This knowledge should not adhere either to Nietzsche's words or to his first clarification of what he meant; instead, it must recognize the abandonment by being as the essence.
73. "Science" and the abandonment by being6
In truth, the modern science of today does not at all immediately touch the field of decision regarding the essence of beyng. Why then does reflection on "science" nevertheless belong to the preparation for the resonating?
The abandonment by being is the inceptually pre-formed consequence of the interpretation of the beingness of beings under the guideline of thinking and of the thereby conditioned early collapse of ἀλήθεια (which never was explicitly grounded).
Now, however, because in the modern era, and as the modern era, truth is fixed in the form of certainty and certainty is fixed in the form of an immediately self-conscious thinking of beings as represented objects, and because the establishment of these fixed forms constitutes the foundation of the modern era, and also because this certainty of thinking unfolds in the instituting and pursuit of modern "science," the abandonment by being (i.e., at the same time, the suppression of ἀλήθεια all the way to its smothering and forgotteness) is essentially codetermined by modern science, yet indeed only inasmuch as the latter claims to be a—or even the—normative knowledge. That is why a meditation on modern science and its machinationally rooted essence is unavoidable within an attempt at indicating the abandonment by being as the resonating of beyng.
This implies at the same time that such meditation on science is still, philosophically, the only possible one, assuming that philosophy is already moving in the transition to the Other beginning. Every kind of (transcendental) laying of foundations that stems from a theory of science has become as impossible as a "meaning-conferral" which assigns an ethnic-political or any other anthropological purpose to the objectively present (and, in its essential content, thereby unalterable) science and its pursuit. These "foundation-layings" have become impossible because they necessarily presuppose "science" and then merely provide it with a "foundation" (which is not really such) and a meaning (which has not been meditated on). Thereby, "science" and along with it the entrenchment (which science pursues) of the abandonment by being are now merely made ever more definitive, and all
6. Cf. The resonating, 76. Propositions about "science.".