“What else remains for us to say but that Zarathustra's teaching does not bring redemption from revenge?” (1977, p. 76). With this verdict, Martin Heidegger concluded his published reflections on Nietzsche's Zarathustra. This is an especially significant conclusion, because Zarathustra sees revenge as the source of most human failings and declares early on that one of his chief goals is to redeem humans from revenge (II.7). Revenge, Zarathustra argues, is the human will's ill-will against the past. Zarathustra thus proposes a new teaching on time – the eternal recurrence of the same – that empowers the human will with respect to the past and thus redeems it from revenge (II.20). According to Heidegger, however, this new teaching attempts to fix the passing of time, to render it secure and stable, and therefore still conceals within itself a hatred of time and a supremely spiritualized form of revenge.

Although Heidegger was careful to add that he did not mean this verdict as a refutation or even as an objection, he was aware that such an impression might easily arise. He worried that he might be read as attempting to refute Nietzsche by imputing to him precisely what he sought to overcome. And, indeed, this has traditionally been regarded as the upshot of his influential discussion. More recently, however, commentators have tried to remain faithful to Heidegger's intent by following his claim that Nietzsche himself anticipated this response.