dread. The essential determinant as regards "nihilism" is not whether churches and monasteries are destroyed and people are murdered or whether this ceases and "Christianity" is allowed to go its way. Instead, what is determinant is whether one knows or even wants to know that precisely this tolerance shown to Christianity, and Christianity itself, as well as the loose talk of "providence" and the "Lord God," no matter how sincere the individuals may be who speak thus, are mere ways of escape and mere predicaments in that domain one does not wish to acknowledge or give validity to as the decisive domain regarding beyng or non-beyng. The most fateful nihilism consists in one's posing as a defender of Christianity and even claiming, on the basis of social accomplishments, to be the most Christian of Christians. The entire danger of this nihilism resides in the fact that it is utterly concealed to itself and is contrasted, sharply and justifiably, against what could be called crude nihilism (e.g., Bolshevism). Yet the essence of nihilism is indeed so abyssal (since nihilism reaches down into the truth of beyng and into the decision about this truth) that precisely these most oppositional forms can and must belong to it. Therefore it also seems that nihilism, calculated as a whole and in a fundamental way, cannot be overcome. If the two extreme oppositional forms of nihilism battle each other, and indeed necessarily in the most strident manner, then this battle will lead in one way or another to the victory of nihilism i.e., to its renewed entrenchment and presumably in such a form as to rule out the very notion that nihilism is still at work.

Beyng has so radically abandoned beings and left them to machination and "lived experience" that all "cultural politics" and those apparent attempts at saving Western culture must necessarily become the most insidious form of nihilism and thereby its highest form. This is not a process tied to individuals and to their actions and teachings; instead, it merely propels the inner essence of nihilism into the purest form assigned to it. To be sure, meditation on this already requires a standpoint from which neither is any illusion possible regarding the many "goods" achieved, the "progress," and the "gigantic" accomplishments, nor indeed can utter despair emerge, which only has not yet closed its eyes to the complete senselessness. This standpoint, which grounds space and time anew for itself, is Dasein, on whose ground beyng itself first comes to be known as refusal and thus as appropriating event. The preparation for overcoming nihilism is paved by the basic experience that the human being, as the one who grounds Da-sein, is needed by the godhood of the other god. What is most inescapable and most difficult in this overcoming is the knowledge of nihilism.