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VII. The Last God [406-407]

The absconding and advent of the gods are now moving together into what has been and are withdrawn from the past

But what is to come, the truth of beyng as refusal, contains the guarantee of vastness—not that of an empty and gigantic eternity, but that of the shortest path.

Yet belonging to this truth of beyng, to the refusal, is the veiling of nonbeings as such, the loosening and squandering of beyng. Only now must the abandonment by being remain. This loosening, however, is not empty arbitrariness and disorder; on the contrary, everything is now strictly bound in planning and control and in the exactitude of a sure course of action and a domination "without remainder." Nonbeings, under the semblance of beings, are brought by machination into the haven of beings, and human desolation, which is ineluctably compelled thereby, finds its compensation in "lived experience."

All this, as distorted essence, must become more necessary than ever before, because what is strangest also needs what is most common, and the fissure of beyng should not be obstructed through the concocted semblance of counter-balancings, "success," and false completion; for the last god hates all those more than anything else.

To speak of the last god—is that not a degradation of God, indeed pure and simple blasphemy? Yet what if the last god must be so named, because the decision about the gods ultimately leads under and among them and so raises to the highest the essence of the uniqueness of the Godhead?

If we think calculatively here and take "last" in the sense of sheer stoppage and ending, rather than in the sense of the most extreme and most compendious decision about what is highest, then any knowledge of the last god is of course impossible. Yet why should thinking about the Godhead be a matter of calculation instead of an attempt at meditation on the danger of something strange and incalculable?


255. The turning in the event1


The event has its innermost occurrence and its furthest reach in the turning. The turning which essentially occurs in the event is the concealed ground of all other, subordinate turnings, circles, and loops (cf., for example, the turning in the structure of the guiding questions or the circle in understanding), ones whose origin remains obscured and unquestioned, although they are readily taken in themselves as the "last."



1. Here the event is viewed with respect to the human being, who is determined as Dasein on the basis of the event.


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