THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

Overcoming is the delivering over of metaphysics to its truth.

At first the overcoming of metaphysics can only be represented in terms of metaphysics itself, so to speak, in the manner of a heightening of itself through itself. In this case the talk about the metaphysics of metaphysics, which is touched upon in the book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, is justified in that it attempts to interpret the Kantian idea from this perspective, which still stems from the mere critique of rationalist metaphysics. However, more is thus attributed to Kant's thinking than he himself was able to think within the limits of his philosophy.

The talk of overcoming metaphysics can also mean that "metaphysics" is the name for the Platonism portrayed in the modern world by the interpretation of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The reversal of Platonism, according to which for Nietzsche the sensuous becomes the true world and the suprasensuous becomes the untrue world, is thoroughly caught in metaphysics. This kind of overcoming of metaphysics, which Nietzsche has in mind in the spirit of nineteenth century positivism, is only the final entanglement in metaphysics, although in a higher form. It looks as if the "meta," the transcendence to the suprasensuous, were replaced by the persistence in the elemental world of sensuousness, whereas actually the oblivion of Being is only completed and the suprasensuous is let loose and furthered by the will to power.

X

Without being able to know it and without permitting a knowledge about it, the will to will wards off every destiny, whereby we understand by destiny the granting of an openness of the Being of beings. The will to will rigidifies everything in lack of destiny. The consequence of lack of destiny is the unhistorical. Its characteristic is the dominance of historiography. Historiography's being at a loss is historicism.

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