78 Ponderings XII–XV [98–100]

The always different struggle between the fanatics of machination,

who carry on the past in ever new novelties, and the futural one who
pertains to the last god and requires the uniqueness of beyng. The
hardest mode of struggle of the latter is to keep from getting involved
in the means and standards of machination; the mode of struggle of
the former is the forceful suppression of everything that is supposedly
29 | inappropriate. Not only does each of the ones involved in the struggle
see the “opponent” otherwise and according to his own claims—but
the opponents are so essentially different that the “struggle” looks as
if it were no struggle. And yet it is a conflict over the same, veiled in
the most alienated essential forms: here beyng and its truth, there be-
ing as the beingness of beings. The failure of the struggle, however,
ends in war—or in “civilizing” destruction.

47
The essence of history (the essential occurrence of the happening) is
the event of appropriation. (To endure the encounter and the strife
in the self-refusal is the transition to authentic history—as the his-
tory “of” beyng.)

48
Travel uncharted paths and renounce the prospects they offer, only so
that the path might be—a passageway to those who gaze. Philosophy
is not to be disavowed out of ignorance of the essence of “worldview”
machinations; instead, knowledge of its essence (the question of be-
ing) must compel a plight on whose ground philosophy arises into its
necessity.

30 49
Need to let the word attain the silent mildness of the transposition
into the clearing of beyng—out of beyng as event of appropriation;
neither feign “words” as new “vocables,” nor seek to say something
“reasonable” by using the common intelligibility of exhausted and con-
fused language.

50
Think out in advance toward “philosophy,” but do not devise a concept
“about” it and its procedure. Instead, find paths to that which alone
 Ponderings XIII [100–101] 79

compels philosophy—; the thinking that is heedful of the history of

beyng is still not a “philosophy.”

51
What does it mean to place oneself in relation to beyng? To become
steadfast in meditating on the essence of truth—through the essential
occurrence of this essence, a future is grounded for beyng.

52
Transition.—What is more decisive: the way and the course or the goal
and its advance representation? Indeed the “goal”; for how otherwise
could there be a way? Or are there goalless ways? To be sure—there
are such ways, ones that do not go astray confusedly or arbitrarily but,
instead, altogether open up and ordain the region of a course—| such 31
a region is the truth of being. And here it remains questionable
whether this region ever allows a “goal” to be set up. Such goalless
ways are strange; the decidedness in favor of the course through
which these ways are first opened up, arranged, consigned, and held
in reserve can be explained so little in terms of something familiar
that any attempt at such an understanding is equivalent to an aban-
donment of the respective way. How unique and rich is what has not
gone by, which is kept open to us in the concealment of the essence
of beyng?

53
Erudition obstructs the way to thinking; mere cognitions never lead to
meditation, which arises out of a mature decidedness in favor of ques-
tioning and out of the still more essential resoluteness toward perse-
vering within what is question-worthy. This steadfastness in beyng—
for beyng alone is question-worthy—develops as knowledge of history,
inasmuch as the essence of history is concealed in the most silent al-
terations of the truth of beyng.

54
No explanation of beings and no research into their regions leads to
beyng. But even less does a survey of notions of beings as a whole in
the manner of “worldviews.”