Philosophical Notebook XII

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The basic assumption of Christianity is the definition of man as a rational animal, who will stay put and be saved within “Metaphysics”. And all hostility towards Christianity, even if it is the struggle against the Christian churches in support of the “genuine”, i.e. social, i.e. socialist “Christian” business of supplying the needs of the human masses, remains still Christian – and thereby shrinks from the essential decisions.

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“Pragmatism” – is the doctrine according to which what is true must be sought in, and must be established as, what is useful. This Utility is regarded as advancing and securing that condition of human life which one takes over as ready-to-hand, or which, proving one’s character of rightful heir, one demands as given and unalterable. Not only the thought of Use, but above all the determination of what the useful thing shall be used for, is essential: that the use remains “directed” towards the extension and enhancement of the unquestioned ready-to-hand – so-called “Life” (prosperity) – that it is geared to the claim to “Life” and serves this – that “Life” itself is thereby the organisation of an exploitation, organised enjoyment of all gratification of the ready-to-hand and prevailing drives for “Power”, “Beauty”, and Sense of Wellbeing. The Life-conditions of Life itself – which has organised itself in its own strivings – are the goal. Hence “Pragmatism” is always the unavoidable consequence and essential complement of a “rationalism” taken to extremes – which has pressing need for insurance measures to secure its own claim to security – insurances which itself, in its own meaning and with its own resources, it can only apparently have fully at its disposal. So, for example, Descartes tries to demonstrate the “existence of God” in the meaning of and by means of his new fundamental principle of clear and distinct perception. What is decisive, however, in this demonstration is the fact that belief in God is established as something needed and useful. Pascal is not at all an opposite to Descartes, but merely the complement which Descartes’ fundamental statement explicitly requires. With the gradual unfolding of the essence of modernity, the power of calculation and planning and securing, “Pragmatism” increasingly becomes something obvious: that something is validated as real and essential through its use.

Why is “Pragmatism“a ”doctrine” and “world outlook” which has found its development and its following especially in “America”? Not because the Americans are especially keen on “what is useful”, but because they are basing Humanity on rational insurance and calculation and wide-ranging organisation and planning. Every genuine “rationalism” in the metaphysical sense (which establishes the Contriving-things of What’s-in-being as Being-in-being, without thinking of it as such) leads to “Pragmatism”, and vice versa: where Pragmatism rules – where that and that alone is true which “is useful” for “Life”, there metaphysical rationalism is in power or is on the way to its greatest power expansion.

For its part, the Rational itself – that which is always calculated and which is insured through planning and organisation – further secures the enhancement of “Life” and thus maintains the character of “Useful” and Necessary – which therefore demands the highest crafting – that’s why Nietzsche’s so-called “Life” philosophy does not exclude the power of “the spiritual” and “knowledge” – the spirit is only the “opponent” of the “soul” in this sense, that it guarantees the ever-higher and wider possibilities pertaining to the soul – and that means to the body – and again and again disturbs them from torpid rest in a once-achieved condition. However, insofar as, locked into this most extreme exaltation of the Rational and Logical, there is hidden affirmation of an abysmal meaninglessness and incapacity to question; insofar as, in the most extreme affirmation of “the Body” and “Life”, there is a hidden flight, or the blindest flight, before What’s-in-being and a shrinking into Beinglessness: this can no longer be known and can never be asked about in this zone where metaphysics culminates (in Rationalism and its associated Pragmatism). The metaphysical danger of this condition of completed modernity lies in its total unawareness of the history of Being, due to which in equal measure, i.e. non-measure, it brings “the Body” and “Reason” to power and gets them going in ever sharper-defined (and that means cruder), forcibly distorted forms, playing off one against the other, only to rescue and affirm both of them ever and again. Probably unawareness in Being is the fundamental condition (and as such, always to be cultivated) for accustoming oneself to what they call “Life”.

Highway robbery and banditry can take a variety of forms in an age when all the means of concealment and deception are fully mastered. One of the pre-forms was Versailles – World Wars are played out on different planes; the lowest plane is reached when high intelligence and deployed force come together for what is purely and simply a waylaying, which does not even have a goal, unless it were the giant concealment of a gigantic emptiness and bafflement.

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The history of western man – no matter whether he resides in Europe or elsewhere – has slowly got itself into a state where all the hitherto trusted zones such as “Home”, “Culture”, “People”, and also  “State” and  “Church”, and “Society” and  “Community” besides, refuse to give refuge, because they have been degraded to mere pretexts and given over to the service of any kind of expedient. The powers that move them remain unknowable and they reveal the game they are playing only in this much, that generally they press mankind into an ever more assertive Mass-man-ness, whose “happiness” amounts to no more than getting away without making decisions and doping oneself with the notion that one is bringing ever more into one’s possession and enjoyment, since what is worthy of possession becomes ever narrower and poorer in content. The only disquiet (and that necessarily un-genuine) which such a condition still permits is the fear that these human operations may suddenly come to an end through new wars and everything may be lost; since where clinging to the ready-to-hand equals possession and sovereign mastery of What’s-in-being, misfortune shrinks to a situation in which all that is ready-to-hand has to suffer removal.

Here, then, how could any trace of disquiet awaken? – the disquiet which perceives that the Ascendancy of the Ready-to-Hand and the lack of Need regarding Decisions, the growth (ungraspable, but grasping all round it) of this situation as the determined condition, is not just Ruin but Devastation, whose rule can no longer be disrupted, but can only be embodied, by war catastrophes and catastrophe-wars? Whether the herd existence of man, given over to himself, by being made general is impelling man towards the Completion of his Animality, or whether the mob of power-holders is driving the masses, articulated and “action-ready” in the highest degree, to complete Decisionlessness; whether therefore a rank-ordering within the definitively established animal in the sense of the “Superman” can still be developed or not: this makes no essential change in the Metaphysical character of What’s-in-being in the Whole. With the coldest audacity, and warding off all pressure from “moral” evaluations and the mood of “pessimism”, the thinker must keep the completion of the metaphysical history of What’s-in-being in view before him and round him, so that the clean and clear air for pioneering Decisions may blow through the Questioning of Meaning.

Here one should know that Devastation is essentially farther advanced in the zones of “education” and “the culture business” than in the field of cruder provision for life’s needs. Correspondingly, here – among the futile guardians of the cultural heritage – a higher expertise has been inculcated, but dissociated from essential awareness. Gaining in influence and exerting its charm, on the one hand there is Disempowerment of all Zones of Rootedness in favour of the Empowerment of a thoroughgoing Contriving-things, and on the other hand there is Mass-man’s Abandonment of all claims to Decision-making or Criterion-setting. Through this expanding correspondence an invisible Void comes into being. Particularly since this Void becomes visible in the guise of its opposite, from the metaphysical basic position which is still dominant one cannot understand its concealed essence: the unconditional Assimilation of Man into the Contriving-things of What’s-in-being in the Whole. This is often still effected with invocations of historical forms of ruling from which all solid ground has by now been taken away – for example, today’s military thinks it can still invoke “Prussianism”; but it is essentially changed and become something different from the warrior force of the last World War years – leaving aside the fact that creative historic decisions can never arise from this sphere of human activity (even when it confronts death with an artificial hardness) – but only forms of an always mediocre discipline; to want to extend this into “Totality” amounts to a crude ignorance of the Essence of Being and the fact that it is situated beyond Power and Powerlessness.

On the same grounds, however, it is out of the question that any “Pacifism” or“Liberalism” could penetrate the Zone of essential Decisions, since they merely provide an opposition to genuine and ungenuine War-making. The temporary rise in the power of Judaism, however, is based on the fact that the metaphysics of the West, especially in its modern unfolding, gave the base position for a diffusion of an otherwise empty rationality and calculating facility, which in this way found itself accommodation in the “spirit”, without ever being able to comprehend the hidden Zones of Decision of its own accord. The more original and path-breaking the decisions and questions of the future become, the more inaccessible they remain to this “race”. (Hence Husserl’s step to phenomenological observation, as an alternative to the psychological explanation and historiographical calculation of opinions, is of lasting importance –and nonetheless it never gets as far as the Zone of essential Decisions, rather it presupposes the historiographical tradition of philosophy at all points; the necessary consequence soon appears with a swerve into the neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy, which ultimately made a further progression unavoidable,  to Hegelianism in the formal sense. My “attack” on Husserl is not directed against him alone, or indeed essentially – the attack is on the neglect of the Question of Being, i.e. against the essence of Metaphysics as such, on whose ground the Contriving-things of What’s-in-being is enabled to determine History. The attack grounds a historical moment of highest Decision between the precedence of What’s-in-being and the foundation of the Truth of Being.)

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Bolshevism has nothing to do with what is Asiatic and still less with what is Slavic in the Russians – that is to say, with the Aryan fundamental essence – it springs from modern western rational metaphysics. – What then if Bolshevism destroyed Russianism? What if the equation of Russianism and Bolshevism guaranteed this destruction would be complete?

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Is Germany the land of the Germans? Will its history be sustained through the grounding of the Germans in their Existence? Or are the Germans consuming themselves in mere extension and diffusion, developing the highest form of the Letting-loose of all the organised powers of Contriving-things?

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The power of Contriving-things – the annihilation even of Godlessness, the dehumanisation of Man into Animal, the Misuse of the Earth, the Calculation of the World – has passed into the state of finality; differences of peoples, states, cultures are now only on the facade. There are no measures by which Contriving-things can be checked and repressed. Never before in the history of Man has Being, in such unconditional fashion and in furious onslaught, and yet fully concealed behind the currently operational What’s-in-being, forced the Entirety of What’s-in-Being into Decisionlessness. For the Knowers, too, never before has a moment in the history of Being been so acute and simple. Never before has Disquiet about Being been suppressed and adulterated through an organised (on a planetary scale) and continually escalated Fear of “wars”, losses, forfeitures of power and economic crashes (caused by fear of What’s-in-Being). But why is it that Being, on this furthest frontier of the destruction of its ungrounded Truth, neglects the necessity of grounding? Why does it leave What’s-in-being racing from one bolt-hole to another? Is this the Refusal to go under vis-a-vis Man, and thereby the profoundest degradation of Man in the satisfaction of his crudest needs? In all of that, who can experience the Sovereignty of Being in its stillness; who knows of the Watcher open-eyed for Decision on the Place of the Last God? All is still entangled in the overfull-of-done-things Void of the Abandonment of Being. Few people have an intuition. And these few are the Unique Ones. And these Unique Ones are not needed for the Counting.

Cast out and incapable even of Godlessness, Man tumbles into Animality – continually arming himself for the purpose historically and technically; he says yes to “Life”, so as not even to say no to Being – that would be a start – but merely to forget it in the barrenest desolation of his Life-business. Pessimism? No. Optimism against that? No again! But – Fervency in the hardest and most fearsome, simple and most unfathomable Cleared Space of Being. But – a Thinking whose Saying brings the Silence of Being to the endangered (and menaced most of all by the Already-spoken) Word. But – a Knowledge which seeks no refuges, neither in the Care of a God nor in the Success of Man, neither in the Protection of the Earth nor in the Validation of the World. Each refuge taken is a shrinking from the Abyss of Truth and a turning aside from the hidden Suddenness of the Gift of the Moment. By appealing to What’s-in-Being, in its highest and ordinary forms, one makes Being something taken for granted, advances Contriving-things  – even against one’s will – to the finality of its power, and risks the experiment of blocking off History from where it belongs, in the Rule of Being; one hunts away the Gods to where Divinity is lost and delivers Man to the madness of dehumanisation, rips the Earth from its moorings and shoves the World into the emptiness of the merely Public.

The Publicity in monstrous commotion which Contriving-things maintains around itself, seems to indicate that to be capable of making a beginning as a historic age after modernity ended, any new age would have to be The Time of Essential Silence. Who wants to know whether Man, and in which form of the Being-of-Man, will be appropriated by Being to the founding of this Time?

The “sound” and “picture” “reportage” of Contriving-things is the planetary “myth” of the period which completes modernity. The world of the most remote German farmyard will no longer be determined by the mystery of the seasons of the year, by “Nature”, where the Earth still rules, but by the illustrated paper with images of undressed film stars and dancers, boxers and runners and other “heroes” of the day. What is involved here is no longer just the destruction of “morality” and “decency”: there is a metaphysical course of events, where every possibility of Being is laid waste in the Done of the do-able, manufacturable and imaginable What’s-in-being. The electrical plug, and the motorcycle that transports one in an hour to the nearest big city, goes together with the American-style glossy magazine and illustrated paper, and also goes together with assimilation of the mores of mountain-dwellers to those of the big-city sport and bar businesses. When Contriving-things has established its power so widely, the “Principles” of “Blood” and “Soil”, which are likewise on makeshift fountations, will be exhausted, and in the end there will be “Science” – which makes its discoveries according to these new points of view. The unmooredness of What’s-in-being in the Abandonment of Being is not to be restrained by any measures whatever – it must itself, as that which is happening, co-determine the future Decision.

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Enlightenment, Despotism, boundless Stupefaction, and metaphysically understood, one single course of events: Uprooting out of Being, replacement of the Source by the Unfolding of Power, Organisation for the Satisfaction of Self with the always Pre-imagined – through and through, the Ascendancy of What’s-in-being.

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That in the age of Contriving-things Race shall be elevated to the explicit and purposefully organised “Principle” of history (or just of historiography): that is no arbitrary contrivance of “Doctrinaires”, but a consequence of the power of Contriving-things, which must reduce What’s-in-being in all its Zones to the terms of planned calculation. Through the race notion “Life” will be brought to a breedable form, which represents a type of calculation. The Jews with their marked gift for calculation have “lived” longest according to the race principle, and for just that reason they also put up the strongest resistance against its unlimited application. The organisation of racial breeding does not stem from “Life” itself, but from the overpowering of Life by Contriving-things. What Contriving-things is actually bringing about by planning of this kind is a complete de-racing of the peoples, by roping them into a same-constructed, same-patterned organisation of all of What’s-in-being. Along with the de-racing goes a self-alienation of the peoples – the loss of History – i.e. of the Zones of Decision towards Being. And this puts an end to the only possibilities that peoples with innate historical power might come to a unity in their counterposition: e.g. knowing Understanding and Passion for Meaning together with Inwardness and Breadth of the Uncanny – Germanism and Russianism – which has nothing to do with “Bolshevism”, the latter being not at all “Asiatic” but only the mutation of western-modern thinking at the late 19th century stage – the first decisive anticipation of the unlimited power of Contriving-things.

It is equally lunatic – i.e. a disorientation of the innermost essential relationships – to want to fight Bolshevism through the race principle (as if both protagonists did not have the same metaphysical root in clearly different forms) and to try to rescue Russianism through Fascism (as if it were not out of the question that these two, separated by an abyss, could have any essential unity). But that such a thing is to be attempted by historical-technical means shows that already Contriving-things has won a definitive victory over History, with the downfall of all Politics vis-a-vis Metaphysics.  And at the same time this is an indication of how far we are going to be driven into a historiographical foreground, more and more mistaking the paths by which the Historic Basis of what is happening may be known.

Philosophical Notebook XIII

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Technology and History-writing: when the peasantry by all external means and above all innerly (in what concerns the simple peace of the passion for seclusion in belonging to Nature) is destroyed; when technology (in the essential sense) annihilates the peasantry, because it must annihilate them, then History-writing “about” the peasantry will come into its own – this will be a subject to occupy scholars – technology plays out Historiography as the last trump in its triumph and produces those mental incompetents who think that when something has been historiographically “processed”, that’s when it first has genuine “reality”. The scholars come forward as if they were the last rescuers and guardians of the peasantry. Or – have they after all “rescued” enough cunning from their operations to know that what they are actually rescuing is only job opportunities for themselves? – and of the kind that are in tune with the times, i.e. which use all means to ensure that at no point does one come to any Awareness and one no longer learns how to know what Awareness is. My dog, the pointer, has more peasantry in his bones and snout than these puffed-up, foundation-less and chair-seeking counterfeiters. But of course, the Volkisch (or other) snob will “read” such historiography of the peasantry without a bother – and may even use it to “educate” his comrades.

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Bolshevism (in the sense of the despotic-proletarian Soviet power) is neither “Asiatic” nor “Russian” – rather it has its place in the culmination of a modernity which in its beginnings was determined in the west.  Authoritarian “Socialism” (in the variations of Fascism and National Socialism) is a corresponding (not equivalent) form of completion of modernity. The term “Socialism” only nominally designates a politics of concern for the people, in the sense of social provision; what is meant is the political-military-economic organisation of the masses. Class = ruling stratum.

Bolshevism and authoritarian socialism are metaphysically the same and have their basis in the Ascendancy of the Being-in-being of What’s-in-being. The next historic decision is this: is it the case that both base forms of the Completion of Modernity, independently of each other, are confirming in unconditional success the Abandonment of Being by What’s-in-being (which means the Giganticism of technical-historical-political organisation and discipline), and thus in gigantic style, with or without an express “political” fusion, are the same? Or is it that a liberating way to their History (not “Race”) is opening up for the Russians and the abyss of question-worthiness towards their History is opening for the Germans, by which means the History of both, from the same concealed ground, may come to originating Determination: to found the Truth of Being (as Event-of-Appropriation).

The giant danger is not the “Bolshevisation” of Europe – since what is the actual state of affairs, and in the essential sense of a necessary historical completion, can never be a “Danger”. The real danger is in the threat of passing over into a still concealed historic Existence, is such a way that this threat will not be recognised as such, indeed cannot be recognised at all. The danger is that the Completion of Modernity, which does not allow itself to lose impetus, proclaims itself as the sole ground for continuation of “History”; the danger is the exclusiveness of the “success” of Contriving-things in the metaphysical sense – the not-able-to-know and not-intuiting burial of every possibility of an entirely different historical Beginning, which would announce itself as the Overcoming of Metaphysics (and consequently also of Contriving-things) and necessarily must withdraw for a long time into the Concealment of the Un-Public – the danger lies in the fact that newly, and unconditionally out of the metaphysical determination of western history, “Goals” will be erected and the one and only decision (either the Ascendancy of What’s-in-being or the Passage to Being) will be pushed away into the Unknowable and Unworthy-of-being-known, and thereby the constructed goals ( of “Culture”, “Making the Peoples Happy”, securing “Life Interests”) as Goals can at all times claim that they enjoy Consent, which Consent at the same time serves them as a guarantee of their “Truth”.

The Knowledge that we are a Passage to Being, i.e. in the Event out of which the Essence of History, as the Foundation of the Truth of the Decision, determines itself, is the sign of Origination and requires Mastery of what is Unfolding-itself in Silence, which keeps an equal distance from Power and Powerlessness, just as from “Action” and “Reaction”. This knowledge of (being-historic) Awareness is the first Fervency in the Truth of Being and therefore the longest, the abiding-there-in-the-distance which can least be blinded by “success” and “effectiveness”, which least succumbs to an over-valuation of itself, but as mere Preparation, on the frontiers of Ever-readiness, senses that it is growing in strength. The danger lies in the threat of the Abandonment of Being by What’s-in-being through Forgetting of Being: this threat is not one of an imminent disturbance of the State of Affairs, but on the contrary, of a consolidation of the Abandonment of Being. The Forgetting of Being gives What’s-in-being unconditionally over to Being-in-being and its boundless unfolding, and thus secures the sole Ascendancy of What’s-in-being, in the sense of habitual “Living-through” and organised “Reality” – whatever apparent Counterplay of Dropping-out and Standing-by may become widespread alongside all this, is merely the Powerlessness that belongs to unbounded Power, and it is a fallback to the Hitherto which Contriving-things has displaced. Thus, by virtue of What’s-in-being’s Abandonment of Being, Being-in-being becomes unconditional as Contriving-things and no longer tolerates any Conditioning through which it might still be limited or directed towards “Goals”. Contriving-things is never Man’s Done-deeds, but rather Man is – and precisely where he relies on himself – the Agent of Contriving-things, who is tangled up in Do-ery. (The everyday meaning of the word “Machenschaft” {here “Contriving-things” – normally “machinations” J.M.] is something foregrounded and derived, in an interpretation of What’s-in-being which itself is not in a position ever to understand the being-historic Essence of Contriving-things.)

Despotic communism and authoritarian socialism are not politically the same, but they are metaphysically the same. Hence, even a political assimilation of the two might still always leave their common metaphysical ground hidden – in historic terms this means: the essential Decisions about Being and its Truth remain unknown. That this always involves “world outlooks”, and therefore departments of metaphysics, is outwardly expressed in the fact that – with a certain violence done to their characterisation – international western (Greco-Latin) expressions have to be used: a testimony to their “origin” in the ratio, which contains a first prefiguration of metaphysics. In the metaphysically things-contriving Zone all concepts, guiding rules and basic principles are purely “means”, which may be diverted into their opposites at need. To attempt to sort out the “contradictions” here means to be ignorant of the metaphysical basic positioning of world outlooks. So, for example, for years on end it may be a primary guiding principle that “politics” cannot be something sufficient in itself but must be grounded through-and-through in the world outlook, so much so that the “world outlook” determines the “politics”. Overnight, however, a “political” necessity can arise to come together with the previously deadly enemy (in world outlook), and thus “political” acquires a quite different meaning, or the liberal meaning of past times.

Now, one may get excited about principles being sold out; in reality the essence of politics has changed. Or is the change here too merely apparent?  This change is only a  Means which has as its unintended and even uncomprehended Goal to raise the metaphysical Essence of completed  Modernity into unbounded Power. Only short-sighted “bourgeoisie” and “Christians”, hanging on to empty ideals, will find reasons here for astonishment, if not indignation. Where one thinks and calculates in Means, necessarily every Binding and Possibility-of-binding is surrendered. This surrender signifies a peculiar basic relationship to What’s-in-being– it presupposes its Being-in-being in the sense of Contriving-things. What is peculiar here is that, for the empowerment of its unconditional power, “values” and “goals”, even “supreme goals”, are shoved into the foreground, on whose account “sacrifice” and “deployment” will be demanded. This is necessary as long as Man himself still hangs on to previous ideals and has not yet found himself in the full things-contriving Subjectivity. Within the things-contriving Zone, where all becomes Means, the corresponding “spiritual” foundations for the respective Postures can be put properly in place and made ready; for the “Spirit” itself is only a Means which stands in the service of the Empowerment of Contriving-things and receives its commands from the latter. Again, this is not the “arbitrariness” of individual “Despots” – but its essence resides in this, that it must not have any Knowledge of the Spirit other than the things-contriving Knowledge. Because all that is “spiritual” must be Calculation as means to an end, it only belongs where the appropriate means are to be found. All “spiritual” activity other than that, which gives itself out as “world outlook” literature and is necessarily forced to the worst distortions and tricks so as to get by, is a marginal phenomenon, which only “has” itself as its “public” and seeks to conceal its own rootlessness (i.e. Incapacity for Awareness) through the most overblown possible forms of utterance. In the age of Contriving-things there is a gigantic display of “Writing”, but correspondingly – i.e. gigantically – meaningless and without effect.

From mere War, especially from such as, in the Age of What’s-in-being’s Abandonment of Being, breaks out (and can only break out) in things-contriving style, no Awareness can ever arise. Such can be hoped for only by Romantics and all those who have forgotten, or on whom it has never dawned, that the First World War, despite the bloodiest sacrifice, was unable to awaken any Awareness. On the contrary, at its height it became the first School-example of unconditional Contriving-things and its organisation and discipline. Let the horror be ever so fearsome, let the heroism be unheard-of, let the sacrifice be unforgettable, through all of this the fundamental condition for Awareness will never be created: the inner Freedom of Man for the essential (not interested) Decisions, the readiness for a historic Question-worthiness of Being. In general, Contriving-things has empowered itself over all the possibilities of What’s-in-being and confirmed them with its interpretations, so that Man, despite all distress and dismay, can no longer press forward into the essential Zones of a Necessity stemming from Being.

Awareness as Fervency in the Question-worthiness of the Essence of Truth cannot be forcibly produced by Hardships, but only necessitated by an essential Need, which demands Magnanimity of the Heart. But where is this to come from?

Historically the spread and consolidation of Contriving-things has been visible in various forms. One is that mercantile Calculating-facility, overpainted with Morality, of the English-American world. The Fate which this furthers consists not only in what it produces but still more in what it is incapable of: it is estranged from every essential spiritual Decision and has shunted aside everything onto “Psychology” and Logistical Calculation, which even still include an alleged cultivation of the tradition of classical antiquity. And precisely this “spiritual” side is completely displaced into antiquarianism and moralism and without any creative impulse. Compared to that, Russian Bolshevism (in its origin of the same type as the English-American world) in its crudeness and mass-man-ness is a harmless phenomenon – for the essential evaluation cannot be made according to the number of the Moderately-ruled and the Shot, but rather according to the breadth and ruthlessness of the suffocation of each creative historic Being (something which lies beyond the sphere of moralising aunts).

Hölderlin, the greatest of the Germans, has this to say: He, who has made the most essential migration into the historic Decision Zone of the History of the West, calls the Germans “the all-calculating barbarians”. – What does that mean? Self-accusation? Essential Insight? Historical Decision? Intuition of that? There is gigantic confusion, in which the surrender and diversion of fundamental principles is already one of those commonplaces which are hardly noticed any longer; this has its simple basis in the necessity-less Incapacity to experience What’s-in-being’s Abandonment of Being and to hold onto such Experience in a foundational Knowledge.

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The Completion of Modernity: In the age of unconditional Contriving-things the Enormity of Criminality comes into public view under the name of the “True”. English politics and their mode of realisation is the model of the End-form of the Modern Age that is coming to its end. In the English “spirit” both “knowing” and “acting” have long been translated into the mediocrity of calculation; the metaphysical incapacity of this “spirit” for essential historic decisions of the future is definitive. Can it be coincidence that in England alone my Thinking and Questioning over the past decade has always been rejected and no translation has even been attempted? It is quite indifferent whether the English appeal to morality is hypocritical or “genuinely” intended in a long-accustomed self-deception and self-satisfaction: the definitive fact remains this, that the English spirit never gets beyond this appeal to “morality” and can only assess anything that is alien to it as immoral. The danger of this spirit-less “spirit” consists not just in the ruthlessness of its game of Contriving-things, but above all in the fact that Defence against it can too easily be tangled up in what is merely things-contriving. The sub-division of political power-groups is only a sign of the end of the hitherto-known Age and of the Indeterminacy of the historic Ground of an Age of the Future. Mere agreements in “world outlook”, similar to those in “politics”, can no longer suffice to ground the history of Europe in an earnest world. Metaphysics – and with it “Ideals” and “Morality” and “Culture” as its operative forms – is at an end; the Beginning of the Other, however, is dark – but it remains and will become an Essential Event, which will experience the Other of a different Beginning and its Necessity. Admittedly, this demands the inner overcoming of the Things-contriving Essence of Being. The next Decision looms: whether Contriving-things by its own means can still hold back the Destruction of its Essence and thereby make itself durable in a new form, or whether it will break apart in the final Empowerment of its Unconditionality. The Decision, and the way it goes, will depend on this: whether the Readiness of western Man for a Grounding of the Truth of Being awakens out of Being itself, changing a single Necessity of the Heart into the Joy of Encounter with the God for a guarded Earth in a simple World, and so the Human Being, the There-Being, will occur as the Essence-ground of the Essencing of the Truth of Being.

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Dostoyevsky says at the end of the first chapter of The Possessed: “But whoever has no people also has no God”. – But who has, and how, a people and his people? Is it only he who has (and just like he has) the God? But who has the God, and how? Are we falling here into the Back and Forth of a paradox, which as such, in its one- and two-sidedness, can achieve nothing and again nothing? Where is this paradox pointing? Will it not be sustained and opened out through that which is neither people nor God, but which both in essentially different ways need in order to find and to ground their Essence and to be What’s-in-being? And what is this something? Being in its Truth. Only the Relationship to Being may provide the Possibility of a Necessity for the Encounter with the God; only the Need of Being (on the God’s part) broadens out the God to a scope from which He may allow What-encounters to come to Him and intentionally pass through His own Essence. Being – as Event-Appropriation in the Human Being, as that which donates the Span and Playing-space of its Flying-high to the Event, and will only be accessible to experience at that Instant when History finds its Essence as the Essencing of the Truth of Being.

96

“Socialism”. – If we ask about the history-shaping concept and not about a romantic ideal, then we find the profoundest answer, because the most resolute and the one that shrinks from nothing, in a statement of Lenin’s: “Socialism is Soviet power plus electrification”. This statement requires a comprehensible explanation. First of all, there is no talk here of “community” and “welfare” and “equality” of all popular comrades, but rather: Socialism is “Power” – the unleashing of a despotism which forces a proletarianisation of the entire people and holds them in a pincer-grip, and accordingly is in constant change regarding the means used, even changing over to the opposite (cf. New Economic Policy). Socialism is despotism “plus”; this summative addition stems from the “empirio-criticism” of the late 19th century, which gave Lenin a metaphysical shaping via German philosophy. Something accrues to power – but not as a mere bonus – the “plus” is only the characterising expression for the calculative conception of the essence of socialism. This calculation comes from the computation of a unity, according to which “electrification” must be the decisive and sustaining executive form of power, and that means affirmation of power as expansion of power. Here, however, “electrification” is the name for the most modern primary form of manageable and manufacturable powers and power networks – the name for technology in its very latest form, which perhaps is obsolete as soon as spoken.

Socialism is despotic proletarian power, in which technology is no mere appendix and is not a means, but rather the fundamental form of the empowerment of power. This socialism is the essence of Bolshevism. Despotism (power in the hands of the Few, who are actually No One), which forces an unconditional proletarianisation and to that end, taking the road of technology, beats down all resistance – since technology is enchanted and irresistible, and at the same time ruthless and cold. Conversely, however, this socialism, which need not necessarily have a Russian form, brings technology to the unconditional degree of a power whose decisive content is this, that it renders impossible, as a mere intellectual false need, every “spiritual” and “historic” demand and questioning, and reduces life to “interests” and the raising of “standards”. – But what is more old-fashioned, i.e. more “liberal”, than these goals?

In thinking worthy of a thinker, the most difficult thing is to have clear knowledge out of its exuberance and nonetheless to carry it right through, more simply carefree even than the rose that lets her bloom stream forth in Nature, since the rose has the “bliss” of the knowledge-less and enjoys the enclosed protection that the Earth gives its wards.

101

There are still “islands”; but those people are lacking who are able to be voyagers on the sea from which these islands rise. (The Human-being out of Being.) The “islands” are the Unique Ones of a historic determination to which the Grounding of the Essence of History is given as the Settlement of Encounter and Conflict – this history is the History of Being. Belonging-in-it presents itself in Impoverishment in the Poverty whose abiding Possession it is to be the Property of the Event. The merely historiographical History (the metaphysical) remains in prologue. Besides, the Power-articulation of “historiographical” Reality has pioneered a division of roles, whose secret course will slowly become more evident. The role of the nationalisms of various types is to stimulate imperialism. The role of socialism is the expansion of imperialism. Stimulation progresses to a propulsion of despotism.

Expansion leads to a levelling, with no exceptions, on a lower plane. The imperialism (in the sense of despotic proletarianism) which is thus brought out in the open is itself by no means a firm “ideal” and “goal” – rather it is still a form in movement, which has not yet revealed its final shapes. This empowerment of “imperialism”, however, signifies the bringing over of modern mankind to unconditional Contriving-things. This latter makes use of an irresistible bait: it leaves the Agent-being of Contriving-things the consciousness of serving himself in such “imperialism” of Contriving-things, while in reality, i.e. in the Essence of what is here as History still Hidden, it is already decided that imperialism will be followed by the unconditional Slavery of Contriving-things. In this broad and far-reaching Antechamber of the History of Being “nothing” happens – because All is thrust forth into Decisionlessness and forced together to the Waste of Decision-blindness; and nonetheless, using the above-mentioned bait, the greatest possible Business must keep all men continually and “restlessly” occupied.

Within this Antechamber of the History of Being, the western revolution is approaching us. The revolution in this unconditional form does not, however, lead to something new in the sense of the Beginning of something Other – rather it brings the “end” that is torn away from its one-time beginning – that end which in all the chatter about the “final end” is unwittingly mentioned. This revolution, however, is not the mere “quantitative” spread of Bolshevism to Germany and the West, but rather the end of something unique and peculiar. The climax of unconditional Contriving-things, as the replacement of the seemingly still “personal” and done-in-person dictatorship by the Despotism of Nobody – pure Empowerment of the Processes of boundless Planning and Calculation – the bringing forth of the “Real” – of “Deeds” – of Means and their Execution as What’s-in-being and the Empowerment of (essentially this) What’s-in-being as the by now entirely forgotten Being – in this “history” the Power of Nothing at its most extreme will for the first time be impregnably erected (all so-called “nihilism” as known hitherto, even in the Nietzschean sense, is merely a temporary, limited prologue to all this). Through this “history” the Essence of History comes to the verge of a first-time Decision between Nothing and Being – the imperialist-warmaking and the humane-pacifist Thinking-modes, which belong together though they are always brought forward separately as pretexts, are merely “historiographical” “History”-making “Dispositions”, in whose Zones no Decisions are possible any longer – since they are no more than the Outrunners of Metaphysics.

It follows that “international Jewry” can make use of both of them, invoke and activate one as a means for the other – this things-contriving “History” tangles up all the players in its net in equal measure –; in the orbital range of Contriving-things there are “ridiculous States”, but also a ridiculous Culture-Fraud. In the approaching western revolution the first modern revolutions (the English, American, French, and their sequels) will first be brought back to their Essence; the “west” will be ultimately and most decisively gripped by it – for all that it still thinks it can fight it.

Who will claim and achieve “world rule” in this struggle is no less indifferent than the fate of those who will mostly be crushed; for they all still stand and fall on the plane of Metaphysics and remain shut out from the Other.

103

Russia is not Asia and Asiatic, but no more does it belong to Europe. What is it? And Bolshevism is absolutely not Russianism – and so the obscure danger arises that a renewed and radical consolidation of Bolshevism (i.e. of authoritarian state capitalism, which does not have the least thing to do with the socialism of sentiment), amounting to a despotism of the technological and industrial intelligentsia, is holding back the awakening of Russianism for a long period of time and is bringing about a mere plunder of the land (imagined and exploited western-style) – is thinking historylessly in everything and in the Essential and is merely calculating “historiographically”. The “west” is not positioned (nor are the Germans) in a historical awareness which would be strong and creative enough for a freeing of the essence of Russianism. A precondition is that we forget much, perhaps all, of what now dominates “Life”. Perhaps an uncommon destruction of modern Europe will come to our aid in the run-up to this Forgetting.

Philosophical Notebook XIV

5

An Englishman (Thomas Buckle) says: “The locomotive has done more to unite men than all the philosophers, poets and prophets who preceded it since the beginning of the world”. If we take “the locomotive” in this strange statement as the model of machine-technical means of transport, then we must first ask which unity is meant here, to which this indisputable “unification” has led. Is it not that unity which would become a fundamental condition for the possibility of the sharpest discord and enmity – what would modern war be without this “unity”? One has to be an Englishman to dare to speak here of “Unification” and to have so little sense of the Essence of Poets and Thinkers.

14

The “Time” of essential thinking cannot be worked out from what presents itself publicly and announces itself as What’s-Needed. To concede to that means often to arrive too early and to equate the craving for immediate stability with the Decisiveness of Questioning, which first lays the ground for a foothold in What-is-questioned. It follows that there can be times whose highest demand is: really to be silent. Whether someone, and who, grasps this, is something that cannot be discovered; and it also remains without significance.

The translation of the Metaphysics of the Will-to-Power into the Petit-bourgeois leads, within the Reality of that Metaphysics, whither?

The powerlessness of Thinking vis-a-vis the Real seems limitless; and nonetheless this Real in its Reality is only the consequence of an unleashed Power, which for hundreds of years Thinking, as calculating Planning, has sent forth into the field and is now steering towards its end, and which makes all Reflection tumble to and fro in the difference (now become baseless) of “Theory” and “Practice”.

33

Socialism is a transition, but so also is nationalism: the first towards the power-related Organisation and Disposability of everything in all respects and modes; the second as Organisation of Power-holding towards its unfolding into unconditional Earth-mastery. The time of the peoples has passed; they are already preparing to abandon the Popular as a goal and to give up all that is folklike as a means to the attainment of Mastery of the Earth. With the consolidation of this seizure of possession the Question-worthiness of Mankind ascends to that Stage where such Question-worthiness can easily be brushed aside as a futile delusion – until the Moment when the unbounded Freeing of What’s-in-Being to every Utilisation and Transformation announces itself as Abandonment of Being, and all of What’s-in-being begins to shake in the hidden Storm of Being. Then, for the first time, is the Moment of Decision: whether the Human Essence can mature for the sole Determination, or whether it will dry up in a seeming Bloom.

39

Is the war an essential disturbance of western mankind? This second world war is no more that than the first one was (and the two go together). However, the second world war brings the New Ordering of the “Earth”, i.e. of this technically organised Human Space. The “Order” is new insofar as it brings the previously moulded (but always hitherto applied with undeveloped potential) Contriving-things of Being into unconditional, Consciously Organised Form and makes it a Recognised Principle. Mankind will now for the first time be unconditional as the animal rationale in his Rationality and Animality, and what was hitherto the Essence will be consolidated to Completeness. This is, admittedly, a course of events of a peculiar type, and every attitude that sees here only decline and mere Expansion of the Status-quo remains trapped in confined and gloomy Zones and is incapable of being a Co-actor, i.e. being history-making. The New Order is the decisive victory of “Power” as the Essence of Being and hence the beginning of the Unfolding of this Essence in the most extreme Completion: Contriving-things.

41

Nowadays people chatter non-stop about the “situation” of Man, and right from the start they always avoid having any Awareness of Being. The Forgetting of Being which goes with unconditional Contriving-things is no greater than that of Christianity, just that it has got rid of the mendacity of double bookkeeping which at one and the same time submitted itself to Reason and subjected Reason to Faith. That the Christian Faith and the Completion of Metaphysics, which has become a World Outlook, represent themselves as out-and-out opponents, merely shows the blindness on both sides. But accordingly both can also, as the need arises, go together.

Metaphysics

Everything must go through the entire Devastation which precedes a Destruction, in the sharpest form, of what “Culture” appears to have preserved. Only in this way can the two-thousand-year-old structure of Metaphysics be shaken and brought to its downfall. But even this Destruction and Devastation still has the organisational form of Metaphysics (“Ideas” and “Values”).

From National-Socialism to Rational-Socialism, i.e. to the unconditional Calculation and Computation of the Together-being of the Mankinds in themselves and with one another.

This Rationality demands the highest Spirituality. The Essence of the western Spirit as techné.

After the typewriting-, adding-, counting-, bookkeeping-machine, the manufacture of the Thinking Machine is only a matter of time. Thinking has already become Calculating. And why should this “thinking” not have its machine? Ever more will be taken away from Man, even Thinking (and Awareness is long gone). The consequence of this course of events is that Man is ever less able to begin anything with himself – all the more must he surround himself with Apparatuses.

Today the “Poets”, i.e. the Writers, meet like the shareholders and supervisory council members of a share company. Probably all that they talk about is likewise the “shares” and seeing to it that they’re “holding up well”. These “Gentlemen” have got nothing to do with the much-trumpeted “Mission of the German People”. – One won’t become “Rilke” by also posing with the Muzot mansion as backdrop. It’s nice that Hans Grimm is not to be found in such company.

52

The truly Uncanny, which must come to the fore in the age of the Completion of Modernity, i.e. of the Discovery and Conquest and Mastery of the Earth, is the Enormity of Mediocrity in All. Thereby everything will be protected, but everything will also be used only as a means of power. “Culture” (which itself is a modern construction) and “Barbarism” will have equal status: their difference falls away, one stands for the other. From here on the entirety of the Past will be recalculated and the “Goals” of “the Future” will be “set”. Hence any fears of an Age of “Barbarism” are just childish funk. It won’t come precisely to that. But just as little will “Culture in itself” bloom and blossom. It impedes the way to an Intuition of the Initial. The Enormity of unconditional Mediocrity in All will be a real bastion against every Decision of an Essential. Whatever comes to the fore and moves and stirs is already calculated and allotted. Unconditional, all-knowing, all-calculating, all-scheming Mediocrity in All as the Measure of the Highest.

80

One shouldn’t make too loud a fuss over the Psychoanalysis of the Jew “Freud”, if and so long as one is not able to “think” anything about all things except that Everything as an “expression” of “Life” “leads back” to the one thing: “Instincts” and “Instinct Loss”. This mode of “Thinking”, which starts off by making no room for “Being”, is pure Nihilism.

91

For three centuries the English have renounced every Essential-beginning. What they no longer have, the Germans still do not have for the centuries before us. From this Void-in-between comes the war, which is not an essential struggle, since it is being waged over the Nullity of Nothing. This war springs from the Forgetting of Being by modern Man, who has come to his end. Every goal given to him falls short of the Essential. The Americans, however, take the state of Nothingness as the Promise of their Future, since they’re destroying everything in the delusion of the “Happiness” of all. Nihilism reaches its peaks in Americanism.

92

At the earliest, there might be history again around 2300. By then Americanism will have exhausted itself and be sick of its emptiness. Till then Man will be still making undreamt-of Progress into Nothing, without recognising, which means outgrowing, this Space where he Races. Remembrance of what has been, and of what exists in concealment, will become ever gloomier and more confused, i.e. outwardly “simplified” to some clear Principles and Opinions. The “historiographical Balcony” will become a “Symbol” of Completed Historylessness. What brings a certain delusive richness into the history of the long-drawn-out ending of modernity is that in this concluding state of civilised barbarism the Ones fight for Civilisation, the Others for Barbarism, with the same craving for Calculation. And so a barrenness will be achieved that is appropriate to the void, but which spreads all round it the mirage of an abundance that was never actually there.

94

Nietzsche is the last thinker who sacrificed himself to “Platonism”; since by overturning Platonism he got totally tangled up in it, and eventually the Overturned and the Overturning came rushing out undifferentiated in the pure Power-makings of Power.

107

Why do the English-American “world” and “Bolshevism” belong together in their inmost selves, despite the seeming incompatibility of Capitalism and Anticapitalism? Because both in essence are the same – the unconditional Unfolding of Subjectivity in pure Rationality. For the former, the counterbalancing mood is the “sentimental”, and for Bolshevism Asiatic impassiveness.

120

The outbreak of the war against Bolshevism has finally freed many Germans, who were worried on account of an allegedly all too close bond with Russia, from the weight of this burden. Only later ages will properly be able to appreciate the document that became known to the world public on the morning of June 22, 1941. The very first sentence offered an insight into the time which immediately preceded the outbreak of war: “After being compelled to silence for months on end, weighed down by heavy cares, the hour has now come when I can finally speak my mind.”

At the same time, the “underhandedness” of Bolshevik policy is coming to light. The Jew Litwinow is again making appearances. The man for whose 60th birthday the editor-in-chief of Moscow’s “Iswestija”, the well-known Communist Karl Radek, wrote the following sentence: “Litwinow has shown that he understands, in a Bolshevik manner, how to seek allies, even if only temporarily, wherever they are to be found”.

121

Why are we so late to recognise that England in truth is and can be without a western stance? Because only in the future will we grasp the fact that England began to organise the modern world, but Modernity by its very Essence is aimed at unloosing Contriving-things right round the globe. Even the idea of an understanding with England, in the sense of a division of the “rights” of imperialisms, misses the essence of the historical process which England now within Americanism and within Bolshevism, and that equally means within World Jewry, is playing out to the end. The question of the role of World Jewry is not at all a racial one; it is rather the metaphysical question about a type of humanity which in complete unconstraint can take on as their world-historical “task” the Uprooting of all What’s-in-being out of Being.

Philosophical Notebook XV

2

People are saying that motorised warfare has made the mere War of Materials obsolete, above all because it has re-introduced “movement”. In truth, it is only now that the War of Materials is first brought to its Essence. Matter has become more material and thereby more exclusive. Man is entirely at the service of the machine, even if he says and pretends that he masters it. Above and beyond this, Matter as What’s-in-being does not at all or ever have its Essence in the Stuff: one can designate its Being, according to the metaphysical way of thinking, as “Spirit”. Insofar as Matter in its Essence comes through Mobility and Movability, it will become “more spiritual” and so precisely “more material”; and so it will return into its Violence and will conform to what is fundamentally the dominant Being (Brutality). At the End of Metaphysics, the characterising mark of the Reality of every real thing is its Brutality-capacity. That’s what the “Mastery” of Technology amounts to.

9

Americanism is the historically definable manifestation of the unconditional Expiry of Modernity in Devastation. Russianism, in the unequivocality of brutality and pig-headedness, at the same time possesses a rooting Source-Territory in its Earth, which has given it a predetermined World-Unequivocality. By contrast, Americanism is the Heaping-up-together of All, and this Heaping-up-together always also means the Uprooting of What-is-heaped. As soon as this is unconditionally exalted to the Settled State of Affairs of what simply is historically Do-able, then All is always possessible, but at the same time each thing is deprived of its Origin. Russianism does not get down so deep in this metaphysical Zone of Devastation; since it has within itself, independently of “socialism”, a Possibility of Beginning, from which all Americandom is barred from the start. Russianism is, despite everything, too firm-grounded and hostile to Reason to be in a position to take over the historical Determination of Devastation. To take over the Forgetting of Being and organise it as such and give it permanence as an Attitude, it is necessary to have a Faculty of Reason that is in the highest degree prepared and calculating everything – one can, if one wants, also call it “Spirituality”. Only this “Spirit” has matured for the historical Task of Devastation. Within this Devastation the Servant’s Role has been taken on by the “Master Race” of Englishmen. The metaphysical Nothingness of their history is now coming to light. They attempt only to rescue this Nothingness and thereby perform their part in the Devastation.

On a given day someone will appeal against Americanism and its Rootlessness to the Western History of Europe. Very well. But is this appeal itself justified? Can it be justified, when it merely uses “European culture” as a ready-to-hand requisite and at every opportunity points to an Earlier, which the “Present” had nothing to do with? When will the western Appeal to the West come into its Essence-right? When will it, like its earlier self, experience Western-ness as History and open itself for a Coming, instead of – un-knowing in All – imitating and trying to outdo Americanism? What right can it have to appeal to its own historical Essence, when everything is geared towards burying the Possibility of perceiving this Essence?

Someone objects: oh but “the Intellectuals” are not able to assert themselves, though there’s a chance they can do so. But wait a moment! What is one demading here, when one demands that they should “assert themselves”? What freedom is one donating when the demand is raised “to get right in there”? Hasn’t one thus already prejudged everything which must be the First Question for Awareness? Namely, whether the “intellectual”, as it is traditionally called, is at all the Essential-Type which will be “effective” in “assertion”. “Assert themselves” – that Followers will be recruited and led together and Believers schooled for the purpose, generally such as are not willing and able to enter the Relationship with the Essential. “Assert themselves”? How – if it was all about making oneself ready for what never needs Assertion, but which demands Awe and long Awareness and Steadfastness? “Assert themselves” – like some make of car in the car industry asserts itself! “Assert themselves”, just like an Organiser of Human Masses gets himself listened to, by each person for different reasons and often for none at all? “Assert themselves” – as if the Essential was a “Business” and a matter of what’s “Manufacturable” and would first be awarded its Essence-right only after achievement in this sphere.

“Assert yourselves”, people call out to us. No – extract yourselves! we call back – free yourselves from the seductive Giddiness of the self-asserting and from the fake reality of “Self-assertion”. “Assert yourselves” – doesn’t this promote Americanism to the status of fundamental principle? What more do we need?

The epidemic spread of this seemingly obvious and generally valid claim to “Self-assertion” as the yardstick for the Essence-worthiness of Anything, destroys the very possibility of Awareness. And here the Devastation is already begun. Where then is the “settlement of accounts” with America?

Extract yourselves from the Essence-poverty of Being. Learn first of all that no “biological” Breeding of Man and no anthropological Glorification will ever be good for anything, unless Being determines the Relation of Man to it and the Human Being makes an originating decision. Extract yourselves from the Possibilities that our History holds ready for this Awareness and Transformation, but lay aside the Vanity of the “Present”, which measures World History with its tape-measure like a draper.

16

At the beginning of the third year of the planetary war. – The common understanding likes to see history totted up and desires a “Balance Sheet”. Furthermore, there are some people who cannot be helped even by the most strenuous efforts. As long as one thinks only historiographically and not historically and also brings Planetarism into the mutation of history, instead of using it only and at most geographically as a framework for the “historiographical” events; as long as one only gives credit to “facts”, which are always only half true and therefore erroneous, the following assertions can be regarded as pertinent:

1. We have been victorious for two years now.

2. The number of those who have to be provided for grows, as the conquered territories also come under the blockade.

3. The territories to be administered are expanding continuously.

4. The chances of a political trade-off are all exhausted, as there are no partners left.

5. The war on multiple fronts, which a brilliant policy had supposedly averted as a serious danger, has become a reality through our own decision.

6. The chance of a decisive outcome within the sole still remaining military conflict has disappeared.

7. In all areas of action and planning a plain and simple “more of the same” is the only discernible goal.

8. The approximation in mode of action of the military opponents is increasingly complete.

9. World Jewry, egged on by the emigrants allowed to leave Germany, is generally impossible to engage, and to maximise its power it need never take part in military actions, whereas we have no choice but to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people.

10. The “New Order” is what one calls this German-European state of affairs, suitably veiled, and the transition from encirclement of Europe to siege of Europe.

On the other hand, one must keep this in mind: one advantage which the war leadership has this time round, in contrast to the First World War, is that it can learn from that war and has indeed done so. In order to make a timely counter to the aforementioned ten points, which in whatever adapted form can easily cloud one’s clear view of history and hold one back from awareness, our generally well-rehearsed propaganda would have to take them as assumptions.

22

Corresponding to Planetarism, there is Idiotism. – Here this word does not have to do with the psychiatric concept of stupidity of mind and soul. In being-historic terms it thinks the idion – the One’s-own, in which man today finds himself within the Mass Ordering. This One’s-own is the very same in which others too, and everyone, in which “one” finds and mutually affirms “oneself”. Idiotism means: that one fits the One’s-own suitably to the Everyman; e.g. the authority of the “illustrated papers”; the obligatoriness of the totally tailored-for-One claim of the radio, where “No one” speaks, for which very reason, however unimportant a concert may be, each violinist and trumpeter will be identified with first names and titles. Generally, one discovers by oneself in the One’s-own that it’s precisely Everyone who belongs there. Idiotism is the essential Narrowing-down to the World-faring, i.e. the Planetary. And this can only be in the Mode of Idiotism. This Narrowing-down includes the renunciation of all Awareness, in such a way that the renunciation is not recognised as renunciation, any more than one recognises the possibility of Awareness. Idiotism is therefore not some sort of privilege of “idiots” (i.e. mentally handicapped people). Quite the contrary: the unconditional Torn-ness and Turning-ness and Handy-ness of technical-historical Man goes together with Idiotism. Only planetary Man can be idiotic and idiotic Man must be planetary. The idiotic Essence of the Radio, for example, is still to a great extent inadequately developed. It is not enough that there should be an apparatus in every house and on every floor. Each “family” member, the servants, the children must have their own device, to be able to be Everyone, quickly and easily to learn and to hear and to “be” what each person elsewhere likewise is. The radio apparatus is the symbol of the Belonging-together of Planetarism and Idiotism; not only a symbol in the old “sense”, but technically-historically – as the piece of junk which accomplishes the Belonging-together of both, but which has also first got into its own line of business through the Belonging-together of both those and derives its development from this.

The real pacemaker of the Unity of Planetarism and Idiotism, but also its appropriate heir, is Americanism, the barrenest form of “historiographical” Historylessness.

25

Someone says, I’m a Platonist, and what he means is the Evangelical Church’s Confessional Front. The church “circles” bewail what they allege is a downfall of “culture”. They have no inkling of the fact that they themselves are doing much more “work” towards the burial of all “thinking” by means of their “rescue action” for the “spiritual Tradition”. The question is where the real Zones of Decision of “Being” are preparing themselves and opening up. The question is not who and what from the Hitherto (and long ago slid into mendacity and unfruitfulness) is to remain protected and rescued, if What’s-in-being is to have its Satisfaction. The question is solely whether Being as a Zone of historic Decisions is essencing towards its Initiating or not. The How of this Preparation can be very painful and difficult. How could this possibly be otherwise, when it’s about the Uniqueness of Being? But if one saves oneself in the Faith in Christ, the difficulty arises that this Faith cannot occur in the Philosophy which one professes to be engaged in. One therefore calls oneself, instead of professing to be a believing Christian and then also giving up “Philosophy” as a “Vanity of the World”, an “irredeemable Platonist”. And together with that, one complains about the intellectual False-coinage of Bolshevism. It’s in such goings-on that Devastation first becomes apparent.

30

The thought which has become well-known under the title “The Decline of the West” still remains in the narrow zone of Romanticism, even if Spengler knows something of the Caesarean brutality of Power. But for the type of “influence” that this thought has, it is symptomatic that people think they can refute it by simply pointing to the ongoing Progress. Overall “it goes on”. Nowhere is there an “End” and a Ceasing. On the contrary: the Consolidation of What’s-in-being is already at work to make an Endless Forward March come true in the form of Enormity. But perhaps even that is only an outer surface of History; this too shows nothing of what is eventing.

31

The future of the west in the Age of the Completion of Modernity: A Prussianly-reined unconditional Hyperamericanisation.

For “recreation” the bourgeois will no longer travel to the Riviera; rather, the captain of industry will fly to Borneo or to a reindeer hunt in Finland. The new possibilities of organisation will become endless and Enthusiasm boundless. The links to all of the Hitherto must very quickly crumble. A new type of “Happiness” will come over the planet, whose deficiencies if need be will be got over by Cinema and other “cultural” provisions. One day no one will any longer want to know what the West was. Animal rationale: Homo faber.

34

Progress is only apparently a principle of so-called “Liberalism”. In truth, it belongs to the Essence of an Age which as Modernity/New Age holds the always New to be the genuinely True and Real. The always New is essentially coupled with the Craving for unconditional Self-securing, which at all times and universally and “under all circumstances” and in every situation must reckon with what the “World”, already organised for complete Mastery, demands. Hence the particular Ready-to-hand is necessarily already obsolete within the sphere of planning Fore-calculation. The always New is hence also not the Result and Demand of a pure and sweeping Curiosity, but rather the escalating Sequence of the New is the inner Law of Reality, which has determined itself as “Will”, but at first still wavers in Indeterminacy: if and how “Will”, which is not meant “psychologically”, is a Will of Reason or Love or Power, or all together in a half-developed Mix. The New will always be newer, cheaper, more daily, more fleeting, more any-way-you-like, and hence necessarily louder and pushier. It has, and all of Reality along with it, trodden away the Power of Decision to a groundless Pushiness. The Essence of what at first one called “Americanism” is preparing itself. The New must outdo itself and the most Unheard-of is thereby already out-heard. But accordingly, now even the most inconspicuous thing and what the presumably still enduring “World” either values or finds indifferent, must also be regarded as the decisioneless Deciding.

38

What is a “Tautology”? For example, the words “Lying Propaganda”.

42

All the world interprets. No one thinks.

For a century now the Russians have known a great deal, and very accurately, about the Germans, their Metaphysics and their Poetry. But the Germans have no intuition of Russia. Prior to every practical-political question of what attitude we are to take to Russia stands the solitary question, how the Russians really are. Both communism (taken as unconditional Marxism) and modern Technology are west-european through and through. Both are only instruments of Russianism and not this itself.

Insofar as technology and communism are storming from the East against the West, in truth the West is storming against the West in an uncanny self-destruction of its own powers and tendencies. Alongside its public face, History always has another that is hidden.

In Russianism completed Metaphysics finds the appropriate place for its Rebirth-in-the-Rear. From there it will one day come as Counter-impulse towards the Beginning.