will. Even if the essence of willing which is thought here is obscure i n many respects, perhaps even necessarily obscure, we can sec that, from the metaphysics of Schelling and Hegel, back beyond Kant and Leibniz to Descartes, the being as such is at bottom experienced as will.
Of course , that does not mean that the subjective experience of human will is transposed onto beings as a whole. Rather, it indicates the very reverse, that man first of all comes to know himself as a willing subject in an essential sense on the basis of a still unelucidated experience of beings as such in the sense of a willing that has yet to be thought. Insight into these connections is indispensable for an experience of the history of nihilism proper, an experience of its essential history. Those connections cannot be explained here, however. For the moment, that task is not a pressing one. What was said about nihilism proper in describing Nietzsche's metaphysics as a fulfillment of nihilism must have already awakened thoughtful readers to another supposition: that the ground of nihilism proper is neither the metaphysics of will to power nor the metaphysics of will, but simply metaphysics itself.
Metaphysics as metaphysics is nihilism proper. The essence of nihilism is historically as metaphysics, and the metaphysics of Plato is no less nihilistic than that of Nietzsche. In the former, the essence of nihilism is merely concealed; in the latter, it comes completely to appearance. Nonetheless, it never shows its true face, either on the basis of or within metaphysics.
These are disturbing statements. For metaphysics determines the history of the Western era. Western humankind, in all its relations with beings, and even to itself, is in every respect sustained and guided by metaphysics. In the equation of metaphysics and nihilism one does not know which is greater—the arbitrariness, or the degree of condemnation of our entire history heretofore.
But in the meantime we should also have noticed that our thinking has still scarcely responded to the essence of nihilism proper, let alone thought it adequately enough for us to reflect meditatively on the statements made about metaphysics and nihilism, so that afterward we might pass judgment on them. If metaphysics as such is nihilism proper, while the latter, in accord with its essence, is incapable of