PONDERINGS XIII
We do not know goals
and are only a passageway.
Need to grant admission ever more exclusively to the one and be always more steadfastly present where for a long time no echo offers the semblance of a concord and yet never break away from the concealed tradition, but instead in the future grow back into the history which must become preservation and loss, grounding and collapse, recollection and neglect of the truth of beyng, provided this truth comes to its essential occurrence.
The transition itselfâis what is most transitionlessâof itself the uniqueness of the inceptual decidedness which incorporates both beginnings.
Need to be present where beyng must ground itself in a ground which of itself wins for itself its own heightâbecause this ground can be appropriated only out of the essential occurrence of beyng itself, through beyng as event of appropriation.
áŒÎ»Î»áœ° ÏαλαÎčᜰ Îłáœ°Ï
ΔáœÎŽÎ”Îč ÏÎŹÏÎčÏ
But indeed the old
bestowing illumination of strict grace is sleeping.
Pindar, Isthm., VII, 171
Only if we relearn to think on long passageways and in tiered ascents will we create for ourselves broad paths and with them the guarantee of coming from afar; yet this is the precondition for any drawing near to what is great. The length of a thoughtful path, however, is to be measured not by the size of a âbookâ but only by the concealed order of the question-worthiness of a question.
Those who proceed on the transition can only intimate what it is that appropriates them.
No self-interpretation attains what is first said, because in the latter alone does the unsaid vibrate.
We are now standing where the dictum holds: before there can be a poetizing (as poesy), a thinkingâin the sense of the disclosive thinking of beyngâmust first recur.
1
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.
2
How much the heart is in tune with the attunement of beyngâ
3
What is happeningâ(but even this word, like all others, is already worn outââhappenâ can mean anything). Yet the question is to be maintained in this word! For the task is not to ascertain facts and to report incidentsâinstead, the happening must be recollected in the decision; but âhappeningâ 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.
4
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 humanâand thus the voice of beyng will find its tongue and history will attain its first, long silence.
5
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 subjectumâlife for the sake of lifeâthe unproblematic sheer power of the âinterestsâ of the âlifeâ 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 beyngâ. The involution of life on itself is the releasement of âlived experienceâ into incessant quaffing without measure or rank.â
6
The basic disposition of the future decision is the passion of the word of refusalâhere is grounded the first and farthest remoteness of the godâhis 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 âbetweenâ qua the clearing of the âin the midstâ and the âmeanwhileââi.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.
7
âAnthropomorphism.ââHow 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 essenceâi.e., in the stewardship of beyng. Here the human being first attains the highest freedom toward himselfâ; here no redemption is needed, just as little as is its counterpart: flight into the âlifeâ 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 experienceâinterlaced and equally alienated from beyng. Supersensible and abstruse powers | and being-less empowerment of âlifeââboth 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 unformedâsince 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. âAnthropomorphismâ is therefore a component of metaphysics. As soon as the human being achieves human dignity, anthropomorphism of any sort is impossible.
8
What is happening?âThe abandonment of beings by being as releasement of being into machinationâthe involution of the human being into life and of life into lived experience and mere classification.
9
How long is the path on which the thinking âofâ beyng might be released from the usual mistakesâthe scientific representation of beings and of their beingnessâand 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 âlivesâ only on letting the moment pass by? Which moment pertains to the disclosive thinking of beyng? The preeminent of all momentsâthe momentâof the momentâthe 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 resultsâwhat 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 preparationâonly the âbetweenââso that beyng might essentially occur. This is difficult to see for those who are all-too-blinded by beings and is still more difficultâeven for the fewâto endure in disclosive questioning; therefore the great, intrinsically obscure errancies approach on this path.
10
In the future, may the thinker love only this: beyng as the abyss in beingsâbetween the projective enchaining and entanglement of beyng as the âbetweenâ of the abyssâfrom which a plight of grounding arises.â
The thoughtful wordâabove all, âbeyngââspeaks out of the highest univocity, because it names what is most unique, | which is threatened by no evasions into what is still nameable âotherwise.â And yet: what this word says is never properly understood, since it is always improperly taken as referring to a being; we expect in the word something that can be represented instead of carrying out a leap into the steadfastness of Da-sein. This word is the deepest conjuncture of the abyssânothing perceivable (and nothing to be extracted by ratio2), but rather the conjunction of the essence of the âbetweenâ into the decidability of the extreme decision between the truth of beyng and the supremacy of beings.â
11
Beyng.âThe gods have need of a ground from which they summon humanity to an encounter wherein their transfiguration of all things and of all history can be bestowed. The human being requires a ground on which to stand so that he can venture an open region wherein a dialogue first resounds in confrontation. The world vaults into the arch of a ground in whose features the one refers to the other and the one casts toward the earth while opening out various worlds. The earth reposes on a ground into which it retracts its own mystery and, | as something closed, protrudes out into a world.
In each case and at the same time the ground is in another grounding, so the reciprocally intersecting affiliation of the grounds is the one character of the abyss: the âbetweenâ of the silence that is kept silent in the word of beyng.
Between the gods and humans, there essentially occurs the same âbetweenâ to which the world and the earth owe their essential turning to each other in strife. And this âbetweenâ is beyng itself. Human speech is merely the unrecognized reverberation of the word wherein the silence of beyng is kept silent as the abode of the âthere.â The thoughtful word expresses nothing about objects and their investigation, and even less does it give information about lived experiences. Because we seldom venture the uncanny âbetween,â however, and are even less frequently able to bear the alienation of the most intimate silence of this âbetween,â and because we cannot illuminate in the simplicity of our essence the sad-joyful grace of the rigor of the abyssâtherefore we can scarcely surmise any longer the sovereign dignity and nobility of the awaiting which infinitely surpasses every possession and everything impeding | and, as inexhaustible, is all that remains akin to the abyss.
12
Who knows truth? Those who rest in the confidence of possessing something trueâwithout knowing about truth or wanting to know about it? Noâtruth as the essence of what is true can never be a âmatterâ of a possession. Truth pertains to the seeking which desires what is to be attainedâthe desiring reaches out into what is reservedâis the broadest and genuine âpossessionâ of what is forthcomingâin order to âpossessâ inexhaustibly in its own way and so is sovereignty over the abyssâ, over what can never be exhausted. The inexhaustibility of the abyss is âgroundedâ not in immeasurableness and not in a nearness that could be paced offâbut rather in the fact that the abyss immediately, constantly, and definitively repudiates every ground and support and compels into the oscillation of the âbetweenââprovided only that we do not take the abyss as a semblant ground and misuse it as a pretext and hiding place.
13
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 extremityâhow? 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.
14
The historical recollection of what has been is possible only where the recollected is transposed into the intimacy of the same actionâ; 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 pastâfor instance, when a historiologist of philosophy, a mere scholar, reports on a philosophy, or a âhistoriologist of literature,â who can be no poet, recounts an earlier poetry.
15
The beginning of our Western historical âDa-seinâ is the poetizing and thinking of the early and high Greek antiquityâand is nothing else, provided we do not conflate âhistoryâ with the zoological inheritance of the | successive generations of emerging and disappearing groups of living beings that âmakeâ a âcultureâ the way beavers make their âlodges.â
16
Everything dependsâthe act of beginning in the other beginning dependsânot in the sense of the beingness of beingsâbut in the sense of the truth of beyngâon the basic experience, i.e., on the leap to and of Da-sein qua the essential grounding of beyng itself.
17
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-seinâand so the unique decision, and so the god-bestowing beginningâand so an originary history, and so also a downgoing.
18
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 beingâcan enter into the strife of world and earth.
19
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 dispositionâthe âbetweenâ for everythingâhas alreadyâin clearing and illuminatingâoverthrown everything and in this way essentially occurs as the âbetweenâ which makes circulate in the âbetweenâ everything protruding and standing and fallingâsuch that what is present and absentâbeingsâmerely revolve like a narrow ring in an abyss.
20
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 generalitiesâand to ignorance of the decisiveness and uniqueness of everything essential ...