other history of being. Yet an apparently external power, great wealth, inherited “culture,” a spirit of mere resistance, and a vast amount of hypocrisy—place something like a barricade in front of the transition to the consummation of modernity—a barricade that can delay but is incapable of stopping the essential consummation of modernity, because everything contributing to such a barricade is only a surpassed preliminary form of the consummation—in the modern sense, but without the courage for the unfolded essence and for the extreme essential consequences. Accordingly, even precisely there a remarkable religious-commercial-“political” vindication of Christianity—accordingly, even there an utter incapacity to grasp in its abyssal character the metaphysical beginning of Western history in the Greeks—accordingly, as the already long-extant consequence, an evasive escape into “humanism.”
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Because the “consummation” of modernity does indeed not amount to a mere finishing of something already underway, since a consummation is always the last and authentic grasp of a previously hidden essence, therefore such consummation necessarily takes on the character of a new start. This gives rise, however, to the often long-persisting ambiguity as to whether this start launches the consummation or whether it does not already reach forth beyond the consummation to another beginning. The two are not mutually exclusive—they can exist simultaneously but can never be brought about by the same basic relations of human creating and suffering. Why does the consummation of modernity pertain to “politics” qua unconditional “technology”? Why does the transition into the other beginning pertain to an already—precedent—poetry (Hölderlin)? And why does this poetry above all need a long—poetryless—thoughtful meditation on the beginning of Western history, i.e., on the still ungrounded truth of beyng? How few recognize the simultaneity of what is essentially different and of the historical destiny of “acting” and of thinking? How few are able to know that this simultaneity is necessary and are able to affirm (not merely acquiesce in) the sovereignty of what is public and at the same time tolerate, indeed demand, the passing over and overlooking of the genuine | transition as essentially justified? Who surmises that beings as a whole are, in concealed tremors and unnoticed strokes, twisted free from the abandonment by being? Yet we all too readily “think” in terms of the historiological comparison and planning of history, without recognizing history itself as a course of the event of the truth of beyng. This course ultimately generated the