Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939

and are only a passageway.

Need to grant admission ever more exclusively to the one and be always more steadfastly present where for a long time no echo offers the semblance of a concord and yet never break away from the concealed tradition, but instead in the future grow back into the history which must become preservation and loss, grounding and collapse, recollection and neglect of the truth of beyng, provided this truth comes to its essential occurrence.

The transition itself—is what is most transitionless—of itself the uniqueness of the inceptual decidedness which incorporates both beginnings.

Need to be present where beyng must ground itself in a ground which of itself wins for itself its own height—because this ground can be appropriated only out of the essential occurrence of beyng itself, through beyng as event of appropriation.

ἀλλὰ παλαιὰ γὰρ

εὕδει χάρις

But indeed the old

bestowing illumination of strict grace is sleeping.

Pindar, Isthm., VII, 17 1

Only if we relearn to think on long passageways and in tiered ascents will we create for ourselves broad paths and with them the guarantee of coming from afar; yet this is the precondition for any drawing near to what is great. The length of a thoughtful path, however, is to be measured not by the size of a “book” but only by the concealed order of the question-worthiness of a question.

Those who proceed on the transition can only intimate what it is that appropriates them.

No self-interpretation attains what is first said, because in the latter alone does the unsaid vibrate.

We are now standing where the dictum holds: before there can be a poetizing (as poesy), a thinking—in the sense of the disclosive thinking of beyng—must first recur.

The truth of beyng is the ground of history: in such a way that beyng is cleared and allows this clearing to attain a grounding, whereby beings are preserved in Da-sein as the ground of the human capacity for grounding.

How much the heart is in tune with the attunement of beyng—

What is happening—(but even this word, like all others, is already worn out—“happen” can mean anything). Yet the question is to be maintained in this word! For the task is not to ascertain facts and to report incidents—instead, the happening must be recollected in the decision; but “happening” can here mean only that which essentially grounds history: the truth of beyng and the way beyng bestows itself in its truth, that truth which essentially occurs in beyng itself.

Behind the consummation of machination (the unrestricted makeability of all beings as the unique although now unrecognizable truth of being) is concealed | the abyss of the essential decisions: whether the human being will at one and the same time place himself back into the closedness of the earth and also cast himself forth into the openness of a world (the openness that brings something questionable to a worlding) or whether, in the strife of both, there will intersect the encounter of the essential groundings of the divine and the human—and thus the voice of beyng will find its tongue and history will attain its first, long silence.

The metaphysical revolution is this that breaks out as the consummation of metaphysics, namely, the rolling back and rolling in of life on itself, life that has become the subjectum—life for the sake of life—the unproblematic sheer power of the “interests” of the “life” that does not itself pronounce these claims but entirely falls between them, pursues the ever more blind involution of life, permits anything only as an expression of itself, from day to day involves itself in something always different, transforms everything with the highest technology into a gigantic historicism, and thus even steps out of the sphere of nearness and remoteness to beyng—. The involution of life on itself is the releasement of “lived experience” into incessant quaffing without measure or rank.—

The basic disposition of the future decision is the passion of the word of refusal—here is grounded the first and farthest remoteness of the god—his purest radiance. The passion for the clearance of the refusal accords with the essential questioning which must first be a knowledge in advance, earlier and more precursory than all planning: knowledge of the “between” qua the clearing of the “in the midst” and the “meanwhile”—i.e., knowledge of that as yet ungrounded space-time in which the advent and flight of the gods eventuate and the human being fulfills his most human essence.

“Anthropomorphism.”—How are all the anthropologizing of beings and every anthropomorphizing of the human being to be overcome in a radical way? Only through the grounding of the human being in his most abyssal essence—i.e., in the stewardship of beyng. Here the human being first attains the highest freedom toward himself—; here no redemption is needed, just as little as is its counterpart: flight into the “life” that merely has a lived experience of itself. Beyng as machination tolerates this alone: the blind and formless to and fro between redemption and lived experience—interlaced and equally alienated from beyng. Supersensible and abstruse powers | and being-less empowerment of “life”—both originate in the one circumstance: that the human being is experienced and questioned too deficiently, too inhumanly. As soon as the essence of the human being is grounded in Dasein, we are no longer seduced into treating him like something present-at-hand or sacrificing him like something present-at-hand for something unformed—since in each of these cases, even if they are directed to the contrary, the essentially still ungrounded human being provides the measure for the beingness of beings. “Anthropomorphism” is therefore a component of metaphysics. As soon as the human being achieves human dignity, anthropomorphism of any sort is impossible.

What is happening?—The abandonment of beings by being as releasement of being into machination—the involution of the human being into life and of life into lived experience and mere classification.

How long is the path on which the thinking “of” beyng might be released from the usual mistakes—the scientific representation of beings and of their beingness—and hearers might be produced for the other claim of another truth? How otherwise than through the easily misinterpreted word which is immediately mixed into things that are said and are constantly ignored | and which “lives” only on letting the moment pass by? Which moment pertains to the disclosive thinking of beyng? The preeminent of all moments—the moment—of the moment—the originary leaping-back-into-itself of what is decisive: that does not mean to put forward an image of humanity or institute public worship or negotiate a supernatural bliss or boast of accomplishments and results—what is most preliminary to beings must be carried out first: the truth of beyng. For this truth is most in advance of everything and yet is only the very first preparation—only the “between”—so that beyng might essentially occur. This is difficult to see for those who are all-too-blinded by beings and is still more difficult—even for the few—to endure in disclosive questioning; therefore the great, intrinsically obscure errancies approach on this path.

In the future, may the thinker love only this: beyng as the abyss in beings—between the projective enchaining and entanglement of beyng as the “between” of the abyss—from which a plight of grounding arises.—

The thoughtful word—above all, “beyng”—speaks out of the highest univocity, because it names what is most unique, | which is threatened by no evasions into what is still nameable “otherwise.” And yet: what this word says is never properly understood, since it is always improperly taken as referring to a being; we expect in the word something that can be represented instead of carrying out a leap into the steadfastness of Da-sein. This word is the deepest conjuncture of the abyss—nothing perceivable (and nothing to be extracted by ratio2), but rather the conjunction of the essence of the “between” into the decidability of the extreme decision between the truth of beyng and the supremacy of beings.—

Beyng.—The gods have need of a ground from which they summon humanity to an encounter wherein their transfiguration of all things and of all history can be bestowed. The human being requires a ground on which to stand so that he can venture an open region wherein a dialogue first resounds in confrontation. The world vaults into the arch of a ground in whose features the one refers to the other and the one casts toward the earth while opening out various worlds. The earth reposes on a ground into which it retracts its own mystery and, | as something closed, protrudes out into a world.

In each case and at the same time the ground is in another grounding, so the reciprocally intersecting affiliation of the grounds is the one character of the abyss: the “between” of the silence that is kept silent in the word of beyng.

Between the gods and humans, there essentially occurs the same “between” to which the world and the earth owe their essential turning to each other in strife. And this “between” is beyng itself. Human speech is merely the unrecognized reverberation of the word wherein the silence of beyng is kept silent as the abode of the “there.” The thoughtful word expresses nothing about objects and their investigation, and even less does it give information about lived experiences. Because we seldom venture the uncanny “between,” however, and are even less frequently able to bear the alienation of the most intimate silence of this “between,” and because we cannot illuminate in the simplicity of our essence the sad-joyful grace of the rigor of the abyss—therefore we can scarcely surmise any longer the sovereign dignity and nobility of the awaiting which infinitely surpasses every possession and everything impeding | and, as inexhaustible, is all that remains akin to the abyss.

Who knows truth? Those who rest in the confidence of possessing something true—without knowing about truth or wanting to know about it? No—truth as the essence of what is true can never be a “matter” of a possession. Truth pertains to the seeking which desires what is to be attained—the desiring reaches out into what is reserved—is the broadest and genuine “possession” of what is forthcoming—in order to “possess” inexhaustibly in its own way and so is sovereignty over the abyss—, over what can never be exhausted. The inexhaustibility of the abyss is “grounded” not in immeasurableness and not in a nearness that could be paced off—but rather in the fact that the abyss immediately, constantly, and definitively repudiates every ground and support and compels into the oscillation of the “between”—provided only that we do not take the abyss as a semblant ground and misuse it as a pretext and hiding place.

Basic disposition. Every essential attitude and action of the historical human being vibrates in a basic disposition. The most decisive action of the historical | human being is his poetizing, and if this should be used up into something distorted in essence and small, then thinking must propel all poetizing into an extremity—how? All deeds are merely consequences of the one and are bridges to the other, or they remain offsprings of an unmastered and merely calculative mania.

The historical recollection of what has been is possible only where the recollected is transposed into the intimacy of the same action—; where, e.g., thoughtful recollection of the inceptual thinking speaks out into thoughtful questioning and so can only be radically decisive. But where the recollectors cannot be ones who ground immediately in the same essence as the recollected, then it is merely historiological cognizance of something past—for instance, when a historiologist of philosophy, a mere scholar, reports on a philosophy, or a “historiologist of literature,” who can be no poet, recounts an earlier poetry.

The beginning of our Western historical “Da-sein” is the poetizing and thinking of the early and high Greek antiquity—and is nothing else, provided we do not conflate “history” with the zoological inheritance of the | successive generations of emerging and disappearing groups of living beings that “make” a “culture” the way beavers make their “lodges.”

Everything depends—the act of beginning in the other beginning depends—not in the sense of the beingness of beings—but in the sense of the truth of beyng—on the basic experience, i.e., on the leap to and of Da-sein qua the essential grounding of beyng itself.

As long as the human being experiences, possesses, and pursues himself as animal rationale, for that long does he indeed pertain to beings as such, but the truth of beyng is refused him, and thereby so is the abyss, and so likewise Da-sein—and so the unique decision, and so the god-bestowing beginning—and so an originary history, and so also a downgoing.

The human being is as Da-sein the place of the casting of being (the clearing event of appropriation) into that which then for the first time can step forth as a being—can enter into the strife of world and earth.

What we project in advance as world to things present-at-hand and to the rest is in each case only the counterprojection | of a resonance of the basic disposition. Therefore a disposition—the “between” for everything—has already—in clearing and illuminating—overthrown everything and in this way essentially occurs as the “between” which makes circulate in the “between” everything protruding and standing and falling—such that what is present and absent—beings—merely revolve like a narrow ring in an abyss.

The long and more and more extrinsic supremacy of metaphysical thinking has led to every essential meditation being taken as a groundless representing of empty generalities—and to ignorance of the decisiveness and uniqueness of everything essential and likewise to ignorance of the mode of meditation and of treatment required by the essential.

The basic disposition—is an abyssally grounding transposition into beings. This transposition in each case decides the transposed human being to an essential direction:

Disposition is more originarily clearing-exposing and assigning than is passion, | of clearer knowledge and more fecund than is thinking, more constantly bearing and maintaining than is action, and more intimate and stimulating than is pleasure.

Disposition is everything, primarily in the highest simplicity, and is the ungraspable ground of all things. Disposition out of the voice of the silence of beyng as event of appropriation.

Who surmises the full uniqueness of the historical moment? Who experiences the transition—without the compulsion to hasty solutions and escapes? Who prepares, for being, the silence of the concord? Who grasps in the apparent emptiness the unresolved fullness, that of an abyss? Who reveals to whom, that few are—dominated by the other beginning? Who knows that the uniqueness of every god both requires an abyssal nonrecurrence and posits the downgoing to the beginning? Who accomplishes the renunciation of the empty “eternities” which entangle us in a craving for the mere conservation of the sheer “and so forth”? Who has sustaining faith not in the human being as a present-at-hand living thing—but in the human being—as pretext—behind which is concealed a thrust of being into Dasein? | Who realizes that the longest transition, to which perhaps successive generations must reconcile themselves, cannot be calculated according to the hours of day-to-day comfort? Who is able to see what is great in the self-refusal and to be great in this greatness? For the answers here to become justifications and an action, the usual, popular, everyday estimations must be breached. But everydayness persists with such tenacity that only seldom does anyone venture to experience everything in general differently and to maintain an openness for what is hidden.

And even if it were only this, to reflect on what is still implicit in the fact that in the first beginning of Western thinking ἀλήθεια—unconcealment—became the term for the essential occurrence of being itself—then the future—invisible—philosophy would still be endowed with enough of a legacy.

It is remarkable how basely people take the projection of Da-sein in Being and Time and believe that the human being is grasped there only in his relation to things (the ready-to-hand) and congeners (being-with-one-another)! People do not want | to see that it is above all the “understanding of being,” as projection of being, which distinguishes Da-sein and places Da-sein back into a clearing. To be sure, this clearing is essentially passed over in silence and not mastered, but it is indeed all that is in question, while everything else is necessary foreground of an indispensable determination. The projection of being is the immediate ground for the simple-manifold relation of the human being to others, to things, and to himself. Yet this ground is the closest—scarcely touched—margin of the abyss, and as this the “there” is steadfastly grounded in Da-sein—toward the clearing by which beyng eventuates while bearing the playing out of the encounter and strife—and essentially occurs as this event of appropriation. The essential occurrence, however, is the clearing “of” the self-refusal.

Need to leave behind—and not merely break up—all “anthropomorphizing” of being—; but who are the ones that will follow this course? And are they supposed to be able to follow it?

The glare of an arc light does perhaps illuminate precisely the “occurring” history of the world, but one sees in this illumination—nothing.

Our greatest danger?—is not the brutalitas of the calculative animal, and not the loss of the tradition of the essential beginnings, but is the most exceptional taste for the “spiritual” and for its configurations, the taste that, tasting and preparing all, leads these configurations to the body and soul of a religious faith, for the sake of adorning that faith, and helps to entrench the decisionlessness. But is this still a danger? No—only a very cunning activity that in another form has already long been pursuing the destruction and for this purpose has been spreading an illusion to which even those who no longer have religious faith fall victim, since they on another path already no longer accept a knowledge and a questioning that no longer require the spirit (i.e., the animal rationale)—because such knowledge and questioning venture in advance the leap into being.

The extreme abandonment of beings by being occurs where, under the protection of an accepted and rectified “metaphysics,” there is constant talk of beings and of the most eminent being (ens entium), of the creator and the savior God of religious belief, and yet everything becomes blurred in indecision, because a grounding question must be excluded in advance and constantly. Here then for | everyone who demands something decisive, even if mere decisions, the most beautiful and tasteful presentations become a play of figures of speech, ones which are immediately abandoned when a questioning might be at issue—then is announced only the retreat to a revealed faith and its religious promulgation. At most, a spiritual importunity succeeds in regions which can never pertain to one who is pressing forward, since he in advance renounces the essence of those regions, in that he has already, with the possession of “truth,” brought himself under cover, such that nothing can ever happen to him. How is anyone then—and so, ever—supposed to be capable of hearing? This higher mendacity of the tasteful “life of the spirit” fits into the region of the empty pursuit of “culture,” which is a pursuit equally mendacious on the other side—such that the decisionlessness is everywhere and thoroughly the same.

To ask what a thinker or a poet says must mean asking at the same time and above all who the thinker or poet is supposed to be addressing: merely an importunate person behind a mask of | humility, someone who has already, before hearing, falsified everything said into something merely to be used for the adornment, refurbishing, and veiling of an already secured “truth,” or instead a listener who is ready to cast himself and his essence into the question-worthiness of what the thinker or poet says and thereby become a questioner himself.—But the pursuit of refinement—a pursuit today in the possession of the apologetics of the Churches and Orders—knows nothing of such meditation, and consequently the pursuit here of any genuine grounding is without power and weight—and can never have any impact.

Technology and historiology: if the agrarian world is destroyed in every way from without and especially from within (in respect to the simple repose of the passion of the seclusion in an affiliation to nature), if technology (in the essential sense) annihilates the agrarian world, because it must do so, then historiology arises “over” that world—which becomes a mere object of concern to scholars—and technology, as the apex of its triumph, plays historiology out to the end and thereby still finds those who are incapable | of meditation and who believe that something will first have genuine “reality” when it is historiologically “elaborated.” The scholars fancy themselves the ultimate rescuers and guardians of the agrarian world. But—they have not even “rescued” from their bustling about enough shrewdness to know that what they are here rescuing amounts merely to occupational possibilities for themselves—indeed possibilities which count as timely, i.e., which operate with all available means to keep anyone from meditating anywhere and from even learning what meditation is. My dog—the “Pomeranian”3—has more of the “agrarian world” in his snout and in his bones than do these puffed up, groundless counterfeiters craving for professorial chairs. Yet the folkish [völkisch] and other snobs will “read” such a historiology of agrarianism with pleasure—and their associates perhaps will still use this historiology for “indoctrination.”

The “language” of “motorsport” contains the “beautiful” term “up-and-coming driver” [“Nachwuchsfahrer”]. Similarly, up-and-coming philosophers are now indoctrinated in suitable camps. Are such word formations attributable merely to the growing licentiousness in everything essential, or do they announce a more profound destruction of the previous essence of | humanity? Are words already severed from being and now only a means for the violent instituting of a blind vital urge?

The living being—(in distinction from Da-sein) is the prematurely thwarted, self-satisfied, and dulled approach run toward the groundless grounding of an Open ground—i.e., toward freedom.

Whoever does not have the power and the will to concede to thinkers essentially more than they themselves have expressed and could express should never attempt an interpretation of them; for otherwise the result is only an erudite degradation. The essentially “more,” however, is in each case a more originary thinking of the essence and of its essentiality. Because today—when it is difficult to say whether the obliviousness surpasses the exaggeration or vice versa—when everyone in half thoughts thinks precisely halfway and is immediately transplanted at least into the vicinity of Nietzsche, it is at times good to know something of Nietzsche. Admittedly, a sufficient reason for reflecting on his thoughts never resides in such circumstances—the reason derives only from the consummation, achieved by Nietzsche, of metaphysics as a whole.

The modern “world” is becoming a gigantic “prostitution” into noise; therein is instituted the self-consciousness of machination—indeed noise is the basic form of its self-consciousness, and the latter constitutes an essential moment of subjectivity. Noise is the promulgation in that publicness which first lets something count as a “being.” Noise is the swagger of every undertaking. Noise is the historiological compilation (“montage”) of everything past and over and done. All speaking and writing are noise. Noise is the machine—even one that operates soundlessly. All proclamation and praise are noise. Noise carries out the essential step of what is loud into the distorted essence. Noise consummates the instituting of the distorted essence in complete releasement. But even if the beingness of beings were not entrapped in noise, the clearing of beyng would essentially occur on quite another ground: silence—and would endure such grounding.

What is the shining blueness of the heavens which makes the rotation of the stars invisible? A clearing that conceals, a gift that is grounded in the | nobility of refusal. Essential occurrence that grounds at once world and earth in an endurance and that issues from the event. Letting everything arise in advance out of the transfiguring. Yet the transfiguring derives from beyng and is not an enhancement of “life.”

Transition.—In times of transition, reality (what passes in public as real) and the essential occurrence of beyng are driven apart the farthest—indeed even into a forgotten alienation. In this interval resides the broadest field of the most insidious ambiguity—but this ambiguity is the authentically Transitional history—those who are transitional must not evade this field—but must endure it and for their part bear it.

What “now” “is”?—The abyssal self-refusal—is already the essential occurrence of beyng! Yet to a metaphysical gaze, everything seems to be a “downgoing,” which is understood as no longer standing up in the light and in the certitude of the ordered above and below of the metaphysically intended world. | The transition and the age of complete meaninglessness.

Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal recurrence of the same expresses the essence of the will to power, and in this basic thought the beingness of beings consummates its history. The consummation of metaphysics through Nietzsche is the grounding of the last age of modernity: we name it the age of complete meaninglessness. This name thereby has a unique metaphysical and also transitional nominative power. Meaninglessness is here understood according to the concept of meaning worked out in Being and Time, viz., as the projective domain of projection and especially of the projection of being onto its truth, whereby truth is grasped as the clearing of self-concealing. (Cf. below, p. 98ff.)

Meaninglessness is truthlessness, i.e., the truthlessness of being.

Beingness has dissolved into pure machination, so much so that through machination beings attain unrestricted power and the abandonment of beings by being accedes to its hidden “sovereignty”—one that does not stem from this power but, instead, arises out of the concealed history of beyng. Machination alone can keep itself exclusively under its own command to itself and therein can find something definitive. Where meaninglessness has attained power, | specifically through the human being as subjectum, as the reckoner and grasper of his own calculability and that of all things, there the removal of all meaning (i.e., the removal of the question of the truth of beyng—or of the accord of that truth in beingness and in its projection) must be replaced by something which alone still remains admissible as an appropriate substitute: through a calculating and specifically through a calculating with “values.” “Value” is the transference of the essentiality of the essence into the quantitative and gigantic, the delivering up of beings to calculation. (If these values are now—through a retrograde philosophical erudition, i.e., in a historiological-Platonic way—considered to be values “in themselves,” are given out as intuitable objects, and are calculated in gigantic tables and schematized by order of rank, then the consummation of metaphysics immediately turns into the devastation of thinking. And the consequence of this shows itself in a cultural swindle and in the perverting of culture to a means of propaganda.)

In the other beginning, thinking is older than poetizing. But the thinking of this beginning takes on an unrecognizability which corresponds to the essence of such thinking (the keeping silent of beyng).

At least we now possess “the greatest track-clearing locomotive in the world.”—

“Culture” as a means of propaganda and “solitude” as the arrangement of the correct instituting of the unrestricted power of publicness: the former definitive and genuine exploitation of the thought of culture and the latter mindless perversion of solitude as a producible and occasional expedient—these condition each other reciprocally and together consummate the expulsion of the human being into the publicness of beings in their ground and their machination.

All thinking is primarily taken as mere thinking that accomplishes nothing (i.e., nothing effective or even capable of effecting anything) and that therefore can only count as sheer onlooking. Since onlooking admittedly achieves all-too-little even for this appraisal of thinking, one concedes to it the business of detached analysis. By reason of this trivial opinion about “thinking,” one is misled surreptitiously to an empty conception of “deeds,” which are valued primarily in terms of an anticipatory calculation of possible effectivity, and the latter is understood in the horizon of the “reality” that is already accepted without question. This disparagement of mere thinking | relies on a thoughtlessness and seeks support only in what is held to be “results.” But where is the flight from what is question-worthy greater? Is it not greatest where, in the certainty of a presumed reality of immediate life, a bustling about is instituted which is in accord with such life?

The thinker always leaps forth after himself, because he must have already overleapt himself.

History, because in essence the eventuation of the truth of beyng, is constantly and in incalculable forms and stages a concealed suspension of a decision regarding beyng.

Poor Hölderlin—how he is now “maltreated” in the timely views of literary science and of politics, and his most proper word is debarred him—all the more so, the more often he must turn up in pronouncements and treatises. His word is not apprehended—on account of our inability to hear the voice of beyng. But this incapacity is the servant of the | abandonment by being.

The thinking which is heedful of the history of beyng is, as a disclosive questioning of the truth of beyng, never a “mere” questioning on into an endless “and so forth” but is also not an answering from oneself—; this questioning is more finite than any calculative explaining and replying, because in essence it delivers itself up to an answer that derives only from beyng itself.

What is primarily “nonrecurrent” is not what historiology calculates along a “time”-line as historical in its particularities; instead, the highest uniqueness belongs to history itself, its essence, the fact that history, as the essential occurrence of the truth of beyng, is bestowed by beyng itself. How are we able to say this, that the uniqueness of history is the essential bestowal of beyng? The “nonrecurrence” of historiology is merely the such-and-such in the respective, never to return, now—this nonrecurrence is proper to what commonly does return as what is most ordinary. Here is strutting only a semblance of nonrecurrence, and not long ago people were on the point of recognizing in this “individualization” even the essence of history. But such nonrecurrence of history | is determined only out of the previous and present now of historiology—never out of the essentially occurring uniqueness of beyng.

The claim from self to self—only if a history is entirely able to set free an expressly acquired affiliation to beyng, only where there lies in the claim the bestowal of the power to preserve what is most proper, can the claim ground something freestanding.

Being and Time is the first and, despite the fact that it breaks off, indispensable attempt to express “metaphysically” the essential overcoming of metaphysics as such (in a meta-metaphysics); since we still speak of a meta-metaphysics, what is to be overleapt draws itself back into its essence.

Hölderlin—to think ahead to the poet of the poetry of the history of beyng, without making him timely, i.e., without objectifying him historiologically. Therefore in thinking he and his poetry can never be “treated,” nor can he—as a consequence of such mistreatment—be compared “with” thinking. What then? The keeping silent of his essence—who is able to hear this silence?

The one who asks the question of being is never the one who answers it; but neither does he let the question stand open in the void—for his questioning is in itself, as a disclosive questioning of the truth of beyng, a delivering up to that which answers. What counts here is not to “acquit” oneself to a question with an assertion, but to hearken to the voice of silence. This highest transformation of the human being, however, needs to retain its protective inconspicuousness. Reckoned from what came before, this says that the meditation which is heedful of the history of beyng remains without any visible results—; “more enduring” than such “effects” and alone “constant” is the other ontological mode of steadfastness—whose assents remain in silence. And all who pertain know the one decision: whether the sovereignty will be one of beings or of beyng.

The always different struggle between the fanatics of machination, who carry on the past in ever new novelties, and the futural one who pertains to the last god and requires the uniqueness of beyng. The hardest mode of struggle of the latter is to keep from getting involved in the means and standards of machination; the mode of struggle of the former is the forceful suppression of everything that is supposedly | inappropriate. Not only does each of the ones involved in the struggle see the “opponent” otherwise and according to his own claims—but the opponents are so essentially different that the “struggle” looks as if it were no struggle. And yet it is a conflict over the same, veiled in the most alienated essential forms: here beyng and its truth, there being as the beingness of beings. The failure of the struggle, however, ends in war—or in “civilizing” destruction.

The essence of history (the essential occurrence of the happening) is the event of appropriation. (To endure the encounter and the strife in the self-refusal is the transition to authentic history—as the history “of” beyng.)

Travel uncharted paths and renounce the prospects they offer, only so that the path might be—a passageway to those who gaze. Philosophy is not to be disavowed out of ignorance of the essence of “worldview” machinations; instead, knowledge of its essence (the question of being) must compel a plight on whose ground philosophy arises into its necessity.

Need to let the word attain the silent mildness of the transposition into the clearing of beyng—out of beyng as event of appropriation; neither feign “words” as new “vocables,” nor seek to say something “reasonable” by using the common intelligibility of exhausted and confused language.

Think out in advance toward “philosophy,” but do not devise a concept “about” it and its procedure. Instead, find paths to that which alone compels philosophy—; the thinking that is heedful of the history of beyng is still not a “philosophy.”

What does it mean to place oneself in relation to beyng? To become steadfast in meditating on the essence of truth—through the essential occurrence of this essence, a future is grounded for beyng.

Transition.—What is more decisive: the way and the course or the goal and its advance representation? Indeed the “goal”; for how otherwise could there be a way? Or are there goalless ways? To be sure—there are such ways, ones that do not go astray confusedly or arbitrarily but, instead, altogether open up and ordain the region of a course—| such a region is the truth of being. And here it remains questionable whether this region ever allows a “goal” to be set up. Such goalless ways are strange; the decidedness in favor of the course through which these ways are first opened up, arranged, consigned, and held in reserve can be explained so little in terms of something familiar that any attempt at such an understanding is equivalent to an abandonment of the respective way. How unique and rich is what has not gone by, which is kept open to us in the concealment of the essence of beyng?

Erudition obstructs the way to thinking; mere cognitions never lead to meditation, which arises out of a mature decidedness in favor of questioning and out of the still more essential resoluteness toward persevering within what is question-worthy. This steadfastness in beyng—for beyng alone is question-worthy—develops as knowledge of history, inasmuch as the essence of history is concealed in the most silent alterations of the truth of beyng.

No explanation of beings and no research into their regions leads to beyng. But even less does a survey of notions of beings as a whole in the manner of “worldviews.”

We must above all be historical, dominated by history in all our decisions, if the concealed tradition of the simply essential is to be able to bear us. Without this tradition, everything falls into historiological-technological machination. Tradition awakens only where meditation as the basic form of human freedom allows a self to be. The supremacy of historiology is a sign of the absence of tradition. Only humans of essential futurity master the recollection through which the having-been of beyng raises beyng into its Futural essence—one accruing to another preparedness.

The basic metaphysical positions are to be experienced and thought historically, i.e., according to their essence, only in the thinking which is heedful of the history of beyng.

What is this? The gigantic establishment of a motion picture studio whose filming is entirely independent of landscape and sun—, an establishment that can “pose” everything to order? Only one industrial establishment among others? Or one that is directed toward a supremacy in the instituting of the representation of everything? And, in accord with its | character as an establishment, entirely surrendered to historiological-technological arbitrariness?

Why does the divinizing of being accompany the humanizing of beings?—Because both stem from the same root and with its extirpation can no longer grow. This root, however, is the projection of beings as producible—makeable—things, which projection is grounded in the unmastered experience of beings as the present and constant. The divinizing of being turns being into a “cause” and “final purpose.” But humanizing and divinizing come into play because in advance the human being and God are degraded to present-at-hand things and the essential occurrence of being comes into a mere sham sovereignty. The divinizing of being and the humanizing of beings also obstruct every essential grounding of “truth”—which leads to the invocation of divine revelation and the self-certainty of the human being transgressing each other and wrestling with each other for power over beings; in every case as if what is called beyng did not essentially occur—as if “there were” “beings” only because everyday opinion and everyday pursuit came across them.

The sovereignty of the beginning is the self-concealing withdrawal into the inexplicable, from which the beginning, without effectivity, before all else leaps over the decisions.

How much must pass away until what has been can arise? (Cf. p. 63.)

Rank is the grounded protrusion into an essential decision eventuating out of beyng itself and bestowing its own law and measure and from itself first and only recognizing all things of rank in their uniqueness and in that way alone cognizing them. What has rank recognizes rank never in an equalization, but always only out of an exaltation. The essential ground of rank is dignity.

History is the occurring, grounding, and downgoing of decisions about the essence of beyng out of beyng in the domain of the truth of beyng—as this truth and its grounding.

History is essentially the appropriation of the endurance and in the essential consequence of the appropriation is especially the steadfastness of the in-between: Da-sein. Da-sein is historical not in the sense of a property—but essentially and indeed as the grounding and constancy of the appropriation.

A fixed and distant star over the land of the heart.

The end of an age is visible only to someone already exposed to another beginning which the age itself must fail to recognize; and this failure is not the consequence, but rather the most protracted ground, of the fact that the age is an end.

As if the gigantic derangement of all human productions, which is spreading over the planet, constituted history, whereas such derangement can only be the fluttering of a machination no longer in control of itself and therefore, reckoned in terms of the respectively Present publicness, must mark an immensity of empty violence toward the essence of reality.

It is merely a convenient sham to consider the easy familiarity of historiologically understood basic concepts such as “reason,” “reality,” “nature,” “human being,” and “art” clearer than the words seeking to name beyng and its truth originarily, out of a beginning: event—clearing—Dasein. Even if in the latter case an essentially changed thinking is required, nevertheless | the distinctiveness of the question of being is grounded not in the difference of methods and altogether not in the types of human actions, but in the history of beyng: whether beyng will bestow itself in the essential occurrence of its truth as the essence of history and of the uniqueness of history.

The one makes “foundering”4 the content and object of a metaphysics which plays with historiologically graspable possibilities of metaphysics (metaphysically interpreted) and thus “appeals” to human morality—the other founders in the overcoming of all metaphysics out of the beginning of a reserved beginning. Each has—in a fundamentally different way—an essentially different necessity.

As soon as machination attains unrestricted supremacy and beings (that which is effective and real, effectuated and effectuatable, the so-called “facts” and the “real”) determine all calculating and instituting of precisely “compelled” “goals” and “ideals,” then these latter can be extolled and apparently held fast but at the same time can also be forgotten and discarded in favor of the “facts.” This abandonment of the “holiest” “convictions” can no longer be branded as “inconsistent,” “perfidious,” “rootless,” and “arbitrary,” because, with the feebleness of all ideals, | in particular every domain for “ideality” has already disappeared. Machination does not merely permit, but even requires, the forming of the current machinationally effective opinion and interpretation of “happening,” without any consideration of the “principles” still proclaimed as valid. Moral indignation becomes laughable and above all is of no “use”—; but just as myopic are the opposite attitudes, which versus the adherence to “ideals” and “doctrines” extol the “realism” that considers these to be mere pretexts. The intention to act “realistically” is as childish as the preaching of the “highest ideals”; both already stand in service to machination, and they use and misuse each other reciprocally, according to the need prescribed by the machinational requirements. Essential are neither the “ideals” nor the “real results”—but rather the fact that both, according to the need of the unrecognized supremacy of machination, can be constantly interchanged. In each case what is then preferred can be justified “convincingly.” In other words: the essential is the machination itself that obstructs all meditation and every decision, forecloses every relation to beyng, and lets that relation be replaced by “lived experiences” which rush in one after the other and outdo one another in novelty. Thereby all power for the claims of the essential decisions slowly disappears. This inevitable exchange of requirements and goals. The place | of their justification is determined out of machination itself and merely serves its execution in the domain of historiology and technology. The age of complete meaninglessness is shocked neither by the extolling of ideals and the promulgation and vindication of the highest values nor by the renunciation of ideals in favor of “facts.” Only someone who has grasped that both are equally “necessary” to this age and are also equally inconsequential can surmise a little of what the sovereignty of beyng is capable of in the form of the accepted abandonment of beings by being. The overcoming of modernity can therefore never pave a way for itself in the establishment of new goals, but can do so only in the “experience” of being: i.e., in meditation on what is undecided of the intersecting of an encounter of humans and gods with the strife of the originating essential occurrence of world and earth. Therefore the task is not the endeavor to invent goals and expedients with cleverness, but the preparedness for meditation, a preparedness having “freedom” toward the appropriation through beyng in relation to the ground (of this preparedness) grounded by beyng itself. But as long as peoples persist in sheer goallessness or in the invention of goals, all that will remain to them is the competition of “interests,” a production (i.e., technology) of historiology as avoidance of the unique possibility of a history, and this production mixes up “great” and “small.”

What if those who are small (together with their publicness) constitute that which may count as great, and if the great ones of such greatness pursue only in this way their proclamation as something great? Then it is time, since great and small have united, to posit everything on what can be made and to tolerate makeability as reality. This unification, however, only seems to stand in the power of a decree and a volition of the ones who are pursuing it—for they are themselves first of all pursued and struck by a stroke they themselves nowhere actually encounter, because it derives from being, from its self-refusal, whereas they know and can know only their effective beings as an explanatory domain. If technology in the essential sense has become assured of limitless possibilities in exploiting raw materials, then it has been released into its distorted essence and has become entrenched in such a way that, within the machination by which it itself is carried out, it assumes unconditional supremacy and thus suppresses all meditative attitudes, because it can offer itself as the genuine and universally successful and manageable “knowledge,” without requiring any decisions. In the age of unrestricted machination, the prospects and promises of “eternal times” become an easily squandered commodity—here the thought of “value” achieves the extreme pinnacle of its distorted essence.

Silver thistles are glittering without intruding into the clear air of a day on which late summer is starting to set in.

All too strongly habituated to public acclamation as the measure of the “standing” of anything, we do not surmise that what is most essential must remain withdrawn for a long time, must retain its own space, and has no need of “effectiveness.” Thereby in the future we will be required to bear the essential silently into the silence of the simplest decisions and to think essentially only of what is most silent and out of it to expect the enduring whereby beings become the domain of what is proper to beyng.

Is it not idle and empty to think forth into the essence of poetry? Or is it the fullest thinking, provided poetizing itself is grasped in terms of the event—i.e., as appropriated by beyng? The other beginning of thinking begins with the thinking forth into poetry and into its history-grounding essence—such grounding as the decision in favor of the truth of beyng.

We must bear what is confused and groundless—not from knowledge of belonging to some sort of now riotous “beings,” but from recognizing that we are appropriated | by beyng itself. This keeps open the essential decisions for which we are only a little prepared. But such a little amount is more essential than everything gigantic.

The ultimate form of machination comes into play when “reality” and “beings” assume a spectral character—a specter frightens, haunts unexpectedly, behaves obtrusively, has no background or content, and is the groundlessness itself which allows every sort of measure in every respect and diffuses an overpowering bewitchment—and posits itself as the unconditioned.—

In order to be appropriated by beyng qua event, we must divorce ourselves from the beingness of beings and from the supremacy of beings. We are capable of preparing the latter in surmising the former through meditation, and the former must bestow itself on us so that we can accomplish the latter. Elevated toward the bestowal and directed toward the accomplishment, Da-sein becomes grounding for a humanity which must know itself summoned to an Other beginning of history—Da-sein becomes the jointure of beings.

Da-sein is the first appropriation—; as Da-sein, the essence of the truth of beyng is fundamentally appropriated; what is thus appropriated is history. The beings disposed in Da-sein—i.e., liberated into the clearing of the appropriation—constitute the domain of appropriation.

Bolshevism (in the sense of despotic-proletarian Soviet power) is neither “Asiatic” nor Russian—but instead pertains to the consummation of the modernity which was determined Occidentally at its commencement. Correspondingly, authoritarian “socialism” (in the variants of Fascism and National Socialism) is an analogous (not identical) form of the consummation of modernity.* Bolshevism and authoritarian socialism are metaphysically the same and are grounded in the supremacy of the beingness of beings (cf. the earlier Ponderings). The most proximate historical decision is: whether both basic forms of the consummation of modernity, independently of each other, entrench the abandonment of beings by being (i.e., the gigantism of technological-historiological-political arrangements and institutions) into unconditional results and thus in their gigantic style are the same, with or without explicit “political” union, or whether through them, in a mediated indirectness, a

*The term “socialism” designates only in appearance a socialism sympathetic to “people” in the sense of social solicitude; instead, it refers to the political-military-economic organization of the masses. Class: dominant stratum.

| reacquiring liberation of the Russians paves its way toward their history (not “race”) and an abyssal question-worthiness of the Germans paves its way toward theirs, whereby the history of both peoples stems from the same concealed ground of an inceptual destiny: to ground the truth of beyng (as event of appropriation).—

The gigantic danger is not the “Bolshevizing” of Europe—, for what is already a state of affairs, and is so in the essential sense of a necessary historical consummation, can never be a “danger”—. Danger prevails only where a complete passing over of the still concealed historical essence is imminent, in such a way that this threat is not, and indeed cannot, be recognized as such. The danger is that the inexorable consummation of modernity will assert itself as the sole ground of the advancement of “history.” The danger is the exclusiveness of the “results” of machination in the metaphysical sense—the unrecognizable and unsurmised subversion of every possibility of a completely other historical beginning which would announce itself as an overcoming of metaphysics (and consequently also of machination) and would necessarily have to recede far into the concealedness of what is not public. | The danger is that in a new way and unconditionally, out of the metaphysical destiny of Western history, “goals” would be set up and the unique decision (supremacy of beings or passageway toward beyng) would be thrust aside as unknowable and unworthy to be known, whereby the attained goals (of “culture,” of the “happiness of peoples,” of the assured “vital interests”) could in each case already as goals claim for themselves an agreement which at the same time guarantees their “truth.”

The knowledge that we are a passageway to beyng, i.e., into the appropriation out of which the essence of history is determined as the grounding of the truth of enduring—this knowledge is a sign of inceptuality and of itself requires the mastery of that which unfolds itself in reticence and which remains just as remote from power and impotence as from “action” and “reaction.” This knowledge of meditation (meditation heedful of the history of beyng) is the first steadfastness in the truth of beyng and therefore is the longest one, the one that in persevering far forth can least of all be blinded by “results” and “effects” and least of all is subject to an overestimation of itself, but instead, as mere preparation in the limits of constant preparedness, surmises itself in gaining strength. The danger lies in the threat of the abandonment of beings by being through the forgottenness of being, and this threat | now consists not in an approaching convulsion of the content but, quite the reverse, in the entrenchment of the abandonment by being. The forgottenness of being relegates beings unconditionally to beingness and to its unrestricted unfolding and in that way guarantees the sole supremacy of beings in the sense of arranged “lived experience” and instituted “reality.” What thereby and therewith swaggers as an apparent opponent to the rejection and to the standing aside is merely impotence (belonging to the unrestricted power) and reversion into the respective past which is cast off precisely by machination. Thus, in virtue of the abandonment of beings by being, beingness becomes unconditional as machination and accordingly tolerates no condition through which it could still be restricted or be postulated in terms of “goals.” Machination is never a product of humans; instead, these—precisely when they posit themselves on themselves—are the executors of machination, ones entangled in makeability. (The everyday meaning of the word “machination”5 implies something superficial and derived and does so within an interpretation of beings which is itself incapable of ever grasping the essence of machination as that essence is understood in terms of the history of beyng.) (On the concept of machination, cf. On meditation, p. 1ff.⁶)

Despotic communism and authoritarian socialism are indeed the same metaphysically, but not politically. Therefore, the common metaphysical soil will always remain concealed in a political comparison—; historically, this means: the essential decisions regarding being and its truth will remain unknown. That it is in each case a matter of “worldviews” (cf., on this concept, the lecture of 1938 7), and so a matter of offshoots of metaphysics, can be seen explicitly in the fact that with a certain unavoidability international Western (Greek-Latin) expressions must be used to designate these worldviews: evidence of their “origination” out of ratio,⁸ a term that contains a first predelineation of metaphysics. In the metaphysically machinational domain, all concepts, principles, and axioms are simply “expedients” which according to need can turn into their opposites. To attempt here a reckoning up of “contradictions” would mean to mistake the basic metaphysical position of the worldviews. Thus, e.g., for years the highest principle was that “politics” is not something self-subsistent but instead something that must be thoroughly grounded in a worldview, such that the “worldview” determines even what is “political.” Overnight, however, there can arise a “political” necessity | to affiliate with the former enemy of one’s worldview, whereby the term “political” receives a completely different sense, i.e., the previous liberal sense.

One can now be stirred up by the fact that a standpoint has been abandoned; in truth, the essence of politics has changed. Or should this change also only appear to be such? This change is merely an expedient whose unintended and ungrasped goal is to raise into unrestricted power the metaphysical essence of consummated modernity. Only myopic and empty idealistic “conventionality” and “Christianity” will find here occasions for surprise, if indeed not indignation. To think and calculate within these expedients is essentially to abandon all binding and every possibility of binding. This abandonment signifies an actual basic relation to beings—and presupposes their beingness in the sense of machination. It is proper to machination, for the empowerment of its unconditional power, to thrust forward “values” and “goals,” indeed even “supreme goals,” as that for the sake of which “sacrifice” and “engagement” are required. Such is necessary as long as the human being still adheres to the previous ideals and has not reconciled himself to his complete machinational subjectivity. Within the | machinational domain, where everything becomes an expedient, even the corresponding “spiritual” groundings can accordingly be set up and arranged expediently for the respective attitudes, since the “spirit” itself is indeed only an expedient standing in service to the empowerment of machination and receiving its orders thence. This is again not the “arbitrariness” of individual “despots”—on the contrary, their essence itself consists in their not being able to possess any other knowledge of spirit than machinational knowledge. Everything “spiritual” must be an expedient calculation and so also belongs only where prescriptive expedients are encountered: all other “spiritual” pretense, which poses as “worldview” literature and is necessarily compelled to the worst dislocations and subterfuges in order to keep pace at any time, is therefore a marginal phenomenon which “has” only itself for its “public” and seeks to hide its own rootlessness (i.e., impotence for meditation) through a phraseology as inflated as possible. In the age of machination, “literature” is done up gigantically but is likewise—i.e., just as gigantically—insignificant and ineffectual.

Mere war, especially one that could break out machinationally, and could do so only thus in the age of the abandonment of beings by being, never gives rise to meditation. Only romantics expect such a thing, as do all those who have forgotten or never considered that the first world war, despite the bloodiest sacrifices, was not able to arouse any meditation. On the contrary, it became at most the first textbook case of unconditional machination and of the latter’s institutions and arrangements. The horror may be ever so terrible, the bravery unprecedented, the sacrifice incomparable, yet all this never creates the basic condition of meditation: namely, the inner freedom of the human being for the essential (not self-interested) decisions, i.e., the preparedness for the historical question-worthiness of being. Everywhere machination has already seized all possibilities of beings and has imposed on these possibilities its own interpretations, so that the human being, despite all the affliction and dismay, is no longer able to press forth into the essential regions of a plight issuing from beyng.

Meditation as steadfastness in the question-worthiness of the essence of truth cannot be forced by tribulations; it can be incited only by an essential plight, which requires a magnanimity of heart. But whence this magnanimity?

Historiologically, the proliferation and entrenchment of machination are visible in various forms: one form is the commercial calculation (covered with a veneer of morality) of the Anglo-American world. The doom hastened by this form does not consist merely in what the form produces but still more in what it cannot perform: it is alienated from every essential spiritual decision and has geared everything toward “psychology” and Logistical reckoning. Thereby this form still claims for itself a supposed cultivation of the tradition of classical antiquity. And precisely this “spirituality” is altogether suppressed into what is antiquarian and moral, and it remains without any creative impulse. On the other hand, Russian Bolshevism (in its origin, alike in kind with the Anglo-American world) remains in its coarseness and massiveness an innocent phenomenon—for the essential appraisal cannot be carried out according to the number of those who have been disciplined and shot, but only according to the breadth and relentlessness of the strangling of every creative historical being [Sein], which has nothing to do with old-maid morality.—

Hölderlin, the greatest of the Germans, i.e., the person who most essentially migrated into the domain of the historical decision of the | history of the West, calls the Germans “the all-calculating barbarians.”9—What does that signify? Self-accusation? Essential insight? Historical decision? Presentiment of this decision? The gigantic confusion (in which already belong the abandonment of the principles and their perversion into long-since hardly noticed inconsequentialities) has its single ground in the plightless incapacity to experience the abandonment of beings by being and to preserve such experience in a grounding knowledge—(on “socialism,” cf. p. 70f.).

The consummation of modernity: in the age of unconditional machination, the gigantism of criminality becomes public under the title of “truth.” English politics and its kind of actualization constitute the paradigm of the final configuration of the modernity which is now proceeding to its end. In the English “spirit,” even “knowing” and “acting” have long been displaced into the mediocrity of calculation; decisive is the metaphysical incapacity of this “spirit” for the essential historical decisions of the future. Can it be accidental that my thinking and questioning of the last decade are constantly rejected in England alone and that no attempt has been made at an | English translation? It makes no difference at all whether the English invocation of morality is hypocritical or is “sincerely” meant in long-accustomed self-delusion and self-complaisance. What is decisive is that the English spirit does not at all transcend this appeal to “morals” and is able to evaluate as purely and simply immoral everything foreign to that spirit. The danger of this spiritless “spirit” consists not only in the relentlessness of its machinational play but above all in the fact that the resistance against it is too easily entangled in what is merely machinational. The distribution of the political power groups is only a sign pointing to the end of the previous age and to the indeterminateness of the historical ground of the future one. Mere “worldview” agreements, corresponding to “political” ones, can no longer suffice to ground the history of Europe into a consolidated world. Metaphysics (and thus also “ideals” in general and “morals” and “culture” as their effective forms) is at an end. The beginning of the other, however, is obscure—yet already this remains and becomes an essential event: that the other of another beginning | and of its plight is experienced. To be sure, that requires an intrinsic overcoming of the machinational essence of all things today. The most proximate decision stands out in relief: whether machination by itself still is capable of preventing the destruction of its essence, thereby letting itself endure in a new configuration, or whether machination will be broken apart by the last empowerment of its unconditionality. The decision and the way it is carried out depend on whether a preparedness of Western humanity will awaken for the grounding of the truth of beyng out of beyng itself and a unique plight of the heart will change to the jubilation of the encounter of the god for a protected earth in a simple world and thus Da-sein will be appropriated as the essential ground of the essential occurrence of the truth of being.

What must be thought farthest in advance in meditative thinking is both the essence of poetry and the preparedness for the plight of poetry, since the machinational supremacy of “reality” can be broken only by the necessary sovereignty of poetry. Yet this poetry must be of an essence that accords with the history of beyng, inasmuch as the poetry states disclosively the moment of the decision | in favor of beyng as appropriation of the enduring.

The historical human being of the Western future must be allowed to acquire one thing as what is first: to dwell on this earth poetically, i.e., to build, for the grounding of the truth of beyng, measure and structure in humanity—in order to experience an essential plight, the assignment to being in its question-worthiness.

Why do we hesitate to renounce in a radical way the historiological-political superficies of history, i.e., the technologizing of history, whenever the issue is meditation and the grounding of the future? The predominance of “facts” and of the valuing of “reality” does not suffice to explain this priority of the “political,” for that predominance is itself already the consequence of the hegemony of metaphysics, which prevents meditation on being and dissembles the essence of history. Therefore metaphysics stands as the single great impediment to historical meditation.—

The current and ultimate supremacy of metaphysics—diffused in the forms of “worldviews” and “ideologies”—must be broken. Without this overcoming, hope and fear stiffen into the fields of historiological calculation and remain far from a transformation into the basic disposition of a preparedness incited by the Essential plight.

The gigantic, intrinsic to the essence of machination, is not some present-at-hand oversized thing; then it would remain small, empty, and impotent. Gigantism consists in the continuously hiding and constantly lurking measurelessness of everything which becomes “extant.” Every exaggeration turns into an impetus for the next one and an ostensible justification of it. And every exaggeration is entirely calculative, although always clamped in that which is properly effective: the threat of the decisive, but in each case suppressed, measurelessness—the lurking of this measurelessness in relation to everything and through everything, the ungraspability of this incalculability which encompasses all calculation, the semblance of the legitimacy of every step of the self-concealing measurelessness, the ingenuity with which the measurelessness “enraptures” all common opinions and practices, the evasion of all questioning, the corresponding insistence on the publication of every success (—for everything made is here in advance branded a success), the unboundedness within the semblance of the most rigorous binding—called “alignment”—all these are signs of a machination that has broken out into the unconditioned. This machination eludes all explanations that are based on human activities;—qua being, it penetrates all humanity and the remainder | of the human “world” which is hollowing itself out and is driven into decisionlessness. The measurelessness of machination is no longer steerable or even only graspable through human presumption [Vermessenheit], which always moves within the acknowledgment of a measure and therefore still bears in itself the possibility of something transcending it. The measurelessness of machination demands no human presumption; it demands only the ungrasped and unknown detachment from every essential decision. This that is detached enables the sudden, constant, and often self-reversing entrenchment of all pursuits and productions in precisely that which in each case promises results. The “result” is only a pretext machination palms off on us so that we might create for ourselves according to need a changing sphere of representation within which our activities might appear “heroic.” Such detachment is an essential consequence of the abandonment of beings by being, whereby beingness as machination is kept in power. But the abandonment by being—arises out of a concealed essential occurrence of beyng. All incidents, made public historiologically-technologically as “happenings,” constantly surpass one another in their meaninglessness, the one thrusting the previous one into oblivion. The technology of the machinational institution of historiology in public opinion prepares an | essential a-historicality of humans. The a-historicality would not be an essential feature of machination unless it could hide behind the gigantic historiological montage of the respectively current happening of the respectively greatest time. The flight of the gods is so definitive that beyng no longer allows the human being to be taken as worthy of a knowledge of this flight, and so the human being is relegated to the subjectivity of the subject. But the leap into the disclosively interrogative experience of abandonment by being as such is already steadfastness in the knowledge of beyng as self-refusal—this essential occurrence of beyng shatters all historiological-technological human “history” and appropriates the human being differently: into Da-sein.

For Da-sein, machination as such and, along with it, the gigantic are knowable in a knowledge which thrusts this that is known back into its insubstantiality. This thrusting away has its authentic sharpness in a passing over—, which disdainfully renounces even giving notice to what is passed over. In this passing over, however, there still radiates a transformative gaze which recognizes in the abandonment by being the arrival of a most remote intimation of the abyssal beginning of the history of beyng out of the essential occurrence of its truth. Here is prepared the impoverishment into the essential poverty whose sole possession is beyng.

“Science.”—The historiological aftereffect of a past educational history is so obstinate in the remembrance of the scions of today’s older “generation” that the name “science” always makes them think of a tranquil erudition that in the sphere of its “questions” and opinions lives in a peaceful “world.” Only with difficulty do the elders resolve themselves in favor of what the younger ones already know in no other way and “totally” acknowledge with the smallest amount of spiritual claims: i.e., in favor of the supremacy of the purely machinational essence of “science.” Characteristic of this “science” is not a philology or a physics—but “barnacle research,”10 which has its own institutes seeking ways and means to keep barnacles off the hulls of ships, since such growths considerably reduce the speed of navigation. Here lies a “problem” of “vital” importance—science is to be grasped in terms of the essential character of such a problem. But this sort of “research” has a prescriptive character not because it is carried out precisely at present—quite the reverse, its prescriptiveness is the consequence of a change in the “origin of knowledge” and in the capacity for knowledge, and such change arises out of the essence of being as machination. The pseudophilosophy which would like to read off the essence of science from actually pursued sciences, and even | attributes the discovery of this procedure to Kant, is unable to recognize that Kant experienced, and took departure from, mathematical natural science as a “factum” only because the essence of knowledge in the sense of the mathesis of modern thinking was certain to him and this certainty itself coconstituted the content of the self-certainty of the subjectum.

Anyone who expects consolation from philosophy, and lets himself be at all consoled by it, must remain outside of its proper domain and can know of philosophy only its name and its historiology. All consolation avoids the danger of displacement into an abyssal transformation of humanity. Yet this displacement is in essence the appropriation of humanity to the grounding of the truth of beyng. Is there a standpoint that could still assess consolation and displacement against each other? Or is each, in its own radically distinct way, unconditioned? All of metaphysics tempts itself openly or indirectly with consolations and can abominate and distrust that which is essentially other to it only as what is disconsoling—or, at most, metaphysics dismisses what is disconsoling as something unintelligible (to metaphysics).

What is now proceeding is illusorily the decisive abandonment of all “lived experience,” or possible “lived experience,” of beyng as well as the abandonment of everything in that way reported and even already forgotten about beyng. What is affected and what does the affecting are—in a similar way and similarly unprepared for meditation—especially the “object” and “subject” of machination and do not extricate themselves from this unique dichotomy, but instead throw themselves from objectivity into subjectivity and vice versa. In the concealed ground, however, everything is released from beyng into beings. The releasing creates the abyss of a latent plight which casts only the most distant shadows on the most proximate suffering of the perplexed humanity thrown back on itself.

What is now proceeding is a-historical, already something past (in essence something decided and no longer summoned out of itself into an essential transformation) even where it becomes the most importunate present moment. What is proceeding is but the now nearly measureless making visible and publicizing of the machination which in essence is still only running out: what is utterly without a future, i.e., what of itself finds no motive to prepare for something forthcoming in the sense of an appropriation of the essence of humanity to the task of grounding the truth of beyng. What is proceeding is the gigantic flickering of the products of the | age of unconditional meaninglessness. Insofar as we know this, i.e., bear it steadfastly out of the basic disposition of feeling unsettled, we already tarry in the silence of what is forthcoming and already surmise the simple necessities of the liberation of the earth to the simple world in the open air of the encounter of gods and humans.

What is proceeding is definitively snatched up in advance into the calculation which itself runs ahead of machination and compels into its clutches everyone who still sets about to maintain concomitantly a role in these incidents, called “history.” All distinctions of “cultures,” “worldviews,” and “political goals” level themselves off on the same plane in which only the designations are different. And this difference sinks to nothing, for even the words dissipate into mere sounds and become one means of incitement among others. Peoples turn the defects of machination into possessions as appearances of a superiority—from the opinion that meditationlessness is an achievement. What is futural, however, that which is appropriated to what is forthcoming, is meditation as liberation to steadfastness within the question-worthiness of the essence of truth.

Expect nothing from beings; instead, be appropriated by beyng.

Perhaps proceeding now is the last change in those who execute the machination of beings. Previously, there was still a hesitancy to allow the gigantism of machination to come into play unconditionally and with unrestricted violence. Now machination has directed its executors to what is unconditioned and to the venture of unlimited meaninglessness. This change looks superficially like something “new”; it is indeed “new”—but the novelty is only the different continuation of the hitherto and is ultimately the full culmination of the hitherto. The novelty is the extreme opposition to the beginning. The change is the unconditional denial of the possibility of a beginning. In the age of the machination that has been released into unconditionality, the works of delusion are so gigantic that they tolerate no other “works” next to them and so swagger about as the “truly real.”

It is easier to act in the secure domain of an immediately effective task than “merely” to reflect. Yet what matters is not what is “easier” or “more difficult,” but that everyone abide by his own destiny.

What if the present were only something already past and exhausted itself in the replenishment of the past through ever new surprises and the newest ones? Then reigning in concealment would be the moment of the complete incapacity for decisions and even for the preparedness toward a decision (Cf. p. 34.)

Dostoyevsky says at the end of the first chapter of Demons: “But whoever has no people also has no God.”11—But who does have a people, his people, and how so? Only he who has a God—and only in that way? But who has a God, and how so? Are we now falling into the back and forth of a counterplay which as such, in its unilateralness and bilateralness, is of no avail in either case? Whither does this counterplay point? Is it not itself borne and spanned by that which neither a people needs, nor God needs, though indeed both together need in essentially different ways in order to find and ground their essence and to be beings? And what is that? Beyng in its truth. Only the relation to beyng can bestow the possibility of a plight of the encounter with God; only the need for beyng (on the part of God) extends this relation into something out of which what is to be encountered can enter into the relation and can allow the relation to receive explicitly its proper essence. Beyng—as appropriation into | Da-sein, in which guise it endows the event with the amplitude and arena of its oscillation and can be experienced only at the moment history finds its essence as the essential occurrence of the truth of beyng.

Everything inceptual arises from roots and so comes from “below.” But this “below” is nothing unless it harbors the possibility of its “above” and brings that to hold sway. Therefore, nothing essential ever comes “merely” from below and never “merely” from above—but solely from the struggle regarding the essential liberation of both—out of their “in-between”—yet the latter is already itself the appropriated of the appropriation (i.e., of beyng). Mere going-down-to-the-roots (all radicalism) is ambiguous: it can mean to pull up the roots or to sink them into the soil. The distorted essence of what is radical is merely exaggeration extended to the level of the unconditioned.

Liberation is grounding in the latent essence and receives its direction from an indigenous proximity to the origin. Sham liberation leads off into what is rootless and alien, into what can bestow no fittingness.

The transition—means the essential, nondisdainful passing over on the part of those who are torn away from the beginning; the renunciation of the supremacy of beings. Such a transition arises only on the basis of history: i.e., out of the essential occurrence of the truth of beyng.

The unfathomable simplicity of Russianism includes what is unpretentious and also what is exorbitant—both in reciprocal affiliation. Bolshevism, thoroughly un-Russian, is nevertheless a dangerous form of the distorted essence of Russianism and thus is a historical passageway; as this form, Bolshevism holds in readiness the possibilities of the despotism of what is gigantic but also the other possibility, viz., for the gigantic to fall into the chasm of its own emptiness and leave the essence of the people without a grounding.

We see an early form of nihilism in the fact that all “goals” are disappearing and all “faith” is becoming otiose. Nihilism first attains its essential power when goals and the attitude of faith completely sink down to a mere arbitrarily exchangeable tool of machination and the bleak devastation of the earth hides within the semblance of supposedly “great” historical moments. | Even this gigantic misrepresentation of history, by way of an immediately concurrent and regulative historiological technology, is not an accomplishment or invention of individuals. Instead, it is a process which simply offers to those who are already uprooted a shelter for their groundlessness and goallessness.

The “highest” things machination allows are “interests,” including even “cultural” and “religious” ones—; “culture” and “religion” are already of a machinational essence and bear no relation to history or to the gods. These latter, admitted merely as ideas, simply become pretexts of cultural and ecclesial activity which dispatches propaganda everywhere, so as to gain prestige. “Interests” relate to that which is a matter of concern; that there occurs something like a “matter of concern” expresses precisely the constraining of the human being into the machinery of the ideals and of their domains of actualization. “Interests” could never comprehend that outside of themselves (the “matters of concern”) something essentially other might still occur, for the sake of which the human being is steadfast in beings.

Every “for the sake of which” is decisive. Decisions arise from meditation—meditation qua the relation to what is most question-worthy as such—and that is beyng; “interests” are fixed only on beings, | i.e., on their beingness as represented in terms of ideas. The pursuit of “life-interests” remains what it is, even if the interest is directed toward individuals, a community, or a community of communities; in this way, the interest is merely expanded and is thereby completely entrenched in its exclusive validity. Thus the machination is confirmed in its gigantism. Within the sphere of the supremacy of the life-interest, what is “interesting” may also shoot up and its diffusion may be served by all the means of information and “illustration.” The wasteland of the life-interests apparently fills up its emptiness with a constantly changing multitude of interesting things. Then one day even the sculptures in the Parthenon and manuscripts of the Middle Ages become “interesting.” Everything becomes interesting for a while, and nothing is decisive any more. Even what is proclaimed to be “decisive” counts merely as something interesting to an interest. How could it not?

If the history of the West is to be rescued once again in an essentially inceptual configuration, then needed is a transformation which surpasses all the previous revolutions that concerned beings alone: the change in beyng and the concomitant decision against beings and their supremacy designate the “place” of the beginning of another history.

Lines of demarcation between Russia and Germany merely veil the abysses of preconditions for a still unquestioned decision regarding the essence of Western history. Dividing strokes have to make manifest what is insidious, viz., what is essentially the same, precisely in its sameness. National Socialism is not Bolshevism, which is not a Fascism—but both are machinational victories of machination—gigantic forms of the consummation of modernity—a calculated depletion of nationalities.

Cowardice in the face of meditation is taken as a “heroic attitude.”

Technology is the most subtle form of the most persistent proletarianizing.

More important than the “romantic” expectation of a “spiritual blossoming” out of the currently a-historical “happening” is the experience of the abandonment of beings by all the truth of beyng. Only then do we know the one thing: the flight of all the gods. But that knowledge is the first and most remote nearness to their unfulfilled divinity.

The future is not the mere negation of something past, as if a present would have already thrust itself into its future by turning away from the past. Nor does the future arise out of an advance calculation of something present. In both these cases, the future [die Zu-kunft] is debarred from its essence: namely, as that which comes forth [das Zu-kommende] upon the present, back into recollection in such a way that what comes forth, instead of introducing some object, beckons out into the self-clearing of something to be endured—which conceals its innermost essence in what is here called the event and constitutes the essential occurrence of beyng itself. The future: the forthcoming conveyance out into the enduring of the encounter and of the strife; the carrying away that incurs.

That which “activity” brings forth is always only something made but never something generated [entstanden]; the latter can come to stand only out of and into a proper origin.—

Lying hidden in the essence of Russianism are treasures of expectation of God, and these essentially surpass all the stocks of raw materials. Who will mine these treasures, i.e., liberate them to their essence and | not merely calculate them in terms of historiology and literature? Who is so simple that he discovers and founds equiprimordially into unity his most proper essence and also what is most alien to him? What must happen so that such might become a historical possibility? Beyng itself must first bestow itself in its truth, and for that the supremacy of beings over being, i.e., metaphysics in its essence, must be overcome historically.

“Socialism.”—If we ask about the concept imprinted in history, and not about some romantic ideal, then we find the deepest answer (deepest because most resolute and least evasive) in Lenin’s dictum: “Socialism is Soviet power plus electrification.”12 This dictum requires a searching interpretation. In the first place, nothing is said here of “community” or “welfare” or the “equality” of all citizens; instead: socialism is “power”—the releasement of a despotism which compels and holds in pincers a proletarianizing of the entire people and accordingly often changes its tactics, sometimes even to the opposite ones (cf. NEP 13). Socialism is despotism “plus”; this summative addition derives from that “empirio-criticism” of the | end of the nineteenth century which determined Lenin metaphysically through German “philosophy.” Something is added to “power”—but not as a mere appendage—the word “plus” is only a characteristic expression for the calculative formulation of the essence of socialism. This calculation arises from the computation of a unity according to which “electrification” must be the prescriptive and sustaining form of the carrying out of power and thus of the assertion of power as the expansion of power. But “electrification” is here only the name for the most modern main form of producible and manageable forces and networks of forces—the name for technology in its newest form, one that is perhaps no sooner instituted than it is already out of date.

Socialism is despotically proletarian power in which technology is not a mere appendage nor a mere means—but is instead the basic configuration of the empowering of the power. This socialism is the essence of Bolshevism. Despotism (power in the hands of a few, who are actually no one) compels an unconditioned proletarianizing and also, by way of technology, suppresses all resistance (since technology enchants). Despotism is peremptory, ruthless, and cold. Conversely, however, this socialism, which does not necessarily have to take the Russian form, brings technology into the unconditionality of a power whose decisive character consists | in its making impossible every “spiritual” and “historical” demand and question as a merely intellectual false need. Thus it degrades “life” to “interests” and to the elevation of the “standard.”—But what is more erstwhile—i.e., “liberalistic”—than this setting of goals? (Cf. p. 86f.)

The greatest difficulty of contemplative thinking is to have clear knowledge of its superfluity and nevertheless to carry out such thinking in an essentially still more simple carefreeness than could ever be the one with which the rose radiates its flowering into nature. For the rose has the “bliss” of ignorance—and of something entirely retained in the protection of the closure of the earth.

The individual—someone who, in solitude and without protection, help, or confirmation, brings to maturity the simple decisions out of the concealedness of essential history and in these decisions endures the establishment of a future world. The individual—how could such a one be a “private” person? This latter outgrowth proliferates only in “communities,” because they need such in order to justify themselves out of resistance to it. They are unmitigated enemies of the individual, and their enmity is expressed | above all in the varied and continuous falsification of the individual into the “private person.” (Cf. p. 74.)

If today anyone still reads a book, an activity which falls in the usual sphere of refinement, then that is already recorded as the “vibrant life of the spirit”—as if that life were a matter of “reading” and of the use of books. This is the last remnant of a liberalism diverted into Bolshevism and of the cultural pretense of such liberalism.

War, even if an occasion and form for an always varied heroism, is appalling. But this is even more appalling: an a-historical people, blind to its uprootedness, and without the sacrifice of blood and without external destruction, tottering about amid the greatest historiological noise of all its orators and newspaper reporters, meditationlessness counting as reason, and the latter securing its essence in unconditional calculation.

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The basic error: that a people might create for itself a “life”-space through “spaces”—and thereby unlearn and forget the decision regarding “life” and allow only the | “standard” to count as the measure. In power here is ignorance, to which the essence of meditation is denied: the knowledge that meditation alone opens worlds and the earth, in that it gathers them into the simplicity of a decision regarding the relation to beyng.

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There still are “islands”; but lacking are those “islands” that could experience the sea out of which the islands protrude. (Da-sein out of beyng.) The “islands” are the unique persons of a historical destiny to whom the grounding of the essence of history is assigned as the enduring of the encounter and the strife—this history is the history of beyng. The affiliation to such history is bestowed in the impoverishment to the poverty whose sole possession is its occurrence as the proper domain of an appropriation. The merely historiological history (metaphysical history) persists in a prelude. Thereby the division of powers of “historiological” reality has prepared a distribution of roles, and the mysterious ways of this distribution are slowly becoming clearer: the role of the nationalisms of various deviations is the incitement of imperialism. The role of socialism is the expansion of imperialism. The incitement serves to impel despotism.

The expansion proceeds to an invariable flattening down to a low level. The imperialism (in the sense of despotic proletarianism) elicited in this way is not a fixed “ideal” or “goal”—but is only a motile form that has not yet revealed its ultimate configurations. Nevertheless, this empowerment of “imperialism” signifies the conducting of modern humanity to unconditional machination; and the latter employs an irresistible lure: it grants the executors of machination the consciousness of availing themselves of machination (here in the superficial sense of the calculation that plans and institutes) in such “imperialism,” whereas in truth, i.e., in the essence of what is still concealed here as history, the surrender of imperialism into unconditional slavery to machination has already been decided. In this broad and elongated anteroom of the history of beyng, “nothing” happens. Because everything is impelled out into decisionlessness and compressed into the wasteland of blindness with regard to decisions, the greatest possible activity must still, on account of the allure, occupy all humans constantly and “without remainder.”

Within this anteroom of the history of beyng, we draw near | to the Western revolution. In this unconditional configuration, however, the revolution does not lead to something new in the sense of an Other beginning—but instead brings about the “ending” which has been torn away from its erstwhile beginning—that “ending” which is meant unwittingly in all the idle talk of the “ultimate end.” This revolution is nevertheless not the mere “Quantitative” extension of Bolshevism to Germany and westward—instead, it is as an ending something unique and peculiar. The consummation of unconditional machination as the displacement of an apparently “personal” dictatorship of an identifiable person into the despotism of no one—of the pure empowerment of the processes of unrestricted planning and calculation—the flaunting of “realities”—of “facts”—of tactics and their implementation as beings—and the empowerment of beings of such an essence as henceforth completely forgotten being [Sein]—; in this “history” the power of nothingness is first attained unassailably in its extreme form (all so-called nihilism in the previous—even Nietzschean—sense is only an occasional limited prelude to this one). Through such “history,” the essence of history first comes to the verge of a prospective decision between nothingness and beyng—| the imperialistic-bellicose and the humane-pacifistic ways of thinking are only interrelated historiological (as formative of “history”) “sentiments” that in each case are differently proposed as pretexts in whose domains no decisions are any longer possible—because these ways of thinking merely represent offshoots of “metaphysics.”

Therefore even “international Judaism” can avail itself of both of them, can proclaim and carry out the one as a means to the other—this machinational pretension to “history” entangles all participants alike in its toils—; there are “ludicrous countries” in the sphere of machination, but also ludicrous cultural pretensions. In the approaching Western revolution, the first modern revolutions (the English, American, and French ones, and their sequels) are brought back to their essence; the “West” is ultimately and most decidedly grasped in terms of them, specifically such that it still intends to struggle against them.

Anyone who in this struggle asserts and gains “world domination” is not less inconsequential than is the fate of those who are the most abraded; for all still stand and fall on the level of metaphysics and remain excluded from what is other.

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With regard to the overcoming of metaphysics, Nietzsche is the ultimate and genuine danger point, because his thinking appears to be such an overcoming but in truth is only the inversion of metaphysics and so becomes its most insidious entrenchment. Thus even Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism remains a half-measure, and all his attempts to elude metaphysics become all the more entangled in half-measures and undecidedness. (Cf. p. 80.)

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Russia is not Asia or Asiatic and yet belongs just as little to Europe. What then is it? And Bolshevism is utterly not Russianism—and so arises the dark danger that a renewed and radical securing of Bolshevism (i.e., of an authoritarian state-capitalism, which has not the least to do with a compassionate socialism) and the conditioned despotism of technological and industrial intelligence might long delay the awakening of Russianism and bring about only a plundering of the Occidentally represented and utilized land—and in everything, including the essence, might think a-historically and calculate entirely “historiologically.” What is further West certainly does not, nor do the Germans any less certainly, stand | within a Historical meditation which would be strong and creative enough for an essential liberation of Russianism. A precondition would be for us to forget much—perhaps everything—that now dominates “life.” Perhaps this forgetting will be assisted on its way by an unusual destruction of modern Europe.

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Where “organization” is itself “organized” as a means of power, the masses have gained power and have made proletarianizing their goal. “Leaders” are distinguished by their capacity to be the purest “functionaries”—i.e., the most subordinate executors of the instituting of the urges of the masses. “Leaders” must place the highest demands on their organizational staff (“the party”); that is the sole way for them to retain power (since power exists only in the overpowering of itself—never through currying favor). The fact that all leadership is the production of a determinate level of consciousness in the masses shows how essential to organization is “computation” in the sense of a representational-productive “consciousness.”—

Only as long as resoluteness toward disorder and toward the application of extreme violence bears all its tactics, does a “revolution” maintain itself in a state of “evolution” that is supposed to seem to those who are led as a termination of the revolution but that in truth must remain an unconditional intensification of it.

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The replacement of the “ideal” by a “human type” is only the transfer of the metaphysical projection of beingness in a general way onto the uncomprehended projector. This transfer is not an overcoming of metaphysics, but is only the most insidious forcing of its essence into that which is without history. Insofar as the human being represents himself in the “type,” he renounces every possibility of the essential occurrence of beyng and becomes set in the mere unfolding of the properties and accomplishments possible in his characteristic domain. In this way, metaphysics is thrust into blindness and utter thoughtlessness. (Cf. p. 78.) The human being grasps himself as the “creator”; insofar as he has therein found his essence, he has delivered himself over to subjugation by machination.

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Ungenuine silence—from perplexity and ignorance—falls at once into unrestrained idle talk. Genuine silence—| from knowledgeable mastery over the decisions—prepares the essential word. A person who is genuinely silent works toward a simple stillness, which is the spatiotemporal field essentially originating out of the essence of truth itself.

The step into the other beginning of philosophy is decided by knowing that, and how, the essence of truth belongs to beyng itself. The worthiness of beyng to be thought could never be fulfilled through “thinking” in the metaphysical sense.

Truth: the clearing “between” of the enduring of the encounter and strife essentially occurring as event of appropriation.

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(Cf. p. 88.) Only arising gods—gods coming forth—can newly fulfill the essence of divinity: the fact that beyng itself is required as the arena of the extreme decisions regarding a possible essential occurrence of truth. Arising gods—establish their divinity in the prefigured passageway of an approach to the human being, who is himself first to be decided with regard to beyng. The arising gods found the deepest history and are the precursors of the last god. Therefore, the merely underhanded and retrograde power-attitude, e.g., that of the ecclesial God of the Christian-curial Churches, has no essential force, even if the appeals to this God might still for a long time | offer solace and support to many. But the decision does not concern the consolation of precisely present-at-hand human beings in their apparently still unaffected “pursuit of life,” a pursuit supposedly assured by the previous forms of society and structures of community. The question is not whether the humans of this age will still have available a way of escape into solace and comfort—for all this—apart from the merely semblant seriousness of a pretended meditation—remains entirely a calculation over the security of the human being—; “God,” introduced here only as “savior,” is degraded to the role of a help in time of need—and no one comes to terms with the divinity of God—instead, this business of the “salvation of the soul” always takes precedence. What the decision does concern is the essence of truth itself—that beyng might become the spatiotemporal field for an essential identification of the gods and for the maturity of humans to take up the task of grounding the truth of beyng. (And for that reason the basic question of my thinking has never been: What is the human being?—but is always the question of the truth of beyng as the beyng of truth.) The coming and grounding of the path of beyng that broadens the clearing, meditation as going out to meet this that is coming, and the thinking of beyng qua event of appropriation—constitute what is unique and simple, whose articulation the thinking of the other | beginning prepares to dispense. The first step of this preparation is the “overcoming” of metaphysics—the leap into such preparation as pertaining to the first clearing of the essence of history. The demand of beyng—is the grounding of the truth of its essence, which grounding is appropriated by beyng itself.

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To impute responsibility for incidents reciprocally is futile, if responsibility has lost all meaning through the transference of all calculation and action to the empowerment of power. Then it becomes inconsequential who has to bear the much-invoked responsibility, because everything in the face of which responsibility as such could still be possible and necessary has fallen victim in its content to disavowal and nullification. Nor can “history” assume for responsibility the role of a “forum,” because that reciprocal imputation of responsibility has already entered the plain of the preparation of full a-historicality, i.e., decisionlessness with regard to what is essential.

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“Pragmatic politics” [“Realpolitik”] as total prostitution.

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Christianity is the most extreme anthropomorphizing of the | human being and is the de-divinizing of its own God. Here cries out only the lamentation of the calculation regarding the salvation of the soul, and everything divine is measured according to this salvific function. But if power now comes to anti-Christianity, an attitude that unconditionally affirms Christianity, merely in reverse, and that exaggerates Christianity to an unsurpassable extent, then the anthropomorphizing of the human being, in unity with the de-divinizing of God, would exhaust all possibilities. The flight of the gods would then be decided, especially if the Churches once again and thus ever more extrinsically and emptily (with the help of radio, motorized transportation, and the like) seem to offer resistance to anti-Christianity. For what would then be attained is that situation in which essential decisions not only appear strange but also are completely forgotten in their possibility and even in their mere idea. Yet religious faith retains—already in virtue of the tradition preserved in it—the capacity to offer consolation, perspective, and refuge in general—and then remains, reckoned in terms of what preceded, once again a possession over and against nothingness. Yet the latter has become so null that it can precisely no longer be recognized in its essence.

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The age of the consummation of modernity faces two possibilities: either violent and swift demise | (which looks like “catastrophe,” but in its already decided and distorted essence is too lowly to be such) or else deterioration of the current state of unconditional machination to infinity. Unavoidable in each case is obliviousness to the possibility of a history which includes a decision on the truth of beyng. Wars and revolutions, even if of gigantic proportions, remain superficial incidents. The presentation of these incidents in public becomes ever shallower, the horror ever more desolate, and the pain ever more solitary. Here perhaps a path takes its point of departure into something other; admittedly only perhaps—for first of all the most remote meditation must think out beyond demise and the notion of infinity and toward another beginning. Demise and infinity, within their machinational context and their domains of planning, can offer views that look like a “burgeoning” and a rejuvenation and that newly display all possibilities of the previous “heroism.” And yet—the entanglement in what was hitherto becomes only more insidious in such “young peoples,” because they burn behind themselves all the bridges on which an insight into the abandonment by being could tread.

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“Bolshevism” and Russianism have something in common only because Russian socialism set in motion a first, though still clumsy, form of Bolshevism which was not yet in command of the essence of Bolshevism, and thereby took decisive “measures” in the metaphysical sense. These then underwent intensification and entrenchment, primarily in the form of a battle against Bolshevism. Yet this process of itself presses on toward a relentless and unscrupulous carrying out of the essential consummation of Bolshevism in its unconditional configuration. The occurrence of the shot in the back of the neck [Genickschuss] is only a coarse, superficial, and impotent sign of “terror.” The latter holds its genuine and essential power gathered in what is inconspicuous and impalpable, namely, that the constant and indeterminate possibility of a severe threat to everything lies over beings.

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The irksome din of the discontents, as well as the mania to instruct on the part of the know-it-alls, can drive on merely to the superficies of contemporary history, whose historicality must remain closed to such persons. If the age of unconditional machination compels our “people” toward “life-interests” as their single goal, i.e., toward the | conservation and elevation of the “standard of living” for purposes of promoting the advancement of culture, then, in order to reach this “goal,” our “people” need the corresponding possessions as well as the possibility to dispose of extension, matter, transportation, management, and value-formation in general. The pursuing and securing of these interests, however, unavoidably increase the breadth and height of the interests themselves, until the claims necessarily become unconditional and limitless. The satisfaction of these interests, which are intrinsically irresistible and therefore are called “natural,” includes a confrontation with the previous possessors of “world domination.” The struggle over this domination must flare up, not because the previous possessors own “too much” and the others “too little,” but because the type and form of their ownership and use have fallen short of the only way in which unconditional power can be fully maintained as power. That is the despotism of the machinationally-metaphysically (no longer morally-democratically) grasped socialism. That this struggle becomes a war (war which itself, in the ways it is carried out and in its means, must satisfy the unconditionality of machination) is not due to the violence and the craving for prestige and acquisitions on the part of individuals. On the contrary, it is the consequence of the process by which all “interests” are already unconditionally arranged and computed toward the planning and instituting of life. This process itself, however, merely unfolds the genuine, concealed, and already long-since decided | history of modernity: the abandonment of beings by being and the forgotten sovereignty of truth as correctness. But each of these is an event of beyng, an event that still withholds its essence as event and thus withholds the grounding of an inceptual history and allows only the historiology which procures for itself a present moment in technology. No wrangling with “time” and no glorifying of the results of “time” take even one step in the direction of the decisions—all that can take such a step is meditation on beyng, on how beyng essentially occurs: whether beyng appropriates humans, i.e., casts them out into the necessity of a transformation which provides a first illumination for encountering the most arising god. (Cf. p. 81.)

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War is not, as Clausewitz still thinks, the continuation of politics by other means.14 If “war” signifies “total war,” i.e., the one deriving from the unfettered machination of beings as such, then it becomes a transformation of “politics” and a revelation of the fact that “politics” itself has become merely the executor of unmastered metaphysical decisions, an executor that is no longer in control of itself. Such war does not continue something already present-at-hand; on the contrary, it forces the implementation of essential decisions, ones of which it itself is not the master. Therefore such war no longer admits of | “victors” and “vanquished”; all become the slaves of the history of beyng, a history for which right from the beginning they were judged to be too small and so were compelled into war. “Total war” compels “politics” (all the more inexorably, the more “pragmatic” this “politics” already is) into the form of a mere executor of the demands and importunities of beings abandoned by being, beings which only through the arranging and instituting toward unconditional planning secure for themselves calculatively the supremacy of the constant overpowering of the pure development of power. Such war no longer knows “victors” and “vanquished,” but not on account of both being claimed equally and both suffering an equally great harm; instead, the ground is the fact that both opponents must always remain within what is essentially undecided—and thus can know and calculate nothing other than their “interests.” War itself does not allow these “interests” as such, in their character as possible “goals,” to become question-worthy for the one opponent or the other.

Nonetheless, through holding both opponents down in the sphere of some not attained and perhaps destroyed possibilities of interest, war can lead to the verge of meditation—though can never let meditation arise, since meditation requires its own most proper ground. Struggle as war | is not the “father” of all “things,” if this latter term names everything which in the most preeminent sense is not nothing. Such struggle is never the begetter and master of beyng—but always only of beings. Beyng knows no begetting and cannot be mastered. Beyng “is” incomparable and nonrelational—as appropriation into the abyss.

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How restful is the alleged “struggle” on the basis of a “truth” that is never questioned and is declared to be “eternal”! Here struggle is merely an “occupation,” the filling of the days with ever newly prepared occasions for the satisfaction of ambition and of vanity. If the measure of a “struggle” is the power and competence for “decisions,” then of what avail is that “struggling” in the service of “ideas” of power politics, state politics, and ecclesial politics? But for most of us it may be good that such activities are taken to be “struggles.”—

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Only unique ones who are concealed to their “times” can ever invoke God and await that which is most coming to be. According to the distance and inaccessibility, there then arises the type of something ordinary and available to many, and there accords the stamping of them to a preservation of essentially occurring history.

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It is essential to all “schemes” and “institutions” (ones which arise out of the plans and calculations regulating in advance the essence of what is “real” and effective as a whole) that they are never to be rescinded but, instead, undergo an intensification into unconditionality. Institutions compelled by total war determine in advance the composition of a state of peace and determine it so exclusively that a state of peace becomes basically altogether impossible; e.g., the “people’s informant service” [“Volksmeldedienst”],15 which such a war finds indispensable, will be transformed into a “natural” institution of “peacetime.” What holds for the essence of power, viz., the incessant overpowering of itself all the way to a resolution in an unconditional process of power, holds also of every instrument and preservational form of power. Therefore, only rarely and with difficulty can any backward-oriented “thinking” form a notion of the greatness of the power that has made planned calculation its first, unconditional mode of fulfillment. At most, one takes this greatness “relatively” as gigantic, without considering that the gigantic consists not in a sum total of unusual extent but in the already unconditionally secured and constantly operative possibility of measurelessness. (Cf. p. 15f.)

118

Every beginning is something sudden; all the more protracted and concealing remains the transition, until the rupture from which what is sudden estranges itself.

119

Futural philosophy does not simply ask about something other (the truth of beyng on the basis of the beyng of truth, instead of the beingness of beings in consciousness and lived experience), it necessarily asks otherwise (in the mode of a reticent transformation of humanity into steadfastness in Dasein, instead of in the mode of a “systematic” computation of the categories of beingness in a summary representation). Yet that transformation itself can be carried out only in the appropriation by the event—it arises out of the plight of a lack of a sense of plight, and that plight is necessitated by beyng. The semantic structure of the transformation, if attainable at all, is peculiar. The utterance of the transformation, as an appropriated utterance, must return entirely into the highlands of beyng; all didactic, persistent striving to capture such an utterance by way of an agreement about its conceptual formation is unavailing, for it masks precisely the essential human flight (flight from knowing and grounding the truth of beyng) which is itself a function of the abandonment of beings by being. The highlands of beyng—the protruding and sheltering bifurcation of the appropriation that clears the way out—must incorporate heaven and earth. The thinking of beyng is not | the concurrent ascent of the highlands, but is the delineated origination out of them, and such origination can be constant only in the essential space of the highlands. In this space, thinking “merely” thinks and a feature of the highlands “merely” “is,” without effectuating or “dealing” with anything and without attributing to itself “deeds.” Thinking—steadfast in Da-sein—endures the truth of beyng.

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It can scarcely be said which doom is spreading more destructively: the unconditional absorption in machination through its unrestrained pursuit or the apparent resistance to machination through the weakening insinuation into every attempt at a preparation for the collapse of machination. Perhaps this fence straddling of the Christian cultural pretension which grasps at everything and assimilates everything is the more disastrous, because it metaphysically actualizes the basic form of hypocrisy and can “morally” claim a Good conscience and provide many people repose and security. It should be no surprise if even the thinking that is heedful of the history of beyng and stands outside of metaphysical (and thus also Christian) notions, is misused as an aid to Christian-ecclesial apologetics.

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In every war, the enemies battle for their own respective “self-assertion” and are precisely therein more united than friends ever could be. But the discord consists in what each claims and determines as his “self” and how he does so. The “cause” of a war is concealed in the alleging of goals during an age of complete goallessness. What then if each of the enemies basically does not know the goal of his war and if that ignorance is at the same time accompanied by the knowledge that such war no longer allows victors and vanquished because it definitively precipitates all beings into the abandonment by being? The ground of the essential decisionlessness could of course never be known by those who are supposedly “knowledgeable,” for such knowledge would have to destroy definitively its own content—even without warmongering. Thus the unrecognized resistance to every trace of a dawning of such knowledge.

The proceedings of a war consist not in “operations” and not in the “explosion” of bombs and the annihilation of squadrons—but only in the silent and impalpable suppression of every attempt at an essential meditation that questions history in the whole of its essence. This suppression is covered over on all sides by the noise of radio and of newspapers. The compulsion into meditationlessness, however, is not “produced” by individual | rulers and agents; on the contrary, those themselves are in virtue of their essence the first ones to be compelled and to lose their freedom. Therefore, even all “moral” “defamation” is childish behavior (nowhere equal to or even near the essence of history) and consequently itself useful only as a “tool of war.” The compulsion into meditationlessness and into its required schemes must therefore thwart and annihilate, as harmful to the nation and its military might, everything that is not immediately, visibly, and palpably useful for the “self-assertion.” The compulsion thus at the same time leads necessarily to an attitude whereby the appearance of doing harm must extend even to that meditation which perhaps assists the self-asserting people to the beginning of an essential history in which “war” and “struggle” are not simply renounced for the sake of a lame and empty “pacifism” but are instead displaced into the abyssal domains of the higher decisions and missions out of which there might arise for a people the attunement toward its future.

What we provided the Czechs and Poles is something England and France want to let be to the benefit even of the Germans. Except that France would like to maintain its a-historicality in a destroyed Germany, and England its a-historicality in a gigantic business venture. Whereas, the future Germans | are assigned the enduring of another history—for their thinking stands in the transition to meditation.

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No one should place his hope in a thinker, unless a person hopes for the destiny of an assignment to the unfamiliar friendship of those future ones who are waiting out everything present because an intimation of what is most coming forth has been bestowed on them. The basic disposition of those who are futural is magnanimity toward what has been and patience for what is most coming. “Interests,” assurances of salvation, results, and advancements have no influence on those who are futural.

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The notion that the humans who must ground are “geniuses” and “great” has long since taken on its modern stamp. The most insistent notion reveals itself in the opinion that those who are great are “ahead” of their “time” and that what they “created” will only later be understood and used, in order then to be surpassed by new geniuses. Competition and calculation are here in play.

Everything essential, however, is unsurpassable, not only because there could be nothing beyond, but because the measure of a surpassing cannot at all be applied here. But the uniqueness of what is essential is least of all | akin to that “eternity” which all human pretense, the more petty and loud its comportment, attributes to itself as a goal and a claim.

124

In this second world war, the invisible devastation will be greater (more intrusive) than the visible destructions.

125

My meditation of Russianism began in 1908–1909, when I attempted, in my last year of secondary school, to learn Russian. Since then, this volition went its own way and has been determined neither through the emergence of Bolshevism nor through the political “development” of the relation between Russia and Germany since January, 1939. The political-tactical, i.e., historiological-technological relation between Russia and Germany, i.e., between the respective “parties” leading these states, will generate its consequences “historiologically” one way or another—but this relation could never be a possible ground and space for a confrontation between Germanity and Russianism, as that confrontation would be understood in terms of the history of beyng. Such a confrontation can arise only from an overcoming of historiology through the sovereignty of the history of beyng. (Cf. above, pp. 70ff., 86, 87.)

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What is most Godless is what is intended widely as “religious”; | the turn toward the “religious,” a turn established and concomitantly pursued by literati in “literature.”

127

Disconsolateness grows with the craving to find in consolation the fulfillment of “life.” This craving is nourished by the opinion that “life,” whether the one to be pursued “on this side” or “on that side,” is the unique and highest ontological form a human being could possess.

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The end of modernity in terms of the history of beyng.—The metaphysical mark of this end is the historical development of the essence of “Communism” into the age of complete meaninglessness. (Cf. above, p. 22f.) “Communism,” thoughtfully grasped, consists not in the fact that each has an equal share of consumables, earnings, work, and pleasure, but that everyone stands in the same compulsion through the unconditional power of an anonymous few and that the decisionlessness (the curtailing of every possible growth of a decision and of every adoption of one) becomes the average air breathed by all. This commonality, this communalizing of each with all, is as though it did not exist; that industries are nationalized and likewise banks, that landed estates are split up and monasteries dissolved, that all knowledge is falsely turned into the “intelligence” which finds its use and thus its “reality” solely in the specialization of the “insiders,” that | the fabrication of a “public opinion” of the “people” through newspapers and radio is aimed only at maintaining a facade no one actually takes seriously, except for the rulers, and even they consider this facade merely one means of power among others—all this might appear, on the background of the possessions and attitudes of the previous Middle Class, to be a genuine loss and a matter of destruction. Nevertheless, this nationalization into the state signifies little, inasmuch as the state is merely a subordinate instrument of the party, and the party itself the instrument of the few, whose essence requires that they remain anonymous and that the ones who are well known by name (Stalin and the others) be tolerated only as figureheads. (Cf. p. 102.) Therefore, the despotism of the few does not have its ground in the personal craving for power on the part of individual “subjects.” On the contrary, these latter are themselves unwittingly exploited as the mere bearers and “functionaries” of the unconditional empowerment of pure power, with the one goal of letting this power get established in its own proper institutions and securing for it the repute of the truly real. To speak here of “materialism” is merely to testify how much this notion is still caught up in the fragments various doctrines have cast into it for the benefit of the “people.” This “materialism” is in the highest sense “spiritual,” so decisively that what must be recognized in it is the consummation of the essence of the Western | metaphysical spirit.

A person such as Lenin knew this with clarity. Accordingly, the danger of Communism does not reside in its economic and societal consequences but rather in the fact that its spiritual essence, the essence of Communism qua spirit, is not recognized and the confrontation with Communism is placed on a level which completely secures its supremacy and irresistibility. The historical power of Communism and of its proper essence as oligarchic Soviet power is the simplest and most compelling counterproof against the allegedly Nietzschean doctrines (but properly those of his exploiters) asserting an “impotence” of the “spirit.” The “struggle” of the Christian Churches against Bolshevism, for example, will accomplish nothing, because these Churches are incapable of recognizing the spiritual essence of Bolshevism, since they themselves are subservient to something “spiritual” which essentially and definitively prevents Christianity from ever grounding, in opposition to this “world-enemy Bolshevism,” a site that would fundamentally uproot Bolshevism and be of a completely different essence, i.e., the site of a decisive questioning. Prior to every “struggle” that always merely deteriorates into pseudofighting and ultimate agreement, the | knowledge must awaken that this pure power in its unconditional empowerment still for its part refers back to something else as its origin and essential support. That something else is machination, and to be thought in this word is an essential decision within the Western history of beyng. This thinking (indeed not as idle staring) comes infinitely closer to the “reality” of the incidents of the age than does every petty-bourgeois sort of “engagement.”

It would of course be an erroneous desire if one ever wanted to see this thinking transformed into a general and universally practiced way of forming representations and opinions. On the contrary, only one thing is necessary: knowledge of the ineluctable, essentially diverse multiformity in which the historical overcoming of Communism must be carried out. The most stubborn obstacle to this knowledge is the unspecified and nearly inadvertent expectation of a recurrence some day of pre-Communist, bourgeois conditions. This deluding expectation takes constant nourishment from the mistaken view that “publicness” constitutes the sole reality, whereas what is public is only an empty shadow of history, although indeed a necessary one, not simply to be leapt over. But history essentially occurs only as the history of beyng.

The “only a few” does in no way mean a small number in distinction to the numberless many who are excluded from the possession of power and signifies instead a peculiar mode of the gathering of every empowerment of power into the utter relentlessness of an unconditional procedure as the origin of such relentlessness. Only the few guarantee that the most inconspicuous unfolding of power will be unrestricted and certain. This procedure is determined metaphysically and is provoked and spurred on solely by the abandonment of all beings by being, an abandonment unrecognizable as an abandonment. Only such a few can unconditionally and fully guarantee the agreement that “welfare,” participation in cultural advancements, elimination of class distinctions and vocational distinctions, and the equality of the ruled and the “rulers” are simply pretexts for the benefit of the “people,” who stand entranced before these pretexts and so do not endeavor to see beyond, into what solely is, namely, the power of the few. Once again: the point is not that these few possess the power; it is that their “resoluteness” alone maintains everywhere and in unassailable priority the full power of the institutions over and against every attempt at independent insight by individuals and groups and every attempt by them to impose their own will.

It is not flight from the essential content of political | reality, i.e., flight into the “spiritual,” but on the contrary a thinking which penetrates the political all the way to the ground of the essence of its unrestricted power that will reach the domains from which the “spirit,” as a sovereign form of metaphysics, as well as metaphysics itself, can be overcome. Only where “spirit” is in advance effective, as a prototype or antitype, does the opinion regarding the rootedness of the spiritual in the “bodily” attain its prestige, reasonableness, and possible validity as a worldview creed. Yet “Communism” is not a mere civil form, nor simply a kind of political worldview; instead, it is the metaphysical condition in which modern humanity finds itself as soon as the final phase of the consummation of modernity sets in.

We are accustomed to pass our “life” in the sphere of familiar activities (of our welfare and of the promotion of culture) and have covered ourselves with the protective roof of fancied deliverances (“eternal salvation”). Since, however, those assurances are slowly revealing themselves as having long since become fragile and groundless, we today are falling into that widely vacillating perplexity which allows us only to be on the watch for “goals.” These are supposed to surpass the previous ones but thereby must precisely plunge into homogeneity with them. For if beyond the cultivation of the proficiency and pleasurableness of bodily life nothing | more remains except the unconditional expansion of this “goal” to the whole of the satisfied and healthy, industrialized and technicized, acculturated human masses who constantly manifest a new enhancement of these life-interests, and if even the European peoples, in willing either the assertion of the interests they have already long possessed or the first assured satisfaction of these interests, are not able to avoid war, then the compulsion that necessarily presses on within such interests, as compulsion toward a corresponding unconditionally instituted mass war, confirms that modern humanity still stands everywhere within what preceded, i.e., within the metaphysical determination of beings. The perplexed entanglement in beings prevents an experience of that which lies closest, namely, the fact that history in its essence is here determined by the flight from beyng. This flight leads to a condition that, along with the complete securing of a whole life and of its spheres of interest, nevertheless allows the uncertainty of a decision to increase beyond comprehension. The threat to humanity out of that which precisely constitutes the unconditional mastery of a sure steering of all defensive and offensive tactics, the threat which is as such inchoately surmised and yet at the same time rejected as illusory, this threat | announces something the modern calculative human being, in pursuing metaphysics to its end, could never experience—not because it lies too far beyond his customary haunts but because it is too close to him. It is so close that the human being, intent on security, must have always already leapt over this that is closest to his concealed essence. The closeness, however, is not a closeness to the “body,” nor to the “soul,” nor to the “spirit” of the human being; it is unrelated to all that. Instead, it is close to the concealed essential ground of the human being: close to that steadfastness in the truth of beyng in virtue of which the human being can be overtaken by insecurity amid what is secure, can be cast back and forth with the fluctuation and expiration of goals, but can also thereby experience sheer nullity (an intimation of nothingness).

Nothingness, however, is not “nothing”—but only the simplest (and most difficult to endure) essential configuration of beyng. Only at rare times of its concealed history does beyng establish the core of the essence of the human being and assign this core to the relation to beyng. This relation is not a representation and altogether not any sort of “lived experience.” Instead, it is the presently still unaccomplished | grounding of the truth of beyng. This essential core of the human being nowhere and never subsists in itself; instead, it first “comes to be” in the event of the appropriation of the human being to Da-sein and abides only on the basis of that appropriation. The human being cannot “make” this history and cannot ever intervene in it. Instead, the human being is himself the one seized—by the essence of history—and can only prepare a time when that which is most coming forth (of everything coming out of the remoteness of what is closest) might strike him (establish him in the core). As long as the human being remains outside of this preparation, he totters back and forth between blocked exits at the end of a long blind alley. He has forgotten to follow the way back, of course not back into what was hitherto, but into the beginning, whose dominance Western humanity immediately evaded. The beginning, in what it retains, beckons to itself the most remote future. Thinking, in keeping safe its essence, assigns the preponderance of its questioning to watchfulness for what is most coming forth. The beginning is the mystery of history, for the beginning brings itself into the sudden clearing of the suddenness of beyng on the way to nothingness. This self-bringing belongs intrinsically to the essential occurrence of beyng.

If “Communism” is the metaphysical condition of peoples in the last phase of the consummation of modernity, then | this “Communism” must already have placed its essence in power, even though hiddenly, at the outset of modernity. That happened politically in the modern history of the English state. This state—viewed in terms of its essence and disregarding the contemporaneous forms of government, society, and religion—is the same as the state of the union of Soviet republics—with the single difference that in the former case a gigantic subterfuge 16 in the semblance of morality and public education makes the unfolding of violence harmless and self-evident, whereas in the latter case modern “consciousness” divulges itself more ruthlessly in its own essential power even if not without paying lip service to the people’s happiness. The bourgeois-Christian form of English “Bolshevism” is the most dangerous. Without the annihilation of this form, modernity will continue on and on. But the definitive annihilation can only take the form of an essential self-annihilation and is promoted most strongly by the exaggeration of one’s own pseudoessence into the role of the savior of morality. To determine at which historiological point in time the self-annihilation of “Communism” will start to proceed visibly to its end is inconsequential compared to the decision that has already been made in the history of beyng and that renders this self-annihilation inescapable. The self-annihilation finds its initial form in the fact that “Communism” | presses on toward the outbreak of militant entanglements which make it impossible to halt the releasing of their full force. (Cf. above, p. 88, “War is …” to p. 89.)

Lenin was the first to recognize, uphold, and practice the promotion of world wars as a deliberate tactic. At the outbreak of a world war in 1914, his jubilation knew no limits. The more modern such world wars become, all the more relentlessly do they demand the concentration of all military might in the authority of a few. This signifies, however, that whatever in any way belongs to the being of the people will be incorporated without exception as an element of the war machine. World wars actualize precisely this “total mobilization” (recognized and even named as such for the first time by Lenin), i.e., this incorporation of all beings into the unrestricted entrenchment of power, this immoderate encompassing of everything. Such mobilization raises “Communism” to the highest level of its machinational essence. This supreme “height” is the only appropriate site from which “Communism” is to plunge into the nothingness of the abandonment by being (a nothingness “Communism” itself has prepared) and to usher in the long ending of its demise. All peoples of the West, in accord with the respective historical determination of their essence, are drawn into this process, whether they accelerate or retard it, whether they | work to veil or to unmask it, whether they apparently resist it or attempt to withdraw from its unlimited field of effectiveness.

Meanwhile, however, another history of beyng has already begun. For if beings as they basically are (here and now the beings of machination) are pressing on toward their end, then a beginning of beyng must be occurring, even though only rare and futural ones may be able, through some unusual knowledge, to think and poetize this beginning. The very act by which a beginning begins is nevertheless the most worthy and richest legacy of its own essence bestowed on the history of the grounding of the truth of the beginning in nascent beings. What is the significance of the appearance of the gigantic frenzy of machinational devastation, and of the “deeds” that are kindled by such devastation, over and against the coming of the last god and his assigned silent dignity of expectation? But the god—how so a god? Interrogate beyng, and in its silence, as the inceptual essence of the word, the god will answer. As for beings, you may wander through all of them, but nowhere will a trace of the god show itself. How then are you to become a questioner, namely, a questioner who interrogates beyng? Only through the voice of silence, which will attune your essence to steadfastness in Da-sein and elevate what has been attuned into an attentiveness toward what is coming. For only what is coming can inceptually fulfill the essence of divinity. In their coming, | the gods fathom the ground of the deepest history and are the heralds of the last god, whose lastness is his coming. He brings nothing, unless himself; but even then only as what is most coming of all that is coming. The last god does not mete out any consolation (cf. p. 98). To count on the salvation of the soul is to be compelled into that Daseinless “lived experience” from which this god remains so remote that he does not first turn away from the regions and products of such experience. Nevertheless, interrogated beyng, out of which the last god answers in his own good time, does attune to a trust in the bestowal of the most silent relation of a world to the earth, and these, world and earth, broaden to become the site of a history of the encounter of the human being and the last god. The trust is not chained to something present-at-hand and not built upon any being. Beyng appropriates this trust as the constantly inceptual, never lapsing into routine, and always more open serenity of the protracted courage for stewardship over a preparation for the event. This serenity is strong enough to take up into the essence of trust the shock occasioned by the abandonment of beings by being. In its forbearance this trust engenders magnanimity toward the invisible devastation of the essence of beyng, | a devastation that has already surpassed all the proliferating destruction of beings.

Perhaps for a long time humans will still not be mature enough for the pain of this magnanimous forbearance of the trust in beyng. Yet that trust harbors the essence of joy. Metaphysics and all its subservient forms, such as worldviews and religious faith, always only attain, inasmuch as they are lost in beings, “pleasure” in and through beings and at most “intellectual” and “spiritual” pleasure. Joy is not the same as pleasure. Joy has its origin in the beginning of the history of beyng. Joy places the end of metaphysics and thus the end of modernity into that which the transition has gone beyond. The reciprocally attuned magnanimity and forbearance of the trust in beyng express more expansively what the word “care” was supposed to name. Ordinary “lived experience” and the usual opinion always find in this word only the connotation of dreariness or affliction and thereby betray how exclusively their thinking is based on the opposite, which they know as “pleasure.”

And so arises the inability to know the essence of “care,” i.e., arises out of fixation on the now already commonplace metaphysics and on its ultimate triumph: | “Communism” as that which, on the human level, propels machination. The “sovereignty” of machination marks the ending of the first beginning of the history of beyng. The sudden breaking off of this ending is the other beginning of that history. In the first beginning, beyng essentially occurs as self-emergence (φύσις); in the other beginning, beyng essentially occurs as event. Self-emergence, machination, and event are the history of beyng, in that they liberate the essence of history out of its inceptual concealment, beyond its perversion as historiology, and into that which the future will think in advance as the grounding of the cleared enduring and will think out toward as the truth of beyng.

129

A people can have its “time” in which this people is precisely too late for downgoing, on account of lacking the essential height out of which the plunge would have to occur. And if what remains is only the protracted habituation to the inconspicuous lowering of the concealed standards and the imperceptible accommodation to the leveling down of the claims, then a destruction “of” being is in the path of the future and all extrinsic devastation can be taken only as the empty spectacle of a supplement that has arrived too late. But precisely then, those who know are given | a sign that a unique moment of history is in preparation, wherein humanity once again has to endure the encounter with a god. Yet the more essential the decisions, all the more silent becomes the domain in which such decisions occur. And for persons who are meditative, everything depends on their finding silence in these decisions and recognizing them amid all the noise, indeed surmising them even in what is apparently only empty and null, and thus contemplating the nearness of the most remote god. We believe ourselves ready for the time, and we fail to recognize in what is closest that which the time offers us anew at every small bend of its path—and this that is offered is never time itself.

130

“Heroism”—a vain floundering in the face of what is necessary qua what is publicly inevitable. How extrinsically to beyng, how loudly and full of expense—the passion for the poverty of the great silence pertains to those who are futural.

131

The sign that a philosophy is philosophy remains the place only occasionally intended for it on the basis of its thinking, the place in which either a “yes” attaches itself | to questioning or the “no” of those who are already assured thrusts it aside. What otherwise is brought forth to surround a philosophy is mere prattle.

132

The unique ones do not need the many, the others, and their alliances in order not to be mere individuals.

133

What is “good” is not the “pleasant,” nor what brings “happiness,” nor the beneficial, nor the useful, nor the obligatory, nor a mere value; instead, it is the steadfastness of Dasein in freedom on the basis of an affiliation with beyng. But because beyng, to those who are futural, is the most question-worthy, freedom is thus that poverty of the silence of persevering which never garners its truth out of verifications.

134

At a time when the invisible devastation is more intrusive than are the visible destructions, even the ways of daily thought must be directed toward what is invisible, in whose domain is carried out a mutual approach of those few who are invisible and yet are alone real, those who have grounded the human being | upon Da-sein. These are on the one hand the individuals who stand today in the immediate militant struggle and do not take support from anything present-at-hand, nor from society or comradeship. They must in their own way surmise in advance something else, something for which they are prepared to sacrifice and which they nevertheless are unable to express in words and yet do create a sacrifice. How many such individuals are in the world no one knows. But that there are some is certain. Secondly, there are the women who from an inceptual love hold in readiness silent spaces for what is noble and who, in virtue of this love, are indestructible. Who they are is withdrawn from all public opinion. And then thirdly are those we may perhaps recognize from their belonging to another history by way of a poetizing and thinking that run far ahead. Who these are, and whether they are, are matters so deeply hidden that a questioning in this regard can scarcely awaken, let alone become common. These three, invisible and solely real, prepare the “poetical” in the ground of which alone the history of humanity is fathomed. The gift of beyng belongs to these three, that they might allow the advent of inceptual decisions to reach them and, in their three respective ways, might watch over this advent.

The span of the heart must find its piers in the hard importunity of a daily accomplishment—and in the proximity of the trust in beyng. The difficulty for those who are properly steadfast in beyng is not “to live dangerously,”17 since the danger always retains the univocity and familiarity of their fixed domain. What is difficult and therefore genuine is to live transitionally, to make one’s way on the bridge of that span of the heart and to dispense with small expedients and consolations. The publicness pertaining to this time is very ordinary and conventional and therefore is to be encountered historiologically everywhere. But what is concealed of this time is unique, as unique as the beginning of our Western history.

135

War, which people now call “peculiar” in order to become already accustomed to it day by day and thus keep from it every essential intimation, is merely the weak interplay and counterplay of a process known only by a few—and to them knowledge is steadfastness in a truth of beyng. These knowledgeable ones are the only futurally acting ones; they need no publicity.

136

For a spirited, active person, there are today only two possibilities: either to stand out there on the | conning tower of a minesweeper or to steer into the storm of beyng the ship of the most extreme questioning.

137

Theology: a “poor soul” is of no concern to the devil. A devil enters into a pact only with persons about whom he is certain they are of a devilish essence. Just as God is still divine in his harshest smitings, so his adversary, a devil, is still devilish in his most innocent behavior. But what if the devil attained his greatest deviltry through the “arousing of remorse and grief” over his previous deeds?

138

The lecture course: one person snatches up something useful, in order to refurbish his “science,” another takes away reassurance, in order to edify his fluttering “soul,” a third strains toward surprises, in order to draw some charm into his wasteland—and no one surmises the way and the path or ventures a step. But wanderers wander and are.

139

Summer.—When to find oneself anew among the tallest firs yonder in “Hämmerle” after the last blow of the axe amid the yet for a while lingering groans in the falling of the tree and with the dull thud of the resounding earth—

140

Missives one has just begun to write—are at times testimony to an already finished recollection permeating all the domains of Da-sein.

Appendix

Concerning no. 104

nothing can be grounded as to its form—because no freedom toward oneself—toward the ground

no superiority—

no effective volition—	but to set up only
to be placed under the	brutality as the means
most proper essential	the one who appeals to results
law—and its unfolding—	which are not of his own doing!
instead of skirting it!

no openness of questioning—

or room for the strife allowed!

only blather from the belligerent one!

The genuine opponent of the struggle not at all recognized—| now in the most peculiar self-praise to the skies!

1. {Pindari carmina cum fragmentis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935).}

2. [Latin word.—Trans.]

3. {The Heidegger family purchased a Pomeranian dog named Mohrle [“Blackie”] from a farmer at the end of the 1920s.}

4. {Cf. Karl Jaspers, Philosophie vol. 2, Existenzerhellung (Berlin: Springer, 1932), 411.}

5. [The German word is die Machenschaft and has the same everyday connotations as the English cognate.—Trans.]

6. {Heidegger, Besinnung, GA66 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997), 16ff.}

7. {Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege, GA5 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), 75–113.}

8. [Latin word.—Trans.]

9. {Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, Gedichte-Hyperion-Briefe (Berlin: Propyläen, 1923), 284.}

10. {“Barnacle research” is concerned with the reduction of resistance to the movement of a ship by way of decreasing friction in water. It was and is carried out by the Nautical Research Institute established in Hamburg in 1913.}

11. {Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Die Dämonen (Munich: Piper, 1922), 53.}

12. {Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Our Foreign and Domestic Political Situation and the Task of the Party” (Speech of 1920), in Werke, vol. 34 (Berlin, 1966), 414.}

13. {NEP = New economic politics; economic and political initiative of Lenin and Trotsky in 1921.}

14. {Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Berlin: Feddersen, 1933), 19. “War is the mere continuation of politics by other means.”}

15. {Cf. Reinhard Heydrich, “Der Volksmeldedienst: Die Mobilmachung gegen Verrat und Denunziation,” in Der Schulungsbrief. Das zentrale Monatsblatt der NSDAP, 6. Jahrgang, 1939, 338f.}

16. [Reading Verstellung for Vorstellung, “representation,” following the corresponding passage as published in Die Geschichte des Seyns, GA69, 208. Cf. the editor’s afterword to the present volume, p. 223.—Trans.]

17. {Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Werke, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1921), 215.}

{Index}

The page numbers in Index represents the print page number and will differ with the eBook page numbers

Abyss [Ab-grund]

Anthropomorphizing [Anthropomorphie]

Beginning [Anfang]

Being and Time [Sein und Zeit]

Beyng [Seyn]

Bolshevism [Bolschewismus]

Care [Sorge]

Christianity [Christentum]

Clearing [Lichtung]

Communism [Kommunismus]

Consolation [Trost]

Culture [Kultur]

Danger [Gefahr]

Dasein

Decision [Entscheidung]

Dignity [Würde]

Disposition [Stimmung]

Doom [Verhängnis]

Downgoing [Untergang]

England [England]

Freedom [Freiheit]

Future [Zukunft]

Gigantic [Riesiges]

Gods [Götter]

Good [Gute]

Greatness [Größe]

Ground [Grund]

Highlands (of beyng) [Gebirge (des Seyns)]

Historiology [Historie]

History [Geschichte]

Hölderlin

Individuals [Einzelne]

“Interest” [“Interesse”]

Interpretation [Auslegung]

Kant

Knowledge [Wissen]

“Life” [“Leben”]

Machination [Machenschaft]

Meaninglessness [Sinnlosigkeit]

Meditation [Besinnung]

Metaphysics [Metaphysik]

Modernity [Neuzeit]

Moment [Augenblick]

Nietzsche

Nihilism [Nihilismus]

Noise [Lärm]

Organization [Organisation]

Origin [Ursprung]

Passageway [Gang]

Past [Gewesenheit]

People [Volk]

Philosophy [Philosophie]

Poetizing [Dichten]

Poverty [Armut]

Power [Macht]

Providence [Vorsehung]

Questioning [Fragen]

Rank [Rang]

Recollection [Erinnerung]

Russianism [Russentum]

Science [Wissenschaft]

Silence [Stille]

“Socialism” [“Sozialismus”]

Solitude [Einsamkeit]

“Spirit” [“Geist”]

Technology [Technik]

Theology [Theologie]

Thinking [Denken]

Tradition [Überlieferung]

Transition [Übergang]

Truth [Wahrheit]

Value [Wert]

War [Krieg]

Word [Wort]