as resistance and resentment. That subjection appears as will, and that means it is also effective here.
However, where one interprets the execution of this metaphysical will as a "product" of selfishness and the caprice of "dictators" and "authoritarian states," there speak only political calculation and propaganda, or the metaphysical naivete of a thinking that ran aground centuries ago, or both. Political circumstances, economic situations, population growth, and the like, can be the proximate causes and horizons for carrying out this metaphysical will of modern world-history. But they are never the ground of this history and therefore never its "end." The will to preservation, and that always means the will to enhance life and its lastingness, works essentially against decline and sees deficiency and powerlessness in what lasts only a short while.
On the contrary, for the inception of our history, for the Greeks, decline was unique, momentary, laudable, and great. Clearly, we have to distinguish here between decline while entering into something unique, and perishing while clinging fast to the ordinary. What is imperishable in the inception does not consist in the longest possible duration of its consequences nor in the furthest possible extension and breadth of its effects, but in the rarity and singularity of each varied return of what is originary within it. Hence we cannot experience the inception through mere historiological familiarity with what was before, but only in realizing what essentially came to be known at the inception itself.
4. Practicing the relation to what is “thought-worthy” by considering the ground
If now and then we hear a brief saying of the incipient Greek thinkers of the West, the important thing at first is that we hear, and we think about the fact that everything has to do with us. But in order to consider this, we must actually become practiced in thinking. The worst way to Practice thinking, however, would be an academic course in "logic." The usual, orthodox logic thinks, at best (if it thinks at all), "about" thinking. But we do not learn to think originarily when someone shows us how to think, in an inferior and long-since impossible manner, "about" thinking. Rather, we learn to think only when we try to attain an essential and