Heidegger and Nietzsche

In the Vision of Alexis Karpouzos

The encounter between Nietzsche and Heidegger is not merely a dialogue between two philosophers, but a decisive event in the history of Being itself. In the vision of Alexis Karpouzos, this encounter unfolds as a tragic and luminous tension between the end of metaphysics and the possibility of a new beginning. Nietzsche appears as the last metaphysician and at the same time as the one who announces the collapse of metaphysics; Heidegger emerges as the thinker who listens to this collapse and seeks, through it, the still-unspoken truth of Being. For Karpouzos, Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God” is not a simple atheistic gesture, but an ontological earthquake. It signals the exhaustion of all transcendent guarantees of meaning and exposes humanity to the abyss of becoming. Yet this abyss is not merely nihilistic; it is creative, Dionysian, and open. Nietzsche’s will to power and eternal return are not doctrines but cosmic gestures: attempts to think existence beyond fixed identities, stable truths, and moral absolutes. Being, for Nietzsche, is not what is, but what becomes.

Heidegger, however, hears in Nietzsche’s thought a deeper and more troubling resonance. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche does not escape metaphysics but brings it to its extreme fulfillment. The will to power, in Heidegger’s reading, becomes the final metaphysical determination of Being as availability, domination, and calculability. In this sense, Nietzsche is both the destroyer of metaphysics and its final prophet. Karpouzos emphasizes that this paradox is not a failure but a necessity: metaphysics must fully exhaust itself before another way of thinking can emerge. At the heart of their relationship lies language and silence. Nietzsche breaks language apart—through aphorism, poetry, irony, and song—revealing its masks and its creative violence. Heidegger, by contrast, seeks to listen to language, to let it speak from the stillness of Being itself. In the vision of Karpouzos, Nietzsche shatters the old words, while Heidegger waits in the clearing created by their collapse. One dances with language; the other dwells within its silence.

This tension reveals a profound ontological contrast. Nietzsche affirms becoming without ground, a world without ultimate foundation, where meaning must be created again and again. Heidegger seeks the groundless ground—the Ereignis, the event of Being that grants presence and withdrawal simultaneously. For Karpouzos, these are not opposing paths but complementary movements of thought: Nietzsche opens the abyss; Heidegger learns how to remain within it without reducing it to concepts.

Both thinkers confront nihilism, but in different ways. Nietzsche attempts to overcome nihilism through affirmation, through the creation of new values and the transfiguration of existence into art. Heidegger sees nihilism as the forgetting of Being itself, a historical destiny that cannot be “overcome” by will, but only thought through and endured. In Karpouzos’ vision, nihilism is not an enemy to defeat but a threshold to cross—a night through which thinking must pass. Ultimately, Nietzsche and Heidegger meet in the question of the human. Nietzsche dissolves the human as a fixed essence, opening the path toward the Overhuman as a figure of transformation. Heidegger dec enters the human in favor of Dasein, the being that stands open to Being. Karpouzos sees here a shared intuition: the human is not a substance but a passage, a site where the cosmos becomes conscious of itself.

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