著者

森 一郎

出版者

東京女子大学

雑誌

東京女子大学紀要論集 (ISSN:04934350)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.46, no.1, pp.p37-64, 1995-09

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In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche says, "Die at the right time!" According to him, one should learn to die triumphantly and cheerfully, and the best end of life is dying such a "death that comes to one because one wishes it." This teaching of "the voluntary death (der freie Tod)" is a climax of his radical protest against modernity-his anti-humanism. However, what Nietzsche means by the phrase is neither to die calmly at a great age, nor to choose to commit suicide early in life, but, rather, to live positively so as to be always ready for death. This kind of extraordinary hospitality seems a strange fancy, but imagining it could be a demonstration of the supreme human possibilities in thinking. Nietzsche's struggle for the "superman" is nothing else but a challenge to the human imagination itself. In Being and Time Heidegger seeks for the authentic Being-towards-death as an existential category and defines it as "anticipation of death (Vorlaufen in den Tod)." He then explains this idea with a term "freedom towards death (Freiheit zum Tode)." Here we can find a remarkable correspondence between Nietzsche and Heidegger. The latter's sophisticated concept of death is an ontologically revised version of the former's stimulating notion of death. In this way, Nietzsche's experimental spirit lives in Heidegger's ontological projects.