NIETZSCHE'S WORD: "GOD IS DEAD"
metaphysics as metaphysics. Yet what is metaphysics? Do we know its essence? Is it itself able to know this essence? When it comprehends its essence, it grasps it metaphysically. But the metaphysical concept of metaphysics continually lags behind its essence. The same is true of every logic, assuming that logic is still in fact able to think what λόγος is. Every metaphysics of metaphysics and every logic of philosophy that attempt in whatever way to clamber past metaphysics most certainly fall down beneath it, without coming to know in the process where they have fallen to.
In the meantime, however, at least one trait of the essence of nihilism has become clearer in our thought. The essence of nihilism is rooted in history; accordingly, there is nothing in the appearance of beings as such in their entirety that is going on with being itself and its truth; indeed, as a result, the truth of beings as such is taken as being, since the truth of being stays absent. Nietzsche indeed came to know, in the age in which nihilism was beginning to be completed, some of the traits of nihilism, but at the same time he interpreted them nihilistically, thereby completely burying their essence. Nietzsche never recognized the essence of nihilism, like every other metaphysics before him.
However, if the essence of nihilism is rooted in the history that in the appearance of beings as such in their entirety the truth of beings stays absent, and if accordingly there is nothing going on with being itself and the truth of being, then metaphysics, as the history of the truth of beings as such in their essence, is nothing. If in the end metaphysics is the historical ground of the world history that is being determined by the West and by Europe, then it is nihilistic in quite another sense.
Thought in terms of the destiny of being, the nihil of nihilism means that there is nothing going on with being. Being does not come to the light of its own essence. In the appearance of beings as such, being itself stays away.
The truth of being escapes us. It remains forgotten. So nihilism then would be in its essence a history that happens with being itself. It would lie then in the essence of being itself that being remains unthought because it removes itself. Being itself removes itself into its truth. It saves [birgt] itself in its truth and conceals [verbirgt] itself in such shelter [Bergen].
In looking at the self-concealing shelter [das sich verbergende Bergen] of its own essence, perhaps we catch a glimpse of the essence of the mystery in which the truth of being essences.
Accordingly, metaphysics itself would not be simply overlooking a question about being that is still to be reflected upon. In the end it would not be
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