"Towering high above the site, forfeiting the site
Is he for whom non-beings always are
For the sake of risk."
These two statements name what is unhomely in human beings, and do so by indicating that human beings indeed never attain their essence among whatever beings they "get" or get "hold of" on any occasion. The second statement names that proper realm within which human beings, venturing everywhere in all directions, fail to arrive at any experience. In the midst of beings, the πόλις is the open site of all beings, which are here gathered into their unity because the πόλις is the ground of such unity and reaches back into that ground. The πόλις is not some special or isolated region of human activity. Yet the fact that all activity and occasioning undertaken by human beings as historical has in every respect the πόλις as its site, as the locale to which it belongs, is not to be conflated with the modern "totality" of the "political," which historically is quite different in kind. This merely leads to a falsification of the Greek by way of the modern, and indeed of the modern by way of the Greek.
Because modern thought grasps all beings in terms of consciousness, modernity conceives of all history "historiographically," that is, according to the manner and way in which it is established in (investigative) human consciousness. As self-consciousness, however, such consciousness is intent on being unconditionally certain of itself and thereby of all beings that can be experienced. The fundamental guise of such certainty that provides its measure is the surveyability and indubitability of everything that Can be calculated and planned. That consciousness that wishes to be certain of history must therefore be a consciousness that plans and acts. The fundamental modern form in which the specifically modern, self-framing self-consciousness of human beings orders all beings is the state. For this reason, the "political" becomes the definitive self-certainty of historiographical consciousness. The political is determined in terms of history grasped according to consciousness, that is, experienced in a "technical" manner. The "political" is the way in which history is accomplished. Be cause the political is thus the technical and historiographical fundamental certainty of all action, the "political" is marked by an unconditional failure to question itself. The failure to question the "political" belongs together with its totality. Yet the grounds and subsistence of such belonging together do not rest, as some naive minds think, on the arbitrary willfulness of dictators but in the metaphysical essence of modern actuality in general. Such actuality. however. is fundamentally different from that way of being in which and from out of which the Greek world was historical. For the Greeks, the πόλις is that which is altogether worthy of question. For