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Knowledge and action.—Let it be conceded that thinking can by itself “effectuate” nothing immediately, especially if “effectuation” and “reality” are gauged according to the number and extent of changes in what is present-at-hand. Let it be admitted that we need those who act. But let us also for a moment meditate on what a lack of thought and knowledge effectuates; these “effects” are still more gigantic than all the results of action, and they are also more necessary, if indeed the essence of modernity cannot avoid its consummation and must even maintain a “greatness” in this consummation.
All such “ponderings” never have the aim of simply establishing “states of affairs,” of looking on the “dark side,” or even of “criticizing,” without being able to commend an effective means of change. Instead, the point is always only to think out from the reference to what is closest, out into beyng itself and its simple basic movement. In turn, the purpose of that is not to acquire a mere “metaphysical” insight instead of insight bearing on the critique of culture. To the contrary, the goal is always meditation—the self-transposing of humanity into the domain of the truth of beyng—which means: exposure to the plight and to the need of a transformation, one which is already older than all historiological | incidents and also younger than the newest achievements. For, this transformation of the human being from subject to the grounder and steward of Da-sein is the necessity of beyng itself— and that has always required such a transformation, because beyng in itself is only the “between” in whose openness the gods and humans become recognizable to one another and fitted together in order to raise up beings as a whole to the glory of the god and at the hazard of the human being.
In which basic movement of beyng does our—historiologically unrecognized— history vibrate? What is modernity itself in the short span of Western history with its few simple thrusts of beyng? Is modernity the liberation of the distorted essence of beyng (the liberation of the machination arising out of this distorted essence) into the affiliation with the essence of beyng? And if this essence—thus consummated in its first beginning—will launch the other beginning, in whose course the simplicity and stillness of beyng first create an excess of appurtenance to the struggle over the gods and humans, in the age of which not only are the old tables of “values” smashed, but so are all the “new” ones, because the wretchedness of “values” | no longer finds shelter in the spatiotemporal field of the truth of beyng— then this, by refusing itself (as the event of appropriation) in the abyss