Time and history: Outlines of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation

Abstract

We present some guidelines of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation, weaving ties between Heidegger’s confrontation in Being and Time and a mode of thought of the “advantages” and “disadvantages” of historical knowledge “for life”, a life that demands forgetfulness and a life that is recovered as a memory, as a “bring or retention in memory” or a “think-in” [An-denken] who remembers his destiny. From the approaches of both thinkers, we seek agreements and confrontations that lead us to think of the “symptoms” of an excess of “historical knowledge” that suffers an era, a community, and to question the remissions of the absence of a historical experience or a “forgetfulness of being”—as a detachment from the original meaning of temporality. In this sense, our aim is to engage in a dialogue with the elucidation of original time that both Nietzsche and Heidegger fail to question for a sense of time that is internalized in historical consideration. We also seek to bring to mind the significant motives of Nietzsche’s work that prompt Heidegger to manifest another uptake of the historical phenomenon that will be deployed as “meditation” of the event-appropriator of history itself. And to correspond to the perspective of the belonging of history to life, we suggest a confrontation—in Nietzsche’s work—between man as historical and animal as non-historical. If “animality” can be carried and assumed as a fundamental basis that frames the essence of man, as a rational animal in within “a Western historical destination”.