e.g., the gigantic accomplishments of technology, become themselves the greatest “lived experience,” and the lived experiences seek the form of a contrivance. A boxing match is a “lived experience,” but surely not for the boxers themselves; they have no lived experience, but at the limit they still box; the lived experience resides in the spectators, and what is lived is the entire display of a grand-production theater. The lived experience becomes a contrivance; let us reflect a moment on what has been put together in the term “confessional front,” a term which is not merely due to the process of forming it [denken wir einmal einen Augenblick nach, was im Wort “Bekenntnisfront” sich zusammengefunden hat, und dass es zu diesem Wort, nicht nur zum Vorgang kommt].
The lived experience as our contrivance, and the latter itself as a lived experience—what arises in this process as a whole cannot be attributed to any one individual but is the process in which man, conscious of himself, and operating, as the “rational animal,” draws the ultimate consequences of his “culture” and “civilization”: the most extreme distancing from his primordially established position with regard to beings. It is one and the same process that the original essence of truth could not be retained and that historical man everywhere comes to his end along with his contrivances and lived experiences. No wonder that for us today only rarely and with difficulty does it become clear what occurred in the beginning of Western thinking as beginning.
§34. The need and the necessity of our inquiry into unconcealedness itself on the basis of a more original understanding of the first beginning.
The adherence of the Greeks to the beginning, to an inquiry into beings as such, and their adherence to the first answer, to the unfolding of what it opens up, hence their lack of inquiry into truth, are not omissions or failures but testimony to the power of the Greeks to be equal to a necessity. If we now ask, and perhaps must ask, what this unconcealedness itself is, then our inquiry cannot be a mere making up for an omission. Then what must it be, if it is the preparation for the occurrence of something not yet come to pass? What must our questioning be at least and at