NIETZSCHE'S WORD: "GOD IS DEAD"

the connection is obscure between the thinking that thinks the overman in the shape of Zarathustra and the essence of metaphysics. That is why the character of the work Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a work remains hidden. Only when future thinking has been brought into a position to think this Book for Everyone and No One along with Schelling's Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809), which means along with Hegel's work The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) too, and also along with the Monadology (1714) of Leibniz; and only when this future thinking has been brought to think them not only metaphysically, but also on the basis of the essence of metaphysics; only then are the right and duty to confront this work, as well as the ground and horizon for a confrontation, established.

It is easy but irresponsible to be outraged by the idea and the figure of the overman, which was designed to be misunderstood; it is easy but irresponsible to pretend that one's outrage is a refutation. It is difficult but for future thinking unavoidable to attain the high responsibility out of which Nietzsche reflected on the essence of that humanity destined (in the destiny of being as the will to power) to undertake mastery over the earth. The essence of the overman is not a warrant for a fit of capricious frenzy. It is the law, grounded in being itself, of a long chain of the highest self-overcomings, which alone will make man ripe for beings which as beings are part of being. This being as the will to power brings to light its essence as the will to power and through this disclosure is epoch making, that is, it makes the last epoch of metaphysics.

According to Nietzsche's metaphysics, erstwhile man is called erstwhile because although his essence is determined by the will to power as the fundamental trait of all beings, he nonetheless has not experienced and taken over the will to power as this fundamental trait. The man moving beyond erstwhile man receives the will to power (as the fundamental trait of all beings) into his own willing and thus wills himself in the sense of the will to power. All beings are as beings set in this will. What, in the mode of goal and norm, used to condition and determine man's essence has forfeited its unconditional and immediate — and above all its ubiquitously infallibly effective [wirksame] — power to effect [Wirkungsmacht]. No longer does that supersensory world of goals and norms inspire and sustain life. That world has itself grown lifeless: dead. The Christian faith will still exist here and there. However, the love that prevails in such a world is not the effecting-effective [wirkend-wirksame] principle of that which is taking place now. Thought as the effective reality [wirksame Wirklichkeit] of everything real [Wirklichen], the supersensory ground of the supersensory world has grown

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