in need of explicit agreement, of the objective and static surfaces and foreground facets of all things as alone valid and valuable—a setup with whose help man carries on and degrades everything.
Summary and Transition
To find what Nietzsche really thought is as difficult as it is to lose it. The difficulty cannot be removed in a few hours of lectures. But it can be pointed out. In fact, a pointer is needed, if only for the reason that we men of today hardly know what it takes to gain access to a thinker, especially one so close to us in time as Nietzsche. The following reflections, however, concern the way of access to the tradition of thinking generally. The best and basically only manner to find out is to go that way. But it takes the devotion of almost a life time. The thinkers' thought is laid down in books. Books are books. The only allowance we make for books in philosophy is that they may be difficult to read. But one book is not like another, especially not when we are concerned with reading a "Book for Everyone and No One." And that is here our concern. For we cannot get around the necessity of finding Nietzsche first, in order that we may then lose him in the sense defined earlier. Why? Because Nietzsche's thinking gives voice and language to what now is—but in a language in which the two-thousand-year-old tradition of Western metaphysics speaks, a language which we all speak, which Europe speaks—though in a form transposed more than once, timeworn, shallowed, threadbare, and rootless. Plato and Aristotle speak in what is still our language of today. Parmenides and Heraclitus, too, think in what is still our realm of ideas. But an appeal is made to modern man's historical awareness in order to make us believe that those men are museum pieces of intellectual history, which can occasionally be placed back on