The True Metaphysical Significance of Life

At the same time as Nietzsche was delivering the Basel lectures and laying out the plans he had for his pedagogical and extra-philological commitments, he was continuing to work out all the problems of the recently published The Birth of Tragedy and its meaning for the history of modernity, in his time and after. How do we not pause when confronted by no more than a few sentences and the burden of their call to us, for the perspective of a philosopher as he first becomes aware of the depth-psychological convictions of the true metaphysical significance of life? His phrase should strike us with force. Making him one-sidedly opposed to metaphysics was simply not true and misleading; the characterization of him as an anti-metaphysician could only be made by overlooking an entire thrust of his creative thinking when the other-worldly made way for an immanent meaning and its realization in human life. Neither the transcendental nor the in-itself were ideas to be pursued except to recognize a historical problem; neither mattered as he set out to re-think what metaphysics (as a relation of the self to the real) could still offer for thought and life.