Translated by William McNeill1
[213]
This essay presents the unaltered, slightly expanded (pp. 24ff.) text
of a contribution to a publication in honor of Ernst Jünger (1955). The
title has been altered. It formerly read:
Concerning "The Line" [Über "Die Linie"]. The new title is meant to indicate that the meditation on the
essence of nihilism stems from a discussion locating [Erörterung],2 being
as being. In accordance with the tradition, philosophy understands the
question of being as the question concerning beings as beings. This is the
question of metaphysics. The answers to this question in each case appeal
to an interpretation of being that remains unquestioned and that prepares
the ground and soil for metaphysics. Metaphysics does not go back into
its ground. Such a return is addressed in the "Introduction to 'What Is
Metaphysics?,'" which since the fifth edition (1949) has been placed before
the text of the lecture (seventh edition [1955], pp. 7-23).
Dear Herr Jünger!
My greeting on your sixtieth birthday adopts, with a slight change, the title of the treatise that you dedicated to me on the same occasion. Your contribution Across the Line [Über die Linie] has meanwhile appeared as a separate publication, expanded in a few places. It is an "assessment of our situation," concerned with "crossing" the line, yet does not confine itself merely to describing the situation. The line is also called the "zero meridian" (p. 29). You speak (on pp. 22 and 31) of the "zero point." [214] The zero indicates the nothing, indeed an empty nothing. Where everything presses toward nothing, nihilism reigns. At the zero meridian it approaches
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