79
§46 [99-101]


This plight, as the ground of the necessity of philosophy, is experienced through the shock in the jubilation of belonging to being, and that belonging, in its intimating, brings the abandonment by being into the open.


46. The decision
(Preliminary concept)


about what? About history or loss of history, i.e., about belonging to beyng or abandonment in nonbeings.

Why decision; i.e., because of what? Can that be decided?

What is decision anyway? Choice? No; choosing always concerns only something pregiven, something that can be taken or rejected.

Here de-cision means grounding and creating, disposing in advance and beyond oneself, or else abandoning and losing.

Yet is that not here and everywhere both arrogant and impossible at the same time? Is it not in concealment that history comes and goes as it does? Yes and no.

The decision arises in the stillest stillness and has the longest history.

Who decides? Everyone, even by not deciding and by not wanting to know about it through an avoidance of the preparation.

What is to be decided? We ourselves? Who are we? In our belonging and non-belonging to being.

The decision is related to the truth of being, not only related to it but rather determined by it alone.

What is intended here is thus decision in a preeminent sense, and that is the reason for speaking about the most extreme decision which is at once the most intimate.

But this decision is because of what? Because only out of the deepest ground of beyng itself is there a saving of beings: saving as justifying preservation of the law and assignment of the West. Must that be? How does it happen that there is a saving only in this way? Because the danger has increased to the extreme on account of the uprooting taking place everywhere and also (which is even more portentous) because this uprooting is already in the act of hiding itself-in other words, because the onset of the lack of history is already here.

The decision arises in stillness, not as coming to a resolution but as the resoluteness that already grounds truth, i.e., re-creates beings and thus is a creative decision or else is stupor.

Yet why and how preparation of this decision?


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