But what about the struggle of those who think ahead so as to ground and found?

Being [das Sein] is beyng.

(Cf. gods, p. 45f.¹)

Care is Western care—it draws us into the plight of the truth of beyng, for the concealed intimation of the vocation of the West to ground the space-time of the most noble and most abyssal gods is in danger of being received no longer into the fervor of creative hearts, ones in which a history of the gods can again arise in the sight of an awake humanity—instead of a historiology of blinded actions through which modern humanity totters up against a sheer self-instituted perishing.—

There where beyng has appropriated that clearing (Da-sein) in whose open realm it refuses itself, so that the refusal might once again effectuate the intrinsically vibrant event of a possible rejoinder to that which, through such self-encounter, is found in the essence of God and humanity.

Why do we torment these well-intentioned historiological animals that in the historiology of their own advancements and gratifications become ever more content and jovial with questions that appear to them to be empty, eccentric, and snobbish? Out of the animal rationale has come the historiological animal, i.e., that living thing which pursues the conservation and enhancement of “life” and takes that for a “goal.” But the pursuit happens “historiologically”—by way of calculating previous ideals and accomplishments (the “great past” as means of forming public opinion—) in the planned wishes and claims. The sovereignty of the historiological excludes the existence of any essential opposition; the calculation has overcome all admissions of anything which, as essential resistance, could make constant struggle a necessity with which the decisions might first comply and might replace the historiological animal into the history of Dasein. The more historiological the human being becomes, all the more bestial does the animal become, all the more exclusively does everything revolve around | the conservation and breeding of life as life, and all the more improbable becomes the possibility of a downgoing. All comportment is appraised in terms of accomplishment, which is the expression of life, and life lives for the sake of life. In this way, the encirclement of historiology through the animal presses the historiological animal down beneath the mere animal and altogether beneath all pure growth, indeed even beneath the “grown” rock, because here an essence spreads which, belonging to beyng but disloyal to it, sees the goal of its advancement in the abandonment of beings by being. But this applies above all where, in dependence on and in imitation of previous cultural “accomplishments,” even something quite “respectable” is attained, because every decision is avoided and the manufacture of things that can be accounted “not bad” is held as more important than a renunciation stemming from genuine knowledge and from an originary power of reverence.

No one seems to grasp that we are confronting a decisive time whose anteroom must be filled by essential abjurations. No one seems to have an eye and a judgment for what is not done on the basis of a knowledge that thinks in advance, and no longer can be done on that basis, because it is producing only a concealing obstruction of the essential decision. | The half is justified by appealing to the necessity for something to happen; but no one surmises that this “half” only makes the need and the claims more composed and more secure and closes off the possibility that what is beginning a history is not the claim of calculative humanity on beings, but instead is the thrust of beyng on unguarded and unsupported humanity. In the space-time of this history, the gods arise—e.g., those that uncalculatively let the human being be steadfast in Da-sein, whereby the truth of beyng might announce the uniqueness of this extraordinary circumstance in which gods and humans could come to an encounter and could produce the moment wherein the thatness of beyng gathers itself against the blind inconsequentiality of nothingness.

This encounter is no possible goal and does not know any purposes. It essentially occurs as the abyss out of which all grounding draws its freedom. This freedom, whose ever incomparable uncalculability testifies to the essential occurrence of beyng, transposes the human being into the stillness of his most concealed dignity, from which comes to him not satisfaction and enjoyment, but quite to the contrary, that unsettling which raises him up against the intimation of the gods and into his affiliation with such encounter. | Only if the human being in advance and in uncanny inner convulsions endures the decision toward this history of beyng will he find the ground on which arises for him a source of necessary creativity. Within this creativity, every work preserves the truth of beyng in a being and through such preservation first lets beings as beings protrude into the open realm of the space-time of historical Da-sein and protects the moment of beyng as the highest possibility of this work. Out of such protection, beings first again find themselves on the way toward beings, and they thereby world on the basis of world and, as earth, survive their misuse as mere materials and forces.

What we must know about this may be illustrated by an example, if indeed it can at all be termed “example.”

How far do the horizons of our endeavors and arrangements in fact extend? Through three rubrics: people, culture, Christianity. “People”—is not a goal, but only the substructure of a way which never determines itself out of itself. “Culture” is the affirmation of the modern self-certainty of humanity in the machination of beings; not a goal and not a domain of possible decisions; still only an expedient for the assimilation to previous history. “Christianity”—a stopgap without any power of creativity, because it knows and tolerates no question-worthiness and seeks only compromise or at most consolations and vain promises. In no case do these horizons reach into the decisive domains, and yet the sovereignty of such horizons obstructs a sense and will for those domains and denies us any knowledge of them and keeps us in the compulsion of the calculation that still misinterprets itself.

Our thinking does not need to be “international” or even European; but it must indeed be Western and metaphysical if it is to fathom more originarily the ground of our history out of the essence of beyng, i.e., out of the “between” of the encounter of gods and humans. Incomparable is our care, as the care of Da-sein, wherein the truth of being is to strike roots. This care, in its holding sway, has extensions and proportions which are not at all touched by the superficial—although ever so rebellious and afflicting—confrontations with peoples, cultures, and worldviews—insofar as we take these as ultimate and do not surmise that they themselves already stand in the service of a beginning which is coming from afar. This beginning dislodges the human being into the need to come to terms with the very goallessness and superficiality of his most vital exertions and actions and to experience therein the first celebration of Da-sein. The unsettling attunes the celebration and makes us aware that beyng still awaits its grounding and that, out of the dialogue vibrating in beyng, the gods bring to language anew the essence of humanity.

People, culture, Christianity—in whichever of their variations and combinations—are already things of the past, and because in them an originary relation to being and to its question-worthiness in the most manifold forms is in advance, i.e., at all times, closed off—indeed is never known and experienced—therefore people, culture, and Christianity possess no originary and essential power for the approaching decisions. Yet these three horizons now explicitly come up for discussion and pursuit, and they precisely cover over what is in truth merely their already severe horizonlessness, all of which indicates the fact that beyng is already driven within the Western forgetfulness of being and casts its still ungrasped signs into the domain of today’s humanity and already brings up for decision this one single issue: whether now already the few will venture to surmise the signs and from these intimations will let flow (into the forthcoming questioning, knowing, and thus creating) another disposition and destiny—i.e., whether we, whether precisely the Germans, are strong enough to assume this highest and most hidden care, the care for the truth of beyng.

For we “are” kindred | to the Greeks not in that we take them as models and guard them, perhaps especially and otherwise than did mere “humanism” and “classicism”—but rather in that we, like the Greeks, have to venture the first beginning of Western history and carry out the completely other beginning. And to carry this out we have to undertake a possibly very lengthy and downright “fantastic” preparation that will for a long time be misinterpreted and unrecognized. These preparatory inner decisions are called “inner” because they pertain to the concealedness of beyng and can therefore never be taken up in the manner of realizable plans and calculations regarding beings. These inner decisions (cf. Ponderings VIII and VII) must be thought in advance and said in advance by those who already seem to be striving for a sheer negation of everything hitherto and everything of today, as if they took nourishment from the most meager food of the lack of prospects of so-called cultural development and as if they grazed their fill on the “enjoyment” of the continued establishment of a “downfall”—which indeed presupposes the calculation of “ascents.”

Furthermore, if we count on an obvious doctrine and an assignment to a blessed life, if we expect representations of objects, to which we can flee if necessary, and if we demand to be immediately saved and to be spared every essential worry, then | Hölderlin and Nietzsche, each in his own way, leave us “unsatisfied”—so much so that we do not once manage to recognize what we need in order to grasp their intimating that speaks in advance.