summarize the 1901/1906 arrangements of The Will to Power, and argue that form must follow the thought’s own law of movement.
With art as the first analytic environment, Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s doctrine of art through five distilled statements and their historical placement vis-à-vis Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer. The argumentative procedure is to show, concept by concept, that in Nietzsche art expresses the primary ontological character of beings as will to power—that is, as the founding and forming of form through rapture, measure, and the grand style. The interpretive wager is that aesthetics becomes first philosophy when art discloses the truth of beings as the powerful setting-to-work of forms; that wager is then tested against the “raging discordance” of truth and art, the mimetic distance in Republic, and the felicity in Phaedrus. The text secures the topical path by listing these stations as the inner structure of the course; the detailed claims—e.g., about rapture as form-engendering force or the new determination of sensuousness—are elaborated within the lecture sequence and treated as derived from Nietzsche’s formulations while being re-specified by Heidegger’s ontology.
Two problem-tensions already congeal in the artistic station. First, the truth/art polarity, which in Plato establishes a hierarchy against the poet, becomes in Nietzsche the very site of affirmation: art enacts truth as the happening of power rather than the representation of Ideas. Second, the question of sensuousness and of the physiology of rapture presses toward a reading that neither collapses into biologism nor remains within mere formalism. Heidegger insists that Nietzsche’s remarks on drives and affects are conceptual determinations of will, not reductions to the merely organic; yet he also warns that the interpretation of sensuousness must be rethought if art is to be primary. This warning reveals a methodological anxiety that will return in the later volumes: if “life” is invoked to ground value, does the discourse fall back into a metaphysical grounding that makes Being serviceable to beings? The anxiety is noted explicitly where the lecture disentangles aesthetic physiology from a dogmatic naturalism. These discriminations are textually recorded in the first volume’s discussions of affects, rapture, sensuousness, and the idealistic misreadings of will.
Eternal recurrence of the same is then introduced as the innermost completion of the thought of will to power. The argument is compact: recurrence gives becoming the character of Being by enforcing a sameness that is not mere repetition but the ontological stamp that allows the permanentizing of becoming into presence. Heidegger treats recurrence as neither cosmological hypothesis nor moral doctrine; it is a decision-structure in which freedom is tested at the level of willing. To think recurrence is to confront whether willing can affirm the whole as a whole—whether the “moment” can gather past and future into a single ring. The lectures press that recurrence’s truth must be decided—a philosophical act rather than an empirical inference. This construction is presented as an internal reading of Nietzsche’s “most difficult thought” precisely by extracting it from the interpretive habits that make it physics or ethics. The textual security for this staging lies in Volume II’s course plan and in Volume III’s part on recurrence, which explicitly couples recurrence and will to power and makes the “moment” the point of decision.
A further tension emerges: recurrence seems to threaten will by constraining it to the same; will to power seems to threaten recurrence by ever-overreaching beyond any sameness. Heidegger’s resolution is to say that the two co-belong: recurrence is the law of Being for becoming, while will to power is the essence of beings as becoming; the two name the same decision from two sides. Yet this very resolution exposes the metaphysical structure at work: to impose Being on becoming is already to treat Being as a highest value, a rank-order over beings as a whole. The thought of revaluation therefore does not stand apart; it completes the same move by securing the grounds on which value is measured—namely, the standard furnished by the will’s own demand to heighten power. These steps are argued explicitly in Volume III’s third part, “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics,” where the headings gather will to power, nihilism, recurrence, the overman, and justice into a single account of Nietzsche’s project as a metaphysics of presence through becoming.
When Heidegger turns to knowledge and truth in Volume III, the analysis pivots from aesthetics and temporality to epistemic constitution. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is reconstructed as a genealogy of the “true/apparent” opposition by tracing truth back to estimation of value and “schematizing a chaos in accordance with practical need.” The critical point is twofold: first, that correctness (as concordance) is derivative of valuation; second, that valuation is an act of power that shapes horizon and perspective by ordering the manifold. The lectures introduce here a series of determinations: truth as justice; the law of non-contradiction read as a command rather than an ontological law; and reason understood as poetizing. Each of these determinations, Heidegger argues, exemplifies how will to power functions as a principle of knowledge. He then identifies an inner danger: the transformation of Being into the calculable—accordance and calculation—which threatens to entrench a regime of machination. The textual anchors for these claims are the headings and sequences in Part One of Volume III (“Truth as estimation of value,” “Knowing as schematizing a chaos,” “The law of contradiction as command,” “Truth as justice,” “Permanentizing becoming into presence”), which set out the derived chain from valuation through knowledge to presence.
The question of biologism is addressed explicitly in this epistemic milieu. Nietzsche’s appeals to physiology are treated as conceptual clarifications of the will’s affective character, rather than as reductions of knowledge to organism. Heidegger stresses that the body belongs to the way human existence is (the bodying-forth that lives); yet he refuses to ground the essence of truth in biological function. The textual security for this refusal is provided by the section “Nietzsche’s alleged biologism,” where the distinction is drawn between a heuristic physiology and a doctrine that would make life-processes the ultimate ground. This is an important limiting condition: it opens a path to criticize the way valuation becomes rule (command, calculation) without sliding into a naturalism that would preempt the question of Being.
These three analytic stations—art, recurrence, knowledge—congeal into the fourth: nihilism. Here the work’s macro-claim is advanced with maximum explicitness: the history of Western philosophy becomes legible as the history of nihilism, in which Being is forgotten in favor of beings, and the highest values devalue themselves. Nietzsche’s own self-diagnosis—“European nihilism”—is appropriated and transformed; for Heidegger, nihilism is not merely cultural decay but the essential history in which Being withdraws, leaving beings to stand as the only measure. Will to power and recurrence are then read as the final metaphysical answer to that history: they establish a total grounding in valuation and permanentization, giving the devalued world a new highest principle. But because this grounding is still metaphysical, it cannot overcome the withdrawal of Being; it completes the forgetting by erecting a supreme principle of beings. This is the heart of Heidegger’s critique, and in Volume IV it is unfolded as a sustained confrontation with the conceptual machinery that makes “overcoming nihilism” thinkable only as a more extreme assertion of values. The structure of Volume IV in the English edition places this confrontation as the terminus of the four-volume arc.
Two lines of evidence secure this interpretive center. First, Volume III’s third part, “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics,” collects the decisive concepts under the rubric metaphysics: will to power, nihilism, recurrence, overman, justice. The grouping is not editorial convenience; it is Heidegger’s demonstration that each concept’s intelligibility depends on the others—recurrence as Being’s stamp for becoming, justice as the highest configuration of valuation, the overman as the bearer of this total revaluation. Second, Volume IV’s title and placement register nihilism as the encompassing horizon: the earlier volumes are repeatedly said to be countermovements to nihilism (art against degeneracy, recurrence against purposelessness, knowledge against mere correctness), yet the final volume shows how these counter-moves remain locked within the same decision-structure. Both items are textually explicit.
Heidegger’s manner of argument about nihilism is diagnostic and historical in a precise sense. He tracks the opposition “true/apparent” back to valuation and identifies the hidden ground: the interpretation of Being in terms of presence. From Plato’s Ideas to modern correctness, truth has meant a stabilizing of becoming under the privilege of the present. Nietzsche’s move is to claim that this stabilization itself originates in will; he therefore reconstructs the true/apparent duality as a human, life-grounded projection. For Heidegger, this is indeed a radicalization of metaphysics into its consummation: Being is now explicitly determined from beings (as the will’s demand to permanentize and heighten). But for the same reason, the move intensifies the historical oblivion of Being by making valuation sovereign. Hence the labor of Volume IV consists in unfolding how even the project of “overcoming nihilism” through revaluation functions as the ultimate self-affirmation of the will to will. The methodological point is that overcoming cannot mean a more powerful willing; it must mean a transformed relation to Being. In the four-volume argument, this methodological point is inferential rather than textually demonstrated by Nietzsche’s own words; Heidegger flags it as his own path departing from Nietzsche at precisely this juncture.
Within the fourth volume’s emphasis, metaphysics is redescribed as the epochal destiny in which presence governs the understanding of beings. To say that Nietzsche is the “last metaphysician of the West” is to say that he gives this destiny its most lucid articulation—lucid enough to expose its limit. Will to power, because it determines Being as the will’s self-intensifying command to permanence within becoming, is the decisive configuration of presence in late modernity. Eternal recurrence, because it stamps becoming with sameness, is the ontological formula that secures presence as the only possible Being of becoming. These are not dismissals; they are acknowledgments of conceptual audacity. The displacement occurs where Heidegger argues that the very form of principle—the will to power as principle of valuation—belongs to metaphysics as such, and hence that any “overcoming” cast as a higher principle remains trapped. This displacement is a consequence built out of Heidegger’s own analytic of truth, language, and Ereignis in the same period; within the Nietzsche volumes, it is signaled by the transition from the lecture courses to the 1939/1940 texts that explicitly present “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics” as an end-formulation. The dating and titling of this typescript are documented in the preface, noting its status as an August–December 1940 composition.
To understand the inner mechanics of Heidegger’s critique, one must linger over the sections in Volume III where he redescribes logic, contradiction, and calculation. When he calls the law of non-contradiction a command (rather than a law of being), he means that under the regime of valuation, even logical necessity is an expression of will’s need for calculability; correctness becomes a function of utility. When he calls reason poetizing, he means that horizon-formation is a creative projection that renders chaos manageable. These redescriptions are not casual metaphors; they are the conceptual hinges by which Nietzschean epistemology is tied to the ontology of will. If logic and truth are already valuations, then the move to enforce presence out of becoming is seen to be the culmination of a long trajectory: from Idea to correctness to command—each a modality of securing beings in their appearing under a highest measure. The text secures this chain by the ordered sequence of topics and by the constant cross-reference to the triad’s unity.
Heidegger’s treatment of art retroactively gains a different clarity in this light. Earlier, art was read as the primary disclosure of will’s formative essence. Now, with the epistemic determinations in hand, it appears that art models the projecting that knowing also performs: both are configurations of world by the intensification of forces. But the difference is telling: where art affirms the surplus of form-giving rapture, knowledge tends to will the reduction of becoming to calculable presence. Hence, already in the first volume, concern was raised that the triumph of the aesthetic could shade into the triumph of machination—a term that will carry into Heidegger’s contemporaneous reflections on technology. Within the Nietzsche books themselves, this danger is framed as the risk that permanentizing becoming into presence might foreclose the very path to Being’s withdrawal that the experience of nihilism had intimated.
The role of justice in Volume III’s third part is to name the highest configuration of valuation: to do justice is to assign rank according to power, to bring measure to becoming by distributing weight according to strength. Justice thereby links ethics and ontology through valuation. It is no accident that justice appears near the end of “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics”; in Heidegger’s reading, it shows that the revaluation is not merely a change in tables of values but a re-founding of measure as such—the last word of metaphysics, since measure becomes the ground of Being’s disclosure. The inference then follows: if measure remains a function of valuation, and valuation remains an act of will, then Being’s truth remains subordinated to beings’ empowerment.
The long arc of the four volumes also yields a historical schema. The trajectory from Plato through Christianity to modern science is described as a leveling of Being to presence and of truth to correctness. Nietzsche, encountering the exhaustion of these values, produces a countermove that both names the exhaustion (nihilism) and commands a new ground (will to power). Heidegger’s reconstruction is careful to distinguish what is textually secured—Nietzsche’s own diagnoses and plans—from what is presented as an interpretive consequence—his status as the final metaphysician and the internal logic by which revaluation consummates nihilism rather than escapes it. The former is anchored in the lectures’ sustained engagement with Nietzsche’s fragments and published works, as well as in the specified archival situation of the planned “major work”; the latter is marked as Heidegger’s argument, especially in the 1939/1940 connective texts.
Heidegger’s way of marking inferential steps is subtle but readable in context. For example, when he characterizes recurrence as the Being of becoming, he depends on Nietzsche’s own formulations about imposing the character of Being on becoming. But when he argues that recurrence’s function is to permanentize becoming into presence—and that this permanentizing is the essence of metaphysics—he has crossed into a meta-interpretation. Likewise, when he redescribes truth as justice, he follows Nietzsche’s explicit proposals; when he then claims that this justice is the inner logic by which valuation captures Being under the will’s command, he is adding the architectural inference that situates Nietzsche in the longer history of presence. The text signals such moments by stepping back from exegesis into methodological reflection on “what metaphysics is doing” in the move.
The culmination in Volume IV also recasts decision as a structural motif. Decision appears throughout—most prominently in the lectures on recurrence, where Heidegger insists that the thought must be decided, that freedom is at stake in the moment. In the final station, decision becomes historical: it names the threshold where an age either extends its own consummation or opens to another beginning. Nietzsche, as the transition between the preparatory modern age and its consummation, stands at this threshold. The textual warrant for this placement is in the opening determinations of Nietzsche as the “last metaphysician” and “transition to consummation,” and in the preface material indicating the function of the 1939 concluding lectures as the bridge from the courses’ analyses to the treatises’ statements.
A consistent thematic thread across the volumes is the analysis of the true/apparent dyad. By tracing it to valuation, Heidegger both affirms Nietzsche’s genealogical insight and presses it toward ontology. If truth is an estimation, then it belongs to will; if it belongs to will, it functions as a measure; if as measure, then as a command that secures presence. This thread connects the aesthetic origination, the temporal decision, and the epistemic reconstruction to the final historical claim: nihilism is the name for the epoch in which values grounded in presence disintegrate, revealing both their contingency and their refusal of Being’s withdrawal. In this sense, Nietzsche’s project is heroic and necessary—it names what must be faced—precisely because it fails at the point where “overcoming” is conceived as a higher intensification of the same will.
The volumes, taken as a whole, are thus more than a study of Nietzsche; they are a staged demonstration of how an interpretation can be faithful to textual ground while advancing a systematic displacement. The faithfulness is visible in the care with plans for the “major work,” in the course structures, and in the chain of concepts lifted directly from Nietzsche’s lexicon (power, recurrence, justice, chaos, perspective). The displacement is visible in the insistence that the triad’s unity, once articulated, reveals itself as the closure of metaphysics—closure in the sense of completion and of occlusion. This double movement is a feature, not a flaw: it is the intended effect of composing the analysis across four volumes that successively broaden their horizon while tightening their inferential net.
Some clarifications of scope are appropriate in closing. First, the claim that Nietzsche is the last metaphysician is Heidegger’s; it is argued with Nietzsche’s texts but is not deducible from them without the Heideggerian premises about Being, presence, and history. Second, the identification of nihilism as the essential history is likewise a Heideggerian determination that reframes Nietzsche’s self-description. Third, the diagnosis of knowledge as valuation does draw on Nietzsche’s genealogies; yet the further claim that such valuation must become machination belongs to Heidegger’s analysis of modern calculability. The textual record inside these volumes makes these demarcations legible by its editorial apparatus and by the explicit transitions from exegesis to treatise noted for 1939–1940.
The fourth volume’s emphasis finally defines the book’s philosophical legacy. By insisting that metaphysics names the epochal sending in which Being becomes presence, and that nihilism names the inner exhaustion of that sending, Heidegger places Nietzsche at the decisive hinge of Western thought. The triad—will to power as the essence of beings in their becoming, eternal recurrence as the Being-character imposed on that becoming, revaluation as the justice of rank that measures and commands—forms the culminating constellation. Through this constellation, Nietzsche at once diagnoses and consummates nihilism. For Heidegger, that double status both honors Nietzsche and establishes the necessity to think otherwise: beyond will and recurrence not by a higher will or a purer recurrence, but by letting the question of Being withdraw from the compulsion to permanentize. The volumes end by clarifying that the work’s task has been twofold—to think Nietzsche to his inner limit and to mark that limit as the aperture for another beginning. On both counts, the text’s contribution is exacting: it secures what can be secured in Nietzsche’s words and drafts, and it specifies, with declared responsibility, where the interpretation departs into its own ground.
Simon Gros 
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