determines the understanding of history in such a way that history is thrust aside into what lacks history, and its essence is sought therein. Blood and race become the bearers of history. Pre-historiology gives historiology its now valid character. The way humans bustle about and calculate, put themselves into the scene and into comparisons, the way humans order the past for themselves as background of their present, the way they spread the present out into an eternity—all this is evidence of the reign of historiology.
But what is meant here by historiology? It is the explanation which establishes facts about the past out of the horizon of a calculative bustling about with the present. Beings are thereby preconceived as the orderable, the producible, and the establishable (ἰδέα).
Establishing is in service to a retention whose aim is not so much to prevent the past from slipping away as it is to eternalize the present as that which is objectively present. Eternalizing, as a striving, is always a consequence of the dominance of historiology; it is an apparently prescribed flight of history from history. Eternalizing is the not ridding itself of itself (as something objectively present) of a present that is far from history.
Historiology, as this establishing, is a constant comparing, the introduction of an other, wherein the human being is mirrored as one who has made progress, a comparing which thinks away from itself because it can not cope with itself.
Historiology spreads the illusion that we can gain complete mastery over all reality, and it does so by adhering to everything superficial and displacing the surface itself which it takes as the only sufficient reality. Historiology, as implying an unlimited knowledge of all things, in all respects, and with all the means of presentation, i.e., as implying disposal over everything factual, leads to an exclusion from history. The more decisive this exclusion becomes, the more unrecognizable it is to those who are excluded.
Historiology, in its preliminary forms, in its development into science, and in the leveling down and intelligibility of this science to common calculation, is utterly a consequence of metaphysics, i.e., a consequence of the history of beyng, of beyng as history. Thereby, however, beyng and history remain completely concealed, indeed they even withhold themselves in this concealment.
History is beyng as appropriating event and must receive the determination of its essence on that basis, i.e., independently of any notion of becoming or development, independently of historiological considerations and explanations. Therefore the essence of history can also not be grasped through an orientation toward the historiological "object," the object investigated,