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The Word of Nietzsche

define God, the summum ens qua summum bonum, as the highest value. We hold science to be value-free and relegate the making of value judgments to the sphere of world views. Value and the valuable become the positivistic substitute for the metaphysical. The frequency of talk about values is matched by a corresponding vagueness of the concept. This vagueness, for its part, corresponds to the obscurity of the essential origin of value from out of Being. For allowing that value, so often invoked in such a way, is not nothing, it must surely have its essence in Being.

What does Nietzsche understand by value? Wherein is the essence of value grounded? Why is Nietzsche's metaphysics the metaphysics of values?

Nietzsche says i n a note (1887-88) what he understands by value : "The point-of-view of 'value' is the point-of-view constituting the preservation-enhancement conditions with respect to complex forms of relative duration of life within becoming" (Will to Power, Aph. 715).10

The essence of value lies in its being a point-of-view. Value means that upon which the eye is fixed. Value means that which is in view for a seeing that aims at something or that, as we say, reckons upon something and therewith must reckon with something else. Value stands in intimate relation to a so-much, to quantity and number. Hence values are related to a "numerical and mensural scale" (Will to Power, Aph. 710, 1888) . The question still remains : Upon what is the scale of increase and decrease, in its turn, grounded?

Through the characterization of value as a point-of-view there results the one consideration that is for Nietzsche's concept of value essential : as a point-of-view, value is posited at any given time by a seeing and for a seeing. This seeing is of such a kind that it sees inasmuch as it has seen, and that it has seen inasmuch as it has set before itself and thus posited what is sighted, as a


10. Italics Heidegger's. "Point-of-view" (Gesichtspunkt) is hyphenated in order to differentiate it from its usual meaning, point of view as a subjective opinion or standpoint. The latter meaning is present in Gesichtspunkt as it is used here; but Heidegger stresses immediately that what is mainly involved in valuing for Nietzsche is, rather, a focusing on the point that is in view.


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