And how should not, if this greatest and closest danger were dispelled (and it can be overcome only out of the concealed essence of the Germans as struggle for their own essence against all denial to possess the truth already)—how should not at the same time and inceptually the supreme victory of beyng—namely, the downgoing—already be won?
Of course, we still and ever more obstinately see in all downgoing only ending, stopping, succumbing, and perishing, rather than the highest testimony to, and history of, the uniqueness of beyng—and this fact gives an ever new impetus to meditate on the depth of the abandonment by being in the modern age and to come to know which inceptuality of questioning must face up to this abandonment. And thereby this questioning is only the harbinger sent ahead by beyng itself into the scarcely illuminated domain of its truth and destined to be a mere transition, a harbinger that grounds lonely abodes for the future of Assigned beyng and surrenders to a long stewardship. | The everyday judgments about everyday phenomena are then merely the always newly deposited flat shore of a sea whose currents no one knows and for the traversal of which the simplest boat has not yet been constructed and cannot be constructed as long as the human being considers and altogether calculates the traversal entirely in terms of the shore—away from the shore or toward it.
Yet those who stand in the service of machination and pursue their superficial affairs are the ones who least of all know what is thereby happening to them. Nor should they know it; instead, they believe that they are the bearers of truth and that their pursuits are indeed alone the cynosure of everything. Nevertheless, with time, “romanticism” must recede and give way to the relentlessness of the equipping in arms. The main supports of every genuine—i.e., forceful and today even gigantic—dominion are indeed the hypocrisy of promoting universal well-being (happiness and beauty for all) and that relentless arming which can immediately and definitively strike down every attack. Necessarily following in the wake of this are romanticism, enthusiasm, and the fullness of lived experience.
Yet these supports of dominion must never be deprecated “morally”—they are what they are qua effective forms of machination and | leave just as much room for the integrity of personal convictions and sentiments as for the despicableness of mere careerism. Therefore, history must never be evaluated in these respects, in case history itself ever wants to be experienced. Falsely, and only from the arrested standpoint of the democracies, the executors of the consummation of modernity to its highest essence are called “dictators”—; but their