Growing temporal distance allows a clearer understanding of the internal structures of Nietzsche" s philosophy. The philosophical context is highlighted to the extent that ideologically motivated exploitations or rejections of Nietzsche" s thought recede in history, illuminating Nietzsche" s debts to the European philosophical tradition. Eugen Fink sees Nietzsche's relationship to metaphysics as a relationship of "captivity and liberation."¹ In the fundamental themes of Nietzschean philosophy — the doctine of the will-to-power, the eternal return of the same, the death of God, the Apollonian-Dionysian play "generating all things as products of appearance," and, finally, the Übermensch — Fink sees a return to the four principles of metaphysics: beings as such, the structural totality of being, the supreme being, and the "disclosedness' of being .² Thus Nietzsche's thought is itself absorbed in a doctrine of eternal recurrence, presented as a symbol of the unsurpassed condition of metaphysics.