childhood and do not realize that the deficiency is to be sought elsewhere: in the fact that we, as adults, do not find our way to the poetry and the modes of thought appropriate to childhood and outgrowing it. In the course of the flight to childhood, we abandon the necessity of a poetizing and thinking which, like all of this (even the childlike), must not be explained and interpreted according to the stages of life but, instead, is to be grasped as originating out of beyng itself.
It is well known that in every era the “generations” come into confrontation in respectively different ways and experience (and relate to) “time,” i.e., past, future, and present, differently. The “elders” fail to see what knowledge is for “young people” today. But the lack of cognition is already the consequence of an incapacity for “thinking,” | and thinking is odd, because it is not simply a neutral instrument, does require a relation to being, and can be carried out as meditation only in terms of that relation. The incapacity for “thinking” (not a mere lack of schooling in “logic”) derives from a disturbance in the dispositions, a shutting off of disposition from the voice of beyng. But since disposition can never abandon itself, it flees into the brutalization of the heart, and a justification for this brutalization is procured through a reference to the necessity of “jaggedness” and “adamancy.” The brutalization spreads open an inner void, one which must be constantly refilled through the clamor of a stubborn and pompous self-assertion which is only a harbinger of power and chases after the overpowering of power. Hence the craving for a constant surpassing of others, i.e., for a constant slighting and degrading of others (a pressing of oneself up along with a concomitant stepping down while expecting and calculating to be above immediately and be able to press and step more and more and have to bend down—seemingly—ever less). In truth, this brutalizing and hollowing self-magnification falls ever more acutely into the enslavement to something it itself, in accord with | its incapacity for meditation, can never surmise, namely, enslavement to power and to its machination as the essence of being. One feels omnipotent, expert, and superior with regard to all beings and intends to be master over everything, and yet one is merely in service to a way of beyng (the unleashing of the essence of power) which has concealed itself in the semblance of nothingness and holds those who have no power over themselves in a constantly increasing delusion. Even the dominance of this semblance belongs to the machination of power.