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VII. The Last God [414-415]

not to resist beyng, something which indeed the previous beings, ones in the previous truth, had to do exclusively

The inventive thinking of the truth of beyng will succeed only if, in the passing by of the god, the empowering of humans to their necessity becomes manifest and thus the ap-propriation in the excess of the turning between human belonging and divine needfulness comes into the open, in order for the appropriation to show its self-concealment as central and to show itself as the center of self-concealment and to compel the oscillation and thereby make leap forth the freedom toward the ground of beyng as grounding the "there."

The last god is the beginning of the longest history on the shortest path of that history. A long preparation is required for the great moment of the passing by of the last god. Peoples and states are too small for the preparation of that moment, i.e., already torn away too much from all growth and delivered over only to machination.

Only the great, hidden single ones will create the stillness for the passing by of the god and will produce among themselves the reticent unison of those who are prepared.

Beyng, as the most unique and most rare, in opposition to nothingness, will have withdrawn itself from the massiveness of beings, and all history—where it reaches down to its proper essence—will serve only this withdrawal of being into its full truth. Yet the successes and failures of everything public will swarm and follow closely one upon the other, whereby, typical of that which is public, nothing will be surmised of what is actually happening. It is only between this reigning of the massive and the genuinely sacrificed that the few and their allies will seek and find one another in order to surmise that something concealed—namely, that passing by—is happening to them in the midst of all the tearing away of every "happening" into what is of high speed yet at the same time completely graspable and thoroughly consumable. The perverting and confusing of the claims and of their domains will no longer be possible, because the truth of beyng itself, in the sharpest falling apart of the fissure of beyng, has brought the essential possibilities to decision.

This historical moment is not an "ideal situation," because the latter will always be incompatible with the essence of history. Instead, this moment is the eventuation of that turning in which the truth of beyng comes to the beyng of truth, since the god needs beyng and since the human being, as Da-sein, must have grounded the belonging to beyng. Beyng as the innermost "between" is then akin to nothingness for this moment; the god overpowers the human being, and the latter surpasses the god—immediately, so to speak. Yet both are only in the event, and the truth of beyng itself is as this event.


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger