Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation [Hardcover]

Martin Heidegger'sNietzsche's Second Untimely Meditationpresents crucial elements for understanding Heidegger's thinking from 1936 to 1940. Heidegger offers a radically different reading of a text that he had read decades earlier, showing how his relationship with Nietzche's has changed, as well as how his understandings of the differences between animals and humans, temporality and history, and the Western philosophical tradition developed. With his new reading, Heidegger delineates three Nietzschean modes of history, which should be understood as grounded in the structure of temporality or historicity and also offers a metaphysical determination of life and the essence of humankind. Ullrich Hasse and Mark Sinclair offer a clear and accessible translation despite the fragmentary and disjointed quality of the original lecture notes that comprise this text.

Haase and Sinclair render the German into a readable and fluent English. They make potentially clunky and jargon laden passages from the original seem natural, and also do a good job of dealing with the specific difficulties thrown up by this text. In particular, they confront well the problem of distinguishing between Historie, the study of the past, and Geschichte, which is the past in general, as it underpins reality.

Translators' Introduction
A. Preliminary Remarks
?1. Remarks Preliminary to the Exercises
?2. Title
?3. The Appearance of our Endeavours

B. Section I. Structure. Preparation and Preview of the Guiding Question.
Historiology--Life
?4. Historiology--The Historical
On the Unhistorical/Supra-historical and the Relation to Both
?5. Section I. 1
?6. Section I. 2
?7. Section I
?8. Comparing
?9. The Determination of the Essence of the Human Being on the Basis of Animality
and the Dividing Line between Animal and Human Being
?10. Nietzsches Procedure. On the Determination of the Historical
from the Perspective of Forgetting and Remembering