OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
representation counts on nature and takes account of history. Only what becomes, in this way, an object is — counts as in being. We first arrive at science as research when the being of beings is sought in such abjectness.
This objectification of beings is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing [Vor-stellen], aimed at bringing each being before it in such a way that the man who calculates can be sure — and that means certain — of the being. Science as research first arrives when, and only when, truth has transformed itself into the certainty of representation. It is in the metaphysics of Descartes that, for the first time, the being is defined as the abjectness of representation, and truth as the certainty of representation. The title of his main work reads Meditationes de prima philosophia, Meditations on First Philosophy. Πρώτη φιλοσοφία is the term coined by Aristotle for that which was later called "metaphysics." The whole of modern metaphysics, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of the being and of truth opened up by Descartes (Appendix 4).
If, now, science as research is an essential phenomenon of modernity, it must follow that what constitutes the metaphysical ground of research determines, first, and long in advance, the essence of modernity in general. The essence of modernity can be seen in humanity 's freeing itself from the bonds of the Middle Ages in that it frees itself to itself. But this characterization, though correct, is merely the foreground. And it leads to those mistakes which prevent one from grasping the essential ground of modernity and, proceeding from there, judging the breadth of that essence. Certainly the modern age has, as a consequence of the liberation of humanity, introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism, and that in no age before this has the non-individual, in the shape of the collective, been accorded prestige. Of the essence here is the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism. But precisely this reciprocal conditioning of the one by the other refers us back to deeper processes.
What is decisive is not that humanity frees itself from previous bonds but, rather, that the essence of humanity altogether transforms itself in that man becomes the subject. To be sure, this word "subject" must be understood as the translation of the Greek ὑποκείμενον. The word names that-which-lies-before, that which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of the subject has, in the first instance, no special relationship to man, and none at all to the I.
When, however, man becomes the primary and genuine subiectum, this means that he becomes that being upon which every being, in its way of
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