Tower Warden: For we still lack the trust, or even the proper aptitude for this trust in what carries and what calls on non-metaphysical thinking.
Teacher: Thus you are unable to get by without keeping one eye trained on metaphysics.
Tower Warden: Certainly not, and especially not when it is a matter of a first indication of the other thinking, if you will allow me this naming, which implies no sense of superiority over against metaphysics.
Teacher: I too have never assessed attempts of the other thinking in this manner. Yet it has always seemed and still seems to me that this other thinking, precisely because it is inceptual thinking, would have to be able to come out with its own wealth and present itself immediately.
Tower Warden: We agree that any countermovement against metaphysics, and any mere turn away from it, always remain still caught in metaphysical representation.
Teacher: If one does not, like Nietzsche, see in art the countermovement against metaphysics.
Tower Warden: Hence we may also no longer merely include his thinking in metaphysics.
Teacher: Nietzsche moves on a borderline that he himself drew; yet this borderline is difficult to make out, since the idea of value led his thinking—at least according to its form of expression—to fall back into metaphysics. [188]
Tower Warden: Nevertheless, this seems to me to be more of a minor impediment in contrast to the other issue, namely that Nietzsche interprets art—which he experiences as the countermovement to metaphysics—not only in an anti-metaphysical but also in a metaphysical manner.
Teacher: What else could he have done, when everywhere around him he found only an art that derived from metaphysics.
Tower Warden: Is there then any art that would not have to be metaphysical?
Teacher: Evidently not, so far as I can follow this train of thought.
Tower Warden: Then what today still appears to be art, namely in the dominant purview of metaphysical representation, is in truth no longer art.
Teacher: But what is it then? Indeed yesterday the picture in your tower room excited me with this question. I held it to be something wondrous. You, however, called it “the strange.”
Tower Warden: Before which all metaphysical representations break down.
Teacher: Always again metaphysics. It disturbs us even in this conversation on a country path.