PONDERINGS XIV

“The dinner bell

Was put out of tune

By things as trifling as snow”—

Hölderlin, Entwurf zu Kolomb, vol. 4:2, p. 395.1

Here is manifest a poetry no longer needing to be “art,” i.e., τέχvη, i.e., “poesy,” (πoίησις). Fortunately, such poetry is altogether inaccessible to the versifiers who are now schooled in all the arts and who imitate everything. But why must such poetry be contemporaneous with an unrestricted cultural pretension? So it is thereby concealed and thus preserved from that misuse by all for all out of the arbitrariness of the unleashing of a power.

We are everywhere only in the prelude of the beginning.

Beings never replace beyng; they are always displaced into it. The thinker projects “only” what was projected to him. The projection itself must be something projected. But what projects is beyng. Projection is the event of appropriation. (Cf. p. 62.)

There are burdens which do not let themselves be put aside and must be carried over into a time that will decide inceptually about their weight.

To think into the open region—with the burden of the thinking of two and half millennia on one’s shoulders—

It is necessary to stand knowingly in the essence of truth, if we must be decided in something true.

Have to create a thing that can wait because it does not need to “effectuate” in order to be. So as not to become deceived over “necessities” by means of reputation, one would need to have an effect on one’s “time” and come to its aid. This hospital outlook is foreign to historical meditation.

Even in the farthest corner, no unclarity should lurk and no veiling of the fact that there is now no longer anyone who could grasp even a little of the thinking that is heedful of the history of beyng—simple solitude.

To be there in fundamentally different realms of beyng, indeed ones no longer even comparable in their differences, and at the same time to grant to those who are oblivious a full right to their obliviousness—Da-sein as “care” (πρo-μηθεῖσθαι [“forethought”]).

But care as care over fire qua light and clearing (φάoς—φύσις [“light—nature”])—the care of beyng—(being and time). Yet care is more inceptual than φύσις, inasmuch as the clearing is to be grounded concomitantly. The impossibility of the “a priori.” The latter as the antecedent is the illusion of a beginning.

Only beyond love and hate does there commence the domain first determined in its possibilities of rank by a πόλεμoς [“war”] itself, the domain out of which the struggle first reacquires its own dimensions.

There will perhaps arise, two centuries from now, the first Germans to let themselves be approached by something long preserved as that which is coming. We who are transitional must prepare these first and few ones. Is there a greater proximity to beyng than this thinking out into the distance? Fore-thinking into the beginning.

“Heroic realism”2 is a flight into the “real” in the face of meditation on reality.

Greatness is the grounding of something inceptual or, on the other hand, since it also has its distorted essence, is the most extreme ossification of something already elapsed.

History occurs only where and when the essence of truth is decided inceptually.

The decision comes out of beyng itself.

In order to endure what the law of beyng demands, we need something Essentially other, and “more,” than a “heroism.”

Courses of thinking which have transpired should no longer be falsified into “works” but, instead, must become a trace and must preserve what they conceal. Yet this requires the simplest tact; for where are the abodes of silence and when is the steadfastness in the stillness, if even such things are bruited about into the ravenous void of publicness, the void that indiscriminately mixes everything into a quickly consumed verbal hodgepodge? Everything essential must first become difficult and unrecognizable.

The hopeless floundering in regard to a reform and “renewal” of the “university” still goes on. In the meantime, people observe a growing “indifference” on the part of the students in and toward the “philosophical faculty.” But what is not realized is that these observers, who identify a decline in the number of students enrolled in the classes, | already “see” only with the eyes of the administrators in charge of the curriculum and consequently deduce “indifference” from the lower numbers. In fact, however, it is just the opposite: the hunger for meditation does smart, but nothing caters to it. At least the “wish” for the possibility of spiritual questioning is still alive, although nothing is offered that could carry out an ordered course of thought leading for the first time into the realm of questioning. People are already so accustomed and attached to the instituting and planning of “studies” as to believe that the (supposed) “indifference” could be remedied through the stipulation of a number of required classes. That the philosophical faculty of the University of Berlin—which has long since become an inflated and empty institution—has recourse to such foolish proposals demonstrates the breakdown of the university in a much more convincing way than does any indifference of the students.

Besides, all these “important” affairs are already over and past.

One was horrified in the year of possible decision (1933), remained aloof, and rushed about. After a brief interval, | one was used, saw oneself confirmed, became satisfied, and swallowed everything—“science” was indeed valid again—and now one puts on airs as the admonisher and rescuer—where one bears the proper guilt oneself. And at all times one was oblivious and will remain so. One does not see the irresistible processes—in which the essential assumes the form of that which alone has power. Through small “artifices,” one would still like to turn back what is irresistible and yet one merely promotes it; only for that reason do the “professors” still have a claim to validity. They help to accelerate what they supposedly retard.

The current world war is the extreme overturning of all beings into the unconditionality of machination.

Where the struggles over the possession of power play out in the sphere of the unconditional empowerment of power, the only “victor” is that despot who knows what he can want and does not expose this knowledge to any publicness. He can want only the pure sovereignty of power—without knowing the essence of this power.

In “heroic” times, which know nothing of their own origination, “peace” counts as weakness, because heroism is mistaken about the essence of sovereignty and does not recognize that a “peace,” which is different than the mere suspension of war, requires for its grounding and preservation higher powers than the discernment of rampant forces.

An Englishman (Thomas Buckle) says: “The locomotive has done more to unify people than have all philosophers, poets, and prophets that preceded it since the start of the world.”3 If we take the “locomotive” in this curious statement as a kind of mechanical-technological means of transportation, then we must first ask what unity this incontestable “unification” is supposed to have brought about. Is it not that very unity which became the basic condition for the possibility of the sharpest discord and enmity—; what would today’s modern warfare be without this “unity”—? One must be an Englishman to dare speak here of “unification” while surmising so little of the essence of thinkers and poets.

England produced parliamentary (party) democracy and mechanicism—Russia is only the decisive essential consequence, inasmuch as that country first came to terms with the essence of communism and grasped it as “Soviet power + electrification.” That these two countries will develop into the sharpest opponents is inevitable: for they both want the same thing. And meanwhile? We will either, on the basis of an unrecognized decisionlessness (which would like to be them both at the same time in variants), be abraded to nothing, or we can become a unique beginning of the West, provided we know the decision.

Russia lived for centuries in despotic feudalism and could not endure the “democratic” world of the Kerenski regime⁴ for six months, before accepting despotism in the form of Bolshevism. What does this signify?

Bravery: to reconcile oneself with the structure of what is essential and in this acquiescence to know oneself in one’s essence, i.e., in one’s affiliation with beyng. Recklessness is as little bravery as is fanaticism. But how are there supposed | to be brave ones if a knowledge of the essence is denied or even reviled?

Hölderlin was born in the year 1770, and Lenin in 1870. During Hölderlin’s lucid-creative time of life, the decisive technical discoveries and inventions of modern technology were produced (1774–1806).

Today, i.e., for the coming of that which is coming, what counts is only what stands in an extremity and knows that at issue in the struggle is whether humanity will remain a serf of the devastation or will become, in a differently grounded history, the echo of the voice of the god. All other goals of war constitute a floundering amid mere appearances, ones which then overnight turn into their opposites and thereby betray their nullity. All who build for the future must accomplish this duality: stand amid the gigantic machination of a complete mobilization and at same time harbor a passion for the great silence. Since these | seem mutually exclusive, their unity is what is needed.

The “universities” are now declared to be “vitally important pursuits.” This assessment is unavoidable today but is at the same time an interpretation of the essence of the university equivalent to a death sentence regarding this institution. The defining and supporting power of the “spirit” is withdrawn from the universities. Yet how can something be withdrawn that was never possessed or was so only for moments? Indeed those moments around 1800–1820 are nonrecurrent; and the nonrecurrent should not be compelled into the ordinary. Therefore, this “death sentence” is on the contrary the birth certificate of the modern revision of modernity.

Calculated historiologically—according to incidents and actions—a revolution looks like an essential change—seen historically, revolutions mostly only unite many contingencies and thrust things forward—in the direction an age was already taking and was due to take. Revolutions do not embody any decisions but, instead, wipe out what is undecided in order to further an unneediness for decisions which looks like a decidedness.

Duty—as a binding of oneself to the necessity of a basic attitude for every comportment, duty exists only where freedom is attained. Freedom arises out of the voluntariness [Frei-willigkeit] which casts itself off into an inceptual grounding of the essence of a humanity; this grounding is a knowledge of the abyss. Wherever there still exists an attachment to the community, a recourse to devoutness, a vocation to teaching, or a claim to lawfulness, the respective obligations can very well arise, but never can an originary duty. Kant penetrated this domain; that he nevertheless speaks of a law of reason indicates the age of Enlightenment but also points, as soon as “reason” is conceived essentially enough in metaphysical terms, to a more essential domain he could not enter, because the historicality of reason had to remain concealed to him. Voluntariness, which primarily wants freedom for a ground, is the sign of the inceptuality of a humanity. The absence of voluntariness appears primarily in the incapacity for meditation, i.e., in the withering of the passion for questioning. And if indeed a young generation is overtaken by such desiccation and flees from all thinking, then no “character” or “brawn” will be of any avail.

The stupid obstinacy of sheer violence becomes the instrument of inner destruction.

A new “genre” of “literature” is now proliferating: imitations of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with the help of rigmarole concocted out of Hölderlin, George, and Rilke—well-intentioned but muddled pulp that wants to be a glorification of “life” and of “war” and of everything the great ones have ever named or valued. It is the most insidious form of spiritual devastation, where there is not, and never was, a trace of any simple concerted meditation and where everything totters about amid (supposed) primal sounds and is discoursed upon with grandiloquence and a powerful stride, with an invocation of the gods and a knowledge of everything. And yet it is all a groundless dream deriving from a blind intoxication pretending to be knowledge. And there are still enough oblivious ones who find such a muddle beautiful and “edifying.” Yet it is only the reverse side of the tottering in thoughtlessness and calculation. Even this form of devastation must | founder in its own swamp before there can commence the long meditation which does not attend to itself as an effective preservation of the silence.

Only someone with the courage and knowledge to think over and beyond the next three centuries can today think along here and involve himself in “philosophy.” For how else should metaphysics (which has been bearing Western history for more than two millennia and will bear the first elapsing of that history) be overcome, unless through a detachment from its questioning and unless this detachment leaps far in advance? And how should such detachment be accomplished, unless beyng itself appropriates from afar those who surmise, in order that their generation might break the devastated supremacy of beings and of reality, without juxtaposing some power to this supremacy but solely by grounding in its own ground the silence of tarrying in the disclosive questioning of the essence of truth?

To counter the reproach that the effect of the National Socialistic worldview is the destruction of “culture,” clear evidence is now provided by a newspaper report on the Führer speech of January 30, 1940. In that speech, even “poets and thinkers” are recognized as “workers”: “‘Poets and thinkers, however, do not need as much food as the men who do the heaviest work.’ (Laughter).”5

Nietzsche opposes the “superman” to the “last man” without seeing that the superman is merely the very last “man,” the last of all, i.e., the “consummation” of the subjectivity of the animal rationale: the identification of the “animal” which is the human being. Nietzsche did know of this, but he did not comprehend the metaphysical decision. Sovereignty in the essential sense—which no longer requires power: to be able to show the truth even to someone unfamiliar with it. But this only where an affiliation to beyng: intimacy.

There is a bravery of which recklessness knows as little as does “heroism.”

A basic difficulty impedes the overcoming of the aesthetic-optical interpretation of the Greek projection of beings, since this interpretation has been fixed for centuries and is constantly reinforced and entrenched by the modern, objectifying way of representation. Even if the essence of ἰδέα and εἶδoς is grasped as “outward look” or “self-showing,” a misinterpretation always slips in, to the effect that what is meant is a “picture.” What a “look” and a “view” are, and thus offer, is grasped only as a picture, instead of our grasping that in the outward look a steadfastness (constant presence) manifests itself in the open region. And this self-manifestation is at the same time and essentially a self-retraction into the essential occurrence—and the whole is first of all oὐσία—φύσις [“beingness—nature, self-emergence”]. The coming forth—not merely a sign, but the emergence itself. φύσις is the inceptually concealed “event” that is even further dissembled in the history of the first beginning.

We are grasping the essence of τέχvη and altogether the essence of modern “technology” only on the basis of φύσις, if “to grasp” means here to fathom the essential ground out of which what is “grasped” is overcome because it must be overcome.

The “time” of essential thinking can never be calculated according to what is transpiring publicly and is announcing itself as a need. Yielding to this would mean: often coming too soon and equating the desire for an immediate support with the decisiveness of the questioning that establishes for itself the ground of a foothold only in what is disclosively questioned. Thus there can be times which demand, as their highest point, genuine silence. Whether anyone, and who in particular, grasps this cannot be determined and is also of no significance. The transference of the metaphysics of the will to power into the domain of the petty bourgeoisie leads whither in the actuality of that metaphysics?

The impotence of thinking with respect to what is real seems to be without limit; and yet this that is real is in its reality only the consequence of a released power which for centuries has sent thinking into the field as calculative planning, which is now making straight for its end, and which is permitting all thought to totter back and forth in the now groundless distinction between “theory” and “practice.”

The moment is coming in which humanity will be deprived of the essential power to climb in a true way the height of a metaphysics (e.g., the metaphysics of German Idealism) and to accommodate beings into the open space of that height. Humanity is slipping down (or has already slipped) into the βάθoς [“depth”] of experience and extols “positivism” as the obvious and thus sole truth. And then people proclaim the “collapse” of metaphysics. This “collapse” will then be found in every historiology of philosophy and will be part of the idiom of journalists who are close to the times and close to life. Who has collapsed here? Where has Hegel’s metaphysics ever caved in? Could that be at all? If those who feel content in the swamps and bogs of “biologism” and of facts (and have neither the power nor the desire to climb the mountain of metaphysics) suddenly announce the “fact” that the mountain has caved in and so is no longer there, because they themselves are unable to climb up, then what is to be retained of such a “factual history “? Does it make any sense at all to defend these thoughts against the scorners of metaphysics, i.e., descend to their level, instead of remaining above and only from the heights attempting to overcome metaphysics? Yet such overcoming | finds no consolation in a supposed collapse of that which is to be overcome but, instead, works for metaphysics to develop in its innermost essential power and keeps the confrontation with metaphysics, i.e., the contradicting of it (cf. The history of beyng6), from becoming a mere clever “refutation.”

The knowledgeable one—who thinks the truth of beyng—can experience in this age the admittedly new spectacle of humans proceeding toward total mobilization so they can fight what is in their view the supreme battle: the struggle over the acquisition of the highest, unconditional enslavement to power—(machination). This is called the struggle over “the new face of the earth.”7 All slaves, however, as made abundantly clear by the first thinker of this metaphysics (Nietzsche), require morality, in which they feel confirmed.

The sole recourse for global heroism is the “man in the moon.”⁸ Indeed, this thinking is at home “on the moon”; it itself no longer knows what it thinks and that it thinks. The “moon”—which has merely borrowed all its “light” and can never know it has done so.

Two essentially different kinds of “downgoing” are now not only possible, but necessary: downgoing in the sense of nonconformity with the “time” of the consummation of modernity, a lagging behind on account of a refusal to participate in machination, and, on the other hand, downgoing as disappearance into the concealedness of another beginning. The latter downgoing bears all the traits of the first one and yet is in advance and constantly different—by no means a “heroic” and “tragic” downgoing, but instead only the most silent and simplest one on the basis of the affiliation to being in the midst of the abandonment by being of the beings disporting themselves only in machination, and by no means a downgoing laden with regret and sorrow, but instead one incorporated into a knowledge that cannot fathom its truth, because indeed the abandonment by being is familiar with every question of truth only as a question of power. Despotism is the extreme enslavement to beings.

The romanticism of the bogging down of all the still-persistent remainder of metaphysical thinking is manifest in the growing “Herderism.” Herder’s half-measures, even in relation to Leibniz and Kant, | give the impression of “depth”; people feel their own confusion and their disinclination to decisive meditation confirmed in Herder and therefore attribute “truth” to his presentations. Herder’s presentiments have historical force only if they are encountered by a knowledge which⁹

Far more pernicious than all inadequate proofs and verifications is the attitude that considers proof-claims valid where another sort of questioning and truth is necessary. For such claims signify utter exclusion from the essential domain, whereas the defective proofs merely have gaps which can be filled up. In any case, such proofs never produce or impede any decisions.

It might very well still take a considerable time to recognize that the “organism” and the “organic” present themselves as the mechanistic-technological “triumph” of modernity over the domain of growth, “nature.”

The self-annihilation of humanity does not consist in self-elimination but rather in the breeding of generations | in which the magnificence of humanity is confirmed to them without this delusion being exposed as blindness. The essence of subjectivity goes its own way and rushes into this self-instituting within the unconditional abandonment by being. (Cf. On the essence of φύσις, p. 1010) The posturing in the appropriate self-confirmation is the most intrinsic essential occurrence of subjectivity. Therefore, subjectivity must be radically convulsed—i.e., metaphysics as such must be overcome.

Why can every essential contemplative thinking be flattened down “dialectically” and yet thereby seem to be intensified and sharpened? It is because this sort of destruction must by necessity become more dangerous precisely where a grounding and a beginning hold sway most originarily. In an age that sees all language only as a means of communication and of organization and takes all thinking as “calculating,” the assault of dialectics and of “dialectical” desolation on every sprout and seed is most easily without restraint, indeed rightly so. The essential defenselessness against this destruction, because every defense must already betake itself into the domain of superficiality and must abandon what is most proper; by way of descending, a summit is never attained, let alone retained in the sense of a silent superelevation.

If a humanity is no longer able to question beyng inceptually in its truth and, in questioning, to ground beyng, and is not able to endure the plight of this extreme alienation as what can never be trusted, then the renunciation of “philosophy” has been decided. Out of this renunciation, there first arises by recoil the spurious claim that thinkers are supposed to be the solvers [Löser] of all riddles and thus even the saviors [Erlöser]. But since thinkers are unable to be either, they are obviously superfluous and null. Then it is only a step to feeling not the least restraint in agreeing with the ultimate absurdity of the people who are now coming to be: i.e., in agreeing with the “proclamation” that philosophy is—“chicanery.”

The half-barbarians are worse than “natural” barbarity.

The “future” of the German university resides in the polytechnic institute of the Orient; in other words, to speak of a German university has become meaningless. But such institutes of the Orient will, as industrial communities, | merge into the Sinicism of racial-technological organization and will have neither future nor past.

Often an essential step of thinking is carried out while still couching itself entirely in the form of what has been overcome. Both are necessary: a watchfulness for the past and the alienation of what is entirely other. But both in the unity of the same.

Are space and time mere unresisting mediums in which the things flutter unstably, or is space-time (neither space, nor time, nor their amalgam) the basic clearing in which every truth first receives its solidity?

To be the victor—does not simply mean to emerge from battle as the superior, for thereby the victor can indeed have become the inferior, by subscribing exclusively to the goal and strategy of the enemy and pursuing these to an ever higher degree in the future. To be the victor means to set the authentic and | highest goal for the battle.

In order to think what is unique and self-same (such thinking is the essence of philosophy), a thinker must always pursue his peculiar course, differently than all the others who think the same thing. It is not that there are merely different “formulations” of the same, since to speak here of “formulations” implies that what is to be thought, beyng, is an object lying there merely waiting to be reclothed in a (timely) verbal casing. There are different “formulations” only for thoughtless persons.

Standing furthest removed from the truth of history are the historiologists.

How bygone is already that which is now bandied about in empty space with expressions such as “new order” or “constructive world-picture.” It is bygone, because here only an unconditional supplement to the consummation of modernity is delivered. But the worn-out invocation of the “new epoch” is sufficient to demonstrate that one is thinking merely historiologically, i.e., calculatively, and is making no headway toward a displacement and reconfiguration of power.

Rescuers of “culture” who are frustrated in the expectation of a swift recurrence of the past (their past) and thus seek a hideaway should concomitantly think the essence no less than do those who confirm their obtuseness through their keeping up with the times, inasmuch as they measure “time” in accord with what to them is present, i.e., palpable and useful.

If in a movie theater the “newsreel” set into operation is said to be brought “into engagement” [“zum Einsatz”] what is then the “engagement” of an infantry squad under a barrage? Ignorant people might be annoyed at this trifling with a word. But they do not realize that prior to this usage demanded by the unconditional empowerment of power, both the newsreel and the infantry squad are equally inconsequential, i.e., equally “important.”

Power is in its unconditional gigantism only a dwarf over and against beyng, for power must make itself a slave in the service of the abandonment of beings by being and must help effectuate that for which all its capacities are retained.

Power would renounce its own essence | if it troubled itself about “logic,” i.e., about that representation of things which seeks to hold itself outside the domain of power and to find support in what is ordinary. Admittedly, to avail oneself of this “logic” can become a means of power, e.g., by feeling “deeply” (thus not at all radically) indignant over the aerial bombing of nonmilitary installations. This indignation comes in the same breath used to emphasize that war is total, which precisely means that military and civilian installations (e.g., an office of “food administration”) are equivalent in war and are therefore exposed to the enemy. The indignation over enemy attacks on “civilian” sites is itself, with respect to war, a means of unconditional power. But that the “people” do not understand this “logic” of power and remain stupid is likewise a condition of unconditional power. Anyone surprised by this “stupidity” does not know what is happening, indeed what must happen in the limitless domain of unconditional power.

In the age of an unconditional and automatized economics, a similarly unconditional | commitment to power and to its essence must be carried out in order to gain mastery over this economics. Where a resolute commitment to power no longer knows any limits, gigantic “results” must follow. The mechanicism of commerce extends all the way to the psychic constitution of one who is “engaged,” such that the “inner” becomes as inconsequential as the exterior, with both directed toward the flawless running of the mechanical workings. Likewise, every domain which could provide other standards of judgment has collapsed. The mechanistic result establishes mechanically (“logically,” “inevitably”) the kind of result which must have universal validity. In the age of unconditional makeability, “the specialist” is indispensable everywhere; the narrower his own little corner and the more blind he is to everything else, all the more securely and quickly can he be used and displaced. He can take no action, for action has its origin only where, for purposes of power, the availability of all specialists is calculatively known and ready for use. Yet this mastery over the available specialists cannot accomplish anything unless all misgivings are foreclosed in advance and every moment prepares that volition which assures a relentless empowerment of power. The unconditional service of the | gigantic power machine must have already traversed the complete desolation of everything that could still claim some sort of truth. “Culture” and “spirit,” “morality” and “conduct,” are all merely economic means to the unconditionality of power.

Seen from the viewpoints of the usual Christian, non-Christian, or any other morality, the unrestricted empowerment of unconditional power looks like “demonism.” But the “demonic” can exist only where remnants of the divine strive to be retained, remnants whose possibilities have long since been quenched on account of power. If taken merely “quantitatively” rather than as the unconditionality of the empowerment of power, even the “gigantic” is not a distinguishing mark of power. Where such knowledge has been attained, power is revealed in its unconditional empowerment as the pure abandonment of beings by being, which abandonment has no power over itself and nowhere any knowledge of itself. But this abandonment by being is only the empty place in the history of being, the moment the null and truthless nothingness appears as the all and the highest. The foolish indignation of moral preachers and of Christians attempts in vain to halt this process, transpiring within the history of being, of the unconditional empowerment of makeability with respect to the being | of beings abandoned by being. For “morals” and Christianity themselves, not only their very dilatory adherents, are already fused into this process. Not decisive is whether and how the unrestricted empowerment of power works itself out historiologically in a determinable way and attains validity; for even where this empowerment breaks down, the superior power will merely take over the means and the procedures of the inferior ones and thus will again increase and will slowly follow the operation of power all the way to unconditionality by way of institutions and values.

The most ridiculous of all, however, are those who out of the museum of old notions produce for this process in the history of beyng the image of personalities of genius, ones that alone “make,” “think,” and “plan” all this in the place of the dear Lord or in opposition to him. Our notions of a god or of a devil (demon) or of a demigod do not belong here. The unconditional power creates concurrently its own holders of that power, and their essence is incomparable with that of any previously experienced sorts of humanity, none of which stand yet in the realm of unconditional power. The service toward the essence of power also enables the unchecked and unrestricted | enlistment of all and thus the transformation of each into the character of power. In this way arises a peculiar superiority of the one who is decided in favor of power.

Resting the plow under the overly pale blackthorn tree, taking a simple meal in the noonday sun of early Spring.

No scientist grasps what a thinker is, and the poet does not need to grasp it. To the scientist, philosophy appears as a sheer petitio principii [“question begging”]; he sees in philosophy only a presupposing of that which, in his view, is to be proved. The scientist takes over the proofs which “convince” him. Philosophy is unscientific. And this judgment contains more truth regarding the essence of philosophy than the scientist could ever surmise. At the same time, however, it contains a still more fundamental untruth, in that it measures philosophy up to “science.” All exponents of “scientific worldviews” judge philosophy as do scientists.

The greatest defeat (greatest because authentically historical) consists in a people submitting to the standards and already extant claims of the opponent and adopting his doctrines and principles, even if these are left implicit or are formulated differently. Therein lies the portentous renunciation of an attempt to begin the grounding of what is solely essential.

“Power politics”—English;

“cultural politics”—French;

“authoritarian totalitarianism”—Russian-Italian;

“imperialism”—modern.

We ought not mourn over what is nonrecurrent, but instead must let it constantly come to meet us as something unique.

If the language of a people is externalized into a mere stock of words and everyone “in the end” has daily his own unprecedented “lived experience”…

In the meantime, the Jesuits have normatively dismissed even Hölderlin with a | pseudopious bow to his “linguistic art”; for the time has come; it is noticed that from here decisions could threaten; hence the slogan, “dismissal of Hölderlin,” with a concomitant reference to “Novalis,” who is more acceptable to Christianity and Europe. The Jesuits are concerned only with the opposition of nihilism and Christian cultural pursuits.

The strength to remain ignorant of many things pertains to the basic conditions of contemplative thinking.

At the time “history” becomes the exclusive object of something made, the talk of “happening” is loudest. History is thereby historiology, and historiology technology. Everything becomes univocal for having lost its essential ground out of which an origin could still exist. And in turn: because everything is univocally made and calculated, even the “symbolic” must be made. Indeed everything made in beings is sustained by the machination of beyng.

When the abhorrence to thinking reaches the same level as the incapacity for thinking, then the miscarried professors of medicine and the misfit teachers of elementary school “make up” the “systems” of “worldview.” And this then passes for “philosophy.”

Why does every victory in beings over beings bring with it by necessity a devastation of beyng?

The foolishness (presumably stemming from the circle surrounding George) of thoughtlessly naming Hölderlin together with Nietzsche leads ultimately to Hölderlin being called the “Swabian Nietzsche.” The dreadfulness could not present itself more dreadfully.

The complete devastation of beings as a whole out of the whole (out of the abandonment by being) in the violent imposition of an image of exuberant “health,” the φύσις of the first beginning of the history of beyng and “nature” in the consummation of metaphysics: “A period in which the old masquerade and the moral adornment of the affects provoke aversion: naked nature; in which the power quantities are simply conceded as decisive (as determinative of rank); and in which the great style | again appears, as the consequence of great passion.”11 (Will to Power, no. 1024.) “Nature” has now been taken up into “breeding”; i.e., the forces of nature are consciously stored. The storage and enrichment as the highest presentiment of the future—the unconditional subjectivity. (Cf. Will to Power, p. 398.)

Must we say what is most proper, i.e., what is of the future? Yes. This saying, however, is not already communication and is perhaps never a sharing, because what is to be said (beyng) cannot be brought to cognition but, instead, must appropriate the human being into Dasein. But then it is indeed necessary that the indicational word become perceptible. Indeed. Provided this word has entirely found the truth of its saying, has extricated itself out of the previous way of expression and also out of the “epigrammatic” form, and has made its way to a thinking creature.

Socialism is a passageway, but so is nationalism. The former a passageway to the forceful instituting and making available of everything in all respects and modes; the latter, as the instituting of the attitude of power, a passageway to the unfolding of power into the unconditionality of | mastery over the earth. The time of peoples is over and done; they are already equipping themselves to abandon the folkish [völkisch] as a goal and to relinquish what is populist [volkhaft] as a means of attaining mastery over the earth. The certainty of this possession increases the question-worthiness of humanity all the way to that level on which such a question-worthiness can easily be argued away as a negative and erroneous opinion—up to the moment an unrestricted liberation of beings to every use and reconfiguration announces itself as the abandonment by beyng and all beings begin to tremble in the concealed storm of beyng. Then only arises the moment of decision as to whether the human being can become mature enough for a unique destiny or whether he will dry up in pseudobloom.

Without a backward or forward glance at one’s own endeavors, need to offer oneself ever again to the truth of beyng.

Can the distorted essence of “consciousness” be eliminated if the unconscious, the body, is “consciously” bred? That would merely exaggerate consciousness | into pure calculation and would foreclose the possibility of knowledge—as steadfastness in the truth of beyng.

Serve by running after, being co-present in the carrying out of the institutions of beings.

Serve out of solitude by departing from beings into the grounding of the truth of beyng.

Do not merely surmise and certainly do not say in advance, but speak only when the word of beyng has matured into its inceptuality.

The distorted essence of what is merely gigantic belongs to the essence of “totality”: the essential distorted essence is the “great style,” metaphysically necessary in the extreme consummation of metaphysics, and only within this consummation is something like style possible at all.

Previously (decades ago), the “individuals” (“aesthetes”) invoked Nietzsche’s words against the “despisers of the body,”12 in order to justify metaphysically a capricious and riotous life. Now the same justification in Nietzsche’s metaphysics is sought | by “communities” (where “politics” has presumably been inculcated) in order to gain prestige for their petty-bourgeois notions of the enjoyable and slaveholding life of a “master race” [“Herrenvolk”].

An age that makes it necessary to climb on “the marble cliffs” is still not free for essential questioning; a young generation that finds its “feeling for life” expressed “on the marble cliffs”¹³ is still not mature enough for thinking.

Seldom does a thinker find his way knowingly into that which he knows without conceptualization. And to that appertains what he can know: the essentially occurring truth of beyng.

One should not try to clarify “science” in the modern sense by way of the example of “classical philology” or mathematics, but by way of the research work which, for example, provides the foundations for a contemporary “army commissariat.”

The epoch of the greatest “nearness to life” as the epoch of the complete abandonment by being.

Will to power and stability of time as principles of modern technology. Essential is not the longest possible (although still indeterminate) duration of what is to be built and installed, but instead a specifically brief duration, yet one that is thereby fully exploitable and, above all, for that purpose thoroughly predictable and calculable in its stable duration—not an enduring stability, but a calculatively stable duration which provides the certainty of the highest claim. Correspondingly, everything is directed toward substitution and the provision of substitutes.

The battle against “intellectualism” derives from the volition to make the intellect and its role properly “conscious” and to measure the intellect up against “praxis.” “Intellectualism” is still a deficiency of “intellect,” still not unconditionally “intellectual”; thinking is still not “calculating.” Only when the “instincts” become objects of calculation and breeding, when they not only hold sway but are talked about and inculcated, is intellectualism complete. The embattled “intellectuals” and “liberals” then, entirely without justification, mourn the downfall of “culture”; they are blind to what is happening metaphysically. The metaphysics of the will to power intrinsically demands, | with respect to the controlling of the masses and their reconfiguration into a typology, the relentless organization of a systematic stultification which is accomplished in such a way that the “cultural assets” become accessible to everyone. Why should the “sacks of money” belong only to the oblivious ones who have a “lived experience” of Wagner’s Parsival {sic} and believe they had a “lived experience” of the world? Why should not also “workers” and “farmers” partake in these “lived experiences,” i.e., be included in the process of stultification? They must participate in it. And the insight into this metaphysical and not merely “political” necessity is much more essential and stands higher than any snobbish refinement of an “intellectual” of the previous style. In any case, this refinement comes too late as regards what is happening and what is harboring the genuine decisions. But things have progressed so far that it is already otiose to busy oneself still with the “reaction,” one which is indeed no longer in the “action” but instead displays only its “passivity” and even then only at times and covertly.

I “have” no “philosophy”; instead, I am always merely attempting to think something essential which is named mediately: the history of beyng.

Much must be debated and recorded, just for the sake of what is mediate. For only seldom are a few destined to find immediately their proper domain. Therefore, most speech is only a debate, no echoes ever in it of a word which exists only occasionally.

What is “refinement” (according to the metaphysical concept)? The stamp placed on the attitude and conduct of a human being in virtue of which he remains in the know, beyond beings as a whole, so as thereby to be himself on the basis of this relation to being.

Is the war an essential convulsion of Western humanity? This second world war is no more that than was the first, with which it belongs together. The second world war, however, is bringing about a new order of the “earth,” i.e., a new order of this technological-organized human space. The “order” is new inasmuch as it is bringing the preformed (but always alloyed with something undeveloped) machination of being into unconditional and deliberate institutionalization, into acknowledgment, and up to the level of a principle. Humanity as animal rationale now first becomes unconditional in rationality and animality, and the previous essence is entrenched in what has been consummated. This | is admittedly a unique kind of process, and every intention to see here only deterioration and the mere expansion of what preceded remains arrested in brief and cloudy domains and is not able to act concomitantly and be historical. The new order is the decisive victory of “power” as the essence of being and thus is the onset of the unfolding of this essence into the extreme consummation: machination.

People are already talking even “about” the dispositions and making them objects of “anthropological” discussions. That is the simplest way to elude the disposing of the dispositions, and it drifts ultimately into “anthropology” and obstructs every path that could lead to a presentiment of what was questioned under the title “Being and Time.”

The instruction at “universities,” no matter how decayed it may or may not be, operates like a whirlpool sucking things down into a realm which apparently harbors “knowledge,” whereas it merely entrenches sheer ignorance. Hence the necessity of a constant and basically unprofitable turning back from this realm into what is essential.

The foundering “world” is coming to light through the rushing floods of its wastewaters, which are instituted qua oceans and brought to “immediate intuition.” The “twentieth century” as an Americanized joke book which lacks only that “remnant” of “spirit” whereby it could still poke fun at itself. People pretend to know what is “happening” but do not surmise what is occurring with themselves. Otherwise, they would have to be unsettled by seeing that “the world” is in the American way being transformed into a “warehouse” and that this is what is “German.” But perhaps this is now “German” and “European” and the “style” of one of the “three hemispheres,” of which the “Eurasian” and “Eastasiatic” are distinct only in name from the “fourth” and “first,” the “American” one. Distressed souls speak here of the “Antichrist”; if he came he would remain a harmless lad, over and against what is “happening” and has already found its henchmen.

People now drivel on incessantly about the “situation” (the “ontological condition”) of the human being and in advance | shy away from meditation on being. The oblivion of being on the part of unconditional machination is not greater than that on the part of Christianity and has merely stripped off the mendacity of the double dealing which simultaneously accepts reason and situates it below faith. That the Christian faith and the consummation of metaphysics (a consummation which has become a worldview) fancy themselves the most extreme adversaries is merely evidence of the blindness on both sides. But therefore they can also, according to need, join forces.

Metaphysics.

All things must pass through the complete devastation which is preceded by an annihilation in the most acute form of the apparent preservation of “culture.” Only so is the two-thousand-year-old structure of metaphysics to be convulsed and overthrown. The annihilation and devastation, however, still have the institutional form of metaphysics (“ideas” and “values”).

From national socialism to rational socialism, i.e., to the unconditional calculation and computation of the integration of human domains in themselves and with one another.

This rationality demands the highest spirituality. The essence of the Western spirit as τέχvη.

After the machines for writing, adding, computing, and accounting, the production of a machine for thinking is only a question of “time.” Indeed, thinking has already become computing. And why should not this “thinking” have its machine? More and more is taken from the human being, even thinking (and meditation already long ago). The consequence of this process is that the human being knows less and less what to do with himself—and all the more must he surround himself with gadgets.

Today “poets,” i.e., pen pushers, have meetings as do the shareholders and directors of a corporation. Presumably, even in the former case at issue are only the “shareholders” and their “prosperity.” These “gentlemen” have nothing to do with the much-discussed “mission of the German people.”—One does not become a “Rilke” simply by placing oneself back on the little castle Muzot.14 How fine that in such a corporation Hans Grimm¹⁵ is not to be found.

If contemporary obliviousness as regards what “is” has exceeded the limit of something irresistible, then a person must no longer simply drift along because of the danger of being taken “seriously” by ones who do not at all want to know what “is” but who demand something novel. Yet because everything “new” holds sway so universally, the only expedient for a pen pusher is to elevate curiosity itself into a principle in the extreme form of simulated “adventuresomeness” and to lead the reader around in circles. In this way, “heroic literature” then arises.

It is counterfeiting to say that the behavior of the adventurer would harbor a preparedness for what is coming. Such behavior is the inconsequential (because basically perplexed) craving for some enchantment, no matter which. People flee from boredom at any cost, without questioning, and without the power to question, what boredom is and why it happens.—(It is the companion of machination.)

Slowly the name “Heidegger” will manage to disappear from publicness, and the efforts undersigned by that name will fall into deserved oblivion. It is also scarcely possible, within a time, to know when it is time for this. Perhaps in the year 2327? Or is that also a mistake, one nourished by historiology and its calculations? That may very well be the case.—But beyng is.

University (science).—In this institution, grasped in its full dissolution, two endeavors are “alive.” These are apparently sharply opposed and yet in their own respective ways pursue the same (the obliviousness as regards Essential knowledge).

The one endeavor seeks to rescue the “old” science through the accumulation of erudition and of specialized pursuits and specialized questions (pseudo-“problems” which feed both “polemics” and “specialized literature”).

The other pursues a planning science “directed” entirely toward the most proximate needs.

In each case the meditationlessness is equally great; in each case an equally coarse impediment is stacked up against the other, making questioning impossible.

The antagonism between the two “attitudes” is so ludicrous that it can no longer be called humorous and instead could produce some sort of impetus to become even more startled now—if the two inimical brothers in this way pursue the same thing. That such insight does not occur is clear proof of the level the meditationlessness has reached—; but it is also a sign that here no possibility exists in any respect to improve or even rectify anything. But such would also be superfluous, for within what can be planned and the plans of a total plan, “planning science” is entirely at home. The exponents of this science will fancy themselves justifiably as new-fashioned and “pointing to the future,” will “devise” innumerable “goals,” and will manifest a slavery to ignorance. For their enslavement does not consist in their striving for “political” and “folkish” [“völkisch”] goals, but in their advancing these goals out of ignorance, yet deliberately so, in order to be able to march right past all meditation. Of course, this meditation concerns knowledge, not “science.”

Through the pursuit of the “spiritual tradition,” we now maintain a “fourth humanism”; at once a “fifth,” and in each case the humanism becomes weaker and more problematic. The fourth is attached to the young Nietzsche of the Wagner period and is not yet advanced so far that the genuine Nietzsche rejects Greece in favor of Rome and the will to power, i.e., “technology.” We are still so “spiritual” as to see “technology” always “romantically” as mere “deviltry” and romanticism. Where we place the onset of modernity historiologically is not essential—especially if we falsely impute to this onset thoughts and questions which have already arisen out of an essential overcoming of modernity through an overcoming of Western metaphysics in general.

Simultaneity: the Russian foreign minister Molotov16 comes to Berlin, and the most modern modernity of the Germans becomes visible. Hölderlin’s hymn “of” the holy, “Wie wenn am Feiertage …”¹⁷ is interpreted, and the concealed history covers up its other beginning.

The two Ms: newspapers, which still bore something of the earlier “calendar,” used to recount on this day something of the customs and joys of St. Martin’s day. Now “the press” announces on this day the arrival of Molotov in Berlin.

How constantly the supposed victors over fear are “fearful” about their reputation as “heroes.”

The obligatory compulsion into the service of one’s office (for instruction in philosophical erudition)—and the necessity to speak out of a concealed space-time of thinking.

There are external regions in which at times one must speak outwardly in a sharp and negative way. But the limits of such regions never touch the domain of essential speech.

Solely for the benefit of questioning, renounce the well-rounded configuration which now merely | entrenches the illusion that “truth” can be immediately presented and offered. With the decline of art at the last days of the consummation of metaphysics, “style” also declines. We must, within what is without style, first find our way to the right path. That will happen while at the same time the pursuit of culture increases and against its own knowledge thus allows the essential to be gathered up.

“Hölderlin and Nietzsche” (cf. above, p. 31). By necessity the one is named with the other, because they are separated by an abyss of times. Nietzsche is the name for the consummation of metaphysics. Hölderlin has been standing outside of metaphysics since 1800 and founds something else—to which Nietzsche is never related. Both names denominate fundamentally different decisions. Yet the names are usually taken to mean the same, whereby this sameness remains quite indefinite and may simply involve a relation to the Greeks.

It has thereby been easy to forget that the genuine Nietzsche thinks purely in the Roman way and in his own metaphysics could never grasp the Greek beginning of Western thinking.

The homeland, the birthplace of the upper Danube valley in the Fall (September/October), most beautifully sung by Hölderlin in “The Ister.”—“Beautifully it dwells. The foliage of the pillars burns,/And puts itself in motion.… For that reason Heracles preferred to betake himself/Here to the water’s source and to the yellow shores.”18 This is the land between Gutenstein and Beuron at the base of Wildenstein castle—(cf. Ponderings X, p. 22).

The heart is striving to return here—back to this concealed beginning. And here it is also good that otherwise the land east of the Black Forest watershed breaks away from the clamorous “Alemannia” which, barren in spirit, has become inflated with those who do not belong to it. Now also becoming clear to me is the foreignness of these loud persons incapable of surmising who Hölderlin is and who Hegel and Schelling were but indeed capable of broadcasting their constant noise between the Black Forest and the Vosges into the void (which they believe is fullness). But can meditation turn back again to silent growth?

Palatines, half-Hessians, and quarter-Franconians as “Alemanni”—and the “Alemanni” are swaggering, loud, and sly.

All the innumerable and still disparate foundations offering “cultural prizes” could eventually merge into one “sworn brotherhood” and hold a single competition, which would have to be worded thus: Who today among the Germans speaks the most miserable [miserabelst] “German”?

The question must necessarily, and in accord with the matter asked about, contain a foreign word [“miserabel”], for the German language has no word which could rightly express the depravity of words.

But it will be very difficult for the competitors to find the answer, if one considers that in advance only those will venture to compete who can claim some prospect of winning the prize. Perhaps that is why the question is altogether unanswerable. Moreover, the question itself is still underdetermined, since a concealed discrepancy perhaps prevails over the essence of language and of correct language. The answer would be one thing if language is grasped on the basis of the word and would be something else entirely if language is taken as a means of communication and an apparatus for the enforcing of opinions.

When something becomes extreme, certain ironies show themselves. For example, when one no longer has “culture” and never had “culture,” one organizes “cultural conferences”; when the farmer has become a cog in the foodstuffs industry, then thick books are written about farm life; when science is bereft of all knowledge and has become technology, it then is said to be “close to life”; when art has become impossible in its essence, then arises the festival of German art days.19—That in all this a secure and simple lawfulness holds sway shows how superficially one would be thinking if one simply wanted to place oneself in the role of the indignant citizen (indignant on account of arriving too late) and, in the manner of the emigrants, intoned a dirge about the downfall of “culture.” Here something essential is taking its lawful course, and the small purview of those concerned with refinement does not comprehend what is now to be decided; for the first task is to recognize without cheap deprecation the inevitability of these processes and to see that here for the first time history is made in the great style. Therefore the coincidence of the ironic oppositions also includes this: when an age is consummated into its extreme endings, then the apparent guardians of the past seem | to be correct in their lamentations. In truth, however, they surmise even less than do the unconditional pursuers of what is new.

The truly uncanny circumstance that must arise in the age of the consummation of modernity, i.e., in the age of the exploration, conquest, and mastery of the earth, is the gigantic mediocrity in everything. Thereby everything is protected but is also only used as a means to power. “Culture” (itself already a modern formation) and “barbarity” amount to the same, their difference collapses, the one stands for the other. On this basis, the entire past is correspondingly recalculated, and the “goals” of the “future” are “posited.” Therefore to fear the advent of an age of “barbarity” is childish. That age will never arrive. But just as little will a “culture in itself” blossom. The gigantism of the unconditional mediocrity in everything becomes a genuine bulwark against every decision regarding anything essential and obstructs the way to a presentiment of what is inceptual. Everything that emerges and bestirs itself is also already calculated and arranged. The unconditional, all-knowing, all-calculating, all-computing mediocrity in everything as the measure of what is highest.

Every trace of the unusual (inceptual) has been obliterated. Therefore also a knowledge of the beginning, indeed even only an acquaintance with it or a representation of it, is impossible. All times of emergence and of originary errancy are blocked. The only thing incontestably new in its essence is the unconditional machination that adorns itself now with this, now with that, from the past. (Cf. p. 55.)

The unavoidable misinterpretations surrounding everything essential. Yet even these can still offer help when it is a matter of elucidating the communication within certain limits, without demeaning oneself. The greatest help are the malicious misinterpretations; these are of course rare and different from the simply angry and begrudging ones. Maliciousness requires the crude and far-reaching “perspective” of hate. But hatred is not simply a frustrated love, not simply an indissoluble entanglement in what is hated and a dependence on it, but is instead intrinsically abyssal and cannot at all be grasped “psychologically,” “morally,” or “metaphysically.”

Misinterpretations of such an origin help, because they | indeed indicate something otherwise unfamiliar. Mere praise, however, is always superfluous and an empty presumption.

What will Ernst Jünger now do, since the timeliness of the idea that battles are decided by superior matériel has collapsed in the new war and the “elementary”20 has been revealed as the instituting of mediocrity? Now the fragility of his “thinking” is coming to light, as is the hollowness of all those who used to boast of their “lived experience” and its literary elaboration. Now all that remains is to return to the bosom of the Catholic Church, whether hiddenly or openly and together with his adherents; perhaps existing there are still a few not yet wounded people for his perspicacity.

The highest level of ordering is attained when the order has become an unconditional thwarting of all growth. For that, even growth and heredity must be subjected to planning.

The pure closeness to the essential is not the grasp and possession of it, but is the self-restraint of presentiment. Since it stands in the open domain of the advent of the concealed decisions in beyng, presentiment alone is knowledge.

“Work,” “welfare,” “culture,” and “reason” are the “ideals” of the French Revolution. When these ideals are actualized “without remainder” for the “masses in their millions,” and all restrictions and distinctions fall away, this revolution will be actualized for the first time. That is what is newest of modernity, because it is the first element of modernity and thus its last.

The historical course of the consummation of modernity and of its prolonged duration will be distinguished by a uniform and more and more inconspicuous encasing of all distinctions into the homogeneity of the mediocrity and rationality of all striving and planning. Here belong the rapidly ascending surprises of the extreme and overstrained incidents which just as suddenly expire again in the growing forgetfulness. (Cf. p. 52.)

Mediocrity is not the sovereignty of the masses; | instead, it is groundlessness and lawlessness. Destruction does not stem from the masses, but from the fact that the masses are deprived of a ground, inasmuch as the ground is the relation to beyng. No amount of organizing can provide the masses this ground.

Today the “intellectuals” are merely aiming backward, devising expedient compromises, taking comfort in the past, and giving themselves prestige on the basis of what has already been. Nowhere stirring in them is any presentiment of the inceptual decisions.

Poetry is not a floating off into dreams, but also is never the mere configuration of reality. Appraised essentially, poetry is the projection of being and thus requires in advance a knowledge of beings, ones which must give way to being. The essence of poetry is not “art,” but rather is the enduring of the remoteness proper to beyng.

A people would receive entitlement to so much as this people is. Fine. But who can say what it “is”? Who is able to provide the measure for beyng? Whoever might provide this—would he not first of all need | to be “entitled” to something? But can peoples or individuals ever give themselves the measure for beyng? A people can barricade itself from the measure for beyng, lose the possibility of a measure, and yet believe it can itself determine whether and to what extent it is a “master race” [“Herrenvolk”]. Metaphysically, this belief is grounded solely in the metaphysics of the will to power, and this metaphysics relegates subjectivity unconditionally to the “superman” and purely into a powering. As soon as this metaphysics is accepted without evasions and concealments and “socialism” is simply acknowledged as one means of power among others, then the self-definition as a master race gives itself a “right” in the sense of the “justification” which in advance the master alone has granted as a possible one. Thereby, however, everything of being is abandoned and is calculated in terms of values. No decisions can be made here regarding the affiliation with beyng, because they cannot even be “brought up.”

The political homogeneity of the future opponents first brings to light the hardness of the impending struggle.

The hatred of the Italians for the Greeks and the intention to annihilate them arise from an implicit recognition that ancient Greece, to which we of today have certainly almost no relation, and not ancient Rome, is the ground of Western history, provided history means something other than a mere cavalcade of conquest and pillage. Setting out here is something which aims to justify the groundlessness of the age by depriving it of every possibility of an inceptual recollection. And that signifies an exclusion from the essential decisions in which the essential history oscillates: the commencement of the age of a-historicality. In such an age the first planned incidents are already announced in advance as “historiological” ones. “Historiological” is then equivalent to “important” for the technology of the presently undertaken projects. The “historiological” becomes that which is genuinely calculated. From here, the wretchedness of the zeal of “historiologists” of all sorts is easy to gauge.—

If small persons become arrogant over “refutation,” then they thereby unwittingly | indicate that on which they have become dependent and from which they have learned what is essential, such that they cannot hope to heal themselves from it by any art of hiding from the insightful ones any longer. Where vanity and careerism can be found in every nook and cranny, it is then fitting to be indignant over the vanity and ambition and to praise the superiority of those who let everything count as valid because they are incapable of any decision, evaluate everything from a literary point of view, and season everything to taste. Where then the public and universal lack of any presentiment arises also in everything essential, such bustling ones have found their best hunting ground. The publishing industry is disreputable enough to offer accommodation to all this. We then speak of a flourishing literature.

“Being” at a time when beings race right past beyng.—

Historiology “explains,” “produces” connections, and draws everything together into a single intelligibility. Historical meditation recognizes that everything historical | (each decision regarding the essence of truth) is alien to every other one and that an alienation prevails in the ground of history, because in each case the same happens in the same inceptuality. Historical meditation easily seems to bring what is alien into the compulsion of what is essential to such meditation and so seems to interpret all things precisely in terms of itself. In truth, however, the constantly inceptual incomparability of the same with itself must precisely appear therein as well as the inexhaustibility of the beginning that returns into itself.

The thinking that thinks on the basis of the essence of beyng must not strive to make itself understood; instead, it must turn those who “understand” into questioners and do so by means of the unconstraint of the simple saying of what is said to the point of inaudibility. Here questioning is not doubting and not the mere craving for cognitions, but is rather the beginning of the relation to what is remote and forthcoming. The saying receives its simplicity from what is inceptual.

Technology reaches its apex not in the complete instituting of the machine and the motor, but when “myth” and what is called such are made objects of calculation and the tragic is delivered over to dramaturgical reckoning. In that way the ground of history, the discourse of beyng, is obstructed by historiology everywhere, and tragedy becomes an “object” of planning.

Must we not be blind, in order to have the night constantly right before us? Yet anyone who has never beheld the light has also never seen the night, and how could anyone perceive the light if his eyes are shut to the night? What does it mean that brightness can be dim? There is no bright or dark without the clearing.

To bring under the rubric of the “philosophy of existence” is to provide an opportune mask. For, the complete misinterpretation and the historicizing, which are posited thereby, can become burdensome when seen by day and can provoke an attempt at “rectification.” Accordingly, the mask, bestowed in this way, ever again deserves many thanks.

To name “God” and to speak still in the sense of metaphysics and (religion) and to think not at all of the one who speaks himself, such that nothing might be omitted from this one in the projection [Vorwurf] which must first find the “between” of beyng and be appropriated by it.

What you believe you “have” “before” yourself becomes always something behind you and beyond you—and you yourself are concomitantly projected toward this. (Cf. above, p. a.)

This outweighs everything: to be summoned by the claim of beyng.

Hölderlin—if we take the hymns he did not publish as “literary remains” [“Nachlaß”], then we already misinterpret everything, even if we have not at all started to look into these poems. We take them as something left behind, unfinished; we then believe we know, on the basis of the already familiar poems, what would have become of these “unfinished” ones. In this way we dismiss the genuine task of grasping this supposedly unfinished work precisely as what is genuinely decisive, namely, the other beginning in another law compelling everything to renounce precisely that which is already familiar. The “remains” then are manifest | as what has gone far in advance, what leaves us of today and those to come ever further behind itself.

“Literary remains” is here a misleading rubric that indeed reverses the true temporal relation and prevents us from recognizing in what is supposedly incomplete that which harbors what is coming, from which we remain excluded as long as we fervently, and apparently having made progress, and with an air of regret and superiority, take what thus lies there as an occasion for a false calculation of that which (according to our—quite inadequate—opinion) it should have become. Here, too, the literary-historiological rubrics (i.e., customary opinions) carry on their mischief and impede the preparation for the genuine decisions.—With regard to Nietzsche’s “literary remains,” something analogous, but only analogous, holds—even those “remains” think in advance—but in the sense of a consummation and an end. Here is no beginning of a decision. Even Hegel’s “lecture courses” have still not been brought into the proper context, where the relation to the other works is once again different. Hegel is complete with the “Phenomenology,” i.e., the “System of science,” and is fixed in the unconditionality of Absolute knowledge.

We often escape into the world of fairy tales and child’s play and seek to retrieve this world or to mourn it as bygone. We thus misinterpret everything here excessively through relations to the biological and developmental. We take the more recent and older time as Lost childhood and do not realize that the deficiency is to be sought elsewhere: in the fact that we, as adults, do not find our way to the poetry and the modes of thought appropriate to childhood and outgrowing it. In the course of the flight to childhood, we abandon the necessity of a poetizing and thinking which, like all of this (even the childlike), must not be explained and interpreted according to the stages of life but, instead, is to be grasped as originating out of beyng itself.

It is well known that in every era the “generations” come into confrontation in respectively different ways and experience (and relate to) “time,” i.e., past, future, and present, differently. The “elders” fail to see what knowledge is for “young people” today. But the lack of cognition is already the consequence of an incapacity for “thinking,” | and thinking is odd, because it is not simply a neutral instrument, does require a relation to being, and can be carried out as meditation only in terms of that relation. The incapacity for “thinking” (not a mere lack of schooling in “logic”) derives from a disturbance in the dispositions, a shutting off of disposition from the voice of beyng. But since disposition can never abandon itself, it flees into the brutalization of the heart, and a justification for this brutalization is procured through a reference to the necessity of “jaggedness” and “adamancy.” The brutalization spreads open an inner void, one which must be constantly refilled through the clamor of a stubborn and pompous self-assertion which is only a harbinger of power and chases after the overpowering of power. Hence the craving for a constant surpassing of others, i.e., for a constant slighting and degrading of others (a pressing of oneself up along with a concomitant stepping down while expecting and calculating to be above immediately and be able to press and step more and more and have to bend down—seemingly—ever less). In truth, this brutalizing and hollowing self-magnification falls ever more acutely into the enslavement to something it itself, in accord with | its incapacity for meditation, can never surmise, namely, enslavement to power and to its machination as the essence of being. One feels omnipotent, expert, and superior with regard to all beings and intends to be master over everything, and yet one is merely in service to a way of beyng (the unleashing of the essence of power) which has concealed itself in the semblance of nothingness and holds those who have no power over themselves in a constantly increasing delusion. Even the dominance of this semblance belongs to the machination of power.

How does it happen that in authentic thinking, which (as appropriated by beyng) indeed attempts to ground the truth of beyng in the essence of that truth, the essential steps are often fully prepared and yet are not carried out? Does the reason lie in the essence of human beings, namely, that they can never be transposed into Da-sein and become Da-sein themselves, but that they rather only always and at most perhaps can become importunate with regard to Da-sein and even this only seldom? In the meantime, they are overburdened by their attentiveness to beings and by the previous interpretation of beyng. An | essential step is for us to put into effect the knowledge that philosophy is as old and as historical as the commencement, history, and consummation of metaphysics. There is “philosophy” only since Plato, and it proceeds to its end in Nietzsche’s metaphysics. “Philosophy” is then necessarily replaced by “worldview.” This replacement means that philosophy is consummated in the distorted essence of metaphysics, in which guise the “worldview” has been developing unconditionally since the commencement of the consummation of metaphysics (i.e., since the time of German Idealism).

“Worldview” is thus the legitimate replacement for “philosophy” and is at once the mode and type of the “steering” of “philosophy,” insofar as the latter survives in a scholastic and pedantic way as “metaphysics.” Thereby “philosophy” becomes the “scholasticism” of “worldview”; “scholasticism” in a double sense: 1. by creating the conceptual apparatus for the worldview and 2. by remaining in the attitude of the handmaiden, in that it openly or tacitly submits to the “truth” of the worldview and renounces every leap into inceptual or even originary questioning. This process pertains intrinsically to the consummation of metaphysics and is not at all grasped if one sees in it | only “downfall.” For one is then comparing current “philosophy” only with a state in which it was supposedly “free” and “in bloom,” whereas in truth it merely gadded about goallessly in some sort of historicism (Kantianism, Hegelianism, “philosophy of life,” Cartesianism (phenomenology)).—Metaphysics and its consummation bring philo-sophy to its end. And the beginning of thinking can no longer be a beginning of philo-sophy. On the other hand, this beginning can still for a long time to come make itself unrecognizable and misinterpretable in the form of “philosophy.” Therefore, the apparent sameness is an abyssal difference: the slandering of “philosophy” out of faith in “worldview” and the overcoming of “philosophy” out of the beginning of a more inceptual thinking in the age of the consummation of metaphysics. The essential step out of “philosophy”—while remaining bound to the semblance of a mere modification of previous philosophizing—requires above all a knowledge of the proper appurtenance within the limits stipulated by the truth of beyng. This step must indeed remain the prelude to inceptual discourse.

It is easy, and false, to take my “interpretations” as “historiology”; they are carried out everywhere—especially in the “lecture courses”—with the intention of saying the unsaid. This looks as if the interpretation is a view that is supposed to be attributed to the thinkers. In each case, the interpretation is an overinterpretation, for it goes beyond the limits of what “lies there.” Attached at the same time is the other danger that thereby the “proper” questioning, whose “peculiarity and “novelty” are not the point, might nevertheless lose its singularity and then seem to be carried out still within the thinking of the metaphysicians. Here a sharp distinction must certainly be drawn insofar as the issue is the communication of the futurally necessary thinking out of its proper beginning. It is not in order to rescue an “originality” but, quite to the contrary, in order to experience the inceptuality of the other beginning in the history of beyng, that what is unavoidable, after the history of metaphysics has become more essentially familiar, is opposition to metaphysics. But the appropriate kind of presentation is difficult to find, because there can be no question here of a “refutation” or even of a reckoning up of “mistakes” which are to be “improved” in the future. To devise an “improved” philosophy is an ambition of philosophical pedants.

The perplexed, supposedly “descriptive” drivel over “technology” can find no end. The brothers “Jünger” take this theme as a perpetual occasion to betray ever anew their now already familiar obliviousness of the literatus. And where with Nietzsche’s help the facts of modern technology were once seen more clearly (i.e., in Der Arbeiter21), one no longer dares to go back, because even there only pretexts remain left over. “Technology” is not to be found in “technological things,” but instead essentially occurs as an ultimate and extreme mode of the truth of beingness, namely, the mode of machination.

The puerile endeavors directed to a “German” philosophy do not realize they are merely emulating a “French,” i.e., propagandistic, “nationalistic” way of thinking and are abandoning everything German, namely, meditation and the venture of essentiality. And what if those who in this way bustle about fall into historicism and unearth and calculate the “Germanness” in the previous philosophy? As if these gentlemen somehow knew what is “German.” Or do they first want to find it through this “seeking”? | What is essential to, e.g., “German Idealism” is not that it is “German,” but that something essential was thought there; not that some Germans accomplished this, but that what was accomplished is binding on the essence of the history of being and compels a still more decisive questioning. With that fruitless rummaging about for something German, one can of course easily present oneself as timely and as supposedly close to the people; but we can also uncover in this activity the genuine emptiness and the incapacity for thinking. All of this stands in the slavery through which the abandonment of beings by being incorporates its slaves as the would-be masters.

Timeliness is insubstantiality, even when it gives itself airs as the only possibility left open (for “current” affairs) and claims therefore to be indispensable and therefore necessary and therefore even “free.” What sort of foundry for semblances is behind this idolization of timeliness? And to what extent is the “untimely” only a belated slave of timeliness?

“Growth” in the historical sense is reconciliation to the beginning of the truth of beyng, this reconciliation understood as a rising up out of the beginning. All “growth” having such an essence is an unintentional self-concealment, an originary knowledge of silence.

The “philosophy of existence,” which Jaspers alone grounds and develops, finds its core in the clarification of existence, its keystone in metaphysics, and its guideline in the (scientific) orientation to the world. The “philosophy of existence” is a metaphysics of subjectivity—but over and against Nietzsche and German Idealism it is a return to Kant, though not in all doctrinal components. In the “philosophy of existence,” as in all “metaphysics,” the question of being does not attain the rank of a question; it remains altogether unrecognized and misunderstood, insofar as the question of being means the disclosive questioning of the truth of beyng.

Silence can awaken the false impression that the silent one had something to say.

But silence can also be a seldom-grasped sign that something essential must be kept silent. Then there would indeed be a disclosive silence; certainly, but only within the history of something already spoken.

The most severe (because the most hidden and thus most obdurate) dependence on one’s time befalls the person intent on untimeliness. For him, the constant glancing at the “times” becomes a principle.

The goal of all organization is the unconditional, thorough, fastest possible, always reversible, utterly controllable replacement of each thing by the other and vice versa. Here for the first time the essence of the masses (which does not consist in their incalculable agglomeration), i.e., their massiveness, becomes an unconditional “organ” of unconditional machination. Therefore, “organization” is what is properly “organic.”

“Christian philosophy.”—Whoever uses a presumed concept of “Christian philosophy,” or even only uses the name, is henceforth rid of the burden of proof he otherwise would be saddled with, the burden to show that he has surrendered to thoughtlessness. For he does not form a notion of what is “Christian,” let alone put one into practice, as belief that Christ is the son of God, a belief requiring assent to the Bible as the source of truth. Perhaps he means that Christendom is Christianity and | equates Christendom with support of the intrigues of the political power of the curia of papal Rome. He only half understands the whole of the essence of “Christianity”; in other words, he does not understand it at all. And he takes “philosophy” to be historiological play with general concepts, the pasting together and balancing off of views about the “world” for the satisfaction of intellectual needs. He takes even philosophy only “by half,” as a device for the embellishment of his supposed “faith.” “Christian philosophy” is in this way and in each case the coupling of two “half measures.” And it might be tempting to calculate whether two “half measures” must indeed amount to a whole. But this calculation would go wrong if it failed to see that such a computed whole can only be a whole half, i.e., a complete half, in which the half measures are not eliminated, but are only intensified, so that the whole presents the utter nullity of the notion of a “Christian philosophy.”—To be sure, the impossibility of this concept is seldom recognized in its acuity, because no one ever comes to terms with “Christianity” or “philosophy,” instead of assuming a more innocuous concept of them and thereby believing one is confirmed in the opinion that “factically” such things indeed | “are”—i.e., people constantly proclaim them, people who have a vested interest in them. Indeed many might at first find it difficult to accept that, in essence, a “National Socialistic philosophy” does not in the least differ from “Christian philosophy.” Anyone who thinks clearly regarding politics will therefore also be consistent and reject every “philosophy” within a “worldview”; such a “philosophy” can at most have a purely technical-scholastic meaning.

Anyone who takes to the public streets, for instance by publishing something he has written, unavoidably comes into the view of gapers. But those who gape provide the measure for the way a person is “seen,” in case this can still be called “seeing.” That the gaping is always mistaken is something that must be endured. The attempt to instruct the gapers would be foolish. But then silence will be interpreted once again as it applies to those who are curious: as exasperation or irresoluteness. Who considers the possibility that a word might be necessary only so that there could then be silence?

My relation to Kierkegaard.—I have never expressed myself on this relation, since that would be possible only through a confrontation with Kierkegaard as a “Christian thinker” (a name which is of course to be understood in the modern sense and by no means conflated with “Christian philosophy”). People are now saying: Heidegger has appropriated Kierkegaard but has omitted the Christian belief and—has misused Kierkegaard atheistically. This opinion, set in motion by someone or other, maintains (or, better, assumes without thinking) that the questioning in Being and Time is the same as Kierkegaard’s, with the sole exception that the Christian aspect has been omitted. In truth, the question Being and Time poses altogether for the first time is utterly foreign to every metaphysics and even to Kierkegaard. Why then does the name “Kierkegaard” crop up, and why is his vocabulary appropriated and “existence” thematized “existentielly”?—Because Kierkegaard attempts, within Western (specifically modern) metaphysics, to grasp the selfhood of the human being essentially, on the basis of subjectivity.

Yet Kierkegaard is intent on Christian salvation, and Being and Time on a completely different question, one which is neither Christian nor anti-Christian—but lies altogether outside of Christianity, outside of theology, and outside of metaphysics. | For precisely that reason, however, meditation on human selfhood, meditation compelled by the question of being, becomes the first necessity—admittedly in such a way that already in the approach to this question (out of the question of being and only out of it) all subjectivity is abandoned and the human being is grasped as Da-sein. (Cf. the annotation in Being and Time, p. 235.) “Philosophically,” in the sense of the question of being posed there, more is to be learned from Kierkegaard’s edifying writings, wherein the existentiell, selfhood, rather than Hegelian metaphysics, is brought to knowledge. But Kierkegaard’s selfhood is read more originarily—i.e., existentielly—in Being and Time from the viewpoint of the existential analytic—i.e., the viewpoint of the preparation of the truth of being out of the knowledge of Dasein.

It may hold of Jaspers that he secularizes Kierkegaard, inasmuch as Jaspers—with the assistance of Kantian systematics—does in fact appropriate the basic attitude of Kierkegaard (cf. the threefold articulation: world-orientation, clarification of existence, and metaphysics) and therefore affirms transcendence theologically—but does not carry it out in terms of Christian faith. Nothing of all this can be found in Being and Time, a book which is then branded as “atheistic”—without asking whether, with the more originary question of being, metaphysics as a whole and thus all of theology do not lie completely outside the domain | of essential decision. Is it in fact so?

A certain Bollnow, a prolific writer who even counts himself one of my “disciples” and must therefore know “it,” is now publishing a work on the essence of the dispositions.22 It is possible to write, and have opinions, about everything; why not also “about” the dispositions? Perhaps “psychiatrists” and other people can make use of it. And they should have abundant use of it.

Yet—what has this to do with Being and Time, what has this ink slinging to do with philosophy, i.e., with what is to be decided at this concealed moment of world history? Nothing at all.

But Bollnow intends this. Indeed—he “explodes” and “convulses” the approach and the philosophy of Being and Time, whereby he merely “supplements,” brings overlooked “aspects” to cognition, and attenuates the deficiencies. And how does the philistine deal with this ambiguous convulsing and “exploding”? He takes it as settled that Being and Time is a “philosophical anthropology.”²³ He detects, in a way illuminating for everyone, crude deficiencies and mistakes in this vain formation; thereby the matter is settled. The philistine seems not to know, or does not want to know, anything of the fact that Being and Time is asking something completely different and that it even (which would be the minimum that | could be noticed) explicitly (cf. Being and Time §IV and Kantbook §§36–3824) repudiates all anthropology. Nevertheless, the philistine has the incontestable advantage, within the discipleship and then more generally, of having brought the crudest misinterpretation of Being and Time once again expressly on its way. Let his “elevated” and “happy” dispositions be allowed him. Perhaps, but only slightly perhaps, one day a very depressed disposition will overtake him regarding his “happy dispositions.”—

Phenomena such as this ink slinging, which indeed have become the rule, are all rooted in the long-since-decided detachment of contemporary opinions from all essential thinking. People take refuge in a philosophical activity which the older generation has frequently enough demonstrated to the “rising” one. Previously, this author, in his discussion (D.L.Z.²⁵) of my treatise “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” accomplished something better. But the things said there are supposed to have been the thoughts of someone else.

One should not be so loud in one’s indignation over the psychoanalysis practiced by a Jew, “Freud,” if and as long as one cannot in general “think” about each and every thing otherwise | than by “reducing” it, as an “expression” of “life,” to the “instincts” or to the “atrophy of instincts.” Such indignant “thinking,” which in advance altogether excludes “being,” is pure nihilism.

In order not to understand something, actually not understand it, we must indeed already have grasped some things truly. (Cf. p. 82.)

To interpret oneself is to descend below one’s level. This statement holds, provided “interpretation” is conceived as the standard for the lowest level of understanding. Then “to interpret” means to make oneself comprehensible to those who lack understanding and who adhere blindly and obstinately to their “views,” ones that have befallen them out of the blue. To make oneself “comprehensible” to these who lack understanding means in fact to renounce essential knowledge. But is this way to make oneself understood indeed the essence of interpretation and self-interpretation? Interpretation is projection upon something still concealed, something that determines. Self-interpretation in the genuine sense means precisely to go out beyond one’s level and to overcome oneself. But the only one who can interpret himself is one whose discourse harbors something essential, such that out of the latter arises the necessity | of a surpassing projection. The self-interpretation, however, is not any sort of self-mirroring or self-preoccupation. It is in truth a transposition into that which determines, to which we merely appertain.

Renouncing this self-interpretation then means preserving one’s “level.” But one who simply maintains a level, instead of constantly elevating it, has already begun to subside, along with his level; and for that he no longer needs others, to whom he makes himself comprehensible or distances himself.

Ernst Jünger, the origin of the quoted statement,26 has, to be sure, provided a “self-interpretation” in the bad sense in Marmorklippen; there he descended below the level of Der Arbeiter and did not attain, let alone surpass, the metaphysical decisions of Der Arbeiter, ones he himself indeed did not grasp or explicitly pose. Yet he has made himself “comprehensible” in this regard to the half-Christians and to the supposed champions of a bygone “refinement.”

What is happening when an era is catapulted into an excess of calculability and into the computation of everything and even takes this excess of reflectedness | “into account” in its calculation and reckons the most overly strained “reflectedness” as “instinct,” i.e., as the non-“intellectual” holding sway of originary stirrings and safeguards “of life”?

Lack of comprehension and incomprehension—

Questioning and incomprehension.

Lack of comprehension is lack of understanding as the incapacity for essential thinking. Such incapacity is both an inability and an unwillingness.

Questioning is an incomprehension deriving from the passion for a knowledge that surmises and that may endure in a relation to what is essential even if it must tarry in errancy.

Thus one incomprehension is not the same as another. (Cf. p. 80.)

Every configuration of a “text” must be based on an interpretation. Yet interpretation indeed presupposes an already established text; certainly—but not in such a way that interpretation is based on the text. Instead, the text is at once already brought into an interpretedness and an interpretability and kept mobile in this open domain.

We who have come afterward must—assessed from the little we have at our disposal—constantly delve very deeply into the work of the few unique ones, so that the simplicity of that work might become clear. And if we do grasp this simplicity, then we can indeed easily and readily renounce much that is interpreted into it. And we may then further cross out (cf. p. 86) the interpretations and let them be as one-sided.

Only aberrant eras (which assess the truth of something true exclusively by the number of people who agree that it is true) can believe that a word is not a word, just because there is no one strong enough to hear its voice.

“Hymns”—“one” includes among them the thoughtless noisy bombast rolling on and on unimpeded within the long-since-decided devaluation of words, feigning a disposition, and producing empty befuddlement.

The nonpublic is not the “private,” but is rather the domain of a decision for steadfastness in the truth of beyng.

The currently much-lamented “disappearance of refinement” is not dangerous. But what is dangerous, indeed has already gone beyond mere menace, is the process of that destruction which bursts forth from the absence of all discipline in regard to the “spiritual.” The presentiment that in thinking and speaking the highest rigor remains the first requirement—this presentiment has already been lost. No amount of “cultural accomplishment” can awaken this “discipline” but can only extinguish the last embers of the knowledge of it.

The “farmer,” who once walked the fields, and the worker in the foodstuffs industry, who today is well supplied with radios and movies and has to do with “tractors” and “motorcycles.” To struggle against “urbanization” is absurd, if the countryside is already more “citified” than is the city.

When the tastelessness and repugnance of public “tokens of honor” are no longer descried, then the interpretation of reality according to effectivity has won the upper hand. A human being is then only that which | he accomplishes. This holds indeed primarily and only of the machine. Nevertheless, the human being also accomplishes in such inflation only that which he is. And he is insofar as he appertains to being. And being? (Cf. p. 86.)

“Hölderlin and Weinheber.”27—the “poet” Weinheber²⁸ is left with all due respect; but this conjunction is exactly as tasteless and oblivious as the one of “Kant and Heidegger.” This remark is not supposed to support the equation of “Weinheber” and “Heidegger,” since we would do well, even in other cases, to leave the bandying about of “names” to the newspapers.

Where and when language has been entirely abandoned to utility and words have lost all their weight in “idle talk,” there the unrestricted consumption of words appears as the “natural” relation to language. All speech based on the experience of the essence of what is to be said, every lawfulness and strictness, every rarity and dignity of the word, must necessarily be branded as “artificial” on the universal background of “natural” speaking and writing which go on and on.

Under the “regime” of the devastation of language, all building counts as “unnatural” and “inorganic.” Moreover, what opens up here is a glimpse into the consistency suitable in a higher degree to everything malicious.

The excess of interpreting-into is, in the domain of essential interpretation, never an excess, because we always fall short of the fullness of simplicity. (Cf. p. 83.)

If the human being accomplishes only what he “is” and yet brings about great accomplishments, “is” he then not great? Certainly—measured against the greatness of what can be accomplished, but not in relation to the eminence of being. The great accomplishments could precisely become a proof of the smallness of being. Perhaps humans must be very small and entirely alien from their essence (the preservation of the truth of beyng) in order to carry out “enormous accomplishments” and take from them the basic measure for everything: namely, “unprecedented magnitude.”

Truthless times seem to feel the “halest.” That is admittedly a viewpoint of swine, but indeed still a “viewpoint,” if the human races submit to it.

All nonoriginary, i.e., metaphysical, questioning, thinking, calculating, teaching, and “believing” require by necessity a “history” (a past) reinterpreted according to the respective measures in each case. This reinterpretation thrusts aside the beginning, makes it ineffective, and robs it of the possibility to summon decisions. All historiology, which carries out such a rewriting of “history,” is driven on by anxiety in the face of the inceptual, and this drivenness gives rise to the experience and interpretation of itself as a genuine advancement. “Progress” in all its possible disguises is the “idol” with which the unfamiliar anxiety in the face of the beginning is completely covered over, whereby the obstructed beginning is replaced by proposed goals.

If something is “almost revolutionary,” it may count as unconditionally innocuous.

In the future, what is incomprehensible must be ventured; every concession to understandability is already destruction.

Happily there are still other Germans besides Herder, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, the cooks in a steaming peoples’ kitchen.

If the noise of a “heroic” inebriation becomes the measure of decisiveness, then everything essential appears in its simplicity as the “banal” and becomes rejected before it is even considered.

If what is coming can never be seen with the former eyes, then could what is coming ever be seen? And if not, then how could a being ever strive to present beyng? Therefore, what counts is not primarily the endeavor not to boast about beings; on the contrary, only one thing is necessary: to become of another gaze, of unseeing “eyes,” to think essentially and renounce “proofs.” This renunciation, however, starts the first fulfillment of riches.

The time is coming when only seldom will anyone be allowed to know of the beginning of Western history in Greek thought, the beginning from which an essence of truth was decided. Therefore, instead of lamenting the regression in “humanistic refinement,” we must welcome the covering over of the Greek world to everyday discourse.

We need to acknowledge that a chasm separates the inceptual Greek world from the Roman world and that both cultivated something like a “humanism” only in their last hours and in basically different ways. What was essential in each case, at the high points of their history, was the decision in favor of beings as a whole and this again in different ways.

“Situation analysis”—posing as “philosophy”—and the literary “critique of the age” are extreme cases of a fall into timeliness. But this fall is endowed with the semblance that through this hidden enslavement to contemporary currents a “breakthrough” (it does not get more facile) to “being” would be carried out. The adepts, high born from the contemporaneous literati of the stock of Ernst Jünger, then carry out “spiritual” confusions by taking care that nothing eludes the talking and writing, under the constant assurance that one naturally, as the “theologian of adventure,”29 knows everything and is at home only in the nearness of being, qua the appointed custodian of being.

One then of course no longer has need of “superlatives,” because they have been made the rule out of the abundance of exaggerations, and the immense number of amassed thefts has been forgotten, while for the initiates these thefts still stare out of every statement. Why should a person, laden with so much stuff he has read up on, not play the magnanimous and well-intentioned individual who merely disseminates what indeed never belonged to him? Even a “metaphysics” is now discovered in Jünger, very belatedly, I should say. For this metaphysics, i.e., the one of Nietzsche’s will to power, already existed before there was a “war of superior matériel” in which Ernst Jünger merely “experienced” what he already knew from Nietzsche. If the man of letters lionizes the man of letters, then we need no more proof that the proclaimed nearness to being—is a fraud.

What essentially underlies the bestowing of a gift is not the giving away, but is the immunity to the decisive ingratitude which accepts the gift for the sake of renouncing it.

The English have for the past three centuries abandoned every essential beginning. What they no longer have the Germans will still not have in the coming centuries. Out of this intermediate void arises the war, which is not an essential struggle, because it is conducted around the nothingness of what is null. This war originates out of an abandonment by being of the now-ending modern humanity. No goal given to this humanity reaches what is essential. But the Americans take this state of nullity as the promise for their future, since they indeed nullify everything in the semblance of universal “happiness.” Americanism is the pinnacle of nihilism.

If one already calls thinking “abstract,” in distinction to intuition, from which it has removed everything sensuously intuitable, then one should also know that there is a phantasy of concepts which surpasses even the poetic imagination of poets.

Expansion, diffusion,30 and (in their wake) generalization are the unconquerable enemies of what is essential and of what is essentially “great.”

Around the year 2300 at the earliest, there may again be history. Then Americanism will have exhausted itself, fed up with its own vacuousness. Until that time, humans will make still unimaginable progress into nothingness, without recognizing, i.e., overcoming, this space of their rushing about. The recollection of what has been and of what essentially occurs in concealment will be more and more muddy and confused, i.e., superficially “reduced” to a few evident propositions and opinions. The “historiological balcony” is becoming the “symbol” of the complete a-historicality. A certain pseudoriches thereby enters into the history of the protracted expiration of modernity, such that in this end state of civilized barbarity the ones battle for civilization and the others for barbarity—with the same craving for calculation. Thus a wasteland corresponding to the emptiness will be reached, and this wasteland entirely spreads round about itself the semblance of a factually unprecedented fullness.

The purely gratuitous experience which is given concomitantly to the thinker himself, although he may have nothing for himself, is the recognition that, in his saying, the unsaid becomes manifest and through concealed relations permeates everything he says. This experience is the assignment to an affiliation with beyng.

German blood will be let in vain unless the spiritual decision of Western history is ventured out of the concealed spirit of the West for the sake of the preserved spirit of Europe and is attained by struggle in long meditation.

A teaching staff that avoids the exertion of true thinking and of long meditation must not wonder if “illustrated sheets,” “films,” and mere charts and graphs become the privileged means of instruction and the devastation of the spirit is taken for the spirit itself.

“Culture”: every gaze at “culture,” every pondering of the now evident cultural-“political” essence of “culture,” easily falls into the | danger of misinterpretation by a critique which prematurely determines that “culture” is supposed to be “activity” and attributes to the production of an “ensemble” that which is supposed to arise freely and decisively out of mature origins. The danger looms that “culture” would be interpreted as a mere facade of political-mechanical technology. We have now been definitively exempted from this danger. The self-interpretation of “culture” has removed all uncertainty. The Reich Leader [Reichsleiter] Baldur von Schirach has now, in a “programmatic speech” in Vienna, designated himself the “activity guide for the Viennese cultural ensemble.”31

The real question, “Where do we stand?” which is to be asked concomitantly with the question, “Who are we?,” does not serve a “situation analysis,” as if the task were to determine a position on an already calculated course—the real question concerns the emergence of space-time itself out of the inceptual experience of the truth of beyng.

Nothing is done by merely lamenting contemporary (in part, ineluctable) phenomena in the alteration of schooling and of “refinement”—by way of a comparison of the present time with | “earlier” ones. To be sure, nothing except that the “spirit” is now made subservient to the most proximate goals and to blind activity. But the struggle is not about that and not about “culture.”

The fable that Nietzsche rediscovered “pre-Platonic philosophy” will one day come to light as a fable; for Nietzsche has indeed bequeathed the most superficial interpretation of these thinkers, i.e., of what they thought, due to his very great obliviousness regarding what is reserved for essential thinking as that which is to be thought.*

* Nietzsche is the last thinker to have sacrificed himself in favor of “Platonism”; for through the inversion of Platonism he completely enveloped himself in it and allowed the overturned and the inverting to run out ultimately into the indifferentiation of the sheer powering of power.

Not everyone who “thinks,” i.e., represents conceptually, and by no means everyone who “occupies” himself with “thinkers” (who say what is essential and rare of being) is a thinker.

In the age of unconditional “wars,” the last remnant of a knowledge of the essence of struggle wastes away: namely, the fact that struggle, as a confrontation, does not annihilate the opponent but instead rescues him to a higher possibility of his essence, so that the one involved in the struggle creates for himself in this way the possibility of an essential surpassing of his own essence and thus effectuates a preparedness for the truth of beyng.

The attempts to learn and to imitate the act of interpretation do already from the start fall into the error of believing that there would be a schema for interpretation. In truth, the essential step of any interpretation is the recognition that everything to be interpreted demands in advance its own respective interpretation and places to the side all ulterior designs and their techniques. Kant must be interpreted “differently” than Plato, and the latter differently than Heraclitus—for the projection casts even the interpreter into the respectively self-opening region of a unique discourse. All “historiology,” qua science, entrusts itself to “techniques” and thereby finds no restriction, since “something” “emerges” in every case.

The worst of all deviltries is “collegial propriety.”

The triad of “ideals”—faith, obedience, struggle—characterizes the basic constitution of the Jesuit order. Those three requirements are of course anchored in a previously secured reality, since they are ad maiorem dei gloriam [“to the greater glory of God”].

Henceforth, what counts is “faith pure and simple,” “obedience pure and simple,” “struggle pure and simple.” These then seem to be higher. But in truth they are belief in belief, obedience over and against obedience, struggle for struggle. This unconditionality reaches into the void of nugatory nothingness: unconditional perplexity as principle of education. Can an “empire” be grounded on that?

Kant remarks at one point that for everything “new,” something “old” can be found, whereby the “new” is then deprived of originality.32—In this regard it can be asked whether now also for everything old something new can be found and how the old is constituted with respect to the oldest, the inceptual, over against which (since it remains outside the computation of “old” and “new”) the new and newest can be of no avail. We can never juxtapose to the inceptual | something subsequent, unless we renounce surmising anything of the inceptual.

A person can never redress a great harm, when an essential issue is to be decided, by offering his people something “folksy” [“volkstümlich”]. For such is determined according to the findings of those who make noise and are inessential and who can never know that wherein the decisions develop.

Barbarity does not mean that a people is “primitive” and “uncultured”; instead, it means that the common herd is “refined” or, as a district party whip [Gaudozentenführer] put it, “tanks up on refinement” [“Bildung tankt”] and thereby remains the common herd.

You oblivious ones!

The petty-bourgeois mentality does not require the petty bourgeoisie; it is extant also where there are only workers and soldiers. And not everyone wrapped in a military uniform thereby proves he has overcome philistinism. Perhaps he merely introduces a new form of it.

Appropriate translation of the foreign word “culture” [“Kultur”]: pursuit of amusement [Vergnügungsbetrieb].

Appropriate translation of the foreign word “propaganda” [“Propaganda”]: the art of telling lies [Lügenkunst].

The importance of fostering Germanness would make it necessary to Germanize many foreign words. Nevertheless, people are opposed to an overly extensive desire for translations. There must be motives for that opposition. Why do the terms “culture” and “propaganda” manage better? Why is it more effective to express spiritual [geistig] meditation (or even only the volition toward it) with the word “intellectualism” [“Intellektualism”]?

The apparent arbitrariness of linguistic usage does in fact stand under the concealed law of the word and of the distorted word [Unwort].

In the incidents that follow one upon the other and that monopolize all “interest,” nothing can be decided any longer, for everything is already decided. The incidents are merely the late consequences of this decision.

The appalling immaturity of today’s youth | can hardly guarantee the intrinsic durability of a German empire.

Greatness is what can establish freedom round about itself and for that reason compels us to experience and establish the liberation to freedom as what is necessary.

The illusion of history.—What is happening when “sensations” are made the greatest “sensation” and this pretense is pursued as what is properly “sensational”? What is happening when the human being is driven from one sensation to the next and is supposed to be of the opinion that this (viz., other people proclaiming something as a sensation) is what is real? Then historiology has gained mastery over history. For “historiology,” qua “science,” can count only as the philistine form of the pursuit of sensations and is indeed only incrementally distinct from the production of something sensational.

“Epistemology”—is a kind of “philosophy” stemming from further West, from French-English thought. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is in no way “epistemology,” for reason is regarded as “practical” | and the supersensible maintains its priority in the doctrine of the postulates. The essence of the “epistemological” interpretation of the being of beings consists in taking beings as objects, i.e., taking being as objectivity, i.e., representedness. Accordingly, there are no beings in themselves; representedness belongs intrinsically to the object, and the mode of lived experience belongs intrinsically to the occurrences experienced. This foreign thinking appears most saliently in negative examples: consider a scandal of the greatest “proportions.” As long as the scandal is taken only “in itself,” it would still not at all be grasped in its being, for to be an object (i.e., the way of representation) pertains intrinsically to the scandal. If it were now possible to extract the scandal of the greatest “proportions” completely (i.e., “without remainder”) out of publicness, so that the scandal were “not” represented publicly, then the “proportions” would first attain gigantism. Such an objectivity, apparently effectuated through nonobjectivity, could be reached only if the foreign thinking had been allowed to become unconditional. Then would arise, seen metaphysically, the possibility of a scandal of utterly unsurpassable “proportions.” Kant speaks | of a “scandal to philosophy.”33

The dreadful historicism circulating throughout the “sciences.” It is most extravagantly pursued by the historiologists of art, with their “nineteenth,” “sixteenth,” “twelfth” centuries, and so on and also with their unrestricted search for style—the fact that this pursuit is now underpinned racially and communally-regionally [volklich-landschaftlich] and is “concretized” does not change anything about the attitude. Decisions are made here not about “art,” but at most about artistic styles and movements.

The astonishment at those who are disillusioned.—One expects philosophy to “hold together” all the scientific disciplines, but one finds that such a philosophy “no longer” “exists”; hence, disillusionment. And one expects philosophy to put a rule in our hands and a firmness in our hearts for the practice of active life, and one finds that philosophy does not do so; hence, disillusionment. The conclusion drawn from the disillusionment in each case is that there is nothing to “philosophy.” The disillusionment always arises from expectations which indeed persist but of which it cannot be determined whether they can be the measure for the demands | placed on the essence of philosophy. Perhaps these demands are taken only from something extrinsic. Perhaps we may be astonished at this way of judging. Perhaps the astonishment can indicate that philosophy (or what takes up the peculiar essential task of philosophy) is not at all to be appraised according to the “claims” placed on it but, quite to the contrary, that the decision about “claims” must first be made according to what philosophy thinks (as being). The difficulty of this reversal of questioning perhaps harbors the impediment rendering “philosophy” inaccessible. What threatens to make “philosophy” something alien is not the “abstractness” of philosophical thinking but, rather, is the deep-seated perversity of everyday opinion.

The essential thinking of beyng, the thinking which in the future will be “philosophy,” does not need to proceed as an intricate and conspicuous “breakthrough” to something, as a kind of establishment—; this thinking is the stillness of the perception of that which the steadfastness in Da-sein has already recognized. And thus ordinary opinion again faces an impediment, one erected through the inconspicuousness of thinking, whereas we always only and more and more expect what is enterprising and “large scale” and let that which is “important” be conveyed solely thereby.

The human being always recognizes only what is already familiar. But out of which recognition does the familiar first come to him?

The essential thinker does not “effectuate” anything. He merely grounds, and whether the ground will be taken over and come to bear something is not in his power or even in his intention.

The adulteration of language: yesterday the radio declared, over and against American propaganda, that South America considers itself its “own hemisphere.” For that reason, we already have a “radio science.”34

If Catholic literati today write about “Ignatius of Loyola,” then that is the purest involuntary self-ridicule imaginable. These gentlemen do not notice (or, to be more precise, merely act as if they did not notice) how little separates them from the ostensible despotism of an authoritarian state. The only difference is that the supposedly Catholic-Christian Jesuits erect still another screen before the will to power—namely, the ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

The basic question regarding the essence of history will remain unasked as long as meditation does not consider whether madness does not pertain to the carrying out of history. Of course, madness should not be taken as the “psychiatrist” understands it. In general, the question is where the domains for the basic experience of madness [Wahnsinn, “illusory meaning”] lie—outlook on the essence of “meaning”: the question of the “meaning” of “being.” “Meaning” is taken nowadays as the content of “propositions.” Thus the “proposition” and “meaning” would have to be thought through first of all.

History essentially occurs when the unique solitary ones, as those who ground the essence of truth in the highest reciprocal acknowledgment, pass one another by.

To what extent can the foreign words be expurgated from the following “proposition”:

To an “unprecedented” “extent,” the “deployment” is “ultimately” becoming “without remainder” the “lived experience” of the “guarantor” of “European” “culture” and is “this | all the more as” “Bolshevism” will one day demonstrate its intrinsic unsuitability by the fact that it is incapable of actualizing Bolshevism, since the “crusade” against Bolshevism is merely deferred, on the basis of “political affliction,” but not sublated. The actualization of nihilism is a metaphysical mission. [In einem “bisher nie dagewesenen” “Ausmaß” wird “letzten Endes” der “Einsatz” “restlos” zum “Erlebnis” des “Garanten” der “europäischen” “Kultur,” “dies umso mehr, als” der “Bolschewismus” eines Tages seine innere Unfähigkeit dadurch beweisen wird, daß er nicht imstande ist, den Bolschewismus zu verwirklichen, denn der “Kreuzzug” gegen den Bolschewismus ist nur aufgeschoben, aufgrund “politischer Bedrängnis,” aber nicht aufgehoben. Die Verwirklichung des Nihilismus ist eine metaphysische Sendung.]

An age in which adolescent doctoral candidates, students of miscarried philosophy professors, are allowed to attack writers of history such as Ranke and Jakob Burckhardt and to do so with “arguments” (not with “accomplishments”) they have garnered out of a half-understood Nietzsche—such an age can spare itself the “apologetics” through which it would be proclaimed the redeemer of “European” “culture.”

What difference is there between the following processes: Barmat and Kutisker35 making a good profit for themselves out of the postwar democracy and, on the other hand, elementary school teachers, with the help of the National Socialistic worldview, becoming “philosophers,” about whom a serious person never bothers? There is no difference; for in the latter case the historical essence of National Socialism is grasped just as little as is, in the former case, the historical essence of parliamentary democracy.

Every age, if it is honest, finds the wily and the obtuse, ones who knowingly and at the same time also unknowingly attend to the most sinister business of the age. That is then called “partaking in the spirit of the times.” To what extent does Jünger’s interpretation of the “present” have to adhere to superficialities? At a time of the destruction of the German language “to an unprecedented extent,” the German Academy is awarding a prize to a “work” on the “variation of mouth positions in the pronunciation of German vowels.” What tasks could still be left for the “human sciences”?

The highest—not yet attained—task, the development of meditation on history.

Why do the Anglo-American “world” and “Bolshevism” belong most intrinsically together, despite the apparent opposition between capitalism and anticapitalism? Because both are in essence the same—the unconditional development of subjectivity into sheer rationality. In the former case, what corresponds to this rationality is, in repercussion, “sentimentality”; in Bolshevism, it is Asiatic dullness.

The moment, essentially occurring far in advance, of the decision in favor of the essence of history—is allotted to the Germans—but on the basis of a claim of being on them. Therefore, the decision cannot be reckoned historiologically out of what is present.

Thinking must not submit to such a claim. But it must also never disparage the claim and brand it something base; instead, the claim must remain standing in its rights and must be recognized as something necessary and hence ineradicable. Therefore, the dialogue with this claim is of a peculiar sort: apparently without prospect and yet essential.

The stopping everywhere now of the disgusting review magazines has the benefit of allowing a decision as to whether a person who would still | like to say something does truly know what he wants to say. It could very well be that no one desires to hear any longer, and then the word will be reassigned whence it arose as something genuine, namely, to silence. The pure separation of abilities is good wherever a beginning is prepared.

At times, however, [the word] must have departed into the most everyday everydayness, in order to place intimations within what is most perverse; but never so as to distort it and certainly not for the sake of refutation.

Now a “Europe of reason” is supposed to arrive. We recall having heard the same pronouncements many decades ago from the accursed “lands further West.” And who then are the rational ones there, claiming to know what reason is? Can reason know what it is? Or is not rather its most intrinsic error the fact that it mistakes its distorted essence and in the fabrications of its errancy understands itself less and less?

A plea to those who attend the “lecture courses”—such students may indeed name their “sources” if they utilize in a “literary” way that which they hear; not so that the name of the lecturer might be known, but so one might not attribute to him as his “doctrine” something half understood. If the students are in a hurry to purvey what they have half understood as their own discoveries, then this cannot be a motive to imitate the haste and surrender to a bad timing simply on account of the endangering of a claim to priority and so as to maintain this claim and forestall that which must have its own time. But the stated plea to the students is hardly to be fulfilled by them, since indeed the mark of literary schemers is that they cannot distinguish between what is their own and what they have appropriated, for to make such a distinction they would first have to possess something which actually is their own. The lack of that is supposed to be covered over by the too-hasty promulgation of unverifiable “discoveries”; therefore, even all the hustle and bustle of careerism may be left to itself.

How few today still truly know, from genuinely doing it or from the even more genuine renunciation of it, that “writing” is the most richly mysterious, and thus the most rigorous, handcraft.

It makes no matter whether the Bolsheviks kill one single person, without due process and trial, simply because he is of other convictions, or kill hundreds of thousands. Our age, accustomed to the quantitative, believes that here a hundred thousand is “more” than one, whereas a single individual is already too much to be encompassed by a number. So that we do not confuse the German attitude, we must not, even here, become addicted to numbers.

Otherwise we might face the danger of believing that the execution of a few is not so bad as the execution of many thousands and that “gangsterism” [“Untermenschentum”] would commence only after a sufficiently great number of killings.

How good it is that one can seldom know what must be ventured if thinking has become necessary. Yet what is ventured does not concern the content of a view which perhaps is distinct from other views and even from all others. That remains extrinsic. What is ventured arises from the fact that thinking itself shrinks back from that which is most proper to it, from that which it is underway to think. And again, this is so not because there is nowhere available the support of any confirmation or immediate agreement, but because what is to be thought itself, beyng, surrounds itself in the strangeness of things that are simple and are overly close and lets a transformation of the human essence remain impending.

On the essence of metaphysics: “world-imperialism” can be called such, because it is synchronically, with unessential differences in the external “political” form, coming to light everywhere in the “world,” i.e., everywhere on earth. But its name also signifies that the domain of its diffuse emergence is also the object of its | volition. Even its purpose bears different names and is in its denomination also as synchronous as in each instance the genuine goals are concealed behind some sort of “cultural” “missions” and solicitous intentions. Yet world-imperialism itself is only something pursued and driven by a process having its determinative and decisive ground in the essence of truth in the modern sense. The basic form of this truth unfolds as “technology,” whose essential delimitation cannot be captured by the usual notions. “Technology” is the name for the truth of beings insofar as they are the “will to power” unconditionally inverted into its distorted essence, i.e., insofar as they constitute the machination which is to be thought metaphysically and in terms of the history of beyng. Therefore, all imperialism is conjointly, i.e., in reciprocal increase and subsidence, pursued to a highest consummation of technology. The final chapter of this consummation will consist in the earth itself blowing up and the current humanity disappearing. That will not be a misfortune but, instead, the first purification of being from its most profound deformation on account of the supremacy of beings.

In this process, which we grasp only extrinsically as long as we think of it as “world-imperialism,” absolute subjectivity attains its consummation even according to the circumstance that for humans now there remains altogether no means of escape on earth; that is, the self-certainty of the subjectum has now been caught and enclosed unconditionally in its most proper distorted essence, and self-relatedness, in the sense of absolute reflexion, has become definitive. This unconditional self-entanglement of humans in their own metaphysical perplexity is confirmed in that to such common understanding (now wasted away into something most common) this all appears as “breadth,” “fullness,” and “freedom.” To “see” all this merely means to grasp the abandonment of beings by being. But how nevertheless to relate this abandonment, as the essential occurrence of being, to the forgetting of being? (Written on the way to the hut.)

Do pave path upon path to beyng, but take care that these paths never become a highway. How things that are still beings put themselves “in good order” is already inconsequential, since no truth is proper to them.

The wickedness in beings can never become an affront to being; for even the being of anything wicked is being and therefore is concealment.

Into what sort of inebriation will the growing frenzy for numbers ultimately deteriorate?

The naive maintain that madness is mere confusion. Madness intrinsically includes the unconditional validity of what is systematic in the most proper system. There is no madness without organization.

Previously, there were only certified engineers, certified people in matters of machinery and canalization. There are now finally also “certified psychologists.” Already foolish people are appalled by this. But no one with insight can deny that anthropology must irresistibly become an anthropo-technology. Henceforth one will no longer be subject to the danger of taking “psychology” as a kind of “philosophy.” But it is indeed also already superfluous to provide now | explicitly for a decisive removal of psychology from the neighborhood of philosophy. Moreover, such an endeavor would cause difficulties, since “philosophy” exists only in name: calculation is unequivocal: certified engineers, certified political economists. The next stage is the certified poet and in general the certified functionary of culture.

On the essence of language and of the word, or: the German language in reorganization, and the prostitution of “German science.” “The new colloquialism” is manifestly no longer a German language, since even “non-German peoples” are involved in configuring it. The new formation is the now organizationally and technologically guided and thus much more effective variation of an earlier international underworld slang. The commissioned head of the organization of the new colloquialism, Dr. E. Zwirner,36 is a preeminent scientist, so that the new enterprise is fully assured. The further question will be in | what way a new “poetry” is to arise out of the “new colloquialism.” In order not to allow a favorable occasion for an “organic development” to pass by here, it was advisable to establish at once a syndication of the new research institute with the “imperial chamber for culture” [“Reichskulturkammer”]. Such a syndication could obviate the danger that “language” would be degraded to a purely “technical” “problem” and that functionaries for “culture” would lose their places. Thereby also the priority of the German element in the “new colloquialism” could assert itself prescriptively. As long as the “Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft” serves only as the “registry” of the new linguistic formation, then this is mere “prostitution” before a matter of fact. The relevant agencies were, on the contrary, heedful to bring it about that a new form of “philology” would be able to arise out of the above-proposed syndication of the “institute for the new colloquialism” with the “imperial chamber for culture.” The time might have come to abandon the previous consideration of “philology” and liberate that discipline from the bond | to the interpretation of old authors and texts. Instead, linguistic science must be shifted immediately into the proximity of the “vital” emergence of a newer language, not only so as to acquire thereby an object that is “close to life” but also to receive the possibility of influencing decisively the emergence of the language. In this way, “science” finally, immediately, and intrinsically becomes a “political act.” It then no longer needs to take refuge in the ever-problematic and desperate endeavors of the conservative and exasperated affirmers of the past who at any given moment try to demonstrate after the fact and on any roundabout way whatever the folkish [völkisch] utility of their sciences. The reconfiguration of philology, following the example of the new institute for gramophone records, might also provide a new impetus to antiquated “philosophy departments.”

1941

“Emergence of a new colloquialism.

Berlin, July 13. The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft for the Promotion of the Sciences has, with the consent of the Reichsminister for Science, Education and Popular Refinement, taken into its charge the German language archive in Braunschweig directed by Dr. Eberhard Zwirner. The institute, through phonometric gramophone recordings, is to register and describe the manifestations of the German language. On account of the establishment of the Reichswerke ‘Hermann Göring’ and the Volkswagen plant, natives of the most diverse provinces and regions have been thrown together around Braunschweig. This venture harbors a special scientific possibility to observe and record the formation of a new colloquialism through the gradual fusion of languages of the most diverse German stems and even of non-German peoples.”37

The now-published reports on the Bolshevist death cellars must make gruesome reading.

The recently established institute for the new colloquialism could also acquire a significance for popular education, whereby schooling in proper diction might prevent gross errors in speech. Earlier, all of this had to be pursued only casually and, as it were, with the help of the hickory stick. Earlier, the maidservants, for example, if they did not want to break themselves of their maidservant German, merely received a reprimand. It was of no help. The well-meaning letters always ended: “Hopefully this letter finds you hale and hearty.”

The most infallible sign of the originariness and genuineness of an essential humanity that grounds history is the relation of this humanity to words. Where this relation is indefinite and a matter of indifference, there all essential grounds of a people are already convulsed. External destructions are only late consequences of an already extant devastation.

The outbreak of the war against Bolshevism has finally relieved many Germans of a burden, insofar as they were concerned over what they saw as an overly close bond to Russia. Only a later age will be able to appreciate correctly the “document” that received global publicity on the morning of June 22, 1941. Already the first sentence provides an insight into the times immediately preceding the outbreak of the war: “Oppressed by many cares, and condemned to months of silence, I can now at last speak openly; the hour for me to do so has come.”³⁸

At the same time, the “underhandedness” of Bolshevist politics is coming to light. The Jew Litvinov39 has reappeared, and for his sixtieth birthday, the editor in chief of Moscow’s Izvestia, the famous communist Radek,⁴⁰ wrote the following: “Litvinov has demonstrated he understands, in the Bolshevist way, even if only for the time being, the need to seek confederates precisely where they may be found.”

Why are we recognizing so late that England in truth is, and can be, without the Western outlook? It is because we will only henceforth grasp that England started to institute the modern world, but that modernity in its essence is directed toward the unleashing of the machination of the entire globe. Even the thought of an agreement with England, in the sense of a division of the imperialistic “franchises,” does not touch the essence of the historical process which England is now playing out to the end within Americanism and Bolshevism and thus at the same time within world-Judaism. The question of the role of world-Judaism is not a racial question, but a metaphysical one, a question that concerns the kind of human existence which in an utterly unrestrained way can undertake as a world-historical “task” the uprooting of all beings from being.

1. {Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4.}

2. {Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932), 34.}

3. {Source unknown.}

4. {Alexander F. Kerenski ruled Russia from July to October, 1917.}

5. {Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, vol. 2, Untergang (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1965), 1456. More precisely: “men who do the heavy work.”}

6. {Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns: 1. Die Geschichte des Seyns. 2. Κoιvόv. Aus der Geschichte des Seyns, GA69 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2012), 11–16.}

7. {Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: Mittler, 1922), 48. “We have chiseled the new face of the earth, even if only a few might recognize it.”}

8. {Jünger, “Sizilischer Brief an den Mann im Mond” [“Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon”], in Blätter und Steine (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934), 107–121.}

9. {Cetera desunt.}

10. {Heidegger, “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Φύσις: Aristoteles, Physik Β 1,” in Wegmarken, GA9 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), 241.}

11. {Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht. Drittes und Viertes Buch, Werke, vol. 16 (Leipzig: Kröner, 1911), 375.}

12. {Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Werke, vol. 6 (Leipzig: Naumann, 1904), 46–48.}

13. {Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen [“On the Marble Cliffs”] (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1939).}

14. {Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot 1921 bis 1926 (Leipzig: Insel, 1935).}

15. {Hans Grimm (1875–1959), national conservative author.}

16. {Vyacheslav M. Molotov (1890–1986), from 1939 to 1949 People’s Commissar for foreign affairs of the USSR. Molotov was in Berlin on Nov. 12–13, 1940, to confer with Hitler.}

17. {Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” (Halle: Niemeyer, n.d.).}

18. {Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, 220f.}

19. {From 1937 to 1944, organized eight times at the House of German Art in Munich.}

20. {Der Arbeiter, 46ff.}

21. {Ibid.}

22. {Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Das Wesen der Stimmungen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1941).}

23. {Ibid., 7ff.}

24. {Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA3 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991).}

25. {Bollnow, “M. Heidegger: Vom Wesen des Grundes. Halle, 1929,” in Deutsche Literaturzeitung [D.L.Z.] 51 (1930), columns 1879–1887.}

26. {“Epigrammatischer Anhang,” in Blätter und Steine, 226.}

27. {Adolf Beck, “Josef Weinheber in seinem Verhältnis zu Hölderlin,” in De Weegschal 6 (1939–1940), I, 1–6; II, 17–22; III, 65f.}

28. {Josef Weinheber (1892–1945), Austrian lyric poet and National Socialist.}

29. {Gerhard Nebel, “Versuch über Ernst Jünger,” in Feuer und Wasser (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1939), 224.}

30. [Reading Verbreitung for Vorbereitung, “preparation.”—Trans.]

31. {Baldur von Schirach, Das Wiener Kulturprogramm: Rede im Wiener Burgtheater am 6. April 1941 (Munich: Eher, 1941).}

32. {Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, Werke, vol. 4. (Berlin: Cassirer, 1913), 255: “because human reason has been peregrinating over untold objects throughout many centuries and in many ways, so it can scarcely fail to happen that for anything new something old could be found having some similarity to it.”}

33. {Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Venunft (Leipzig: Meiner, 1926), B, xxxix: “With regard to the essential ends of metaphysics, idealism might be considered ever so harmless (which indeed it is not), yet there still remains, as a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general, the fact that …”}

34. {The first and only “Institute for Radio Science” was founded at the University of Freiburg in the Fall of 1939. Cf. Schriften des Instituts für Rundfunkwissenschaft an der Universität Freiburg im Breisgau (Berlin: Decker, 1941).}

35. {Iwan Baruch Kutisker (1873–1927) and Julius Barmat (1887–1938) were, independently of each other, imprisoned in the 1920s for major financial crimes in which politicians were also involved.}

36. {Eberhard Zwirner (1899–1984), from 1940 the director of the institute of phonometry of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, previously chief of the department of brain research at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut.}

37. {This text is a newspaper clipping pasted into the notebook. The specific newspaper cannot be identified.}

38. {Domarus, Hitler, 1726.}

39. {Maxim Maximovich Litvinov (1876–1951), at first people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the Soviet Union, then from 1941–1943 ambassador to Washington.}

40. {Karl Radek (1885-presumably 1939), in the 1920s a member of the central committee of the CPSU, journalist, in 1937 sentenced by show trial in Moscow to ten years imprisonment, then never heard from.}

{Index}

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

“Accomplishment” [“Leistung”]

Anxiety [Angst]

Beginning [Anfang]

Beingness [Seiendheit] (oὐσία)

Bestowing a gift [Schenken]

Boredom [Langeweile]

Bravery [Tapferkeit]

“Christian” philosophy [“Christliche” Philosophie]

Clearing [Lichtung]

Competition [Preisaufgabe]

“Culture” [“Kultur”]

Decision [Entscheidung]

Dialectics [Dialektik]

“Disposition” [“Stimmung”]

Downgoing [Untergang]

England [England]

“Epistemology” [“Erkenntnistheorie”]

Essence [Wesen]

“Farmer” [“Landmann”]

“German” philosophy [“Deutsche” Philosophie]

Gigantic [Riesiges]

“God” [“Gott”]

Greatness [Größe]

Greece [Griechentum]

“Growth” [“Wachstum”]

Herder

Historiology [Historie]

History [Geschichte]

Hölderlin

Homeland [Heimat]

“Humanism” [“Humanismus”]

“Hymns” [“Hymnen”]

“Instinct” [“Instinkt”]

“Intellectualism” [“Intellektualismus”]

Interpretation [Auslegung]

“Jesuits” [“Jesuiten”]

Ernst Jünger

Kierkegaard

Lecture courses [Vorlesungen]

“Literary remains” [“Nachlaß” (lithist.)]

“Literature” [“Literatur”]

Machination [Machenschaft]

Marble Cliffs [“Marmorklippen”]

Mediocrity [Mittelmäßigkeit]

Metaphysics [Metaphysik]

Modernity [Neuzeit]

Nietzsche

Nihilism [Nihilismus]

“Old” and “new” [“Altes” und “Neues”]

“Organization” [“Organisation”]

“Organism” [“Organismus”]

Pen pushers [Schriftsteller]

“Philology” [“Philologie”]

Philosophy [Philosophie]

“Philosophy of existence” [“Existenzphilosophie”]

φύσις

Platonism [Platonismus]

Poetry [Dichtung]

Power [Macht]

Projection [Geworfenheit]

Questioning [Fragen]

“Realism” [“Realismus”]

Refinement [Bildung]

Revolution [Umbruch]

Russia [Rußland]

“Science” [“Wissenschaft”]

Silence [Schweigen]

“Situation analysis” [“Situationsanalyse”]

Sovereignty [Herrschaft]

Spirit [Geist]

Struggle [Kampf]

Style [Stil]

Subjectivity [Subjektivität]

Technology [Technik]

Thinking [Denken]

“Time” [“Zeit”]

Uncanny [Unheimliche]

University [Universität]

War [Krieg]

Word [Wort]