In order to grasp Nietzsche's philosophy as metaphysics and to circumscribe its place in the history of metaphysics, it is not enough to explain historiologically a few of his fundamental concepts as being "metaphysical." We must grasp Nietzsche's philosophy as the metaphysics of subjectivity. What was said concerning the expression "metaphysics of will to power" is also valid for the phrase "metaphysics of subjectivity." The genitive is ambiguous, having the sense of a subjective and objective genitive, in which the words objective and subjective maintain emphatic and rigorous significance.
Nietzsche's metaphysics, and with it the essential ground of "classical nihilism," may now be more clearly delineated as a metaphysics of the absolute subjectivity of will to power. We do not say merely "metaphysics of absolute subjectivity, " because this determination also applies to Hegel's metaphysics, insofar as it is the metaphysics of the absolute subjectivity of self-knowing will; that is, spirit. Correspondingly, Hegel determines the nature of absoluteness from the essence of reason existing in and for itself, which he always thinks as the unity of knowing and willing, although never in the sense of a "rationalism" of pure understanding. For Nietzsche, subjectivity is absolute as subjectivity of the body; that is, of drives and affects; that is to say, of will to power.
The essence of man always enters into these two forms of absolute subjectivity in a way that is different in each case. The essence of man is universally and consistently established throughout the history of metaphysics as animal rationale. In Hegel's metaphysics, a speculatively-dialectically understood rationalitas becomes determinative for subjectivity; in Nietzsche's metaphysics, animalitas is taken as the guide .