in keeping with the latter's essence remains veiled to our thinking. The question is scarcely asked, and because of the predominance of philosophical anthropology it is hopelessly confused. In any case, however, it would be erroneous were we to take the formulation of the value-principle as testimony that Nietzsche philosophizes existentially. That he never did. But he did think metaphysically. We are not yet mature enough for the rigor of a thought of the kind found in the following note that Nietzsche wrote down at about the time when he was doing the thinking for his projected masterpiece, The Will to Power: "Around the hero everything turns into tragedy; around the demi-god, into a satyr-play; and around God—what?—perhaps into 'world'?" (Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 150, 1 886).
But the time has come for us to learn to perceive that Nietzsche's thinking, although it must display another mien when judged historiographically and on the basis of the label assigned it, is no less possessed of matter and substance and is no less rigorous than is the thinking of Aristotle, who in the fourth book of his Metaphysics thinks the principle of contradiction as the primary truth regarding the Being of whatever is. The comparison between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard that has become customary, but is no less questionable for that reason, fails to recognize, and indeed out of a misunderstanding of the essence of thinking, that Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker preserves a closeness to Aristotle. Kierkegaard remains essentially remote from Aristotle, although he mentions him more often. For Kierkegaard is not a thinker but a religious writer, and indeed not just one among others, but the only one in accord with the destining belonging to his age. Therein lies his greatness, if to speak in this way is not already a misunderstanding.
In the fundamental principle of Nietzsche's metaphysics the unity of the essence of the will to power is named with the naming of the essential relation between art and truth. Out of this unity of essence belonging to what is as such, the metaphysical essence of value is determined. Value is the twofold condition of the will to power itself, posited in the will to power for the will to power.
Because Nietzsche experiences the Being of everything that is as the will to power, his thinking must think out toward value.