greatness consists in their capacity to be “dictative”—in their sensing the concealed necessity of the machination of being and not letting themselves be drawn off course by any temptation. (Cf. p. 109.)
48
Publicity is not a measure of greatness, if greatness means the inceptuality of something unique in being. But publicity itself can indeed determine the essence of greatness, and this essence can appear in the form of the gigantic—everything concealed is small in the regard of this greatness but certainly not altogether null. You need to know which essence of greatness an age has in each case chosen for itself; otherwise, all valuations are confused. The only guarantee of the consummation of modernity is a humanity that already denies itself instinctively every meditation on that | which bears and guides an age in its apprehension of being, of truth, and of the human being himself.
49
The dangers of everything untimely lie, on the one hand, in the fact that it is inordinately overgrown and curbed by what is timely—i.e., by the binding opposition to the timely. On the other hand, the danger is that the untimely, although free from the timely and therefore already no longer un-timely, yet presses on to the wrong time and does not know its own time and is unable to wait for it. Moreover, the times of poetry, of thinking, and of acting are again different in each case. As long as historicism dominates us and history is calculated in one way or another—in sheer onlooking or in planned action—then ultimately there still exists the danger that even genuine meditation will degenerate into the shallowness of mere comparative analysis, will avoid being, and will not be selected for downgoing as the preparation of a beginning.
50
In the “Western democracies,” [“westliche Demokratien”], so-called geographically- politically, for a long time already and specifically in their spoken and unspoken “metaphysics,” | “modernity” has come to a standstill. The step into the consummation is lacking in force and above all in an essential calling. Everything happening here is compromise— attempt at vindicating and coping, no anticipatory configuring or guiding. From here, no decisions are made—above all, not ones of essential meditation on the inceptual and basic form of another