of its intimacy, bestows itself into its essence which is older than its first essence. Let us learn thereby that the basic movement of beyng (a movement which trembles qua modernity) is de-divinization: the unfolding all the way to the end and the entrenchment of decisionlessness about the god.
A god is only the one and the ones that tear humans away from “beings” and that compel beyng as the “between” for themselves and for humans—those gods that must have first arrived if a people is to find its essence.
But the god is never an “object” of Christian tactics or of political expedients or of “incantations” drunk on “lived experiences,” incantations in which such “objects” could perhaps become “perceptible.”
30
Modernity—the age that is more and more sure of its essence the more exclusively it thinks only of what it does. But “it does” only what the fullness of subjectivity must do—preserve itself in meditationlessness— perhaps | to the point of self-destruction. Meditationlessness, however, is not mere blindness; on the contrary, it is gigantism in calculation, and precisely that is what requires gigantism in the unleashing of the drives to violence and to destruction.
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Philosophy—perhaps we have already been too long and too exclusively accustomed to seeking and finding, in what is said and accomplished and thus publicly produced, the unconcealing of what is concealed. And perhaps that is why our claims on the concealed and ultimately on the height and essence of concealedness are very ordinary, superficial, and crude. How could we then still be surprised if humans know little of the event of reticence and above all want to know nothing of it? They had to encounter here a power which has long since convulsed their everyday activity and security without acquainting them about it. Yet there could come into history a moment which required of humans a few who expressly carry out this reticence— even if only for an instant, in order to procure for history a now necessary transition. It could | be that humans would for a time even need to involve themselves in a knowledge of this moment and, unified with that, in the renunciation of “deliberately” (and with the assistance of definite measures) arranging and compelling the impending transition according to what dominates as ordinary. Admittedly— when and where are to be found those who are clear enough