NIETZSCHE'S WORD: "GOD IS DEAD"

representation. Justification [iustificatio] is the achievement of iustitia and is therefore justice [Gerechtigkeit] itself. By being always a subject, the subject makes itself certain of its securing. lt justifies itself before the claim to justice that it has itself set.

At the beginning of modernity, the question dawned anew how man amidst the entirety of beings, which means before the beingmost ground of all beings (God), can become and be certain of his own continuing duration, i.e., of his own salvation. This question of the certainty of salvation is the question of justification, i.e., of justice (iustitia).

Within modern metaphysics, it is Leibniz who first thinks the subiectum as the ens percipiens et appetens. It is Leibniz, thinking on the vis which characterizes the ens, who for the first time clearly thinks the willing essence of the being of beings. In his twenty-four theses about metaphysics, Leibniz writes (Thesis 20): iustitia nihil aliud est quam ordo seu perfectio circa mentes. The mentes, i.e., the res cogitantes, are (Thesis 22) the primariae Mundi unitates.⁶ Truth as certainty is the securing of security, is order (ordo) and a universal ascertainment [Fest-stellung], i.e., a thorough and complete making [Durchund Ver-fertigung] (per-fectio). Making secure characterizes the primary and actual beings in their being; this character is iustitia (justice).

In his critical groundwork of metaphysics, Kant thinks the final self-securing of transcendental subjectivity as the quaestio iuris of transcendental deduction. This is the legal question [Rechtsfrage] of the justification [Rechtfertigung] of and by the representing subject, which has fixed for itself its essence in the self-rightedness of its "I think."

In the essence of truth as certainty (certainty thought as the truth of subjectity and subjectity as the being of beings), justice is hidden, experienced on the basis of the justification by security. Although this justice prevails as the essence of the truth of subjectity, it is not, however, thought within the metaphysics of subjectity as the truth of beings. And yet justice must come into the thinking of modern metaphysics as the being of beings that knows itself, just as soon as the being of beings appears as the will to power. The will to power knows itself as that which essentially sets values, that which secures itself in the positing of values, and that which thereby constantly does justice to itself and in such doing is justice. It is in and as this justice that the proper essence of the will to power must represent, which means, thought in the tem1s of modem metaphysics: must be. In Nietzsche's metaphysics, the thought of value is more fundamental than the fundamental tl10ught of certainty in Descartes' metaphysics, since certainty can only count as right if it also counts as the highest value. Similarly, in the age that has

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