In these sketches from 1941, Heidegger reflects on several elements and steps in the history of being as metaphysics. Plato brought ἀλήθεια under the “yoke of the idea.” Thinking as the saying of the unconcealment of being became representation. In modern philosophy the being of entities was understood as objectivity and founded upon their representation by subjects. Being, as such, became actuality, and actuality was redefined through the self-positing of consciousness. Friedrich Nietzsche discovered that this self-positing is a manifestation of the will to power, which subjected the being of all entities to itself. The completion of metaphysics in modern technology installs the being of entities in the withholding and withdrawal of being.
Heidegger reflects also on the history of the concept of existence and the difference between the concepts of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Søren Kierkegaard, on the one hand, and Heidegger’s own concept of existence, on the other. For Heidegger, existence is an ecstatic standing in the clearing of the “there” of being-there.