Lovitt: The complex interrelation of Being

Within the highly elliptical connection between this and the following sentence in the text lies Heidegger’s understanding of the complex interrelation of Being, what is, and man. That meaning might, in the context of the present discussion of the will to power, be suggested as follows.

The "Being" to which Heidegger here refers is, first of all, the Being possessed by what is. The metaphysics of the will to power, which thinks Being in thinking the truth, the unconcealedness of what is, takes the Being of what is-a Being linked indissolubly with the security and certainty of the objectively represented-as a value, a determining condition directing power-actualizing willing. Hence the metaphysics of the will to power can, with Nietzsche  , take Being to be a value (cf. p. 84); or it might say that to be is to have value. And it is Being itself, ruling in the modern age in the mode of the will to power, that gives itself to the thinking of metaphysics in this way. Yet, at the same time, metaphysics is not here thinking Being itself. It is not thinking Being as Being, "presencing specifically as presencing, from out of its truth" (p. 109). Being, in manifesting itself precisely as value through the thinking belonging to the metaphysics of the will to power, is, at the same time, concealing itself as regards that which it is as Being.

Metaphysics, for Heidegger, "grounds an age" (AWP 115). In interpreting or in laying out (auslegen), i.e., in thinking forth, the Being of what is precisely as a value, that is, in making Being manifest-insofar as it is given to metaphysics to apprehend and manifest Being at all in the latter’s holding-sway in the mode of the will to power-the metaphysics of the will to power, as the consummation of the modern metaphysics begun with Descartes  , provides the thought-out basis for the activity of modern man. And Being needs that activity, undergirded by that thinking, in order to endure as present and to rule in the manner that is now proper to it. Precisely when Being has become a value, when to be is to have value, the metaphysical basis has been consummately given for that human activity through which whatever is-offering itself in the manner governed by the will to power-is fixed as a stable reserve that has value and can be of use just in virtue of its being and of its being available for future "willing to will" and "empowering to power." And precisely through just that metaphysically grounded activity and through it alone, the holding-sway of Being-of Being now manifesting itself in the mode of the will to power-is accomplishing itself through the only open center through which it can ever find accomplishment, namely, through man. (QCT   p. 102-103)