All references to what is historiologically graspable and to incidents and to what is contemporary are aimed at those who are a-historical only in a transcending which leaves all this behind. But these frayings of the fluttering semblance of concealed history must at times be named, just for the sake of a foothold on which a leaving behind could be carried out. This holds also of globalism [Planetarismus] and its idiosyncratism [Idiotismus].
If in the human domain the acquisition of beings amid beings requires a sacrifice such as the one of a war, then what will the appropriation of a word of beyng require of humans?
Beyng can be grasped even less on the basis of a being if the distinction between the two has come into question. A person could strive to see the mountain forest from the steppes sooner than he could approach being on the basis of beings. And yet in dominance is the insidious notion that the way from beings to being would be the “most natural” one.
The great doom everywhere threatening modern humanity and its history is that a downgoing is denied to humans, since only something inceptual can go down. Other things merely perish and specifically in the endlessness that offers the possibilities of its own kind of “infinities.”
The decision which still disposes of the essential impossibility of all “world history” is the one concerning the grounding in being of a temperament in which the reverence toward dignity qua the inceptuality of being will triumph once again over the brutality of beings which is on its way toward endless persistence.
If history is proceeding toward an end, then a beginning must already prevail. The inceptuality of this beginning, however, is concealed, though it can be sheer downgoing. Or the downgoing is the transition into the other beginning and already comes out of it.
Only those who belong to the past respond to the confrontation of thinking. Those who are of the present are merely the contemporaries of what is fleeting. And we never attain those who are of the future. But the past points into what is inceptual. And the very beginning contains what is forthcoming.
Those who think that way do not need any community in order to be unified in what is unique.
The ever-increasing anxiety in the face of “thinking” rests on an incapacity for experience. Genuine experience does not require “empirics” and resides in the disposedness through being. Here arises the insight that there is a phantasy of concepts which contracts all beings into the essentiality of being and precisely does not “abstract.” The “abstract,” as the bugaboo of the publicly noisy “heroes,” will once again arise as testimony to the wretchedness of an age which up to this very hour has not created the least of what the much-slandered nineteenth century has deposited in the essential ground of history. Only the fact that this century saw the consummation of Western metaphysics gives it an essentiality distinguishing it from what preceded and endowing it with the historical destiny to remain historically essential beyond the hubub of the twentieth century, even when that century was supposed to carry out the endeavor to withdraw from recollection everything genuinely past in history and to offer only its bustle and the | meaninglessness of the various Americanisms.
It is said that the motorized battle has now overcome the mere battle of superior matériel, especially by reintroducing “movement.” In truth, the battle of matériel is now first brought to its essence; the matter partakes more of matériel and thereby becomes more exclusive. The human being is completely subservient to machines, although he believes and pretends he is their master. Moreover, matter, as a being, does not and never did have its essence in the physical; instead, its being can be designated, following the metaphysical way of thinking, as “spirit.” Matter comes into its essence through movement and motility and thus becomes “more spiritual” and so precisely partakes “more of matériel”; and thereby matter first shifts into its violence and becomes appropriate to the kind of being (brutalitas) that is basically already sovereign. The mark of the reality of everything real at the end of metaphysics is the capacity for brutalitas. Therein exists the “mastery” over technology.
With the approaching end of metaphysics, the works of the thinkers are becoming more and more noninceptual. On the other hand, what is inceptual is small in extent and requires no “proportions.” Nevertheless, not everything quantitatively | meager is already a beginning or even only a predelineation of one.
In an age that has become groundless, to hear from its spokesmen that genuine thinking would move in a “form of thought” which “belongs to the past” could be a good confirmation of the correct path, in case genuine thinking has not yet arrived at no longer choosing disdain of contemporary judgments as a kind of liberation and even at passing over disdain as the ultimate bond to the times.
Where the measureless is sovereign, “proportions” become null, because their intensified succession makes every measure forgotten. The forgottenness is necessary, in order to maintain, in the unconditional insubstantiality of beings, the illusion that “goals” are attained—whereas they are not even desired.
That which power and its essence pursue is something necessary. But the releasement of power into the uniqueness of the determination of being is not necessary. What is coming: the transformation of power into dignity. The inceptual other courage.
Kant-scholasticism or Hölderlin-mysticism or a wrangling between them or some other sort of “historiological” activity—these are all equivalent. Here no meditation touches what is inceptual. Lacking here is altogether a meditation and even a trace of the knowledge of what belongs to meditation. The previous noise merely finds in this way its continuation.
The dependence on the opponent can become so decisive in confrontations that it compels an assimilation of his essence and loss of one’s own essence. Every conquest over an opponent is then only the entrenchment of one’s own distorted essence. All victories and successes are already defeats as regards capacity and volition.
The animal rationale, having arrived at its distorted essence, is now set into a topspin in a danse macabre.
Errors: believing that being is in beings, that beings are the real, that reality consists in effectivity, and that effectivity makes meditation unnecessary.
Writings and books about reality, about the “there is,” are in truth superfluous, since, if required, the real indeed provides for its reality. But a treatise about that which altogether “is” not—such a treatise could still have some justification, although never any use. Yet who might read discussions about what is not at all? They are not written for those who might or might not like to read them, but only for those who must.
In the age of the unconditional abandonment by being, unsurveyable and therefore calculatively “great” incidents transpire. But nothing decisive can ever happen there, because nothing is any longer at stake, on account of everything having lost its intrinsic weight and all things weighing equally much, i.e., equally little. That is a peculiar sort of “greatness,” the one of the impossibility of decisions.
“Unconditional truth” in the most modern thinking, where truth has become exact certitude, means the same as unconditional conditionality in the selection of facts and in the style of the communication of those facts. In this way, there arises a gigantic correctness, on the basis of which | an individual person can never at all decide what is true or false. That distinction has been effaced as an antiquated one. We still lack the presuppositions for thinking through the essence of unconditional conditionality. It may be surmised that this sort of “truth” infinitely, i.e., essentially, surpasses everything we are otherwise accustomed to call “nihilism.” A supernihilism leads again to “reality,” i.e., to the reality of the utterly worthless nothingness. Admittedly, one who is blind to the essence believes such a thing does not “exist,” because “he” does not “see” it. The question arises as to what extent Christian supernaturalism and this supernihilism belong together in opposition and are the same.
We have a task. The question is only whether we are capable of being this task itself; every German soldier has fallen in vain if we do not hourly strive for the rescuing of a beginning of the German essence, beyond the now quite released and definitive self-devastation of all modern humanity.
Where historiology finds connections, it reckons at once with dependencies and influences. Only in this way does it have in advance a field for its deductions and explanations. It cannot see that historical “connections” exist precisely in originary alienation and that to be other derives from an inceptuality which is already determined by the essence of history. The incompatibility of everything inceptual cannot be rectified or even merely grasped in the “form” of mere “oppositionality,” which then could still be bent straight “dialectically” into a congruity.
Soviet socialism has carried out the first, decisive step toward the unconditional motorizing of humanity; the other socialisms have merely followed behind this one in essentially Dependent resistance. Soviet socialism recognized itself primarily as that system of the unconditional empowerment of power which assigns technology to its definitive metaphysical place. According to Lenin, Soviet power is “socialism + electrification.” In the domain of these essential steps in the | consummation of metaphysics as machination, what matters essentially is not who maintains this system of unconditional power, but who inceptually recognizes and ventures it in its essence. The others are epigones. Where the machine is not ventured as the anti-god, and a-theism is thus not carried out unconditionally, there all the drivel about the human “mastery” over technology remains a helpless embarrassment. The metaphysical wretchedness of the Italians over and against Russia is becoming obvious. Only unconditional human existences, ones that do not shrink back in the face of the ultimate subjectivity, are strong enough to submit unconditionally to the metaphysical essence of technology. But even Russianism has not attained this unconditionality. Cf. p. 9.
Long paths have to be traversed before thinking thinks simply out of that which is to be thought, so simply, and replying only to being, that this thinking no longer entangles itself in its own net, because it is then no longer a net and a trap but, instead, an affiliation to what is appropriated in the event.
Americanism is the historiologically determinable appearance of the unconditional perishing of modernity | in devastation. Russianism, in the univocity of brutality and rigidity, has at the same time a rooted headwaters in its earth, and this univocity has predetermined itself as a world-univocity. On the other hand, Americanism is the amassing of everything, which amassing at the same time signifies the uprooting of what has been amassed. As soon as the amassed is raised into the constancy of pure historical producibility and becomes unconditional, then everything is at once graspable, although likewise everything is deprived of its origin. Russianism does not reach down into this metaphysical zone of devastation, for Russia has in itself, independently of the “socialism,” the possibility of a beginning, and such a possibility is denied in advance to everything American. Despite all this, Russianism is too indigenous and antirational for it to be capable of taking over the historical destiny of the devastation. In order to take over the abandonment by being, institute it as such, and perpetuate it as an attitude, what would be required is a rationality complete to the highest degree and calculating everything, and this could also be called “spirituality.” Only such “spirit” is equal to the historical task of devastation. The English “master race” [“Herrenvolk”] has assumed the role of servant within | this devastation, and the metaphysical nullity of English history is now coming to light. The English merely seek to rescue this nullity, and thereby they carry out their contribution to the devastation.
One day people will appeal, against Americanism and its rootlessness, to the Western history of Europe. Fine. But is this appeal itself justified? Can it be justified if it simply uses “European culture” like a present-at-hand requisite and from it, according to circumstances, exhibits something earlier, for which the “present” can do nothing? When will the Western appeal to the West first attain its essential justification? How will this appeal first experience the West as history and open itself to what is coming, rather than—ignorant in all things—imitate Americanism and carry it to excess? Where is the justification for the appeal to one’s own historical essence, if everything depends on undermining the capacity to perceive this essence?
It will be retorted: yes, but those who are “spiritual” can indeed1 dominate, they indeed have the possibility to do so. Not so fast! What is claimed in saying they can “dominate”? What sort of freedom is bestowed here in the summons to be “assertive”? Does this not already decide everything which must | first come into meditation? Is the “spiritual,” as it may be named by custom, at all of such an essence that it can “effectuate” the “dominating”? “Domination”—that adherents are hired and assembled and true believers indoctrinated, always persons who are never willing or able to take up a relation to what is essential. “Dominate”? How so—if it depends on making oneself ready for the fact that there is something which never requires domination but which demands instead reverence and long meditation and patience? “Domination”—such as a kind of car “dominates” the market in the auto industry. “Domination” the way a demagogue over the human masses obtains a hearing for himself and does so in each case on different grounds and often on no grounds at all? “Dominate”—as if the essential were a “business,” a matter of “production,” and according to success in those fields would first be awarded its essential justification.
“Dominate,” they cry to us. No—“Be exposed,” we call in return—free yourselves from the temptation of the frenzy of those who dominate and from the pseudoreality of “domination.” | “Dominate!”—is not Americanism thereby already raised to a principle? What else could one want?
The pestilence of this apparently self-evident and universally valid demand to “domination,” as the measure of the essentiality of anything, destroys even the possibility of meditation. And here the devastation has already started. What then comes after the “confrontation” with America?
Expose yourselves to the essential plight of being. Learn first that no “biological” breeding of humans and no anthropological glorification could ever be capable of anything unless being determines the relation of humans to itself and inceptually decides the human essence. Expose yourselves to the possibilities our history holds open for this meditation and transformation, but cast off the vanity of the “present” ones, who measure world history by the yard like a cloth merchant.
The “modern” human being is on the verge of making himself a slave to the devastation.
Anyone who as a historical human being must act historically requires above all steadfastness in what is essential | and specifically a steadfastness that has already inceptually settled the essentiality of every essence.
“Politics” is of a modern essence and as such is always power politics, i.e., the carrying out and instituting of the empowerment of power in the beings overpowered by this politics. The highest type and highest act of politics: maneuvering the opponent into a position whereby he is compelled to proceed to his own self-annihilation. Accordingly, politics must have deep breath and a long arm and be capable of accepting shocks for a very protracted time; it must not let itself be confused by occasional defeats.
What matters is not the “refinement” or the “prototype,” but the assignment to being and the equanimity of an essential presentiment.
We are discovering “Americanism” only now and late enough and only halfway as a political opponent (cf. above, p. 8).
The lack of all self-knowledge entails an obliviousness to the essential sameness of this phenomenon with all the others on the globe and the leaving indeterminate of the historical ground of all the phenomena. But that is precisely globalism: the last step of the machinational essence of the power to annihilate what is indestructible on the path of devastation. The devastation is capable of annihilating the indestructible without being obliged ever to grasp at all that which is indestructible. But devastation undermines the possibility of the essence of something inceptual. For the indestructible is not some substantial thing present-at-hand somewhere, but is the inceptual.
Neither annihilation nor ordering nor new ordering can essentially satisfy a historical determination; what can do so is only the poetizing of the essence of being and the constructing of a grounded affiliation to being.
Globalism is the historiologically conceived determination of the abandonment of beings by being, inasmuch as this abandonment is everywhere the same and covers the entire earth. The homogeneity and leveling down of humanity to a kind of achievement of an order of life, | despite the apparent heterogeneity in the provenance and scope of the “cultures” and the communal [volklich] assets (Japan, America, Europe), have their essential ground in the circumstance that power itself, as soon as it attains unconditional empowerment, intrinsically demands a sameness, a monotony, in its ever more simple means. Every power tries to expand and thereby collides with every other one in the same machination. This sameness of essence is the ground of the historiologically determinable totality and unconditionality of the essence of power.
At the start of the third year of the global war.—Ordinary understanding would very much like to calculate history and yearns for a “balance sheet.” Moreover, there are humans who are past help by accomplishments, no matter how impressive the latter are. Thus insofar as we think only historiologically and not historically and still incorporate globalism into the change of history, instead of using it merely and at most | geographically, as the framework of “historiological” incidents, and insofar as we allow only “facts” to be valid, ones that are always only half true and therefore are erroneous—insofar as we do all this, the following observations might be encountered:
1. We have been gaining victories now for two whole years.
2. The number of those to be provided for will grow, since even the conquered regions will be subject to blockade.
3. The regions to be administered will extend more and more.
4. The possibilities of political activity will all be exhausted, since there is no longer any partnership.
5. The multiple-front war, which through a brilliant politics was held to be eliminated as a main danger, is a matter of fact through our own resolution.
6. The opportunity for an essential decision within the sole remaining confrontation as regards the war has disappeared.
7. In all regions of procedure and planning, the only visible goal is a single mere “and so forth.”
8. The assimilation of the enemy in the mode of his actions has been completed.
9. World-Judaism, incited by the emigrants allowed out of Germany, cannot be held fast anywhere and, with all its developed power, does not need to participate anywhere in the activities of war, whereas all that remains to us is the sacrifice of the best blood of the best of our own people.
10. The suitable veiling of these European-German circumstances and the transition from the encircling to the boxing in of Europe will be called the “new order.”
In opposition to these things, it must be considered that the conducting of the current war, versus the first world war, has the advantage of being able to learn from the first and indeed has learned from it. In order to confront in a timely way the just-named ten points, which, in whatever variant, will readily muddle a clear gaze at history and prevent meditation, our universally well-devised propaganda would have to incorporate them.
The historical mark of the newest phase of modernity will be this age itself taking care to make everything new superfluous and impossible. Then we would reach | a situation in which it could be decided whether what is old should again come into its own. But what is old can never be brought back, and where there is only the newest and nothing new any longer, nothing old can exist either; the newest is what is unconditionally without memory, what occupies itself constantly with itself.
We still nowadays encounter Germans of the opinion that English Christianity would be a source of a future configuration of history. This opinion knows nothing of the hollowing out of Christianity in general, namely, that it has long since forfeited its capacity for history or has transferred that capacity to modernity. This opinion also knows nothing of how the “superior” Englishmen make Christianity capable of political power in a supposedly preeminent way. For the rest—if one has already resorted to calculation: other than technology and the metaphysical preparation of socialism, other than commonplace thinking and tastelessness, what has England contributed to “culture”? Nothing that could ever be of help to the Germans. Therefore something else must come to their aid.
The restrictedness of opinion and of rapid calculation would be indulged too much if I were to declare explicitly that my thinking does not dissolve into an “exegesis” of Hölderlin’s poems. If my relation to them, which is a historically essential one, is to be named, then the question must first be asked as to whether only through an inceptual thinking a space is opened for this poet, a space which, as thoughtful, has already transcended the poetizing, despite all the worthiness of its essentiality, and has unfolded into the grounding of an inceptual knowledge that is averse to all dull feeling and to every semblance of a formalistic rigor in reckoning with empty concepts.
The “war effort of German philosophy,”2 “installed” in opposition to the “philosophy of existence” (with which, moreover, I have nothing to do), is setting for itself in 1941 (when we Germans are entering the third year of the extreme struggle over existence) the task of demonstrating that there is no such thing as “care.”
Germany is so blockade-proof that it can still permit itself the self-blockade from spiritual meditation, in that, deprived of its proper essential history already long ago through historiology, it has raised bulwarks of the mere comparison of ages, epochs, centuries, and their styles, and passes these off as inhabitable domiciles of a “spiritual” life. Indeed this thrusting forward of historiology is an essential consequence, and even the dowry, of metaphysics and so is something Western and not restricted to the Germans. But the Germans in their absolute metaphysics promoted historicism at the same time, precisely as the ultimate perplexity, and then have made of it a virtue which proves its excellence in the technology of the mass order.
Even globalism is still a historiological determination of world history; it is not a determination heedful of the history of beyng. In the world-historical task of the ordering of the masses, the massiveness of humanity is affirmed above all, and technology is assigned the unconditional role of the prescriptive type of knowledge (findings, ἱστoρία).
The most dreadful degeneration of the historiology which is in any case already thoroughly entangled in its distorted essence is the “history of art,” whereby what is meant is the “historiology of art.” The interminable trifling and paltering with its “objects,” the reckoning up of the “fourteenth,” “sixteenth,” “nineteenth” centuries, the puerile vanity of the knowledge that discovers such “ascriptions,” and the journalistic presentation of the description and discussion of worldless works of art—all this is intrinsically an abomination, one that moreover takes refuge in “beautiful things” and nourishes the illusion that it is indeed a “spiritual” attitude and a “fostering” of “culture.” Because the historiologists of art are least of all—i.e., not at all—capable of entering into a confrontation with the object, since indeed they are historiologists and not artists, their activity effectuates in all directions an expansion of historicism as well as the most inner corruption of the already intrinsically groundless “human sciences.” Which historiologist of art could ever attain the insight that “art” is at an end? Which historiologist of art would have the courage even only to imagine what that end entails? Instead, the historiologists believe themselves able to contribute to the construction of a new “art.”
Corresponding to globalism is idiosyncratism, a word not meant here in the psychiatric sense of eccentricity of mind and spirit. It is intended instead in terms of the history of being, and it thinks the ἴδιov, that which is one’s own, wherein the contemporary human being finds himself within the mass order. This that is one’s own is the same, and in it even the other and every other, the “they,” find themselves and reciprocally affirm themselves. Idiosyncratism means relegating what is one’s own to that which belongs to everyone: e.g., the normative influence of “illustrated magazines” and the binding force of the entirely “they”-like claim of the radio, where “no one” speaks and consequently even as regards any ever so insignificant “concert,” each violinist and trumpeter must be announced by first and last name. One finds oneself everywhere in what is one’s own, which is yet precisely what belongs to everyone. Idiosyncratism is the essential restriction to the mundane, i.e., the global. And the global can exist only in the mode of the idiosyncratic. This restriction entails a renunciation of all meditation, in such a way that the renunciation is not at all recognized as renunciation, and even the possibility of meditation is recognized just as little. Idiosyncratism is therefore not | a prerogative of “idiots” [“Idioten”] (i.e., persons of limited aptitude). Quite to the contrary; idiosyncratism includes the unconditional shrewdness, resourcefulness, and dexterity of the technological-historiological human being. Only the global human being can be idiosyncratic, and the idiosyncratic human must be global. The idiosyncratic essence of the radio, for instance, has still not been completely developed. It is not enough that a radio is playing on every floor of every home. Each “family” member, the servants, the children, must have his own radio so he can be everyone, i.e., can quickly and easily know, hear, and “be” what everyone else likewise is. The radio set is the symbol of the correlation between globalism and idiosyncratism—not merely a symbol in the old “sense,” but technologically-historiologically, i.e., as the gadget which accomplishes the correlation of globalism and idiosyncratism but which also first comes into production (and receives its “development”) out of this correlation.
The genuine harbinger of the unity of globalism and idiosyncratism, but also the genuinely appropriate heir of that unity, is Americanism, the assuredly most desolate form | of “historiological” a-historicality.
Long paths are still to be traversed, ones on which beyng must come to words, even though we have already twisted free of beyng. The other beginning—that is the inceptuality of the beginning.
The genuine experiences which are allotted to the current generation, but which this generation is unable to take up, intuit, and place back into their essential beginning, constitute the untrammeled outbreak of the unconditional criminality of the modern human being according to his role in the empowerment of power toward machination. Criminality [Verbrechertum] is not mere breakage [Zerbrechen]; instead, it is the devastation of everything into what is broken. The broken is broken off from the beginning and assigned the domain of brittleness. Here resides only the one possibility of being—in the mode of order. Order is only the counterpart of criminality, as the latter is understood in terms of the history of beyng (not juridically-morally).
There are those who call themselves “Platonists” and mean the religious Confessional Front.3 Religious “circles” bewail what they have identified as a decline of “culture.” They do not surmise how they themselves are “working” much more on the undermining of all “thinking,” helped by their “rescue operations” for the “spiritual tradition.” The question, however, is where the genuine domains of decision regarding “being” are prepared and opened up. The question does not concern who and what from the past (the past that long ago slipped into mendacity and unfruitfulness) are protected and rescued or whether beings obtain their satisfaction. The question is only whether or not being, as the domain of historical decisions, is proceeding toward its inceptuality. The “how” of this preparation can be very painful and difficult. Could it be otherwise, when at issue is the uniqueness of beyng? But if someone has recourse to faith in “Christ,” there arises the predicament that this faith cannot occur in “philosophy,” which one pretends to be pursuing. One thus calls oneself—rather than confess to being a believing Christian and then abandoning even philosophy as a “folly of the world”—an “incorrigible Platonist.” And yet one still complains about the counterfeiting involved in Bolshevism. It is in | such activity that the devastation first shows itself.
Something is racing over the planet, something no one anywhere can control, assuming anything ever was governed by someone who meant to govern it. The essence of power is unrolling in its distorted essence and becoming the robbery of its own overpowering. Human mettle has become so vacillating that people intend to gain information about themselves by making the human being a basic theme of “knowledge,” i.e., a theme of historiological-technological-biological explanation and planning. The flood of American anthropologism, which those who are knowledgeable had already basically overcome around the year 1912, is inundating the last dams still perhaps standing here or there. The “certified psychologist” is not simply replacing the “philosophy professor” (that is an inconsequential process in the renewal of the university) but is even becoming the prototype of the only “thinker” still “possible.”
Prior to the advent of the beginning, we must, in the inconspicuous affiliation to being, disclosively await the event in which a truth of beyng might reveal itself once again. Yearning and pain belong intrinsically to Da-sein. But Da-sein receives its dignity only from becoming the steward of the space-time of another future. Into this stewardship we may incorporate all the things gone from us, because they belong to us from former times. Something in its extreme distorted essence is racing around the planet. And yet already long ago hearts had begun to consent to what is inceptual. And this consent is already a richness in which those who know recognize themselves. And even where this knowledge seems to remain indeterminate, like a “gut” presentiment, the simple affiliation to being is still something genuine. Being provides the only measure for what is essential. Not even a departure can ever convulse this affiliation. The departure is only the counterword to the word, harbors the most beautiful tarrying, and in each case is the beginning.
Americanism is the victory of unconditional “abstraction,” the victory of the disregarding of the essence of beyng. All engagement is sunk in abstractness and therefore lives in the delusion of being concrete and of having to battle against “abstract thinking.”
Pragmatism is the “worldview” drawn out of the onset of the fall of Nietzsche’s consummated metaphysics. For this “worldview,” being remains the actuality of calculative and planned effectivity. The politically possible deviations from this worldview are themselves merely forms of the actualization of that essential characterization of being, without the essential beginning of that characterization recognized as such. This “worldview,” carrying out the most extreme fall and departure from the inceptual Greek determination of being, nevertheless takes its name from the Greek language (πρᾶγμα, πρᾶξις [“practical thing, praxis”]), and that is a sign of the contempt and derision into which being has allowed its own distorted essence to slip away.
—For this reason, however, the number of German pedants in philosophy is growing, pedants who, in a brazen or bashful way, proclaim and in every case exploit the trivialities of American pragmatism as great discoveries for anthropology.
Americanism is the organization of the unconditional meaninglessness of “existence,” joined to the prospect of an enhanced “standard of living” (electric heating and cooling of homes, increase in automobile ownership, rise in the number of moviegoers and of other “economic-technological-cultural” amenities of “life”).—
A party meeting recently was pleased to communicate to the people that after this war the commemoration of the fallen will not cost as much money as previously, because accounts would be settled with the “Churches” for the “sacrifice of souls.” In the future, these obsequies, which could indeed “occur” in quite different “proportions,” will be supplied “totally” free of charge.
The essence of exaggeration harbors at its very heart the inexorableness of the ever-more-rapid devaluation and deactualization of whatever had just been attained. Why? Because exaggeration has already accepted groundlessness and the renunciation of repose in an essential goal as principles.
What if a people forces its own essential volition into starvation? Then this people has lost its historical beginning and, along with that, itself. Then this people can neither win nor lose a war: for it … is no longer, to which the one or the other (victory4 or defeat) could be assigned.
The thought that has become familiar under the title “Decline of the West”5 is still trapped within the narrow domain of romanticism, although Spengler knew something of the brutality of czarist power. But what still characterizes the kind of “effectivity” of this thought is the belief that the thought could be refuted through a simple reference to today’s continuous progress. Things are “going forward” everywhere. There is no “ending” or stopping in sight. On the contrary, the assurance of beings is already on the verge of actualizing an endless progress in the form of the gigantic. Yet even this is perhaps only a superficies of history and does not display anything of what is eventuating.
The future of the West in the age of the consummation of modernity: an unconditional super-Americanism with Prussian strictness.
“Recreation” is no longer a matter of a common citizen traveling to the Riviera, but of a tycoon flying to Borneo or going reindeer hunting in Finland. The new possibilities of organization will become infinite and the enthusiasm unlimited. The bonds to anything of the past must break apart very quickly. The globe is being overrun with a new kind of “happiness” whose deficiencies are rectified, if need be, by movie theaters and other “cultural” institutions. Some day no one will any longer want to know what the West was. Animal rationale: Homo faber. [“Rational animal: The human being as artisan.”]
The new measures: “infinitely great,” “still greater,” “totally great.” What is “totally great” is the superinfinite but can presumably only for a short time serve to express “greatness” sufficiently. In truth, however, it is entirely a matter of indifference whether something “is” “infinitely great” | or “totally great” or “superinfinite” or whatever. These long since antiquated judgments are merely expedients for grasping the already decided valuelessness of everything.
Beauty is what stands in essential unison along with the genuine plight and the inceptual necessity.
Grasped in the modern sense, “science” is a way to guarantee certainty. The development of the modern sciences and of their functional character is of an unconditional and therefore also irresistible univocity. There used to be congresses of the sciences. It is necessary that the Congress Central6 should unfold into a science of congresses (congress-sociology). Congresses of sciences and the science of congresses belong together. The decisive step of this essential connection was carried out in its proper effectiveness when Descartes determined the ego cogito [“I am thinking”] as cogito me cogitare [“I am thinking of myself thinking”]. To “battle” (supposedly) against Cartesianism today means to chop off one’s own head (calculating apparatus). | But even this ignorance of the essential pertains intrinsically to self-certainty and consummates the forgetting of being.
The inner consistency and the irresistibility in which globalism unrolls is an event which could confirm everywhere the essence of the history of being to the time period of the unconditional abandonment of beings by being, provided a confirmation could be possible and necessary there. In the unrolling of being, we are rolling into the extreme publicness of the distorted essence of being. But what rolls concomitantly with us, with those who know, are no longer the knowledgeable ones themselves, for they are standing on another star.
Only in appearance is progress a principle of “liberalism.” In truth progress pertains to the essence of an age such as modernity which takes what is constantly new as what is genuinely true and real. The constantly new is essentially linked to the craving for unconditional self-certainty which at all times, everywhere, “under all circumstances,” and in every | situation must reckon with what is required by the “world” that is already directed toward complete sovereignty. Therefore anything present-at-hand within the sphere of plans and advance calculations is by necessity already antiquated. This constant novelty is therefore not a result or demand of a mere roving curiosity; instead, the increasing succession of ever new things is the inner law of the reality which has determined itself as “will.” Yet at first it remains indeterminate as to whether and how the “will” (which is not meant “psychologically”) is a will of reason or of love or of power or of everything in a semideveloped mixture. What is new becomes ever newer, more common, cheaper, more fleeting, more arbitrary, and thus necessarily louder and more importunate. The new, and along with it everything real, has relinquished the decisional power over to groundless importunity. The essence of what was first called “Americanism” is now prepared. The new must surpass itself, and what is most unprecedented is consequently already ignored. Therefore now even what is most inconspicuous and (appraised in terms of a supposedly still extant “world”) inconsequential must be grasped as the indecisively decisive.
Thus “progress” in the “sciences,” especially the natural sciences, is useful. So possibly is also progress in the “human sciences,” but rather more only in service of the maintenance of a cultural-political facade. Modern human science, e.g., the historiology of poetry and art, thereby falls into a licentious will to progress, a will that behaves in a measureless and prescriptive way at the same time, and pauses before nothing when the issue is to place history (meant as the past) in a new and the newest perspective.
The following “new perspective” on poets can offer a sign of what has been noted here about the essence of modernity. In discussions of the “army post office” (which is certainly an essential institution and one carried out with great efficiency), it was naturally at first established through “historiological” learning that “antiquity” did not “yet” possess a proper “army post office.” Then the statement followed: “Nevertheless, we can perhaps see the war poems of Pindar, which soon spread throughout the land, as a kind of ‘army post office’” Who could deny that here a “science” is being pursued that is close to reality? And who does not grasp | how much unsure violence is expressed reluctantly in the “Nevertheless … perhaps”? The poet Pindar, from a “postal” “perspective,” might be considered unconditionally on the basis of an understanding which no longer needs to adhere to the words of the poet. The characterization as “army post office” would suffice.
It will be said that all of this is foolish and superficial. It may be so—to a superficial regard, one incapable of recognizing such superficies as the only surface of a superficiality of the Complete leveling down of everything.
Mutual yearning is that mystery in which hearts, without knowing it, constantly exceed themselves in their affiliation.
The transformed present time, in which occur the fallen of the best youth, has its own radiance whose illumination must be preserved for the future young people. That is still our sole service. “Commemorations” flutter away into the unimportance of empty ceremoniality. χάρις—none of our words grasps its essence, even if we bring together consonant terms: grace, favor, charm, radiance: the innermost mystery of the nobility that inclines toward us and yet remains reposing in itself.
To bring joy is the purest joy. But how will we bring joy unless we are already within what is joyous? And how will what is joyous come to us?
The impossible is the highest human possibility: grace or doom.
The West and Europe.—“Europe” is a planetary concept which includes evening and morning, Occident and Orient, indeed even transfers the weight to the land of the morning, the East.
The “West” is a historical concept which determines the essential history of the Germans (and also determines their origination) out of a confrontation with what is Eastern; but this confrontation does not devolve upon what is Western.
“Europe” is the actualization of the decline of the West. There is no longer the least inducement to take the field against the “pen pusher” Oswald Spengler.
What is a tautology”? For instance, the term “deceptive propaganda” [“Lügenpropaganda”].
Essential thinking knows no haste, for it is not supposed to go “further” but rather is to tread “in place.” The question is only: where is the place and which is the site?
“Interpretation.”—to interpret oneself, says Ernst Jünger, is to descend below one’s level.7 That holds, provided “interpretation” means to make oneself comprehensible to those who are denied the basic condition of understanding, namely, the projection that always bears the understanding. But if interpretation is thought not in this negative and deficient sense, but positively as the originary inceptual fulfillment of the bearing projection, then interpretation is an ascent, not a descent. One can interpret oneself and others only by surpassing them. Interpretation then takes on the semblance | of something merely comparative and subsequent. This semblance does no harm. It is not necessary that those who one day declare that some interpretation is self-evident should notice that they themselves have been unwittingly raised to a higher level and have been compelled to another origin.
Through super-Americanization we will never overcome America and the “Anglo-Saxon world,” but only go to ruin on them. When will the essence of the fatherland come into words? Science—is cognition without knowledge, i.e., without steadfastness in the truth of beyng. Knowledge is cognition without the objectification of what is cognized and without transposing the cognized into beings.
That which knowingly comes above from below and lifts the below upward, destroys the above and thereby also—the below.
The sole and in every respect first “man of letters” in Germany today is Ernst Jünger. Homo literatus.
In view of today’s massive thoughtlessness, it is no longer a great feat to take a half thought (which is intrinsically more ruinous than “no thought”) and still achieve success as an “author” and find “readers.” This circumstance has repercussions on the authors. Consequently, their own “production” becomes increasingly more thoughtless but thereby also more vain. The brothers “Jünger” are a good example of the enslavement to superficiality. And yet—
All “progress” proceeds from the great to the small, whereby what is small can puff itself up into the gigantic, without discarding its smallness.
Why is an organized appearance, systematically given out as the truth, something essentially other than a natural, unavoidable, and even unnoticed appearance?
Perhaps with the departure of many sacrificed sons of farmers the homeland is always preserved more purely and more permanently and turned back to its destiny more surely than in our endeavors, which often remain arrested in the past.
The whole world interprets. No one thinks.
The Russians have for a century known very much very precisely about the Germans, about their metaphysics and their poetry. But the Germans surmise nothing about Russia. Prior to every practical-political question as to how we must position ourselves toward Russia stands the single question of who the Russians genuinely are. Both communism (taken as unconditional Marxism) and also modern technology are thoroughly European-Western and are only instruments of Russianism and not Russianism itself.
Insofar as technology and communism assault the West out of the East, in truth the West is assaulting the West in an uncanny self-annihilation of its own powers and intentions. Besides its public aspect, history always also has its concealed one.
Consummated metaphysics will find the fitting site for its rebirth in Russianism. From there someday, as a counterprojection, this metaphysics will come to meet the beginning.
1. [Reading ja for ja nicht, “indeed not.”—Trans.]
2. {The “War effort of the human sciences” (1941) was a project of the Reichsministry for science, education, and popular refinement.}
3. {The “Confessional Front” or “Confessional Church” was from 1934 to 1945 the resistance movement of the Protestant Church against the National Socialists and the “German Christians.”}
4. [Reading Sieg for Krieg, “war.”—Trans.]
5. {Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. 1 (Vienna: Braumüller, 1918), vol. 2 (Munich: Beck, 1922).}
6. {The “German Congress-Central” was established in 1934 and from 1936 on came under the Reichsministry for popular enlightenment and propaganda. It pursued “congress-sociology.”}
7. {Jünger, “Epigrammatischer Anhang,” 226.}