24
I. Prospect [27-28]

This that is closest is so close that all unavoidable pursuit of machinations and of lived experiences must necessarily have passed it by already and therefore can never be brought back immediately to it. The event remains the most alienating


8. Of the event4


The absconding of the gods must be experienced and endured

This endurance grounds the most remote closeness to the event

This event is the truth of beyng

It is in this truth that the plight of the abandonment by being first opens up.

Out of this plight the grounding of the truth of being, the grounding of Da-sein, becomes necessary.

This necessity occurs in the constant decision pervading all historical humanity: whether the human being in the future belongs to the truth of being and thus, out of this belonging and for it, shelters the truth (as what is true) in beings, or whether the onset of the last human being drives this being away into a distorted animality and denies to the historical human being the last god.

What if the battle over measures would die away; what if the same willing no longer willed greatness, i.e., no longer summoned up a will for the greatest difference in the ways?

If the other beginning is still preparing itself, then this preparation is concealed as a great transformation. And it is all the more concealed, the greater the occurrence. The error consists of course in assuming that an essential overturning, which affects everything from the ground up, must also be known and grasped immediately, and altogether, by everyone and must play out in full public view. Only a few stand always in the brightness of this lightning.

Most have the "good fortune" to find themselves amid objectively present things and thereby to pursue what is their own by pursuing what is useful for a whole.

In the other beginning, what is thought in advance is the entirely other "domain of decision," as it was called, in which the proper historical beyng of peoples is won or lost.

This being [Sein]—historicality—is never the same in every era. It now stands on the verge of an essential transformation, inasmuch as it is given the task of grounding that domain of decision, that nexus of the event, in virtue of which historical human beings are first



4. Cf. Prospect, 16. Philosophy.


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger