through which knowledge (i.e., ἐπιστήμη and τέχνη) carries itself out, then the human is the cunning, clever animal. With an eye toward this essence of the human, and from within the perspective of modern metaphysics, the young Nietzsche precociously caught sight of and verbalized an outline of his later metaphysics of the will to power. In the summer of 1873, the twenty-nine-year-old Nietzsche wrote an essay entitled On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. This essay would be published for the first time only later (in 1903) as a part of his literary estate.1 The essay begins with the following excerpt:
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out into countless flickering solar systems, there was once a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and dishonest minute of ‘world history’; but, still, it was only a minute. Once nature had drawn in a few breaths, the star solidified, and the clever animals had to die.
To what extent Nietzsche, in his later metaphysics, holds fast to this conception of the human, while at the same time radicalizing his thoughts regarding the over-human, cannot be elucidated presently. It is enough if we can initially and approximately see that, from the beginning of Occidental metaphysics on through its consummation, the essence of the human is understood in relation to λόγος, and λόγος is interpreted as thinking. In what sense this characteristic of λόγος is to be understood; to what extent λόγος thereby remains ambiguous; what all of this means for history and the essence of the Occidental human and for the manner in which he exists historically: all of this can only be alluded to here in an inquiring way. ‘Logic’ forms itself and its history in accordance with the fate from out of which λόγος unfolds (and does not unfold) its essence in the history of the Occident and of the world.
The prior session attempted to discuss three things: two relating to thinking, and the third on the doctrine of thinking (i.e., logic as ἐπιστήμη λογική).
1 Nietzsche, Werke, X, 189 ff.