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The Word of Nietzsche

Nietzsche seriously as a thinker. But also, to think means this for Nietzsche : to represent what is as what is. Any metaphysical thinking is onto-logy or it is nothing at all.5

For the reflection we are attempting here, it is a question of preparing for a simple and inconspicuous step in thought. What matters to preparatory thinking is to light up that space within which Being itself might again be able to take man, with respect to his essence, into a primal relationship. To be preparatory is the essence of such thinking.

That thinking, which is essential and which is therefore everywhere and in every respect preparatory, proceeds in an unpretentious way. Here all sharing in thinking, clumsy and groping though it may be, is an essential help. Sharing in thinking proves to be an unobtrusive sowing—a sowing that cannot be authenticated through the prestige or utility attaching to it—by sowers who may perhaps never see blade and fruit and may never know a harvest. They serve the sowing, and even before that they serve its preparation.

Before the sowing comes the plowing. It is a matter of making the field capable of cultivation, the field that through the unavoidable predominance of the land of metaphysics has had to remain in the unknown. It is a matter first of having a presentiment of, then of finding, and then of cultivating, that field. It is a matter of taking a first walk to that field. Many are the ways, still unknown, that lead there. Yet always to each thinker there is assigned but one way, his own, upon whose traces he must again and again go back and forth that finally he may hold to it as the one that is his own—although it never belongs to him—and may tell what can be experienced on that one way.

Perhaps the title Being and Time is a road marker belonging


5. The word "onto-logy" is built from the Greek present participle ontos (being). Ontos is paralleled by Heidegger's use of the German present participle das Seiende employed as a noun, literally, being, i.e., what is, what has or is in being. The meaning of "what is" can extend from "a being" to the most inclusive encompassing of whatever is as such, in its entirety. For Heidegger connotations of inclusiveness regularly predominate. Das Seiende stands always in reciprocal and mutually determinative relation to das Sein, the German infinitive translated "Being." On this relation, see "The Onto-theo-Iogical Constitution of Metaphysics," in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York : Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 64, 132.


Martin Heidegger (GA 5) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays