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

IV. The Leap

IV. th e lea P1 1. Regarding “Beyng,” cf. Überlegungen II, IV, V, VI, VII. 115. The disposition guiding the leap The leap, that most daring venture in the course of inceptual thinking, jettisons and leaves behind everything conventional. The leap expects nothing immediate from beings; instead, and before all else, it leaps into the belonging to beyng in the full essential occurrence of beyng as event. In this way, the leap appears in the semblance of utter recklessness , and yet the disposition motivating it is precisely that diffidence (cf. Prospect, 5. For the few—For the rare, p. 13ff.) in which the will to restraint surpasses itself toward steadfastness in withstanding the most remote nearness of the hesitant withholding. The leap is the venture of a first penetration into the domain of the history of being. 116. The history of being To bring about the preparedness for the transition from the end of the first beginning and into the other beginning does not mean to enter a “period” which simply has never occurred before; rather, it is to step into a wholly other domain of history. The end of the first beginning will still for a long while carry over into the transition and indeed even into the other beginning. As surely as the history of the end will drag on and, measured according to incidents, will be “more alive,” “more headlong,” and more confused than ever, so the transition itself will remain the most question-worthy and especially the most difficult to recognize. Humans—a few, unknown to one another—will prepare themselves in the temporal-spatial playing field of Da-sein and will gather themselves into a nearness to beyng, a nearness which must remain alien to everything “close to life.” In long spans of time, which to the history of being are mere moments, that history knows rare events such as: the assignment of truth to beyng, the collapse of truth, the entrenchment of the distorted essence of truth (correctness), the abandonment of beings by being, the entry of beyng into its truth, the kindling of the hearth fire (of the truth of beyng) as the solitary site of the passing by of the last god, and the flaring up of the non-repeatable uniqueness of beyng. While the destruction of the outgoing world, as self-destruction, screams out its triumphs into the void, the essence of beyng gathers itself into its highest calling: as appropriating eventuation, to assign the ground and the temporal-spatial playing field, i.e., Da-sein in the singularity of its history, to the realm of decision regarding the divinity of the gods. Beyng as appropriating event is the victory of what is ineluctable in the attestation of the god. But do beings fit into the conjuncture of beyng? Is the human being to be endowed with the uniqueness of the going-under instead of with desolation in progressive continuance? The going-under is the gathering of everything great in the moment of preparedness for the truth of the uniqueness and non-repeatability of beyng. The going-under is the most intimate proximity to the refusal in which the event bestows itself on the human being. The entrance of the human being into the history of being cannot be calculated in advance and is independent of all progress or regress of “culture,” as long as “culture” itself refers to the entrenchment of the abandonment of beings by being and pursues an ever-greater mattingdown of humanity in its “anthropologism” or even foists on the human being once again the Christian obliviousness to all truth of beyng. 117. The leap The meditation of “fundamental ontology” (laying of the foundation of ontology as its overcoming) constitutes the transition from the end of the first beginning to the other beginning. This transition, however , is at the same time the run-up to the leap which alone can initiate a beginning and especially the other beginning as constantly surpassed by the first. Prepared here in the transition is the most originary and thus the most historical decision, that either–or which allows no hiding places and no regions for evasion: either to remain trammeled to the end and to its running out, i.e., to ever new variants of “metaphysics” which become ever cruder, more groundless, and more aimless (the new “biologism” and the like), or to initiate the other beginning, i.e...