The following commentary is an attempt to point in the direction where, perhaps, the question about the essence of nihilism can one day be posed. The commentary derives from a thinking that is beginning to win an initial clarity about Nietzsche's fundamental place within the history of Western metaphysics. To point in this direction clarifies a stage of Western metaphysics that is in all likelihood its final stage, since metaphysics, through Nietzsche, has deprived itself of its own essential possibility in certain respects, and therefore to that extent other possibilities of metaphysics can no longer become apparent. After the metaphysical reversal carried out by Nietzsche, all that is left to metaphysics is to be inverted into the dire state of its non-essence. The supersensory has become an unenduring product of the sensory. But by so disparaging [Herabsetzung] its antithesis, the sensory denies its own essence. The dismissal [Absetzung] of the supersensory also eliminates the purely sensory and with it the difference between the two. The dismissal of the supersensory ends in a "neither-nor" regarding the distinction between sensory (αἰσθητόν) and non-sensory (νοητόν). It ends in the senseless. However, it remains the unthinking and insuperable assumption behind blind attempts to evade the senseless through a sheer fiat of sense.
Throughout the following, metaphysics is thought as the truth of beings as such in their entirety, not as the doctrine of a thinker. In each instance, a thinker has his fundamental philosophical position within a metaphysics. For that reason, a metaphysics can be named after a thinker. In accordance with the essence of metaphysics as it is thought here, this in no way implies that a particular metaphysics is the achievement and possession of a thinker as a personality acting within the public setting of cultural affairs. The destiny of being makes its way over beings in abrupt epochs of truth;
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