The question of Being (Seinsfrage) is the one and only question that determines Heidegger's path of thinking and its limits. To facilitate our understanding of this, he has given us detailed analyses of Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaximander. However, his discussions on Protagoras have never found a conspicuous place in background literature. Nonetheless, his views on Protagoras are of great import and it is the purpose of this paper to make this explicit. In particular, we shall examine Heidegger's understanding of Protagoras' fragment which states that man is the "measure" of all things present and not present.
Heidegger discusses the fragment in volume II of his work Nietzsche. It will be helpful if we first see the nexus between Protagoras and Nietzsche. We will begin by outlining the interconnective contexts which bind the two men in Heidegger's thinking, so as to enable us to fix precisely the place in which his explication of Protagoras ties in with Nietzsche's basic metaphysical position. We will then be in a position to understand Heidegger's own novel translation of the famous fragment.
Hence, our presentation divides into three parts: 1.) the framework of thought in Heidegger's Nietzsche I and II and Protagoras' fragment in this framework, 2.) Heidegger's own explication of Protagoras' fragment, and 3.) my own brief gloss on the subject made on the basis of section IX of Nietzsche II, entitled: Entwiirfe zur Geschichte des Seins als Metaphysik, which Heidegger himself regards as a necessary prerequisite for understanding his thinking as a whole.
1.) Any presentation of Nietzsche's metaphysics involves the difficulty of one's being re-volved in the circularity of Nietzsche's thought. Indeed, the cycle -this word taken symbolically -underlies Nietzsche's basic metaphysical position. Heidegger points to this fact and we are well justified in stating that Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung (i.e., critical dialoguing) with Nietzsche has not only opened up new dimensions in Heidegger's own thought, but also (and from the viewpoint of Heidegger's metaphysics) offered new bases for variant explications of Nietzsche. Heidegger repeatedly tells us that the five central themes in Nietzsche's metaphysics, viz., Will to Power, Nihilism, Eternal Recurrence, Over-Man and Justice (in Nietzsche's sense) are interwoven, so that any one involves and revolves through the rest.
But we must caution ourselves right at the beginning not to fail victim to descriptive or psychologistic interpretations of either Heidegger or