44
I. Prospect [54-55]

To ask the question of who we are is in fact more dangerous here than any other opposition encountered on the same level of certainty about the human being (the final form of Marxism, a form that has essentially nothing to do with Jewishness or even with Russianness; if an undeveloped spiritualism still lies dormant someplace, then that place is the Russian people; Bolshevism is originally Western, a European possibility: the rise of the masses, industry, technology, the dying out of Christianity; insofar, however, as the supremacy of reason, qua equalization of everyone, is merely a consequence of Christianity, which is itself basically of Jewish origin {cf. Nietzsche's idea of the slave revolt in morals}, Bolshevism is in fact Jewish; but then Christianity is also basically Bolshevist! Which decisions thereby become necessary?).

Yet the dangerousness of the question of who we are is at the same time, provided danger can compel what is highest, the only way for us to come to ourselves and thereby clear a path for the original salvation, i.e., the justification of the West out of its history.

The dangerousness of this question is in itself so essential for us that it loses the appearance of opposition to the new German will.

Yet this question, as a philosophical one, must be prepared for a long time hence and, provided it understands itself, cannot claim to want to replace, or even merely determine, what at the moment is the immediately necessary course.

Especially since the question of who we are must remain purely and fully incorporated into the asking of the basic question: how does beyng essentially occur?


20. The beginning and inceptual thinking11


The beginning is what grounds itself and what reaches ahead; it is self-grounding in the ground which is fathomed and opened up through the beginning; the beginning reaches ahead insofar as it grounds and is therefore unsurpassable. Because every beginning is unsurpassable, it must constantly be repeated and must be placed through confrontation into the uniqueness of its incipience [Anfänglichkeit] and thus of its ineluctable reaching ahead. This confrontation is original when it itself is inceptual, but this necessarily as another beginning.



11. With regard to "beginning," cf. lecture course, Der Anfang der abendlandischen Philosophie, summer semester 1932 (GA35); rectoral address, "Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitat," 1933 (GA16); Freiburg lecture, "Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," 1935.


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