THE END OF PHILOSOPHY
The sole exception is Aristotle, who thinks out ἐνέργεια, without this thinking ever being able to become essential in its originality in the future. The transformation of ἐνέργεια to actualitas and reality buried everything which became apparent in ἐνέργεια. The connection between and ἐνέργεια becomes obscure. Hegel first thinks out existentia, but in his "Logic." Schelling thinks it in the distinction of ground and existence. However, this distinction is rooted in subjectivity.
A later and confused echo of Being as φύσις shows itself in the narrowing down of Being to "Nature."
Reason and freedom are contrasted with nature. Because nature is what-is, freedom and the ought are not thought as Being. The opposition of Being and the ought, Being and value, remains. Finally Being itself, too, becomes a mere "value" when the will enters its most extreme deformation of essence. Value is thought as a condition of the will.
VIII
Metaphysics is in all its forms and historical stages a unique, but perhaps necessary, fate of the West and the presupposition of its planetary dominance. The will of that planetary dominance is now in turn affecting the center of the West. {GA 7: 76} Again, only a will meets the will from this center.
The development of the unconditional dominance of metaphysics is only at its start. This beginning starts when metaphysics affirms its deformation of essence which is adequate to it, and surrenders its essence to that deformation and fixates it there.
Metaphysics is a fate in the strict sense, which is the only sense intended here, that it lets mankind be suspended in the middle of beings as a fundamental trait of Western European history, without the Being of beings ever being able to be experienced and questioned and structured in its truth as the twofoldness of both in terms of metaphysics and through metaphysics.
92