89
If the history of the West is to be rescued once again in an essentially inceptual configuration, then needed is a transformation which surpasses all the previous revolutions that concerned beings alone: the change in beyng and the concomitant decision against beings and their supremacy designate the “place” of the beginning of another history.
90
Lines of demarcation between Russia and Germany merely veil the abysses of preconditions for a still unquestioned decision regarding the essence of Western history. Dividing strokes have to make manifest what is insidious, viz., what is essentially the same, precisely in its sameness. National Socialism is not Bolshevism, which is not a Fascism—but both are machinational victories of machination—gigantic forms of the consummation of modernity—a calculated depletion of nationalities.
91
Cowardice in the face of meditation is taken as a “heroic attitude.”
Technology is the most subtle form of the most persistent proletarianizing.
92
More important than the “romantic” expectation of a “spiritual blossoming” out of the currently a-historical “happening” is the experience of the abandonment of beings by all the truth of beyng. Only then do we know the one thing: the flight of all the gods. But that knowledge is the first and most remote nearness to their unfulfilled divinity.
93
The future is not the mere negation of something past, as if a present would have already thrust itself into its future by turning away from the past. Nor does the future arise out of an advance calculation of something present. In both these cases, the future [die Zu-kunft] is debarred from its essence: namely, as that which comes forth [das