alone a liberation from what was hitherto could have been secured for such a task.
In this history, what becomes more and more self-evident and therefore remains unthought is the attitude of the guiding question, an attitude which possesses the sense of the formula: thinking and objectivity.
Even when Nietzsche brings forward becoming in opposition to "being" (beingness), he does so while presupposing that "logic" determines beingness. The flight into "becoming" ("life") is metaphysically a mere expedient, the last expedient at the end of metaphysics, an expedient that always bears signs of what Nietzsche himself recognized very early as his task: the inversion of Platonism.
Yet every inversion is afortiori a return to and entanglement in the opposite (sensible—supersensible), even though Nietzsche is very well aware that this opposite, too, must lose its meaning.
For Nietzsche, "beings" (the actual) constitute becoming, and "being" remains precisely the fixing and settling.
Nietzsche is caught up in metaphysics: from beings to being. He exhausts all the possibilities of this basic position, which in the meanwhile, as he himself saw for the first time and with great clarity, had become in all its possible forms the common possession and "intellectual chattel" of the worldviews of the masses.
The first step toward the creative overcoming of the end of metaphysics had to be carried out in such a way that in one respect the directionality of thinking is maintained, although in another respect it is thereby at the same time radically raised beyond itself.
To maintain that directionality means: to inquire into the being of beings. The overcoming means: to inquire first into the truth of beyng, into what never did become, or even could become, a question in metaphysics.
This double character of the transition—the attempt to grasp "metaphysics" more originally in order thereby to overcome it at the same time—is altogether distinctive of the "fundamental ontology" of Being and Time.
That title came from clear knowledge of the task: no longer beings and beingness, but being; no longer "thinking," but "time"; the priority no longer given to thinking, but to beyng. "Time" as a name for the "truth" of being; and all this as task, as "still on the way," not as "doctrine" and dogma.
The basic position that presides over Western metaphysics (beingness and thinking, with "thinking"—ratio—reason as the guideline and anticipatory grasp for the interpretation of beingness) has now come into question, but by no means such that thinking would simply be replaced by "time," everything would merely be intended