Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event): Of the Event

VII. The Last God

VII. th e last god The god wholly other than past ones and especially other than the Christian one. 253. What is last is what not only needs the longest ante-cedence [Vor-läuferschaft] but what itself is the most profound beginning rather than a cessation, the beginning which reaches out the furthest and catches up to itself with the greatest difficulty. What is last is therefore withdrawn from all calculation and for that reason must be able to bear the burden of the loudest and most repeated misinterpretation. How else could it remain what is surpassing? If we have such a poor grasp even of “death” in its extremity, then how will we ever measure up to the rare intimation of the last god? 254. Refusal We are moving into the time-space of the decision regarding the absconding and advent of the gods. How so? Will the absconding or the advent become a future occurrence? Must the one or the other determine the constructive waiting? Or is the decision the opening up of an entirely different time-space for a (indeed the very first) grounded truth of beyng, i.e., for the event? What if that domain of decision as a whole, the absconding or advent of the gods, were precisely the ending itself? What if, over and above that, beyng in its truth had to be grasped for the first time as appropriation, as the eventuating of that which we call refusal? That is neither absconding nor advent, and also not absconding as well as advent; instead, it is something originary, the fullness of the bestowal of beyng in the refusal. Therein is grounded the origin of the future style, i.e., restraint within the truth of beyng. The refusal is the highest nobility of bestowal and is the basic trait of the self-concealment whose manifestness constitutes the originary essence of the truth of beyng. Only in this way does beyng become estrangement itself, the stillness of the passing by of the last god. But Da-sein is appropriated, in beyng, as the grounding of the stewardship of this stillness. The absconding and advent of the gods are now moving together into what has been and are withdrawn from the past. But what is to come, the truth of beyng as refusal, contains the guarantee of vastness—not that of an empty and gigantic eternity, but that of the shortest path. Yet belonging to this truth of beyng, to the refusal, is the veiling of nonbeings as such, the loosening and squandering of beyng. Only now must the abandonment by being remain. This loosening, however , is not empty arbitrariness and disorder; on the contrary, everything is now strictly bound in planning and control and in the exactitude of a sure course of action and a domination “without remainder.” Nonbeings, under the semblance of beings, are brought by machination into the haven of beings, and human desolation, which is ineluctably compelled thereby, finds its compensation in “lived experience.” All this, as distorted essence, must become more necessary than ever before, because what is strangest also needs what is most common , and the fissure of beyng should not be obstructed through the concocted semblance of counter-balancings, “success,” and false completion ; for the last god hates all those more than anything else. To speak of the last god—is that not a degradation of God, indeed pure and simple blasphemy? Yet what if the last god must be so named, because the decision about the gods ultimately leads under and among them and so raises to the highest the essence of the uniqueness of the Godhead? If we think calculatively here and take “last” in the sense of sheer stoppage and ending, rather than in the sense of the most extreme and most compendious decision about what is highest, then any knowledge of the last god is of course impossible. Yet why should thinking about the Godhead be a matter of calculation instead of an attempt at meditation on the danger of something strange and incalculable? 255. The turning in the event1 The event has its innermost occurrence and its furthest reach in the turning. The turning which essentially occurs in the event is the concealed ground of all other, subordinate turnings, circles, and loops (cf., for example, the turning in the structure of the guiding questions or the circle in understanding), ones whose origin...