people—who never know the truth. Only in that way will they come to their “space”! Whereby we of course always primarily mean the place in which the many who are crowded together can spread out. But what if this place were one day given back to us, and yet the necessity of the space continued, indeed perhaps first broke out then? What if the people had as a goal only to be the people, i.e., to remain what they already “are” as present at hand; would this people not then have the volition to be a people without space, without the projective domain in whose abysses they might first find the heights to overgrow themselves and the depths to pursue a rootedness in the dark and to have something self-closed (truly an earth) as that which bears? Or should we maintain that if only the “place” were secured first, then the space would of itself devolve upon the people? Wretched blindness? That “place” for those who are all too many and are ever becoming more numerous would a fortiori have to suffocate completely every necessity of space and thereby stifle the possibility of a historically | creative indigenousness. Therefore, the meditation of the few must go much further, beyond the current shake-up, so that from afar a long goal might strike them and prevent them from being blinded by what is current. (Cf. p. 30f.)
4
Let us not fall prey to empty classicisms which persuade themselves of their “newness” through gigantic proportions and compact means. Let us not become insensitive to the well-concealed emptiness and to the lack of all projective powers and spaciousness in all the smoothness and strictness of the gigantic forms. The latter become ever more easy to learn in the readily increasing cleverness in its domination, and what is alien nowhere finds a place to break in any longer. “Taste” becomes “better,” and the capacity to taste—the power to surmise in advance that which is still unsurmised—becomes rarer.
How should we surmise what is beautiful, if the essential ground of beauty—truth as the truth of beyng—is so completely withdrawn from meditation, especially since meditation is detested and obstructed on account of the unquestionable possession of “truth”?
5
Mere opposition to historicism leads at most to the unhistoricality of machinational “lived experience” but never to the grounding of an essential history. For, to fill up the coming time with incidents and to interpret these as “happenings” still cannot mean to ground history, because what is necessary for that is the compulsion toward a