Being itself throws the human being into the course of this tearing-away, which forces the human being beyond itself, as the one who moves out to Being, in order to set Being to work and thus to hold open beings as a whole. Therefore the violence- doer knows no kindness and conciliation (in the ordinary sense), no appeasement and mollification by success or prestige and by their confirmation. In all this, the violence-doer as creator sees only a seeming fulfillment, which is to be despised. In willing the unprecedented, the violence-doer casts aside all help. For such a one, disaster is the deepest and broadest yes to the overwhelming. In the shattering of the wrought work, in knowing that the work is unfit and a σάρμα (dungheap), the violence-doer leaves the overwhelming to its fittingness. But none of this takes the form of “lived experiences in the soul,” in which the soul of the creator wallows, and it is absolutely not a petty feeling of inferiority; instead, it occurs solely in the manner of setting- into-work itself. The overwhelming, Being, confirms itself in works as history.

As the breach for the opening up of Being in beings—a Being that has been set into work—the Dasein of historical humanity is an in-cident,⁶⁸ the incident in which the violent forces of the released excessive violence of Being suddenly emerge and enter the work as history. The Greeks had a deep intimation of this suddenness and uniqueness of Dasein, an intimation into which they were urged by Being itself, which disclosed itself to them as φύσις and λόγος and δίκη. It is unthinkable that the Greeks decided that they wanted to produce culture for the next few millennia of the West. Because they and they alone, in the unique urgency of their Dasein, uniquely used only violence, and by doing so did not abolish the urgency but only intensified it,

68. Zwischen-fall: etymologically, a between-case or fall-between.