Heidegger condemns "thinking in values" as "the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being," and, on that basis, criticizes Nietzsche's proposed projects of creating new values and constructing a new morality. In this paper I will attempt to show that Heidegger's criticism is misguided. I will attempt to demonstrate, specifically, that Heidegger's objection is undermined by his own conception of philosophy, and, more importantly, that it is itself a specimen of "thinking in values" -the very thing which he so much despises when he discovers it in Nietzsche. In other words, I will try to show that Heidegger's criticism of any and all evaluative messages is itself an evaluative message. However, on the positive side, I will also argue that Heidegger's message, when taken frankly as an evaluative one, is both important and, though he would hate to admit it, valuable. But this message is not inconsistent with Nietzsche's position; rather, I will try to show that the two positions are complementary.
Let us begin by examining Heidegger's criticism of Nietzsche. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger writes: How stubbornly the idea of values ingrained itself in the nineteenth century can be seen from the fact that even Nietzsche, and precisely he, never departed from this perspective. The subtitle of his projected magnum opus, "The Will to Power," is "An Attempt to Re-evaluate All Values." The third book is called: "An Attempt to Establish New Values." His entanglement in the thicket of the idea of values, his failure to understand its questionable origin, is the reason why Nietzsche did not attain to the true center of philosophy?
Again, in his essay on "The Word of Nietzsche," Heidegger expands on this criticism and uses it to explain why Nietzsche fails to overcome nihilism: