Overcoming Metaphysics

All of this remains in the service of the will to power, but it also prevents the will to power's being from entering the clear light of the broad, essential knowing which can only have its origin in the thinking of the history of Being.

The being of the will to power can only be understood in terms of the will to will. The will to will, however, can only be experienced when metaphysics has already entered its transition.

XII

Nietzsche's metaphysics of the will to power is prefigured in the sentence: "The Greek knew and sensed the terrors and horrors of existence: In order to be able to live at all, he had to set up the radiant dream-creation of Olympus above them." (Socrates and Greek Tragedy, chapter 3, 1871. The original version of Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Munich, 1933.)

The opposition of the "titanic" and the "barbaric," of the "wild" and the "impulsive" is put here on one side, and beautiful, sublime appearance on the other.

Although it is not yet clearly thought out and differentiated and seen from a unified perspective, the idea is prefigured here that the "will" needs at the same time the guarantee of stability and escalation. But the fact that will is will to power still remains concealed. Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will dominates Nietzsche's thinking at first. The preface to the work is written "on Schopenhauer's birthday."

With Nietzsche's metaphysics, philosophy is completed. That means: It has gone through the sphere of prefigured possibilities. Completed metaphysics, which is the ground for the planetary manner of thinking, gives the scaffolding for an order of the earth which will supposedly last for a long time. The order no longer needs philosophy because philosophy is already its foundation.

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