of all beginnings to gigantic proportions. But how is a thoughtful directedness into the history of beyng supposed to become the tidings of the essence of the uncanniness to which we have grown all too acclimated?
Why then do those who are near to “life” and are drunk on “reality” know nothing of being—which alone “is”? To what extent are they the complete nihilists and thus the ignorant co-preparers of something already from afar risen up toward what is approaching?
69
Why is meditation with so much difficulty and so rarely equal to the decisive insight: that beyng in its truth can never be derived from beings? It is because this insight demands a transformation of human beings which infinitely surpasses everything hitherto and at the same time elevates what is simplest and unique into what is most worthy, out of whose restraint in relation to all power and impotence the anthropomorphizing of the human being into animality is negated. The enduring of that insight is the other beginning of philosophy; in order to satisfy this endurance all the way to the bold clarity of the essential questions, the preparation of philosophy must renounce everything doctrinal and do so out of patience for a concealed maturing. What does the lush waving of the golden spikes of grain in the radiance of the summer sun know of | the night of the enclosure of the seed in the hard earth?
70
It is not an accident and also not a personal exaggeration on the part of Nietzsche that in the consummation of Western metaphysics, whose basic character involves defining the human being on the basis of an at hand (present) animality and vitality, now also this animality is emerging in the consummation of the predatory nature of the roving beast. The predatory animal, covetous of victory and power, corresponds to the inversion of “Platonism” carried out in Nietzsche’s metaphysics. That the human being as this predatory animal becomes the more or less explicitly affirmed and divulged “ideal” of humanity is only the fulfillment of the essential requirement that one day the human being, identified as an animal, would lay claim to his essence— which is animality—as an ideal. Therefore it is no wonder that Christian theology now does itself the favor of completely acknowledging the “biological” conditioning of all human thinking; for the entirety of Christianity is possible only | as “metaphysics” and can therefore