The Root of Heidegger's Concern for the Earth at the Consummation of Metaphysics: The Nietzsche Lectures

This essay attempts to situate Heidegger’s critique of modernity’s technological worldview within the conceptual context and time frame of his Nietzsche lectures of the 1930’s. Heidegger discovers in Nietzsche’s thought the “consummation of metaphysics” and in Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power” an articulation of the world dominating principle reflecting modernity’s comportment with beings as mere resources for consumption. Such a principle voices the utter destruction of Being and obliterates any possibility for the more considerate disclosure of beings in a non-technological way.