Yet what is Nietzsche’s laying claim to “life,” other than the unwitting and ungrounding postulation of the domain, the measures, and the fulfillment relations—i.e., the postulation of what one can and must explain on the basis of life as its expression, because indeed “life” is the encompassing that bears | everything—(περιέχov [“embracing”]), but which nevertheless must be something “above” “life” and drawn out of it, as long as it still strives to interpret itself and know itself. In this manner, “metaphysics” is unavoidable and “natural,” provided the nature of a human being includes a relation to beings as such and thus a relation to himself. Yet if on the path of its own history metaphysics explicitly attains the form of “physics,” then beings stand purely and simply privileged over beyng—so decisively that beyng becomes correctness. This exclusive affirmation of beings and the empowerment of their power constitute a meditationless denial of beyng (and thus of its question-worthiness). “Nihilism”—carries out the consummation of metaphysics and therefore can also be grasped only metaphysically and overcome solely through the overcoming of metaphysics. But where, in whatever accidental and half forms, “nihilism” is apprehended and pursued—or suspected and refuted—as a “worldview” or the like, where the flight into the past could be justified through the manifest appearance of “nihilism,” there nihilism already grasps its supposed opponents and despisers and conceals itself in | a form whose greatest danger is undangerousness and unrecognizability.
Nietzsche’s deepest meditation therefore resides where he still recognizes himself as a nihilist—and the limit of his meditation consists in his inability to recognize any longer his attempted overcoming as the most extreme form of “nihilism.” That is denied him because he cannot at all think nihilism in terms of metaphysics and the history of beyng, but only in terms of morals and within the horizon of the thinking and positing of values.
11b
The thinking which is heedful of the history of beyng neither portrays present-at-hand facts, nor describes “structures,” nor sees in the universal (as condition of representation) the ground of the particular, nor posits values and goals. The thinking which is heedful of the history of beyng is without “content” and gives the impression of something “abstract” and empty. Yet what looks like emptiness is only the omission of beings in the destiny of beyng, a destiny consisting in the circumstance that the spatiotemporal field of beyng is to be