historiology through which the gods were indeed driven to flight, specifically such that at the same time the semblance of a substitute was offered in aesthetically experienced “art”—which for its part bred the “lived experience” that then ultimately, as “religious” lived experience, feigned to possess what is “divine.”
52
Nihilism (cf. above, p. 45) resides not where being qua machination is displaced and instituted in its unconditional power, but where, under an appeal to proven “ideals” and “cultural assets” (as ineffective goals), it is held fast by the accident of a handed-down state of affairs. Here are carried out the proper and most covert thwarting of all decisions and the disavowal of beyng and thus also of nothingness. On the other hand, where machination has become unconditioned, there indeed nothingness is likewise rejected as nugatory—but at the same time is unwittingly sought out as unrecognized abyss—by way of an evasion from it.
53
Thinking purely “metaphysically” (i.e., in heeding the history of beyng), during the years 1930–1934 I saw in National Socialism the possibility of a transition to another beginning and interpreted it that way. Thereby I mistook and undervalued this “movement” in its genuine powers and inner necessities as also in the extent and kind of its greatness. What starts there, and specifically in a much more profound— i.e., more comprehensive and drastic—way than in Fascism, is the consummation of modernity—. The consummation had indeed more or less started in “romanticism”—with respect to the anthropomorphizing of the human being in his self-certain rationality—but the actual consummation requires the decisiveness of what is historiological- technological in the sense of the Complete “mobilization” of all the capacities of self-reliant humanity. One day even the opposition to the Christian Churches must be carried out in a Christianityless “Protestantism,” one which Fascism of itself is incapable of supplying.
Full insight into my earlier delusion regarding the essence and the essential historical force of National Socialism first resulted in the necessity 28 of affirming National Socialism and indeed on | thoughtful grounds. But also said thereby is that this “movement” remains independent
28. {Heidegger makes a mistake in numbering here. The mispagination has been allowed to stand, so that the cross-references will remain correct.}