of all history. This anti-Christian "worldview" is only apparently un-Christian, for in essence it nevertheless agrees with the kind of thinking that characterizes "liberalism."
3. The transcendent is in the above case an "idea" or "value" or "meaning," something for which one cannot live or die but which is supposed to be realized through "culture."
4. Any two of these transcendences are mixed together—Christianity and ideas of a people, or cultural politics and ideas of a people, or Christianity and culture—or else all three are mixed in various degrees of determinateness. This mixed formation is today the average and dominant "worldview," in which everything is intended but nothing can any longer come to a decision.
As different as these "worldviews" are, and as fiercely as they battle one another, whether openly or in a hidden way—provided wandering around in the undecided may still be called battling—they all agree from the start, without realizing it or even considering it, that the human being can be taken as already known in essence, as the being in relation to which and on the basis of which all "transcendence" is determined, indeed determined as something that is itself supposed to determine the human being in the first place. This is made radically impossible, however, because humans are thereby already fixed in their determinability instead of being determined as what must be dis-lodged out of a previous fixity so as to be first attuned toward a determinability.
Yet how are human beings supposed to be dislodged out of their fixity, to which belongs primarily the domination of those "transcendences" and of their mixtures? If humans must carry out this dislodging by relying on their own resources, then is not the presumptuousness of giving the measure even greater than it is when the human being is simply put forth as the measure?
Or is it possible that this dislodging could befall humans? It could, to be sure. And that is the plight of the abandonment by being. This plight does not first need help but instead must itself first become the help. Yet this plight must actually be experienced. What if humans are hardened against it, indeed, as it seems, more obdurately than ever? Then those who awaken must arrive, those who would be the last ones to believe they had discovered the plight, because they are aware of suffering it.
The awakening to this plight is the first dislodging of the human being into that between where confusion presses on and, in like measure, the god continues to abscond. This "between," however, is not a "transcendence" in relation to the human being; it is, on the contrary, that open realm to which the human being pertains as the one