discredits and that conceals the user's own thoughtlessness from him. But we can also experience the full burden of what the name says when uttered in Nietzsche's sense. Here it means to think the history of Western metaphysics as the ground of our own history; that is, of future decisions. Finally, we can ponder more essentially what Nietzsche was thinking in using this word if we grasp his "classical nihilism" as that nihilism whose "classicism" consists in the fact that it must unwittingly put itself on extreme guard against knowledge of its innermost essence. Classical nihilism, then, discloses itself as the fulfillment of nihilism, whereby it considers itself exempt from the necessity of thinking about the very thing that constitutes its essence: the nihil, the nothing—as the veil that conceals the truth of the Being of beings.
Nietzsche did not present his knowledge of European nihilism in that exhaustive context he surely glimpsed by means of his inner vision, a context whose pure form we neither know nor can ever "open up" with the fragments of his work that have been preserved.
Nevertheless, in the realm of his thinking, Nietzsche thought through what he meant by the word nihilism in all its essential tendencies, levels, and configurations, and he put his thoughts down in notes of varying scope and intensity. A portion of these, but only a scattered, arbitrarily and randomly selected portion, were later collected into the book that after Nietzsche's death was pasted together from his posthumous writings and that is known by the title The Will to Power. The fragments chosen vary widely in character: reflections, meditations, definitions, maxims, exhortations, predictions, sketches for longer trains of thought, and brief reminders. These selected pieces were divided into four "books" under different titles. However, this way of dividing the book, which was first published in 1906, did not arrange the fragments in the order determined by the time of their writing or revision, but assembled them according to the editors' murky and in any case irrelevant personal plan. In this fabricated "book," thoughts from entirely different periods of time and from wholly divergent levels and aspects of a question are capriciously and mindlessly juxtaposed and intermingled . True, everything published in this "book" is Nietzsche's, but he never thought it like that.
The selections are numbered consecutively from 1 to 1067, and,