grounded with respect to logos, assertory thinking. As determinations of the being as such, the categories say what the being as a being is. They say the "most universal" thing that can be said of beings: beingness, or Being. The Being of beings is grasped and comprehended on the guidelines of assertion, judgment, or "thinking." This way of defining the truth of beings as a whole, metaphysics, th inks beings by means of categories.
As an earmark of the essence of all metaphysics, therefore, we can inscribe the title Being and Thinking or, more specifically, Beingness and Thinking, a formulation which stresses that Being is conceived by way of thinking from beings and back to beings as their "most universal" element, whereby "thinking" is understood as assertory speech. Such thinking of beings, i n the sense of physei and technei on, "something present that rises up of itself or is produced," is the guiding thread for the philosophical thinking of Being as beingness.
The title Being and Thinking is also valid for irrationalist metaphysics, which is so called because it drives rationalism to its very peak-disburdening itself of it, however, least of all, just as every atheism must busy itself with God more than any theism does.
Because it is a question of the highest determinations of being as a whole in the matter Nietzsche calls "cosmological values," he is also able to speak of categories. That Nietzsche with no further explanation or justification calls these uppermost values "categories" and conceives of them as categories of reason shows how decisively he th inks along the path of metaphysics.
But whether Nietzsche strays from the path of metaphysics by conceiving the categories as values, and so describes himself correctly as an "antimetaphysician," or whether he merely brings metaphysics to its ultimate end and thereby himself becomes the last metaphysician, are questions to which we are still under way. The answers to those questions are most closely bound up with the elucidation of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism.
The second thing we must point out in our textual analysis of the last sentence in section A is the way in which Nietzsche summarily names the three categories by which beings as a whole have been interpreted . Instead of "meaning" he now says "purpose, " instead of