We only wish to keep in mind the full range of the area we are
approaching
when we ask the question "What is being, being as a whole, this unity that admits no other?
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
The gap opens between two things that in one way are alike, so that they appear to be the same.
On the one side stands the following: "Everything is nought, indifferent, so that noth- ing is worthwhile-it is all alike.
"And on the other side: "Everything recurs, it depends on each moment, everything matters-it is all alike.
"
The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: "everything is indifferent" and "nothing is indifferent. "
The overcoming of this smallest gap is the most difficult overcoming in the thought of eternal return of the same as the essentially overcom- ing thought. If one takes the thought ostensibly "for itself' in terms of its content-"Everything turns in a circle"-then it is perhaps sheer delusion. But in that case it is not Nietzsche's thought. Above all, it is not the thought "for itself," inasmuch as for itself it is precisely the overcoming thought, and this alone.
If we survey once again at a single glance our presentation of Nietz- sche's thought of eternal return of the same, we cannot but be struck by the fact that our explicit discussion of the thought's content has receded markedly before our constant emphasis on the right way of approaching the thought and its conditions. The conditions may be reduced to two-and even these cohere and constitute but one.
First, thinking in terms of the moment. This implies that we trans- pose ourselves to the temporality of independent action and decision, glancing ahead at what is assigned us as our task and back at what is given us as our endowment.
Second, thinking the thought as the overcoming of nihilism. This implies that we transpose ourselves to the condition of need that arises with nihilism. The condition requires of us that we meditate on the
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 183
endowment and decide about the task. Our needy condition itself is nothing other than what our transposition to the moment opens up to us.
Yet what accounts for the fact that with this thought it is precisely thinking, and the conditions of thinking, that are emphasized so essen- tially? What else could it be but the thought's "content," what it gives us to think? Accordingly, the content does not really go into abeyance, as it seemed to; rather, it comes to the fore in a singular way. For now the conditions of the thought-process as such thrust their way to the forefront. With the thought in question, what is to be thought recoils on the thinker because of the way it is to be thought, and so it compels the thinker. Yet it does so solely in order to draw the thinker into what is to be thought. To think eternity requires that we think the moment, that is, transpose ourselves to the moment of being-a-self. " To think the recurrence of the same is to enter into confrontation with the "it is all alike," the "it isn't worthwhile'; in short, with nihilism.
Only by way ofnihilism and the moment is the eternal recurrence of the same to be thought. Yet in such thinking the thinker as such slips into the ring of eternal recurrence, indeed in such a way as to help achieve the ring, help decide it.
Whence does it arise that precisely in the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy the recoil of what is to be thought on the think- er-and the thinker's being drawn into what is thought-come so deci- sively to light? Is it because this kind of relation between thought and thinker is instituted in Nietzsche's philosophy alone? Or does such a relation obtain in every philosophy as such? If the latter, to what extent is this the case? With that question we arrive at the second major division of our lecture course.
• See chapter 4 of Being and Time, sections 25-27. Cf. p. 24, above.
25. The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position; The Possibility of Such Positions in the History of
Western Philosophy
Whenever we think the thought of eternal recurrence of the same, what is to be thought recoils on the one who is thinking,· and the thinker is drawn into the thought. The reason for this is not simply the fact that the eternal recurrence of the same is being thought, but that this particular thought thinks being as a whole. We call such a thought "metaphysical. " Because the thought of return is the metaphysical thought in Nietzsche's case, it is characterized by the relationship of the recoil that includes and the inclusion that recoils. Of course, there must be a special reason for the fact that this relationship comes to prevail in such a conspicuous way precisely with Nietzsche, and that reason can lie only in Nietzsche's metaphysics; we can say where and how and why it lies there only if we have defined what we call meta- physics by means of a sufficiently clear concept. Such a concept must clarify what we mean by a "fundamental position. " In the designation "fundamental metaphysical position" the word metaphysical is not ap- pended in order to indicate a special case among "fundamental posi- tions. " Rather, the word metaphysical designates the domain that is opened up as metaphysical only by virtue of the articulation of a fun- damental position. If this is so, then what does the phrase fundamental
metaphysical position mean?
The title of this section, which indicates the task we have just out-
lined, bears a subtitle. The subtitle invokes the possibility of a
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 185
fundamental metaphysical position in the history of Western philos- ophy. Here it is not so much a matter of referring to the manifold approximations to such fundamental metaphysical positions and to their historical sequence. Rather, what we must emphasize is the fact that what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position pertains expressly to Western history, and to it alone, helping to determine that history in an essential way. Something like a fundamental metaphysi- cal position was possible heretofore only in our tradition; and to the extent that such positions are attempted in the future as well, what has prevailed up to now will remain in force as something not overcome, not assimilated. Here we intend to discuss the possibility of a funda- mental metaphysical position in the most fundamental sense of the phrase, and not to sketch some sort of historiographical account. In accordance with what we have said, this fundamental discussion will nonetheless be essentially historical.
Since in the present lecture course we are to portray Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, our discussion of that concept can only be of a preparatory nature. Furthermore, a well-rounded, essen- tial consideration of the matter is quite impossible: we lack all the prerequisites for such a consideration.
It behooves our tentative characterization of the concept fundamen- tal metaphysical position to begin with the word and concept meta- physical. We use the word to designate matters germane to "metaphysics. " The latter has for centuries referred to that range of questions in philosophy which philosophy sees as its proper task. Meta- physics is thus the rubric indicative of philosophy proper; it always has to do with a philosophy's fundamental thought. Even the customary meaning of the word, that is to say, the meaning that has come into general and popular use, still reflects this trait, albeit in a faint and fuzzy way. When we speak of something metaphysical we are pointing to reasons lying behind something else, or perhaps going out beyond that thing in some inscrutable way. We sometimes employ the word in a pejorative way, whereby those "reasons behind" a thing are taken as mere figments and, at bottom, absurdities; at other times we use the word metaphysical positively, taking it as referring to the impalpable and ultimate, the decisive. In either case, however, our thinking hov-
186 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ers in indeterminacy, insecurity, and obscurity. The word refers more to the end and limits of our thinking and inquiring than to their proper beginning and unfolding.
Yet when we refer merely to the devaluation the word metaphysics has suffered we are not entertaining the proper significance of that word. The word and its origins are quite strange; odder still is its his- tory. And yet the configuration of the Western intellectual world and thereby the world in general depends to an essential extent on the power and preeminence of this word and its history. In history, words are often mightier than things and deeds. The fact that we ultimately still know very little about the power of this word metaphysics and its hegemony makes us realize how paltry and extrinsic our knowledge of the history of philosophy has remained, and how ill-prepared we are to enter into confrontation with that history, its fundamental positions, and the unifying and determinative forces within those positions. His- tory of philosophy is not a matter for historiography, but a matter of philosophy. The first philosophical history of philosophy was that of Hegel. He never elaborated that history in book form, but presented it in lecture courses taught at Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin.
Hegel's history of philosophy is the only philosophical history heretofore, and it will remain the only one until philosophy is forced to think historically-in a still more essential and original sense of that word-taking its ownmost grounding question as its point of departure. Wherever this is already occurring, in its initial stages, it still seems as if it is all nothing more than a slightly altered formulation of the earlier "historiographical" interpretation of the history of philosophy. The fur- ther illusion arises that historical observation restricts itself to what has been and does not have the courage-does not even have the capacity - t o say something "new" of its own. The illusion will persist as long as there is no one who surmises-and is able to estimate the implica- tions of-the following fact: in spite of the ascendant power of technol- ogy and of the universally technicized "mobilization" of the globe, hence in spite of a quite specific preeminence of an ensnared nature, an altogether distinct fundamental power of Being is on the rise; this power is history-which, however, is no longer to be represented as an object of historiography. We allude to these matters here simply be-
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 187
cause the following historical meditation on the essence of metaphysics may well seem to be nothing more than a highly abridged excerpt from some handbook or other on the history of philosophy.
Metaphysics is the name for the full range of philosophy's proper questions. If these questions are many, they are nonetheless guided by one single question. In truth, drawn as they are into that question, they are in effect but one question. Every question, and especially the one question of philosophy, as a question is always bathed in a light that emanates from the question itself. That is why the very inception of inquiry at the grand commencement of Western philosophy pos- sesses some knowledge of itself. Such autochthonous knowledge of philosophic inquiry initially defines itself by circumscribing and com- prehending what it is asking about. Philosophy inquires into the arche. We translate that word as "principle. " And if we neglect to think and question rigorously and persistently, we think we know what "prin- ciple" means here. Arche and archein mean "to begin. " At the same time, they mean to stand at the beginning of all; hence, to rule. Yet this reference to the designated arche will make sense only if we simul- taneously determine that ofwhich and for which we are seeking the arche. We are seeking it, not for some isolated event, not for unusual and recondite facts and relationships, but purely and simply for being. Whenever we say the word das Seiende, we are referring to everything
that is. But when we inquire into the arche of being, all being-as a whole and in entirety-is placed in question. With the question con- cerning the arche, something about being as a whole has already been said. Being as a whole has now become visible for the first time as being and as a whole.
Whenever we inquire into the arche we experi~nce being as a whole at the very beginning, the very rise of its presence and radiance. When the sun begins to radiate its light we speak of "sunrise"; accordingly, we conceive of the upsurgence of what is present as such as a rise. We are asking about the arche of being as a whole, about its rise, to the extent that this rising pervades being in terms of both what it is and how it is. Thus we are asking about a kind of dominion. We mean to acquire knowledge concerning the rise and dominion of being as a whole; such knowledge of the arche is therefore to know what being is insofar as it
188 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
is being. Accordingly, the question of philosophy, as an inquiry into the arche, may be posed in the following form: What is being, insofar as it is viewed as being? Ti to on hei on? Quid est ens qua ens? This question, once its manner of inquiry has thus been established, may be simplified to the following formula: Ti to on? What is being? To ask this question, to find the answer to it once it has been posed and secured, is the primary and proper task of philosophy-it is prate philo- sophia. At its very commencement Western philosophy delineates philosophic inquiry in terms of the question ti to on? In that com- mencement Western philosophy comes to its essential conclusion. It is Aristotle in particular who achieves this essential clarification of philo- sophic inquiry in the most lucid way. Hence at the outset of one of his essential treatises (Metaphysics, VII, 1) Aristotle writes the following words: Kai de kai to palai te kai nun kai aei dzetoumenon kai aei aporoumenon, ti to on? "And so it is asked, from ancient times to the present, and on into the future, even though the paths to this question stop short or are utterly lacking,-What is being? "
In order for us to understand-and that means to assist in asking- this apparently quite simple question, it is important from the outset to attain clarity concerning the following point, a point we will have to think about again and again: inasmuch as being is put in question with a view to the arche, being itself is already determined. If we ask whence and in what way being rises and, as rising, comes to presence, being itself is already defined as the upsurging and as what holds sway and presences in such upsurgence. The Greeks called such rising- presencing governance physis. The. latter word means something else, something more, than our word nature. At all events, the following becomes clear: when the arche is sought, being itself is defined more closely, determined in a correspondingly far-reaching and penetrating way.
A peculiar experience arises as part and parcel of this process: in addition to beings that come to the fore on their own, there seem to be other beings that are first produced by human beings-whether such production occur in handicraft manufacture, in artistic performances, or in the ordered conduct of public affairs. Accordingly, one proceeds to make a distinction with respect to being as a whole between what is
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 189
preeminently and straightforwardly physis, namely, on physei, and what is on technei, thesei, and nomoi. "'
The definitive meditation on being will always first cast its eye on being as physis-ta physei onta-there to perceive what being as such is. Such knowledge, related as it is to physis, is an episteme physike, "physics," though not at all in the contemporary sense of that word. It is of course nonetheless true that physics today has a great deal of work to do, more than it is aware of, or can possibly be aware of. "Physics" is perspective on, and circumspection within, being as a whole; yet its view to the arche always sets the standard. Thus within the philosoph- ical meditation on being (that is, on physis) there are studies that enter more deeply into being and its various regions, for instance, the inani- mate or animate; and there can also be studies that concentrate less on the characteristic details of a given region than on the question of what being is when viewed as a whole. If we designate the first series of investigations with the word physike, in the sense of scientia physica, then the second series is in a certain sense posterior to it; yet although it follows in the wake of the first series, the second series contains the ultimate and genuine studies. Viewed from the outside, in terms of the order, division, and sequence of the investigations and in terms of the kind of knowledge that is attained in treatises that come post physicam, such studies may be given the Greek designation meta ta physika. At the same time, what we have already indicated readily opens onto a further insight: inquiry into the arche asks what determines and domi- nates being as a whole in its governance. The question ti to on? in- quires out beyond being as a whole, although the question always and everywhere relates precisely back to it. Such knowledge of the physika is not merely post physicam but trans physicam. Metaphysics, meta ta physika, is knowledge and inquiry that posit being as physis. Meta- physics does so in such a way that in and through the positing it. inquires out beyond being, asking about being as being. To inquire into the arche-to ask the question ti to on? -is metaphysics. Or, to put it the other way around, metaphysics is the inquiry and the search
• That is to say, a distinction between beings that rise and come to presence under their own power and those that derive from the arts and crafts (teclmei), or are set down in words (thesei), or are proclaimed in laws (nomoi).
190 THE ETERNAL RECURRf~NCE OF THE SAMF.
that always remains guided by the sole question "What is being? " We therefore call this question the guiding question of metaphysics. *
The question "What is being? " inquires so universally and so en- compassingly that all the efforts incited by it at first and for quite some time afterwards strive after this one thing-to find an answer to the question and to secure that answer. The more this question becomes the guiding question, and the longer it remains such, the less the question itself becomes an object of inquiry. Every treatment of the guiding question is and remains preoccupied with the answer, preoc- cupied with finding the answer. The latter has assumed sundry con- figurations ever since the commencement of Western philosophy with the Greeks, as philosophy pursued its circuitous route through the age of Christendom and into the age of modernity and modernity's con- quest of the world, up to Nietzsche. Yet no matter how varied the configurations have been, they remain unified by the framework of the sole guiding question; once it is posed, the question seems to pose itself automatically-and hence to recede as a question. The question is not unfolded along the lines of its own articulation.
With the responses to this wholly undeveloped guiding question, certain positions adopted toward being as such and toward its arche arise. Being itself, as it is definitively experienced from the outset- whether as physis or as the creation of some Creator or as the realiza- tion of an absolute spirit-and the way being is defined in its arche provide the ground on which, and the respect in which, the guiding question troubles itself about the proffered answers. The questioners themselves, and all those who pattern and ground their essential knowledge and action within the realm of the prevailing response to the guiding question, have adopted a stance toward being as a whole, a stance in relation to being as such, in conformity to the guiding question-whether or not they are aware of the guiding question as such. Because the stance in question originates from the guiding ques- tion and is simultaneous with it, and because the guiding question is what is properly metaphysical in metaphysics, we call the stance that
• See Volume I of this series, section II, pp. 67-68, for further discussion of the
Leitfrage.
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 191
derives from the undeveloped guiding question the fundamental meta- physical position. "'
The concept fundamental metaphysical position may be grasped in propositional form as follows: The fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which the one who poses the guiding question remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the questioner comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole of beings.
All the same, the concept of a fundamental metaphysical position is not yet clear. Not only the concept but also the historically developed fundamental positions themselves are necessarily in and for themselves altogether opaque and impenetrable. That is the reason we invariably represent the fundamental metaphysical positions-for instance, those of Plato, or of medieval theology, or of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel-so extrinsically, according to the various doctrines and propositions expressed in them. The best we can do is to say what predecessors influenced these philosophers and what standpoint they adopt in mat- ters of ethics or in the question of the demonstrability of God's exis- tence or with regard to the issue of the "reality of the external world. " We invoke sundry "aspects," which apparently just happen to be there and which we take up as evident, totally ignorant of the fact that there can be such aspects only because a fundamental metaphysical position has been adopted here. The position in question is adopted because knowledge and thought themselves stand under the dominion of the guiding question from the very beginning. And the guiding question itself is not developed.
The concept of a fundamental metaphysical position and the corre- sponding historical positions themselves attain essential clarity and definition only when the guiding question of metaphysics and thereby metaphysics itself in its essence come to be developed. It is almost
• Die metaphysische Grundstellung, literally, "the metaphysical ground position. " Readers must hea1 in the word fundamental the German word Grund. Heidegger always and everywhere contraposes the guiding question of metaphysics to its grounding ques- tion, die Grundfrage.
192 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
superfluous to say that an original, thoughtful stance adopted with regard to a particular metaphysics is possible and fruitful only if that metaphysics is itself developed in terms of its own fundamental posi- tion and only if the way in which it responds to the guiding question can be defined. The mutually prevailing fundamental positions must first of all be worked out in and for every genuinely philosophical confrontation.
The essence of what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position develops with and in the unfolding of the guiding question of metaphysics. Such unfolding of the guiding question is not solely and not even primarily motivated by the desire to achieve a better concep- tion of the fundamental metaphysical position as such. Rather, the determining ground of the development of the guiding question is to be sought in a renewed posing of the question, indeed, in a more original asking of that question. Yet that is not a matter we shall be able to treat here. What we are to communicate now is rather the bare result of the development of the guiding question. We shall present it in a highly compressed, well-nigh arid form, in textbook fashion, so that the inner articulation of the guiding question becomes visible-if only as a skeleton devoid of flesh and blood.
The guiding question of Western philosophy is, "What is being? " To treat this question as stated and posed is simply to look for an answer. To develop the question as it is formulated, however, is to pose the question more essentially: in asking the question one enters explicitly into those relationships that become visible when one assimi- lates virtually everything that comes to pass in the very asking of the question. When we treat the guiding question we are transposed forth- with to a search for an answer and to everything that has to be done on behalf of that search. Developing the guiding question is something essentially different-it is a more original form of inquiry, one which does not crave an answer. It takes the search for an answer far more seriously and rigorously than any straightforward treatment of the guid- ing question can-given the particular stance such treatment has adopted. An answer is no more than the final step of the very asking; and an answer that bids adieu to the inquiry annihilates itself as an answer. It can ground nothing like knowledge. It rests content with the
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 193
sheer opinions it traces and in which it has ensconced itself. A ques- tion-especially a question that involves being as a whole-can be appropriately answered only if it is adequately posed in the first place. The guiding question of philosophy is adequately posed only when it is developed. Here the development assumes such proportions that it transforms the very question, bringing to light the guiding question as such in its utter lack of originality. For that reason we call the question "What is being? " the guiding question, in contrast to the more original question which sustains and directs the guiding question. The more original question we call the grounding question.
Whenever we present the development of the guiding question "schematically," as we are now doing, we easily awaken the suspicion that here we are merely making inquiries concerning a question. To question questioning strikes sound common sense as rather un- wholesome, extravagant, perhaps even nonsensical. If it is a matter of wanting to get to beings themselves-and in the guiding question this is surely the case-then the inquiry into inquiry seems an aberration. In the end, such an attitude, asking about its asking, seems nothing short of noxious or self-lacerating; we might call it "egocentric" and "nihilistic" and all the other nasty names we so easily come by.
That the development of the guiding question appears to be merely inquiry piled on top of inquiry-this illusion persists. That an inquiry concerning inquiry ultimately looks like an aberration, a veritable walk down the garden path-this illusion too cannot be squelched. Con- fronting the danger that only a few or no one at all will be able to muster the courage and the energy required to think through and ex- amine thoroughly the development of the guiding question; and in the expectation that these few might stumble against something quite dif- ferent from a question that is posed merely for its own sake or a piec:;e of sheer extravagance, we shall here undertake to sketch briefly the articulation of the developed guiding question.
The question asks ti to on? What is being? We shall begin to expli- cate the question by following the direction the inquiry itself takes, gradually unraveling all the matters we come across.
What is being? What is meant is being as such, neither some par- ticular being nor a group of beings nor even all of them taken together,
194 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
but something essentially more: what is meant is the whole, being taken as a whoie from the outset, being taken as such unity. Outside of this one, this being, there is no other, unless it be the nothing. Yet the nothing is not some kind of being which is merely other. How matters stand with the nothing is not the question we are now to pursue.
We only wish to keep in mind the full range of the area we are approaching when we ask the question "What is being, being as a whole, this unity that admits no other? " Let us then resolve not to forget in anything that follows what it was that rose to meet us in our first tentative step in the question concerning being, namely, the incontrovertible happenstance that we stumbled across the nothing.
Seen from the point of view of the question iself, that which the question is heading toward is the matter to be interrogated-we may call it the field of the question. Yet this field-being as a whole-is not staked out in our questioning merely so that we can take cognizance of its incalculable abundance; nor is it our intention merely to make being a familiar station on our way; rather, the question aims right from the start at being insofar as it is being. With regard to the field of interrogation, we are asking about something that is peculiar to it, something that is most its own. What name shall we give it? If we interrogate being solely with a view to the fact that it is being, interro- gate being as being, then with the question as to what being is we are aiming to discover what makes being a being. We are aiming to dis- cover the beingness of being-in Greek, the ousia of on. We are inter- rogating the Being of beings.
In the field of the question, in the very staking out of the field, the goal of the question is itself already established-what we are asking for in the matter interrogated, to wit, the Being of beings. Just as we collided against the nothing when we undertook to set the field of the question in relief, so here the staking out of the field and the establish- ment of the goal that is at stake condition one another reciprocally. And if we may say that the nothing looms at the border of this ques- tion, then, in accordance with the reciprocity of the field and the goal of the question, we may experience the proximity of the nothing also in the goal, that is, in the Being of beings; provided, of course, that we are actually inquiring, that our aim is true, that we are on target. To be
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 195
sure, the nothing seems to be an utter nullity; it is as though we were doing it too great on honor when we call it by name. Yet this utterly common affair proves to be so uncommon that we can experience it only in unusual experiences. The meanness of the nothing consists precisely in the circumstance that it is capable of seducing us into thinking that our empty chatter-our calling the nothing an utter nul- lity-can really shunt the matter aside. * The nothing of being follows the Being of being as night follows day. When would we ever see and experience the day as day if there were no night! Thus the most durable and unfailing touchstone of genuineness and forcefulness of thought in a philosopher is the question as to whether or not he or she experiences in a direct and fundamental manner the nearness of the nothing in the Being of beings. Whoever fails to experience it remains forever outside the realm of philosophy, without hope of entry.
If inquiry were no more than what the superficial view often readily takes it to be; if it were simply a fleeting being-on-the-lookout for something, or a dispassionate scrutiny of an object of inquiry, or a passing hit-or-miss glance at a given goal; if inquiry were any of these things, then our unfolding of the question would already be at an end. And yet we have scarcely begun. We are seeking the Being of beings; we are trying to reach it. To that end we must approach being itself and bring it into our ken. Whatever is interrogated is questioned in a number of specific respects, never in an altogether general way, inas- much as the latter runs counter to the very essence of questioning. And so we come to what is asked for. The field is examined in a dual perspective, inasmuch as it is surveyed by a preliminary view toward the goal. The being as such is viewed with respect to what it is, what it looks like, hence with respect to its intrinsic composition. We may call this the constitution of the being. At the same time, a being that. is constituted in this or that fashion has its way to be-as such, being is either possible or actual or necessary. Thus the guiding question,
• When Heidegger refers to the nothing as "this utterly common affair" (dieses Ge- meinste), and when he invokes the "meanness" of the nothing (das Gemeine am Nichts), he adds a new dimension to Hegel's play on the words mein, meinen, Mei- nung, and Allgemeine, discussed on p. 100, above. Being as a whole is not the universal; its common border is with the nothing. And there is something insidious in the intimacy of being and the nothing.
196 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF' THE SAME
besides having its field and its goal, possesses above all its range of vision. Within that range it thinks beings as such according to a two- fold respect. Only in terms of both respects, as they are reciprocally related, can the Being of beings be defined.
When we first hear it, and even long afterwards, the guiding ques- tion "What is being? " sounds altogether indefinite; its universality ap- pears to be engaged in a contest with its haziness and impalpability. All highways and byways seem to be open to its fortuitous search. A re- examination and testing of the various steps involved in the question seems to be without prospect. Certainly-as long as one leaves the question undetermined! Yet our prior explications ought to have made it clear by now that this question possesses a very definite though pre- sumably very complex articulation, one which we have hardly fath- omed and are even less able to master. Of course, we would mistake this articulation from top to bottom if we were to wield it academically and technically in the form of a merely "scientific" formulation-if, for example, we expected to be able to test the steps involved in the question as though they resembled the directly graspable, calculable result of an "experiment. "
Our inquiry into the guiding question is separated from that kind of procedure by a veritable gulf. And being as a whole, itself the field of the question, can never be patched together out of isolated assortments of beings. All the same, the guiding question too in each case sustains an exceptional relationship with a particular region of beings within the field, a region that therefore assumes special importance. This fact has its grounds in the essence of inquiry itself, which, the more sweep- ing it is at the start, the more closely it wants to approach what it is interrogating, in order to survey it with an inquiring gaze. If it is ulti- mately the question concerning being that is involved here, the first thing we have to heed is the fact that being, in its constitution and its ways to be, discloses not only an articulated abundance but also a number of orders and stages which shed light on one another. Here it is by no means a matter of indifference which orders of being become definitive for the illumination of the others-whether, for instance, living beings are conceived in terms of lifeless ones, or the latter in terms of the former.
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 197
Whatever the particular case, each time the guiding question is posed one region of beings becomes definitive for our survey of being as a whole. In each case the guiding question unfolds in itself some- thing that sets the standard. By this "setting the standard" we· under- stand the preeminence of an exceptional region within being as a whole. The remaining beings are not actually derived from that excep- tional region; yet that region provides the light that illumines them all.
26. Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position
In the foregoing we have attempted to portray Nietzsche's fundamental thought-the eternal return of the same-in its essential import, in its domain, and in the mode of thinking that is expressly proper to the thought itself, that is, the mode demanded by the thought as such. In that way we have laid the foundation for our own efforts to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in Western philosophy. The effort to circumscribe Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical posi- tion indicates that we are examining his philosophy in terms of the position assigned it by the history of Western philosophy hitherto. At the same time, this means that we are expressly transposing Nietzsche's philosophy to that sole position in which it can and must unfold the forces of thought that are most proper to it, and this in the context of an inescapable confrontation with prior Western philosophy as a whole. The fact that in the course of our presentation of the doctrine of return we have actually come to recognize the region of thought that must necessarily and preeminently take precedence in every fruitful reading and appropriating of Nietzschean thought may well be an im- portant gain; yet when viewed in terms of the essential task, namely, the characterization of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, such a gain remains merely provisional.
We shall be able to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in its principal traits if we ponder the response he gives to the question concerning the constitution of being and being's way to be. Now, we know that Nietzsche offers two answers with regard to being as a whole: being as a whole is will to power, and being as a whole is
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 199
eternal recurrence of the same. Yet philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy have up to now been unable to grasp these two simultaneous answers as answers, indeed as answers that necessarily cohere, because they have not recognized the questions to which these answers pertain; that is to say, prior interpretations have not explicitly developed those questions on the basis of a thoroughgoing articulation of the guiding question. If, on the contrary, we approach the matter in terms of the developed guiding question, it becomes apparent that the word "is" in these two major statements-being as a whole is will to power, and being as a whole is eternal recurrence of the same-in each case suggests something different. To say that being as a whole "is" will to power means that being as such possesses the constitution of that which Nietzsche defines as will to power. And to say that being as a whole "is" eternal recurrence of the same means that being as a whole is, as being, in the manner of eternal recurrence of the same. The determination "will to power" replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution; the determination "eternal recur-
rence of the same" replies to the question of being with respect to its way to be. Yet constitution and manner of being do cohere as determi- nations of the beingness of beings.
Accordingly, in Nietzsche's philosophy will to power and eternal recurrence of the same belong together. It is thus right from the start a misunderstanding-better, an outright mistake-of metaphysical pro- portions when commentators try to play off will to power against eter- nal recurrence of the same, and especially when they exclude the latter altogether from metaphysical determinations of being. In truth, the coherence ofboth must be grasped. Such coherence is itself essentially defined on the basis of the coherence of constitution and way to be as reciprocally related moments of the beingness of beings. The constitu: tion of beings also specifies in each case their way to be-indeed, as their proper ground.
What fundamental metaphysical position does Nietzsche's philos- ophy assume for itself on the basis of its response to the guiding ques- tion within Western philosophy, that is to say, within metaphysics?
Nietzsche's philosophy is the end of metaphysics, inasmuch as it reverts to the very commencement of Greek thought, taking up such
200 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
thought in a way that is peculiar to Nietzsche's philosophy alone. In this way Nietzsche's philosophy closes the ring that is formed by the very course of inquiry into being as such and as a whole. Yet to what extent does Nietzsche's thinking revert to the commencement? When we raise this question we must be clear about one point at the very outset: Nietzsche by no means recovers the philosophy of the com- mencement in its pristine form. Rather, here it is purely a matter of the reemergence of the essential fundamental positions of the com- mencement in a transformed configuration, in such a way that these positions interlock.
What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the as yet un- developed guiding question, the question as to what being is?
The one answer-roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides -tells us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of is and Being -permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.
The other answer-roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus-tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution.
To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being in such a way that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent; and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet being is both of these, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has Being only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. But such becoming-a-being becomes a being that comes-to-be, and does so in
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 201
the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration. *
Nietzsche once wrote, at the time when the thought of return first loomed on his horizon, during the years 1881-82 (XII, 66, number 124): "Let us imprint the emblem of eternity on our life! " The phrase means: let us introduce an eternalization to ourselves as beings, and hence to beings as a whole; let us introduce the transfiguration of what becomes as something that becomes being; and let us do this in such a way that the eternalization arises from being itself, originating for be- ing, standing in being.
This fundamental metaphysical demand-that is, a demand that grapples with the guiding question of metaphysics-is expressed several years later in a lengthy note entitled "Recapitulation," the title suggest- ing that the note in just a few sentences provides a resume of the most important aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. (See The Will to Power, number 617, presumably from early 1886. )t Nietzsche's "Recapit-
• The text is extraordinarily difficult to unravel: Dieses Seiendwerden aber wird zum werdenden Seienden im stiindigen Werden des Festgewordenen als eines Erstarrten zum Festgemachten als der befreienden Verkliirung. The oxymorons of this highly involuted sentence dramatize the inevitable petrifaction of Becoming in a metaphysics of Being. Only as permanence of presence can Becoming come to be. The wording of the sen- tence in Heidegger's original manuscript (1937) varies only slightly from the 1961 Neske text. Yet a series of energetic lines draws the word befreienden, "liberating," into the sentence, as though to break up all such petrifaction. For the liberating transfiguration of Becoming is what Heidegger elsewhere calls the most intrinsic will of Nietzschean think- ing.
t As the note on page 19 of Volume I of this series relates, Heidegger employs the "Recapitulation" note (WM, 617) at crucial junctures throughout his Nietzsche lectures. See, for example, Nl, 466 and 656; Nil, 288 and 339; and p. 228, below. Yet the title "Recapitulation" stems not from Nietzsche himself but from his assistant and later editor Heinrich Koselitz (Peter Cast). Furthermore, the sentences from this long note which Heidegger neglects to cite by no means corroborate the use he makes of it. The whole of Nietzsche's sketch (now dated between the end of 1886 and spring of 1887), as it appears in CM, Mp XVII 3b [54], reads as follows:
To stamp Becoming with the character of Being-that is the supreme will to power.
Twofold falsification, one by the senses, the other by the mind, in order to preserve a world of being, of perdurance, of equivalence, etc.
That everything recurs is the closest approximation ofa world ofBecoming to one ofBeing: peak ofthe meditation.
202 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ulation" begins with the statement: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being-that is the supreme will to power. " The sense is not that one must brush aside and replace Becoming as the impermanent-for impermanence is what Becoming implies-with being as the permanent. The sense is that one must shape Becoming as being in such a way that as becoming it is preserved, has subsistence, in a word, is. Such stamping, that is, the recoining of Becoming as being, is the supreme will to power. In such recoining the will to power comes to prevail most purely in its essence.
What is this recoining, in which whatever becomes comes to be being? It is the reconfiguration of what becomes in terms of its su- preme possibilities, a reconfiguration in which what becomes is trans- figured and attains subsistence in its very dimensions and domains. This recoining is a creating. To create, in the sense of creation out
The condemnation of and dissatisfaction with whatever becomes derives from val- ues that are attributable to being: after such a world of Being had first been invented.
The metamorphoses of being (body, God, ideas, laws of nature, formulas, etc. )
"Being" as semblance; inversion of values: semblance was that which conferred value-
Knowledge itself impossible within Becoming; how then is knowledge possible? As error concerning itself, as will to power, as will to deception.
Becoming as invention volition self-denial, the overcoming of oneself: not a subject but a doing, establishing; creative, not "causes and effects. "
Art as the will to overcome Becoming, as "eternalization," but shortsighted, de- pending on perspective: repeating on a small scale, as it were, the tendency of the whole
What all life exhibits, to be observed as a reduced formula for the universal ten- dency: hence a new grip on the concept "life" as will to power
Instead of "cause and effect," the mutual struggle of things that become, often with the absorption of the opponent; the number of things in becoming not constant.
Inefficacy of the old ideals for interpreting the whole of occurrence, once one has recognized their animal origins and utility; all of them, furthermore, contradicting life.
Inefficacy of the mechanistic theory--gives the impression of meaninglessness.
The entire idealism of humanity hitherto is about to turn into nihilism-into belief in absolute worthlessness, that is to say, senselessness . . .
Annihilation of ideals, the new desert; the new arts, by means of which we can endure it, we amphibians.
Presupposition: bravery, patience, no "turning back," no hurrying forward
N. B. : Zarathustra, always parodying prior values, on the basis of his own abun- dance.
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 203
beyond oneself, is most intrinsically this: to stand in the moment of decision, in which what has prevailed hitherto, our endowment, is directed toward a projected task. When it is so directed, the endow- ment is preserved. The "momentary" character of creation is the es- sence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its su- preme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal
recurrence ofthe same.
The aptness of our interpretation is demonstrated unequivocally in that very fragment which bears the title "Recapitulation. " After the statement we have already cited-"To stamp Becoming with the char- acter of Being-that is the supreme will to power''-we soon read the following sentence: "That everything recurs is the closest approxima-
tion ofa world ofBecoming to one ofBeing: peak ofthe meditation. "
It would scarcely be possible to say in a more lucid fashion, first, how and on what basis the stamping of Being on Becoming is meant to be understood, and second, that the thought of eternal return of the same, even and precisely during the period when the thought of will to power appears to attain preeminence, remains the thought which Nietzsche's philosophy thinks without cease.
(During our discussion of the plans for Nietzsche's magnum opus [see page 160, above], several students noted that whereas sketches for such plans from the final year of Nietzsche's creative life (1888) mention Dionysos in the titles of their projected fourth and final books, our lecture course up to now has said nothing about this god.
Nevertheless, we ought to pay close attention to the phrases that follow the god's name in these titles: "philosophy of eternal return," or simply "philosophos. "
Such phrases suggest that what the words Dionysos and Dionysian mean to Nietzsche will be heard and understood only if the "eternal return of the same" is thought. In turn, that which eternally recurs
204 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
as the same and in such wise is, that is, perpetually presences, has the ontological constitution of "will to power. " The mythic name Dionysos will become an epithet that has been thought through in the sense intended by Nietzsche the thinker only when we try to think the coherence of "will to power" and "eternal return of the same"; and that means, only when we seek those determinations of Being which from the outset of Greek thought guide all thinking about being as such and as a whole. [Two texts which appeared several years ago treat the matters of Dionysos and the Dionysian: Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Myth and Cult, 1933; and Karl Rein- hardt, "Nietzsche's 'Plaint of Ariadne,'" in the journal Die Antike, 1935, published separately in 1936. ])*
Nietzsche conjoins in one both of the fundamental determinations of being that emerge from the commencement of Western philosophy, to wit, being as becoming and being as permanence. That "one" is his most essential thought-the eternal recurrence of the same.
Yet can we designate Nietzsche's way of grappling with the com- mencement of Western philosophy as an end? Is it not rather a reawak- ening of the commencement? Is it not therefore itself a commence- ment and hence the very opposite of an end? It is nonetheless the case that Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of West- ern philosophy. For what is decisive is not that the fundamental deter- minations of the commencement are conjoined and that Nietzsche's
• The paragraphs contained within parentheses appear as an indented extract in the Neske edition as they do here. Heidegger's original manuscript from the summer of 1937 does not show these paragraphs. Surprisingly, there is no extant Abschriftor typescript of this course; nor is the typescript that went to the printer in 1961 available for inspection. As a result, the date of the passage remains uncertain. My own surmise is that Heidegger added the note not long after the semester drew to a close: the reference to students' questions and to those two works on Dionysos that had "recently" been published make it highly unlikely that the note was added as late as 1960--61. The works Heidegger refers us to are of course still available-and are still very much worth reading: Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1933); Reinhardt's "Nietzsches Klage der Ariadne" appears now in Karl Reinhardt, Vermiichtnis der Antike: Gesamme/te Essays zur Philosophic und Geschichtsschreibung, edited by Carl Becker (Gottingen: Vandenhock & Ruprecht, 1960), pp. 310--33. See note 20 of the Analysis, p. 275, for further discussion of the Reinhardt article.
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 205
thinking stretches back to the commencement; what is metaphysically essential is the way in which these things transpire. The question is whether Nietzsche reverts to the incipient commencement, to the commencement as a commencing. And here our answer must be: no, he does not.
Neither Nietzsche nor any thinker prior to him--even and espe- cially not that one who before Nietzsche first thought the history of philosophy in a philosophical way, namely, Hegel-revert to the in- cipient commencement. Rather, they invariably apprehend the com- mencement in the sole light of a philosophy in decline from it, a philosophy that arrests the commencement-to wit, the philosophy of Plato. Here we cannot demonstrate this matter in any detail. Nietzsche himself quite early characterizes his philosophy as inverted Platonism; yet the inversion does not eliminate the fundamentally Platonic posi- tion. Rather, precisely because it seems to eliminate the Platonic posi- tion, Nietzsche's inversion represents the entrenchment of that position.
What remains essential, however, is the following: when Nietzsche's metaphysical thinking reverts to the commencement, the circle closes. Yet inasmuch as it is the already terminated commencement and not the incipient one that prevails there, the circle itself grows inflexible, loses whatever of the commencement it once had. When the circle closes in this way it no longer releases any possibilities for essential inquiry into the guiding question. Metaphysics-treatment of the guid- ing question-is at an end. That seems a bootless, comfortless insight, a conclusion which like a dying tone signals ultimate cessation. Yet such is not the case.
Because Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of metaphysics in the designated sense, it performs the grandest and most profound gathering-that is, accomplishment-of all the essential fun·- damental positions in Western philosophy since Plato and in the light of Platonism. It does so from within a fundamental position that is determined by Platonism and yet which is itself creative. However, this fundamental position remains an actual, actuating fundamental meta- physical position only if it in turn is developed in all its essential forces and regions of dominion in the direction of its counterposition. For a
206 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
thinking that looks beyond it, Nietzsche's philosophy, which is inher- ently a turning against what lies behind it, must itself come to be a foward-looking counterposition. Yet since Nietzsche's fundamental po- sition in Western metaphysics constitutes the end of that metaphysics, it can be the counterposition for our other commencement only if the latter adopts a questioning stance vis-a-vis the initial commencement - a s one which in its proper originality is only now commencing. After everything we have said, the questioning intended here can only be the unfolding of a more original inquiry. Such questioning must be the unfolding of the prior, all-determining, and commanding question of philosophy, the guiding question, "What is being? " out of itself and out beyond itself.
Nietzsche himself once chose a phrase to designate what we are calling his fundamental metaphysical position, a phrase that is often cited and is readily taken as a way to characterize his philosophy: amor
fati, love of necessity. (See the Epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner; VIII, 206). * Yet the phrase expresses Nietzsche's fundamental
• The text Heidegger refers us to begins as follows:
I have often asked myself if I am not more profoundly indebted to the most difficult years of my life than to any of the others. What my innermost nature instructs me is that all necessity-viewed from the heights, in terms of an economy on a grand scale-is also what is inherently useful: one should not merely put up with it, one should love it. . . . Amor fati: that is my innermost nature.
Nietzsche repeats the formula twice in Ecce Homo (II, 10 and III, "Der Fall Wag-
ner," 4), the first time as the ultimate explanation of his "discernment":
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one does not will to have anything different, neither forward nor backward nor into all eternity. Not merely to bear necessity, though much less to cloak it-all Idealism is mendacity in the face of necessity-but to love it. . . .
The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: "everything is indifferent" and "nothing is indifferent. "
The overcoming of this smallest gap is the most difficult overcoming in the thought of eternal return of the same as the essentially overcom- ing thought. If one takes the thought ostensibly "for itself' in terms of its content-"Everything turns in a circle"-then it is perhaps sheer delusion. But in that case it is not Nietzsche's thought. Above all, it is not the thought "for itself," inasmuch as for itself it is precisely the overcoming thought, and this alone.
If we survey once again at a single glance our presentation of Nietz- sche's thought of eternal return of the same, we cannot but be struck by the fact that our explicit discussion of the thought's content has receded markedly before our constant emphasis on the right way of approaching the thought and its conditions. The conditions may be reduced to two-and even these cohere and constitute but one.
First, thinking in terms of the moment. This implies that we trans- pose ourselves to the temporality of independent action and decision, glancing ahead at what is assigned us as our task and back at what is given us as our endowment.
Second, thinking the thought as the overcoming of nihilism. This implies that we transpose ourselves to the condition of need that arises with nihilism. The condition requires of us that we meditate on the
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 183
endowment and decide about the task. Our needy condition itself is nothing other than what our transposition to the moment opens up to us.
Yet what accounts for the fact that with this thought it is precisely thinking, and the conditions of thinking, that are emphasized so essen- tially? What else could it be but the thought's "content," what it gives us to think? Accordingly, the content does not really go into abeyance, as it seemed to; rather, it comes to the fore in a singular way. For now the conditions of the thought-process as such thrust their way to the forefront. With the thought in question, what is to be thought recoils on the thinker because of the way it is to be thought, and so it compels the thinker. Yet it does so solely in order to draw the thinker into what is to be thought. To think eternity requires that we think the moment, that is, transpose ourselves to the moment of being-a-self. " To think the recurrence of the same is to enter into confrontation with the "it is all alike," the "it isn't worthwhile'; in short, with nihilism.
Only by way ofnihilism and the moment is the eternal recurrence of the same to be thought. Yet in such thinking the thinker as such slips into the ring of eternal recurrence, indeed in such a way as to help achieve the ring, help decide it.
Whence does it arise that precisely in the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy the recoil of what is to be thought on the think- er-and the thinker's being drawn into what is thought-come so deci- sively to light? Is it because this kind of relation between thought and thinker is instituted in Nietzsche's philosophy alone? Or does such a relation obtain in every philosophy as such? If the latter, to what extent is this the case? With that question we arrive at the second major division of our lecture course.
• See chapter 4 of Being and Time, sections 25-27. Cf. p. 24, above.
25. The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position; The Possibility of Such Positions in the History of
Western Philosophy
Whenever we think the thought of eternal recurrence of the same, what is to be thought recoils on the one who is thinking,· and the thinker is drawn into the thought. The reason for this is not simply the fact that the eternal recurrence of the same is being thought, but that this particular thought thinks being as a whole. We call such a thought "metaphysical. " Because the thought of return is the metaphysical thought in Nietzsche's case, it is characterized by the relationship of the recoil that includes and the inclusion that recoils. Of course, there must be a special reason for the fact that this relationship comes to prevail in such a conspicuous way precisely with Nietzsche, and that reason can lie only in Nietzsche's metaphysics; we can say where and how and why it lies there only if we have defined what we call meta- physics by means of a sufficiently clear concept. Such a concept must clarify what we mean by a "fundamental position. " In the designation "fundamental metaphysical position" the word metaphysical is not ap- pended in order to indicate a special case among "fundamental posi- tions. " Rather, the word metaphysical designates the domain that is opened up as metaphysical only by virtue of the articulation of a fun- damental position. If this is so, then what does the phrase fundamental
metaphysical position mean?
The title of this section, which indicates the task we have just out-
lined, bears a subtitle. The subtitle invokes the possibility of a
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 185
fundamental metaphysical position in the history of Western philos- ophy. Here it is not so much a matter of referring to the manifold approximations to such fundamental metaphysical positions and to their historical sequence. Rather, what we must emphasize is the fact that what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position pertains expressly to Western history, and to it alone, helping to determine that history in an essential way. Something like a fundamental metaphysi- cal position was possible heretofore only in our tradition; and to the extent that such positions are attempted in the future as well, what has prevailed up to now will remain in force as something not overcome, not assimilated. Here we intend to discuss the possibility of a funda- mental metaphysical position in the most fundamental sense of the phrase, and not to sketch some sort of historiographical account. In accordance with what we have said, this fundamental discussion will nonetheless be essentially historical.
Since in the present lecture course we are to portray Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, our discussion of that concept can only be of a preparatory nature. Furthermore, a well-rounded, essen- tial consideration of the matter is quite impossible: we lack all the prerequisites for such a consideration.
It behooves our tentative characterization of the concept fundamen- tal metaphysical position to begin with the word and concept meta- physical. We use the word to designate matters germane to "metaphysics. " The latter has for centuries referred to that range of questions in philosophy which philosophy sees as its proper task. Meta- physics is thus the rubric indicative of philosophy proper; it always has to do with a philosophy's fundamental thought. Even the customary meaning of the word, that is to say, the meaning that has come into general and popular use, still reflects this trait, albeit in a faint and fuzzy way. When we speak of something metaphysical we are pointing to reasons lying behind something else, or perhaps going out beyond that thing in some inscrutable way. We sometimes employ the word in a pejorative way, whereby those "reasons behind" a thing are taken as mere figments and, at bottom, absurdities; at other times we use the word metaphysical positively, taking it as referring to the impalpable and ultimate, the decisive. In either case, however, our thinking hov-
186 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ers in indeterminacy, insecurity, and obscurity. The word refers more to the end and limits of our thinking and inquiring than to their proper beginning and unfolding.
Yet when we refer merely to the devaluation the word metaphysics has suffered we are not entertaining the proper significance of that word. The word and its origins are quite strange; odder still is its his- tory. And yet the configuration of the Western intellectual world and thereby the world in general depends to an essential extent on the power and preeminence of this word and its history. In history, words are often mightier than things and deeds. The fact that we ultimately still know very little about the power of this word metaphysics and its hegemony makes us realize how paltry and extrinsic our knowledge of the history of philosophy has remained, and how ill-prepared we are to enter into confrontation with that history, its fundamental positions, and the unifying and determinative forces within those positions. His- tory of philosophy is not a matter for historiography, but a matter of philosophy. The first philosophical history of philosophy was that of Hegel. He never elaborated that history in book form, but presented it in lecture courses taught at Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin.
Hegel's history of philosophy is the only philosophical history heretofore, and it will remain the only one until philosophy is forced to think historically-in a still more essential and original sense of that word-taking its ownmost grounding question as its point of departure. Wherever this is already occurring, in its initial stages, it still seems as if it is all nothing more than a slightly altered formulation of the earlier "historiographical" interpretation of the history of philosophy. The fur- ther illusion arises that historical observation restricts itself to what has been and does not have the courage-does not even have the capacity - t o say something "new" of its own. The illusion will persist as long as there is no one who surmises-and is able to estimate the implica- tions of-the following fact: in spite of the ascendant power of technol- ogy and of the universally technicized "mobilization" of the globe, hence in spite of a quite specific preeminence of an ensnared nature, an altogether distinct fundamental power of Being is on the rise; this power is history-which, however, is no longer to be represented as an object of historiography. We allude to these matters here simply be-
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 187
cause the following historical meditation on the essence of metaphysics may well seem to be nothing more than a highly abridged excerpt from some handbook or other on the history of philosophy.
Metaphysics is the name for the full range of philosophy's proper questions. If these questions are many, they are nonetheless guided by one single question. In truth, drawn as they are into that question, they are in effect but one question. Every question, and especially the one question of philosophy, as a question is always bathed in a light that emanates from the question itself. That is why the very inception of inquiry at the grand commencement of Western philosophy pos- sesses some knowledge of itself. Such autochthonous knowledge of philosophic inquiry initially defines itself by circumscribing and com- prehending what it is asking about. Philosophy inquires into the arche. We translate that word as "principle. " And if we neglect to think and question rigorously and persistently, we think we know what "prin- ciple" means here. Arche and archein mean "to begin. " At the same time, they mean to stand at the beginning of all; hence, to rule. Yet this reference to the designated arche will make sense only if we simul- taneously determine that ofwhich and for which we are seeking the arche. We are seeking it, not for some isolated event, not for unusual and recondite facts and relationships, but purely and simply for being. Whenever we say the word das Seiende, we are referring to everything
that is. But when we inquire into the arche of being, all being-as a whole and in entirety-is placed in question. With the question con- cerning the arche, something about being as a whole has already been said. Being as a whole has now become visible for the first time as being and as a whole.
Whenever we inquire into the arche we experi~nce being as a whole at the very beginning, the very rise of its presence and radiance. When the sun begins to radiate its light we speak of "sunrise"; accordingly, we conceive of the upsurgence of what is present as such as a rise. We are asking about the arche of being as a whole, about its rise, to the extent that this rising pervades being in terms of both what it is and how it is. Thus we are asking about a kind of dominion. We mean to acquire knowledge concerning the rise and dominion of being as a whole; such knowledge of the arche is therefore to know what being is insofar as it
188 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
is being. Accordingly, the question of philosophy, as an inquiry into the arche, may be posed in the following form: What is being, insofar as it is viewed as being? Ti to on hei on? Quid est ens qua ens? This question, once its manner of inquiry has thus been established, may be simplified to the following formula: Ti to on? What is being? To ask this question, to find the answer to it once it has been posed and secured, is the primary and proper task of philosophy-it is prate philo- sophia. At its very commencement Western philosophy delineates philosophic inquiry in terms of the question ti to on? In that com- mencement Western philosophy comes to its essential conclusion. It is Aristotle in particular who achieves this essential clarification of philo- sophic inquiry in the most lucid way. Hence at the outset of one of his essential treatises (Metaphysics, VII, 1) Aristotle writes the following words: Kai de kai to palai te kai nun kai aei dzetoumenon kai aei aporoumenon, ti to on? "And so it is asked, from ancient times to the present, and on into the future, even though the paths to this question stop short or are utterly lacking,-What is being? "
In order for us to understand-and that means to assist in asking- this apparently quite simple question, it is important from the outset to attain clarity concerning the following point, a point we will have to think about again and again: inasmuch as being is put in question with a view to the arche, being itself is already determined. If we ask whence and in what way being rises and, as rising, comes to presence, being itself is already defined as the upsurging and as what holds sway and presences in such upsurgence. The Greeks called such rising- presencing governance physis. The. latter word means something else, something more, than our word nature. At all events, the following becomes clear: when the arche is sought, being itself is defined more closely, determined in a correspondingly far-reaching and penetrating way.
A peculiar experience arises as part and parcel of this process: in addition to beings that come to the fore on their own, there seem to be other beings that are first produced by human beings-whether such production occur in handicraft manufacture, in artistic performances, or in the ordered conduct of public affairs. Accordingly, one proceeds to make a distinction with respect to being as a whole between what is
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 189
preeminently and straightforwardly physis, namely, on physei, and what is on technei, thesei, and nomoi. "'
The definitive meditation on being will always first cast its eye on being as physis-ta physei onta-there to perceive what being as such is. Such knowledge, related as it is to physis, is an episteme physike, "physics," though not at all in the contemporary sense of that word. It is of course nonetheless true that physics today has a great deal of work to do, more than it is aware of, or can possibly be aware of. "Physics" is perspective on, and circumspection within, being as a whole; yet its view to the arche always sets the standard. Thus within the philosoph- ical meditation on being (that is, on physis) there are studies that enter more deeply into being and its various regions, for instance, the inani- mate or animate; and there can also be studies that concentrate less on the characteristic details of a given region than on the question of what being is when viewed as a whole. If we designate the first series of investigations with the word physike, in the sense of scientia physica, then the second series is in a certain sense posterior to it; yet although it follows in the wake of the first series, the second series contains the ultimate and genuine studies. Viewed from the outside, in terms of the order, division, and sequence of the investigations and in terms of the kind of knowledge that is attained in treatises that come post physicam, such studies may be given the Greek designation meta ta physika. At the same time, what we have already indicated readily opens onto a further insight: inquiry into the arche asks what determines and domi- nates being as a whole in its governance. The question ti to on? in- quires out beyond being as a whole, although the question always and everywhere relates precisely back to it. Such knowledge of the physika is not merely post physicam but trans physicam. Metaphysics, meta ta physika, is knowledge and inquiry that posit being as physis. Meta- physics does so in such a way that in and through the positing it. inquires out beyond being, asking about being as being. To inquire into the arche-to ask the question ti to on? -is metaphysics. Or, to put it the other way around, metaphysics is the inquiry and the search
• That is to say, a distinction between beings that rise and come to presence under their own power and those that derive from the arts and crafts (teclmei), or are set down in words (thesei), or are proclaimed in laws (nomoi).
190 THE ETERNAL RECURRf~NCE OF THE SAMF.
that always remains guided by the sole question "What is being? " We therefore call this question the guiding question of metaphysics. *
The question "What is being? " inquires so universally and so en- compassingly that all the efforts incited by it at first and for quite some time afterwards strive after this one thing-to find an answer to the question and to secure that answer. The more this question becomes the guiding question, and the longer it remains such, the less the question itself becomes an object of inquiry. Every treatment of the guiding question is and remains preoccupied with the answer, preoc- cupied with finding the answer. The latter has assumed sundry con- figurations ever since the commencement of Western philosophy with the Greeks, as philosophy pursued its circuitous route through the age of Christendom and into the age of modernity and modernity's con- quest of the world, up to Nietzsche. Yet no matter how varied the configurations have been, they remain unified by the framework of the sole guiding question; once it is posed, the question seems to pose itself automatically-and hence to recede as a question. The question is not unfolded along the lines of its own articulation.
With the responses to this wholly undeveloped guiding question, certain positions adopted toward being as such and toward its arche arise. Being itself, as it is definitively experienced from the outset- whether as physis or as the creation of some Creator or as the realiza- tion of an absolute spirit-and the way being is defined in its arche provide the ground on which, and the respect in which, the guiding question troubles itself about the proffered answers. The questioners themselves, and all those who pattern and ground their essential knowledge and action within the realm of the prevailing response to the guiding question, have adopted a stance toward being as a whole, a stance in relation to being as such, in conformity to the guiding question-whether or not they are aware of the guiding question as such. Because the stance in question originates from the guiding ques- tion and is simultaneous with it, and because the guiding question is what is properly metaphysical in metaphysics, we call the stance that
• See Volume I of this series, section II, pp. 67-68, for further discussion of the
Leitfrage.
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 191
derives from the undeveloped guiding question the fundamental meta- physical position. "'
The concept fundamental metaphysical position may be grasped in propositional form as follows: The fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which the one who poses the guiding question remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the questioner comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole of beings.
All the same, the concept of a fundamental metaphysical position is not yet clear. Not only the concept but also the historically developed fundamental positions themselves are necessarily in and for themselves altogether opaque and impenetrable. That is the reason we invariably represent the fundamental metaphysical positions-for instance, those of Plato, or of medieval theology, or of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel-so extrinsically, according to the various doctrines and propositions expressed in them. The best we can do is to say what predecessors influenced these philosophers and what standpoint they adopt in mat- ters of ethics or in the question of the demonstrability of God's exis- tence or with regard to the issue of the "reality of the external world. " We invoke sundry "aspects," which apparently just happen to be there and which we take up as evident, totally ignorant of the fact that there can be such aspects only because a fundamental metaphysical position has been adopted here. The position in question is adopted because knowledge and thought themselves stand under the dominion of the guiding question from the very beginning. And the guiding question itself is not developed.
The concept of a fundamental metaphysical position and the corre- sponding historical positions themselves attain essential clarity and definition only when the guiding question of metaphysics and thereby metaphysics itself in its essence come to be developed. It is almost
• Die metaphysische Grundstellung, literally, "the metaphysical ground position. " Readers must hea1 in the word fundamental the German word Grund. Heidegger always and everywhere contraposes the guiding question of metaphysics to its grounding ques- tion, die Grundfrage.
192 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
superfluous to say that an original, thoughtful stance adopted with regard to a particular metaphysics is possible and fruitful only if that metaphysics is itself developed in terms of its own fundamental posi- tion and only if the way in which it responds to the guiding question can be defined. The mutually prevailing fundamental positions must first of all be worked out in and for every genuinely philosophical confrontation.
The essence of what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position develops with and in the unfolding of the guiding question of metaphysics. Such unfolding of the guiding question is not solely and not even primarily motivated by the desire to achieve a better concep- tion of the fundamental metaphysical position as such. Rather, the determining ground of the development of the guiding question is to be sought in a renewed posing of the question, indeed, in a more original asking of that question. Yet that is not a matter we shall be able to treat here. What we are to communicate now is rather the bare result of the development of the guiding question. We shall present it in a highly compressed, well-nigh arid form, in textbook fashion, so that the inner articulation of the guiding question becomes visible-if only as a skeleton devoid of flesh and blood.
The guiding question of Western philosophy is, "What is being? " To treat this question as stated and posed is simply to look for an answer. To develop the question as it is formulated, however, is to pose the question more essentially: in asking the question one enters explicitly into those relationships that become visible when one assimi- lates virtually everything that comes to pass in the very asking of the question. When we treat the guiding question we are transposed forth- with to a search for an answer and to everything that has to be done on behalf of that search. Developing the guiding question is something essentially different-it is a more original form of inquiry, one which does not crave an answer. It takes the search for an answer far more seriously and rigorously than any straightforward treatment of the guid- ing question can-given the particular stance such treatment has adopted. An answer is no more than the final step of the very asking; and an answer that bids adieu to the inquiry annihilates itself as an answer. It can ground nothing like knowledge. It rests content with the
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 193
sheer opinions it traces and in which it has ensconced itself. A ques- tion-especially a question that involves being as a whole-can be appropriately answered only if it is adequately posed in the first place. The guiding question of philosophy is adequately posed only when it is developed. Here the development assumes such proportions that it transforms the very question, bringing to light the guiding question as such in its utter lack of originality. For that reason we call the question "What is being? " the guiding question, in contrast to the more original question which sustains and directs the guiding question. The more original question we call the grounding question.
Whenever we present the development of the guiding question "schematically," as we are now doing, we easily awaken the suspicion that here we are merely making inquiries concerning a question. To question questioning strikes sound common sense as rather un- wholesome, extravagant, perhaps even nonsensical. If it is a matter of wanting to get to beings themselves-and in the guiding question this is surely the case-then the inquiry into inquiry seems an aberration. In the end, such an attitude, asking about its asking, seems nothing short of noxious or self-lacerating; we might call it "egocentric" and "nihilistic" and all the other nasty names we so easily come by.
That the development of the guiding question appears to be merely inquiry piled on top of inquiry-this illusion persists. That an inquiry concerning inquiry ultimately looks like an aberration, a veritable walk down the garden path-this illusion too cannot be squelched. Con- fronting the danger that only a few or no one at all will be able to muster the courage and the energy required to think through and ex- amine thoroughly the development of the guiding question; and in the expectation that these few might stumble against something quite dif- ferent from a question that is posed merely for its own sake or a piec:;e of sheer extravagance, we shall here undertake to sketch briefly the articulation of the developed guiding question.
The question asks ti to on? What is being? We shall begin to expli- cate the question by following the direction the inquiry itself takes, gradually unraveling all the matters we come across.
What is being? What is meant is being as such, neither some par- ticular being nor a group of beings nor even all of them taken together,
194 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
but something essentially more: what is meant is the whole, being taken as a whoie from the outset, being taken as such unity. Outside of this one, this being, there is no other, unless it be the nothing. Yet the nothing is not some kind of being which is merely other. How matters stand with the nothing is not the question we are now to pursue.
We only wish to keep in mind the full range of the area we are approaching when we ask the question "What is being, being as a whole, this unity that admits no other? " Let us then resolve not to forget in anything that follows what it was that rose to meet us in our first tentative step in the question concerning being, namely, the incontrovertible happenstance that we stumbled across the nothing.
Seen from the point of view of the question iself, that which the question is heading toward is the matter to be interrogated-we may call it the field of the question. Yet this field-being as a whole-is not staked out in our questioning merely so that we can take cognizance of its incalculable abundance; nor is it our intention merely to make being a familiar station on our way; rather, the question aims right from the start at being insofar as it is being. With regard to the field of interrogation, we are asking about something that is peculiar to it, something that is most its own. What name shall we give it? If we interrogate being solely with a view to the fact that it is being, interro- gate being as being, then with the question as to what being is we are aiming to discover what makes being a being. We are aiming to dis- cover the beingness of being-in Greek, the ousia of on. We are inter- rogating the Being of beings.
In the field of the question, in the very staking out of the field, the goal of the question is itself already established-what we are asking for in the matter interrogated, to wit, the Being of beings. Just as we collided against the nothing when we undertook to set the field of the question in relief, so here the staking out of the field and the establish- ment of the goal that is at stake condition one another reciprocally. And if we may say that the nothing looms at the border of this ques- tion, then, in accordance with the reciprocity of the field and the goal of the question, we may experience the proximity of the nothing also in the goal, that is, in the Being of beings; provided, of course, that we are actually inquiring, that our aim is true, that we are on target. To be
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 195
sure, the nothing seems to be an utter nullity; it is as though we were doing it too great on honor when we call it by name. Yet this utterly common affair proves to be so uncommon that we can experience it only in unusual experiences. The meanness of the nothing consists precisely in the circumstance that it is capable of seducing us into thinking that our empty chatter-our calling the nothing an utter nul- lity-can really shunt the matter aside. * The nothing of being follows the Being of being as night follows day. When would we ever see and experience the day as day if there were no night! Thus the most durable and unfailing touchstone of genuineness and forcefulness of thought in a philosopher is the question as to whether or not he or she experiences in a direct and fundamental manner the nearness of the nothing in the Being of beings. Whoever fails to experience it remains forever outside the realm of philosophy, without hope of entry.
If inquiry were no more than what the superficial view often readily takes it to be; if it were simply a fleeting being-on-the-lookout for something, or a dispassionate scrutiny of an object of inquiry, or a passing hit-or-miss glance at a given goal; if inquiry were any of these things, then our unfolding of the question would already be at an end. And yet we have scarcely begun. We are seeking the Being of beings; we are trying to reach it. To that end we must approach being itself and bring it into our ken. Whatever is interrogated is questioned in a number of specific respects, never in an altogether general way, inas- much as the latter runs counter to the very essence of questioning. And so we come to what is asked for. The field is examined in a dual perspective, inasmuch as it is surveyed by a preliminary view toward the goal. The being as such is viewed with respect to what it is, what it looks like, hence with respect to its intrinsic composition. We may call this the constitution of the being. At the same time, a being that. is constituted in this or that fashion has its way to be-as such, being is either possible or actual or necessary. Thus the guiding question,
• When Heidegger refers to the nothing as "this utterly common affair" (dieses Ge- meinste), and when he invokes the "meanness" of the nothing (das Gemeine am Nichts), he adds a new dimension to Hegel's play on the words mein, meinen, Mei- nung, and Allgemeine, discussed on p. 100, above. Being as a whole is not the universal; its common border is with the nothing. And there is something insidious in the intimacy of being and the nothing.
196 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF' THE SAME
besides having its field and its goal, possesses above all its range of vision. Within that range it thinks beings as such according to a two- fold respect. Only in terms of both respects, as they are reciprocally related, can the Being of beings be defined.
When we first hear it, and even long afterwards, the guiding ques- tion "What is being? " sounds altogether indefinite; its universality ap- pears to be engaged in a contest with its haziness and impalpability. All highways and byways seem to be open to its fortuitous search. A re- examination and testing of the various steps involved in the question seems to be without prospect. Certainly-as long as one leaves the question undetermined! Yet our prior explications ought to have made it clear by now that this question possesses a very definite though pre- sumably very complex articulation, one which we have hardly fath- omed and are even less able to master. Of course, we would mistake this articulation from top to bottom if we were to wield it academically and technically in the form of a merely "scientific" formulation-if, for example, we expected to be able to test the steps involved in the question as though they resembled the directly graspable, calculable result of an "experiment. "
Our inquiry into the guiding question is separated from that kind of procedure by a veritable gulf. And being as a whole, itself the field of the question, can never be patched together out of isolated assortments of beings. All the same, the guiding question too in each case sustains an exceptional relationship with a particular region of beings within the field, a region that therefore assumes special importance. This fact has its grounds in the essence of inquiry itself, which, the more sweep- ing it is at the start, the more closely it wants to approach what it is interrogating, in order to survey it with an inquiring gaze. If it is ulti- mately the question concerning being that is involved here, the first thing we have to heed is the fact that being, in its constitution and its ways to be, discloses not only an articulated abundance but also a number of orders and stages which shed light on one another. Here it is by no means a matter of indifference which orders of being become definitive for the illumination of the others-whether, for instance, living beings are conceived in terms of lifeless ones, or the latter in terms of the former.
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 197
Whatever the particular case, each time the guiding question is posed one region of beings becomes definitive for our survey of being as a whole. In each case the guiding question unfolds in itself some- thing that sets the standard. By this "setting the standard" we· under- stand the preeminence of an exceptional region within being as a whole. The remaining beings are not actually derived from that excep- tional region; yet that region provides the light that illumines them all.
26. Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position
In the foregoing we have attempted to portray Nietzsche's fundamental thought-the eternal return of the same-in its essential import, in its domain, and in the mode of thinking that is expressly proper to the thought itself, that is, the mode demanded by the thought as such. In that way we have laid the foundation for our own efforts to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in Western philosophy. The effort to circumscribe Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical posi- tion indicates that we are examining his philosophy in terms of the position assigned it by the history of Western philosophy hitherto. At the same time, this means that we are expressly transposing Nietzsche's philosophy to that sole position in which it can and must unfold the forces of thought that are most proper to it, and this in the context of an inescapable confrontation with prior Western philosophy as a whole. The fact that in the course of our presentation of the doctrine of return we have actually come to recognize the region of thought that must necessarily and preeminently take precedence in every fruitful reading and appropriating of Nietzschean thought may well be an im- portant gain; yet when viewed in terms of the essential task, namely, the characterization of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, such a gain remains merely provisional.
We shall be able to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in its principal traits if we ponder the response he gives to the question concerning the constitution of being and being's way to be. Now, we know that Nietzsche offers two answers with regard to being as a whole: being as a whole is will to power, and being as a whole is
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 199
eternal recurrence of the same. Yet philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy have up to now been unable to grasp these two simultaneous answers as answers, indeed as answers that necessarily cohere, because they have not recognized the questions to which these answers pertain; that is to say, prior interpretations have not explicitly developed those questions on the basis of a thoroughgoing articulation of the guiding question. If, on the contrary, we approach the matter in terms of the developed guiding question, it becomes apparent that the word "is" in these two major statements-being as a whole is will to power, and being as a whole is eternal recurrence of the same-in each case suggests something different. To say that being as a whole "is" will to power means that being as such possesses the constitution of that which Nietzsche defines as will to power. And to say that being as a whole "is" eternal recurrence of the same means that being as a whole is, as being, in the manner of eternal recurrence of the same. The determination "will to power" replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution; the determination "eternal recur-
rence of the same" replies to the question of being with respect to its way to be. Yet constitution and manner of being do cohere as determi- nations of the beingness of beings.
Accordingly, in Nietzsche's philosophy will to power and eternal recurrence of the same belong together. It is thus right from the start a misunderstanding-better, an outright mistake-of metaphysical pro- portions when commentators try to play off will to power against eter- nal recurrence of the same, and especially when they exclude the latter altogether from metaphysical determinations of being. In truth, the coherence ofboth must be grasped. Such coherence is itself essentially defined on the basis of the coherence of constitution and way to be as reciprocally related moments of the beingness of beings. The constitu: tion of beings also specifies in each case their way to be-indeed, as their proper ground.
What fundamental metaphysical position does Nietzsche's philos- ophy assume for itself on the basis of its response to the guiding ques- tion within Western philosophy, that is to say, within metaphysics?
Nietzsche's philosophy is the end of metaphysics, inasmuch as it reverts to the very commencement of Greek thought, taking up such
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thought in a way that is peculiar to Nietzsche's philosophy alone. In this way Nietzsche's philosophy closes the ring that is formed by the very course of inquiry into being as such and as a whole. Yet to what extent does Nietzsche's thinking revert to the commencement? When we raise this question we must be clear about one point at the very outset: Nietzsche by no means recovers the philosophy of the com- mencement in its pristine form. Rather, here it is purely a matter of the reemergence of the essential fundamental positions of the com- mencement in a transformed configuration, in such a way that these positions interlock.
What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the as yet un- developed guiding question, the question as to what being is?
The one answer-roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides -tells us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of is and Being -permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.
The other answer-roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus-tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution.
To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being in such a way that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent; and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet being is both of these, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has Being only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. But such becoming-a-being becomes a being that comes-to-be, and does so in
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 201
the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration. *
Nietzsche once wrote, at the time when the thought of return first loomed on his horizon, during the years 1881-82 (XII, 66, number 124): "Let us imprint the emblem of eternity on our life! " The phrase means: let us introduce an eternalization to ourselves as beings, and hence to beings as a whole; let us introduce the transfiguration of what becomes as something that becomes being; and let us do this in such a way that the eternalization arises from being itself, originating for be- ing, standing in being.
This fundamental metaphysical demand-that is, a demand that grapples with the guiding question of metaphysics-is expressed several years later in a lengthy note entitled "Recapitulation," the title suggest- ing that the note in just a few sentences provides a resume of the most important aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. (See The Will to Power, number 617, presumably from early 1886. )t Nietzsche's "Recapit-
• The text is extraordinarily difficult to unravel: Dieses Seiendwerden aber wird zum werdenden Seienden im stiindigen Werden des Festgewordenen als eines Erstarrten zum Festgemachten als der befreienden Verkliirung. The oxymorons of this highly involuted sentence dramatize the inevitable petrifaction of Becoming in a metaphysics of Being. Only as permanence of presence can Becoming come to be. The wording of the sen- tence in Heidegger's original manuscript (1937) varies only slightly from the 1961 Neske text. Yet a series of energetic lines draws the word befreienden, "liberating," into the sentence, as though to break up all such petrifaction. For the liberating transfiguration of Becoming is what Heidegger elsewhere calls the most intrinsic will of Nietzschean think- ing.
t As the note on page 19 of Volume I of this series relates, Heidegger employs the "Recapitulation" note (WM, 617) at crucial junctures throughout his Nietzsche lectures. See, for example, Nl, 466 and 656; Nil, 288 and 339; and p. 228, below. Yet the title "Recapitulation" stems not from Nietzsche himself but from his assistant and later editor Heinrich Koselitz (Peter Cast). Furthermore, the sentences from this long note which Heidegger neglects to cite by no means corroborate the use he makes of it. The whole of Nietzsche's sketch (now dated between the end of 1886 and spring of 1887), as it appears in CM, Mp XVII 3b [54], reads as follows:
To stamp Becoming with the character of Being-that is the supreme will to power.
Twofold falsification, one by the senses, the other by the mind, in order to preserve a world of being, of perdurance, of equivalence, etc.
That everything recurs is the closest approximation ofa world ofBecoming to one ofBeing: peak ofthe meditation.
202 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ulation" begins with the statement: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being-that is the supreme will to power. " The sense is not that one must brush aside and replace Becoming as the impermanent-for impermanence is what Becoming implies-with being as the permanent. The sense is that one must shape Becoming as being in such a way that as becoming it is preserved, has subsistence, in a word, is. Such stamping, that is, the recoining of Becoming as being, is the supreme will to power. In such recoining the will to power comes to prevail most purely in its essence.
What is this recoining, in which whatever becomes comes to be being? It is the reconfiguration of what becomes in terms of its su- preme possibilities, a reconfiguration in which what becomes is trans- figured and attains subsistence in its very dimensions and domains. This recoining is a creating. To create, in the sense of creation out
The condemnation of and dissatisfaction with whatever becomes derives from val- ues that are attributable to being: after such a world of Being had first been invented.
The metamorphoses of being (body, God, ideas, laws of nature, formulas, etc. )
"Being" as semblance; inversion of values: semblance was that which conferred value-
Knowledge itself impossible within Becoming; how then is knowledge possible? As error concerning itself, as will to power, as will to deception.
Becoming as invention volition self-denial, the overcoming of oneself: not a subject but a doing, establishing; creative, not "causes and effects. "
Art as the will to overcome Becoming, as "eternalization," but shortsighted, de- pending on perspective: repeating on a small scale, as it were, the tendency of the whole
What all life exhibits, to be observed as a reduced formula for the universal ten- dency: hence a new grip on the concept "life" as will to power
Instead of "cause and effect," the mutual struggle of things that become, often with the absorption of the opponent; the number of things in becoming not constant.
Inefficacy of the old ideals for interpreting the whole of occurrence, once one has recognized their animal origins and utility; all of them, furthermore, contradicting life.
Inefficacy of the mechanistic theory--gives the impression of meaninglessness.
The entire idealism of humanity hitherto is about to turn into nihilism-into belief in absolute worthlessness, that is to say, senselessness . . .
Annihilation of ideals, the new desert; the new arts, by means of which we can endure it, we amphibians.
Presupposition: bravery, patience, no "turning back," no hurrying forward
N. B. : Zarathustra, always parodying prior values, on the basis of his own abun- dance.
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 203
beyond oneself, is most intrinsically this: to stand in the moment of decision, in which what has prevailed hitherto, our endowment, is directed toward a projected task. When it is so directed, the endow- ment is preserved. The "momentary" character of creation is the es- sence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its su- preme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal
recurrence ofthe same.
The aptness of our interpretation is demonstrated unequivocally in that very fragment which bears the title "Recapitulation. " After the statement we have already cited-"To stamp Becoming with the char- acter of Being-that is the supreme will to power''-we soon read the following sentence: "That everything recurs is the closest approxima-
tion ofa world ofBecoming to one ofBeing: peak ofthe meditation. "
It would scarcely be possible to say in a more lucid fashion, first, how and on what basis the stamping of Being on Becoming is meant to be understood, and second, that the thought of eternal return of the same, even and precisely during the period when the thought of will to power appears to attain preeminence, remains the thought which Nietzsche's philosophy thinks without cease.
(During our discussion of the plans for Nietzsche's magnum opus [see page 160, above], several students noted that whereas sketches for such plans from the final year of Nietzsche's creative life (1888) mention Dionysos in the titles of their projected fourth and final books, our lecture course up to now has said nothing about this god.
Nevertheless, we ought to pay close attention to the phrases that follow the god's name in these titles: "philosophy of eternal return," or simply "philosophos. "
Such phrases suggest that what the words Dionysos and Dionysian mean to Nietzsche will be heard and understood only if the "eternal return of the same" is thought. In turn, that which eternally recurs
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as the same and in such wise is, that is, perpetually presences, has the ontological constitution of "will to power. " The mythic name Dionysos will become an epithet that has been thought through in the sense intended by Nietzsche the thinker only when we try to think the coherence of "will to power" and "eternal return of the same"; and that means, only when we seek those determinations of Being which from the outset of Greek thought guide all thinking about being as such and as a whole. [Two texts which appeared several years ago treat the matters of Dionysos and the Dionysian: Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Myth and Cult, 1933; and Karl Rein- hardt, "Nietzsche's 'Plaint of Ariadne,'" in the journal Die Antike, 1935, published separately in 1936. ])*
Nietzsche conjoins in one both of the fundamental determinations of being that emerge from the commencement of Western philosophy, to wit, being as becoming and being as permanence. That "one" is his most essential thought-the eternal recurrence of the same.
Yet can we designate Nietzsche's way of grappling with the com- mencement of Western philosophy as an end? Is it not rather a reawak- ening of the commencement? Is it not therefore itself a commence- ment and hence the very opposite of an end? It is nonetheless the case that Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of West- ern philosophy. For what is decisive is not that the fundamental deter- minations of the commencement are conjoined and that Nietzsche's
• The paragraphs contained within parentheses appear as an indented extract in the Neske edition as they do here. Heidegger's original manuscript from the summer of 1937 does not show these paragraphs. Surprisingly, there is no extant Abschriftor typescript of this course; nor is the typescript that went to the printer in 1961 available for inspection. As a result, the date of the passage remains uncertain. My own surmise is that Heidegger added the note not long after the semester drew to a close: the reference to students' questions and to those two works on Dionysos that had "recently" been published make it highly unlikely that the note was added as late as 1960--61. The works Heidegger refers us to are of course still available-and are still very much worth reading: Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1933); Reinhardt's "Nietzsches Klage der Ariadne" appears now in Karl Reinhardt, Vermiichtnis der Antike: Gesamme/te Essays zur Philosophic und Geschichtsschreibung, edited by Carl Becker (Gottingen: Vandenhock & Ruprecht, 1960), pp. 310--33. See note 20 of the Analysis, p. 275, for further discussion of the Reinhardt article.
Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 205
thinking stretches back to the commencement; what is metaphysically essential is the way in which these things transpire. The question is whether Nietzsche reverts to the incipient commencement, to the commencement as a commencing. And here our answer must be: no, he does not.
Neither Nietzsche nor any thinker prior to him--even and espe- cially not that one who before Nietzsche first thought the history of philosophy in a philosophical way, namely, Hegel-revert to the in- cipient commencement. Rather, they invariably apprehend the com- mencement in the sole light of a philosophy in decline from it, a philosophy that arrests the commencement-to wit, the philosophy of Plato. Here we cannot demonstrate this matter in any detail. Nietzsche himself quite early characterizes his philosophy as inverted Platonism; yet the inversion does not eliminate the fundamentally Platonic posi- tion. Rather, precisely because it seems to eliminate the Platonic posi- tion, Nietzsche's inversion represents the entrenchment of that position.
What remains essential, however, is the following: when Nietzsche's metaphysical thinking reverts to the commencement, the circle closes. Yet inasmuch as it is the already terminated commencement and not the incipient one that prevails there, the circle itself grows inflexible, loses whatever of the commencement it once had. When the circle closes in this way it no longer releases any possibilities for essential inquiry into the guiding question. Metaphysics-treatment of the guid- ing question-is at an end. That seems a bootless, comfortless insight, a conclusion which like a dying tone signals ultimate cessation. Yet such is not the case.
Because Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of metaphysics in the designated sense, it performs the grandest and most profound gathering-that is, accomplishment-of all the essential fun·- damental positions in Western philosophy since Plato and in the light of Platonism. It does so from within a fundamental position that is determined by Platonism and yet which is itself creative. However, this fundamental position remains an actual, actuating fundamental meta- physical position only if it in turn is developed in all its essential forces and regions of dominion in the direction of its counterposition. For a
206 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
thinking that looks beyond it, Nietzsche's philosophy, which is inher- ently a turning against what lies behind it, must itself come to be a foward-looking counterposition. Yet since Nietzsche's fundamental po- sition in Western metaphysics constitutes the end of that metaphysics, it can be the counterposition for our other commencement only if the latter adopts a questioning stance vis-a-vis the initial commencement - a s one which in its proper originality is only now commencing. After everything we have said, the questioning intended here can only be the unfolding of a more original inquiry. Such questioning must be the unfolding of the prior, all-determining, and commanding question of philosophy, the guiding question, "What is being? " out of itself and out beyond itself.
Nietzsche himself once chose a phrase to designate what we are calling his fundamental metaphysical position, a phrase that is often cited and is readily taken as a way to characterize his philosophy: amor
fati, love of necessity. (See the Epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner; VIII, 206). * Yet the phrase expresses Nietzsche's fundamental
• The text Heidegger refers us to begins as follows:
I have often asked myself if I am not more profoundly indebted to the most difficult years of my life than to any of the others. What my innermost nature instructs me is that all necessity-viewed from the heights, in terms of an economy on a grand scale-is also what is inherently useful: one should not merely put up with it, one should love it. . . . Amor fati: that is my innermost nature.
Nietzsche repeats the formula twice in Ecce Homo (II, 10 and III, "Der Fall Wag-
ner," 4), the first time as the ultimate explanation of his "discernment":
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one does not will to have anything different, neither forward nor backward nor into all eternity. Not merely to bear necessity, though much less to cloak it-all Idealism is mendacity in the face of necessity-but to love it. . . .
