b As long as the human being enacts his essence in the sense of the ra-

tional animal, as long as he keeps thinking “metaphysically” in the

form of the distinction between the sensible and the supersensible,
then in such thought he persists in his flight from the question of the
truth of beyng.2 This flight does not stem from human impulses; in-
stead, the human being flees—unaware of his “flightiness”—because
beyng itself disappropriates him from the truth of being—but why is
this? Who might know the reason? Perhaps—it is that the human be-
ing still scarcely surmises even the least of the historical domain of
his essential occurrence, the domain wherein the self-refusal “of”
beyng is the event in whose core intersect all the decisions of the things
to be differentiated (God and human being, earth and world). Per-
haps—it is that the human being no longer wants a beginning but, in-
stead, merely takes refuge in what follows from one.

2. [Archaic form of “being” to render Seyn, archaic form of Sein.—Trans.]

 Ponderings XII [5–6] 5

23 1
“Come to meditate”: these words must be uttered at the right mo-
ment—and not as a summons or a plan—but rather as an already car-
ried out leap in advance that is now to be recovered. Yet the recovery
has a peculiar relation to everything essential in that it projects the
recovered even further in advance, i.e., places it back into history as
unsurpassable beginning. The ways and the holding sway of beyng
are strange—to want to approach them means primarily to renounce
historiology and its habitual mode of representation.
Historiology seems to be overcome most radically when one aban-
dons it, flees into the immediate present, and pursues what is most
proximate and most pressing. In truth, however, that is merely a sham
overcoming; the uncertainty with regard to historiology and the
danger of tottering about in historicism do in fact increase thereby,
because the present is always thoroughly historical and the pursuit of
the present cannot at all resist historiological representation—except
that now historiology is not as such | carried out and must remain ex- 2
ternal to a critical appraisal. Historicism then becomes indiscriminate,
and all the distinctions between ages disappear, if these distinctions
offer to the present only something of which the present believes it-
self to be in need.
How far back historicism reaches is not essential; it in fact uni-
formly beats all things from the past down to the one level of their
current present moment; Greco-Roman columns and porticoes may
be erected and operettas from 1900 may be staged like American re-
vues—yet put forth in each case is the same emptiness of a mere fa-
cade which becomes a fleeting “lived experience.” To attribute such
things merely to the decay of culture would again mean to be ar-
rested in superficiality and to overlook the machinational signs. The
indiscriminateness of historicism stems from a self-certain process by
which the superficial interpretation of the age is slowly breached. At
first, the “natural” right to “life” of the peoples asserts itself, the right
to the Specific4 unfolding of their motive powers.
Yet all of this is only the prelude to that power process by which
the “natural” strength of the peoples’ powers is brought into play.
Since, however, power is always an overpowering and self-surpassing
| will to overpower, the “naturalness” of the strength of the powers 3
ever and again assumes a different form. What was still quite natural
for a lower level of power (so natural that this level seemingly had to

3. [Sic; no entry 1.—Trans.]

4. [Regarding capitalized adjectives, see the editor’s afterword, p. 226.—
Trans.]