NIETZSCHE'S WORD: "GOD IS DEAD"

trying (Werke, vol. XIII, "Nachgelassene Werke," § 181). Although it may well be expected that Nietzsche's metaphysical concept of justice will still disconcert conventional ideas, he nonetheless hits on the essence of the justice which was already historically true at the beginning of the completion of the modem age, in the struggle for mastery over the earth, and which therefore determines all human transactions in this age, explicitly or not, hiddenly or openly.

Justice thought by Nietzsche is the truth of the beings that are in the mode of the will to power. However, even Nietzsche failed to think justice explicitly as the essence of the truth of beings; nor, out of such thought, did he bring up the metaphysics of completed subjectity. Justice, however, is the truth of beings that is determined by being itself. A5 this truth, justice is metaphysics itself in its modem completion. In metaphysics itself is hidden the reason why Nietzsche is indeed able to experience nihilism metaphysically but nonetheless is not able to think the essence of nihilism.

We do not know what hidden fom1, enjoined out of the essence of justice as the truth of justice, has been obtaining for the metaphysics of the will to power. The first ground-thesis of this metaphysics has scarcely been expressed and not even in the form of a thesis. Certainly, within this metaphysics the thesis-character of this thesis is sui generis. Certainly, the first thesis of value is not the major premise in a deductive system of theses. Even if we understand the rubric "ground-thesis of metaphysics" in the conservative sense that it identifies the essential ground of beings as such, i.e., it identifies them in the unity of their essence, it is still sufficiently broad and complex to determine, in accordance with the nature of a given metaphysics, the mode in which that metaphysics speaks of this ground.

Nietzsche expressed the first value-thesis of the metaphysics of the will to power in yet another form (The Will to Power, no. 822, from 1888): "We possess art so that we do not perish of the truth."

This thesis about the metaphysical relation in essence (which means here the metaphysical relation in value) between art and truth is admittedly not something to be grasped according to our ordinary ideas about truth and art. If this happens, everything becomes banal and we lose — and this is now very dire — the possibility of seeking an essential confrontation with the hidden position of modem metaphysics that is bringing itself to completion, a confrontation that would free us from the obfuscation of histories and world views.

In the formula just given for the ground-thesis of the metaphysics of the will to power, art and truth are thought as the fundamental structures of

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