long-since familiar unity of space and time offers us a hold from which to illuminate the unity of locality and journeying. A brief consideration, however, revealed that space and time themselves remain obscure and questionable for us in their essence. Indeed all great thinkers of Western metaphysics have in each case thought the essence of space and time in terms of their own fundamental positions—yet for all the diversity of their metaphysical concepts of space and time. that essential determination that Aristotle set forth in his Physics shines through in each case. The Physics is the first attempted "metaphysics," or "ontology," of nature. Yet if the Physics of Aristotle intends something essentially different from modem natural science, which we know under the name "mathematical physics," we may nonetheless take a hint from the fact that the normative delimitation of the essence of place and of time for all metaphysics is to be found in a "physics." Roughly speaking, this entails that place and time are not conceived in terms of their relation to history or to human beings as historical, but rather are thought with respect to mere processes of movement in general. As such, the places and sequences of events in human history also fall into "dimensions," that is, into those realms in which space and time can be measured numerically. The representations of space and time that have held reign for almost two and a half thousand years are of the metaphysical kind. Yet insofar as Hölderlin's hymnal poetizing falls outside of all metaphysics, insofar as its poetizing of the rivers necessarily poetizes the historicality of human beings, and thus locale and time, metaphysics can be of no direct assistance to us in illuminating locality and journeying and their unity. For our thinking remains everywhere metaphysical, and this is not only because remnants of the Christian world view remain operative everywhere, if only in terms of a reversal and secularization, but rather because metaphysics first begins to achieve its supreme and utter triumph in our century as modem machine technology. It is a fundamental error to believe that because machines themselves are made out of metal and material, the machine era is "materialistic." Modern machine technology is "spirit," and as such is a decision concerning the actuality of everything actual. And because such a decision is essentially historical. machine technology as spirit will also decide this: that nothing of the historical world hitherto will return. It is just as childish to wish for a return to previous states of the world as it is to think that human beings could overcome metaphysics by denying it. All that remains is to unconditionally actualize this spirit so that we simultaneously come to know the essence of its truth.
When we say "all that remains," then that sounds like "fatalism," like merely a tired surrendering to the course of things. Yet in truth, this "all that remains" is not the last escape route. Rather, it is the first historical