concealing. History i s the history of Being. Those who are struck by the clearing of refusal, those who do not know which way to turn in the face of it, are those who flee meditation: duped too long by beings, they are so alienated from Being that they cannot even come up with a reason to be suspicious of it. Still trapped in utter servitude to a metaphysics they think they have long since suppressed , they seek escape routes to some arcane realm, some world beyond the sensuous. They flee into mysticism (which is the mere counterimage of metaphysics) or, frozen in the posture of calculation, they appeal to "values." "Values, "utterly transformed into calculable items, are the only ideals that still function for machination: culture and cultural values as grist for the mill of propaganda, art products as serviceable objects—at exhibitions of our achievements and as decorations for parade floats.
We neither know nor risk something other, something that in times to come will be the one and only: the truth of Being. For, however ungrounded it may be, it haunts the first commencement of our history. We neither know nor risk inherence in that truth from which alone world and earth strive to acquire their essence for man. Man experiences in such strife the response of his essence to the god of Being. Prior gods are the gods that have been.
The consummation of metaphysics as the essential fulfillment of modernity is an end only because its historical ground is itself a transition to the other commencement. The latter does not leap outside the history of the first, does not renounce what has been, but goes back into the grounds of the first commencement. With this return it takes on another sort of permanence. Such permanence is not defined in terms of the preservation of any given present thing. It bends to the task of preserving what is to come. What has been in the first commencement is thereby compelled to rest in the abyss of its heretofore ungrounded ground. It thus for the first time becomes history.
Such transition is not progress, nor is it a dreamy voyage from the prior to the new. The transition is seamless, inasmuch as it pertains to the decision of primordial commencement. The latter cannot be grasped by historical retrogressions or by historical maintenance of what has come down to us. Commencement only is in commencing. Commencement is the handing-over that is tradition. Preparation of