means to dislodge what is grasped into its impossibility. Is it still necessary to take this averting of "metaphysics" and guard it explicitly from mingling with the "anti-metaphysical" intentions of "positivism" (and its varieties)? Hardly, if we consider that "positivism" indeed represents the crudest of all "metaphysical" modes of thought, insofar as it on the one hand entails a very definite decision regarding the beingness of beings (sensibility) and on the other hand always surpasses precisely those beings through the fundamental application of a homogeneous "causality." For transitional thinking, however, what matters is not an "opposition" to "metaphysics," since that would simply bring metaphysics back into play; rather, the task is an overcoming of metaphysics out of its ground. Metaphysics is at an end, not because it asked about the beingness of beings too much, too uncritically, and too intensely but because, on account of the falling away from the first beginning, its mode of questioning could never interrogate that which was basically sought, viz., beyng, and so ultimately, in the predicament of this powerlessness, it reverted to a mere "renewal" of "ontology."
Metaphysics, as the knowledge of the "being" of beings, had to come to an end (cf. Nietzsche) because it never in the least ventured to ask about the truth of beyng itself and therefore, even in its own history, had to remain caught up in the confusion and uncertainty of its guideline (thought). Precisely therefore, however, transitional thinking must not succumb to the temptation to simply leave behind what it grasped as the end and at the end; instead, this thinking must put behind itself what it has grasped, i.e., now for the first time comprehend it in its essence and allow it to be integrated in altered form into the truth of beyng. Talk of the end of metaphysics must not mislead us into thinking that philosophy would be done with "metaphysics." Quite to the contrary, "metaphysics" in its essential impossibility must now for the first time play over to philosophy, and the latter itself in the same way must play over to its other beginning.
Thinking on this task of the other beginning (the question of the "meaning" of beyng, in the terminology of Being and Time) shows that all endeavors reacting against metaphysics (even as positivism, these endeavors are always idealistic) are precisely re-active and thereby fundamentally dependent on metaphysics. And so they themselves remain metaphysics. All biologisms and naturalisms (which proffer "nature" and the nonrational as the matrix from which everything arises, or as the universal life in which everything simmers, or as the dark versus the light, etc.) remain entirely rooted in the soil of metaphysics and need metaphysics, even if only to rub up against in order to produce a spark igniting the knowable, sayable, and—for these "thinkers"—writeable