human never fully throws this word away, since doing so would apparently bring about the loss of his own essence.
Let us imagine, if only for a few minutes, what would become of the human if it came about that every possibility of saying and understanding the words ‘is’ and ‘being’ were revoked. No catastrophe that could befall the planet can be compared with this seemingly most trivial of events [Ereignisse] in which the human’s relation to ‘is’ is suddenly suspended. But this catastrophe has long since arrived, only no one has noticed it in its essence. The human, in its history, has reached the point where he has forgotten the ‘is’ and ‘being,’ insofar as he renounces any consideration of what is named by this word. Indifference to ‘being’ has besieged the planet. The human being allows himself to be washed over by the flood of this forgetfulness of being. But, in truth, this is not even a ‘diving into’ the flood anymore, for that would still require an awareness of the forgetfulness of being. Precisely this forgetfulness of being has itself already been forgotten, which is surely in accordance with the essence of forgetting, sucking up everything in its radius like an undertow.
But what do the thinkers of metaphysics say who, since Plato, have been appointed as the ‘guardians’ of the being of beings? What does the last thinker in the history of metaphysics say about the being of beings? Nietzsche says: ‘being’ is the last vapor of an evaporating reality. Is not the forgetfulness of being justified here by metaphysics itself? Certainly. So, it is not worth our while anymore to remember something [84] that is a mere vapor. It is enough if the human ‘lives’ and acts ‘true to life’ and ‘true to reality.’ Why does the human need being, if beings and reality are already enough for him to, as it is oft en said, ‘fulfill’ his life? With this, one concedes that otherwise there is obviously an emptiness. In fact, through Nietzsche’s metaphysics, ‘being’ is rendered into a mere value: however, this devalued ‘being’ is ‘worth’ even less than ‘becoming,’ i.e., even less than the will to power. For in Nietzsche’s metaphysics the being of beings, which has remained the to-be-thought for all metaphysics, evaporates in one last vapor, which is why Nietzsche’s metaphysics is the end of all metaphysics: for in this final stage a decision is made about being, against which any patchwork solution on the part of a prior metaphysics or a flight into a rehashed Christianity is no longer viable.
But how stubbornly and tirelessly must metaphysics remain within its forgetfulness of being if, as it seems, even two world wars cannot wrest the historical human from out of his mere engagement with beings and awaken humanity’s fear regarding the forgetfulness of being, placing the human before being itself.
Suppose that, however, we were to be placed before being in a less painful way. Suppose that, with one fell swoop, the modern human were to be deprived of such things as the movie theater, the radio, the newspaper, the theater, concerts, boxing matches, and ‘travel.’ Suppose it came about that the human were forced to subsist with only the simple things: he would rather ‘die’ than remember being!
But if we are all so unfamiliar with being and cannot find our way into a thinking of it, how can we be expected to be able to think, as if overnight, what is