of a completion of its possibilities, ones which grew out of what followed the beginning. This end of the first beginning of the history of Western philosophy is Nietzsche; in this sense and only in this sense must we interpret him in the future if his work is to be what it must also be as that end—namely, a transition. All judgment and evaluation of Nietzsche which have another orientation may very well have their determined and conditional usefulness, yet they remain philosophically inessential and erroneous. In this context there is no need to speak of the usual exploitation and even plundering of Nietzsche. Nietzsche is in an essential sense the end of Western philosophy.
At the same time, however, and above all, we are standing within the twilight of the end of Western thinking especially in a second sense, according to which end means the running out and the running astray of the confusion of the various basic positions, valuations, concepts, and systems as they have been prepared and formed throughout the centuries. This end—the product of an uprooted and no longer even recognizable tradition of frozen modes of thought—has its own duration, presumably one which is still to last a long time. It can yet dominate and persist, even if another beginning has begun long ago. In the protracted expiration of the end, former “modes of thought” will presumably be taken up again and again, and the end will characteristically be a succession of “renaissances.”
The reception of the work of Hölderlin throughout a whole century is historical proof that the genuine end, i.e., the great echo of the greatness of the beginning, can be put aside and remain without influence.
We conclude from this that history itself is not only multi-levelled, that in it not only do successive epochs overlap, but that we know almost nothing of its genuine reality, above all because our grounds of knowledge here are insufficient and are becoming more and more insufficient due to the news media. This scarcely understood contemporary phenomenon tells us in advance what we are supposed to want to know and how we are to know it. In a transformed way, and enhanced into gigantic proportions of range and speed, the news media accomplish what was once the function of ἱστορειν, the exploration of remarkable things.
We of today stand—for the most part, unwittingly—to a great