his essence and is now the hodgepodge he is today? Why is man so defenselessly exposed to the constant assault of the historiographical? Why?—because Western man is historical in his essence, i.e., he is founding of history and at the same time destructive of it. Where man lives without history, historiography cannot become meaningful for him and hence cannot possibly gain power over him. Historiography, however, did not gain this confusing ascendancy over contemporary man, to an extent we can hardly imagine, because man has become too historical, but, quite to the contrary, it is because man is no longer historical enough in an original way and so cannot set limits to historiography and assign it its proper end.
We can therefore defend ourselves against the inundations of historiography (today the tide is rising higher and higher) only by, as it were, jumping out of history, although we will gain domination over historiography solely by winning back the power to take up historical Being. The loss of this power is neither accidental nor an isolated process. Instead, it belongs together most intimately with that event in Western history which Hölderlin was the first to suffer and thereby genuinely experience, and which Nietzsche subsequently expressed in his own way, by pointing out that Western man has, for the last two millennia, been unable to fashion for himself a God. What is the meaning of this lack of the power to fashion a God? We do not know. But it would be a much too cheap account if we deduced from it already the decline of Western man, even if it appears that all the powers of the West still at work, perhaps also those of the earth, are submerged in the pursuit and production of what is closest and most palpable, i.e., of what is useful to the many and to the life-will of anyone at all. History does not withhold itself from prediction but from calculating judgment, especially if we understand history in its longest and hence slowest and therefore hardly graspable occurrence: namely, the approach and distantiation of the gods in relation to beings—an event which lies far beyond and well on this side of the facticities of religions and churches and cults and which has as its concomitant opposite side what we are calling man’s strength or lack of strength with regard to history.
If there once were gods, who are now in flight from man, as they