251. Da-sein and the essence of a people5
A people is a people only if it receives its history as allotted to it through finding its god, the god that compels this people beyond itself and thus places the people back amid beings. Only then does a people escape the danger of circling around itself and of idolizing, as its unconditioned, what are merely conditions of its subsistence. How is a people supposed to find the god, however, unless there are seekers who in reticence seek on behalf of this people and who, as these seekers, must apparently even stand against a "people" that is not yet properly a people? Yet these seekers themselves must first be; the task is to prepare for them precisely as beings. Da-sein: what else is it but the grounding of the being of these beings, the future ones of the last god?
The essence of a people is grounded in the historicality of those who belong to themselves through their belonging to the god. Out of the event, wherein this belonging is historically grounded, first arises the reason "life" and the lived body, procreation and lineage, or, most basically, the earth belong to history and in their own way in turn take history back up into themselves. In all this they are merely in service to the strife between earth and world, borne by the most intrinsic diffidence as in each case something unconditioned. For their essence is indeed, because of its intrinsicality to the strife, at the same time near to the event.
252. Da-sein and the future ones of the last god
This god will raise over his people the simplest, yet most extreme, oppositions as paths on which his people wander beyond themselves, so as to find their essence once again to make the most of their historical moment.
World and earth, in their strife, will raise love and death to their highest level and will integrate them into fidelity to the god and into a capacity to endure the confusion, within a manifold mastery of the truth of beings.
In the playing out of this strife, the future ones of the last god will reach the event through the strife and in the broadest retrospect will recollect the greatest created thing as the fulfilled non-repeatability and uniqueness of being. Moreover, the massive will release all the guile of its rage and will wash away everything uncertain and lukewarm, everything
5. Cf. The grounding, Dasein; cf. Uberlegungen V, p. 35f.