180 • The Restriction of Being

Both, each in a different way, are menaced by perdition. The one who is violence-doing, the creative one, who sets out into the un-said, who breaks into the un-thought, who compels what has never happened and makes appear what is unseen, this violence-doing one stands at all times in daring (τόλμα, line 371). Insofar as he dares the conquest of Being, he must risk the assault of un-beings, the μὴ καλόν,67 disintegration, un-constancy, un-structure, and unfittingness. The higher the peak of historical Dasein rises, the more gaping is the abyss for the sudden plunge into the unhistorical, which then only flails around in a confusion that has no way out and at the same time has no site.Having come to the end of the second phase, we may ask what yet another phase is supposed to do.

The third phase. The decisive truth of the ode was brought into relief by the first phase. The second phase led us through all [124|170] the essential domains of the violent and the violence-doing. The concluding strophe completes the whole by pulling it together into the essence of the uncanniest. Some details still remain to be noticed and explicated more closely. This would result only in a supplement to what has been said so far, but nothing that would demand a new phase of the interpretation. If we restrict ourselves to explicating what is directly said in the poetry, the interpretation is at an end. And yet with this the interpretation stands for the first time at the inception. The authentic interpretation must show what does not stand there in the words and nevertheless is said. For this, the interpretation must necessarily use violence. What is authentic is to be sought where nothing further can be found by scientific exegesis, which brands as unscientific everything that exceeds its domain.


67. These words from Antigone, line 370, are conventionally translated “not beautiful,” “ignoble,” or “dishonorable.”

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