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

But indeed the old

Pindar, Isthm., VII, 17¹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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