if that refers only to the artistes and danseurs of the Berlin Wintergarten.26 All these never-too-many need perpetual opportunities to gain “lived experience”—for what else could they do with their “life,” if they did not have a lived experience of it? Moreover, there are still “Christians” who, | because they surmise nothing of what actually is, believe that they live in “catacombs,” whereas they recently knew they were in “heaven” since there were opportunities everywhere for sharing in political power. The Phariseeism of Karl Barth27 and his adherents surpasses even that of ancient Jewry by those measures posited necessarily with the modern history of being. These adherents believe that the loudest possible screaming about the long-since-dead God would lead at once into a domain of decision regarding the divinity of the gods. Because these adherents flee into the past while speaking “dialectically,” they believe themselves to be lifted out of time into “eternity”—whereas they merely, qua the genuine destroyers, undermine “the future” (but not the progress) of humanity. In truth they are nevertheless the quite aloof and ignorant promoters of the brutalitas—they belong in their own way to the indispensable ones by contributing to the prevention of essential knowledge and to the opening of the path for the brutalitas of being.
A consequence—not at all the basis—of the brutalitas of being is that the human being makes of himself, as a being, explicitly | and thoroughly a factum brutum [“brute fact”] and “establishes” his animality by means of the doctrine of race. This theory of “life” is therefore the most plebeian form in which the question-worthiness of beyng poses as something self-evident—without this theory surmising it in the least. The elevation of humanity through the flight into technology—explanation on the basis of race—the “leveling down” of all “appearances” to the basic form of the “expression” of something or other—all this is ever “correct” and is “illuminating” for everyone—because there is nothing here to question, since the question of the essence of truth has become inaccessible from the start. This “theory” is distinguished from other “natural scientific worldviews” only in that it apparently affirms everything “spiritual” and indeed first brings it into “effectiveness,” and yet simultaneously and at the deepest level denies the “spiritual” with a denial that drifts toward the most radical nihilism—for it is “in the last analysis” (i.e., already at its commencement) an “expression” of race. In the framework of this teaching, everything
26. {Famous variety theater in Berlin, destroyed by bombing in 1944.}
27. {Karl Barth (1886–1968), important Protestant theologian, co-founder of the “Confessional Church” critical of National Socialism.]