Heidegger and Nietzsche

Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is captured in his doctrines of will to power and the eternal return of the same.

Heidegger claims that with Nietzsche's position, metaphysics has come to an end ("God is dead"), or perhaps to a new beginning?, viz., in Heidegger's own work with the recovery of Being.

This is because Heidegger arguably identifies metaphysics with onto-theology. When God dies so does metaphysics.

Now metaphysics has had a strong history as a necessary foundation for the empirical science of modern physics.

Kant claimed it was a scandal that philosophers could not even prove the existence of the external world - the "Dasein" of Things, let alone the Sein of God.. Heidegger said of such a proof:

The 'scandal of philosophy' is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.

Heidegger's mentor, Edmund Husserl questioned Kant's division of the world into phenomena that are only revealing the "secondary qualities" of the British empiricists David Hume, John Locke, and George Berkeley. Empricists said we could not know the things themselves - Kant's Ding an sich," but Husserl said we did reach them in our "Ideas". Information philosophy agrees with this access "to the things themselves" in our perception (at least some of) of their information content.