OFF THE BEATEN TRACK


will. At any rate, the concomitant doctrines of action and the ideologies of representation never say what is and therefore happens. With the beginnings of the battle for mastery of the earth, the age of subjectity presses to its completion. Its completion means that beings, which are in the sense of the will to power, are becoming certain [gewiss] and therefore also conscious [bewusst] of their own truth about themselves, each in its way in every respect. To make something conscious is a necessary instrument of the will that wills out of the will to power. It occurs, as regards the objectifying, in the form of planning. It occurs in the region of man's uprising into self-willing through the continuing analysis of the historical situation. Thought metaphysically, the situation is always the station for the action of the subject. Whether it knows it or not, each analysis of the situation is grounded on the metaphysics of subjectity.

"The great noontide"7 is the time of the brightest brightness: namely, the consciousness that has become unconditionally and in every respect conscious of itself as that knowledge which consists of knowingly willing the will to power as the being of beings; and, as such will, rebelliously to withstand each necessary phase of the objectification of the world, and in this way to secure the enduring duration [beständigen Bestand] of beings for a willing as uniform and regular as possible. In the willing of this will, however, the necessity comes upon man to will along with the conditions of such willing. This means: to set values and esteem everything according to values. In this manner, value determines all beings in their being. Which brings us to the question:

What is now, in the age when the unconditional mastery of the will to power is manifestly dawning and when this manifestness and its public character are themselves becoming a function of this will? What is? We are not asking about incidents and facts; in the realm of the will to power, testimonies for any fact or incident are produced or dismissed at any time, as required.

What is? We are not asking about this or that being but about the being of beings. Or rather: we are asking, what is going on with being itself? And we are not asking this idly but in regard to the truth of beings as such, a truth that is articulated verbally in the shape of the metaphysics of the will to power. What is going on with being in the age when mastery begins to be exercised by the unconditional will to power?

Being has become value. To make the duration of durables endure [Beständigung der Beständigkeit des Bestandes] is a condition that is set by the will to power itself and that is necessary for securing the will to power.


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Nietzsche's Word: “God Is Dead” (GA 5) by Martin Heidegger