rather as the essentially occurring word which hovers freely in beyng qua abyss and fades away into the silence of the truth of beyng.—
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How long must a person be enraptured with the sciences and traverse them by working in them, so one day he will learn that and why they must remain merely superficial knowledge? Today’s “youth” seem to possess simpler ways; these young people grow up already distrusting the “sciences” and find themselves justified always and everywhere in turning away from them. But do these young people thereby arrive more quickly and more surely at some essential knowledge? Do they really have simpler ways? Or is this semblance spreading only because a knowledge of the domains of decision has become altogether useless and because these domains are no longer even “questioned”? What is the meaning of this unneediness, which is quite different than the increasing unrefinement whence in the first place an extensive breakdown has developed, specifically in “praxis”? Is this unneediness saying that the modern human being is now completely swallowed up by beings and | by the pursuit of beings (Who makes this bargain?—as the unshaken basic question of the “great politics”31) and that being has withdrawn from beings, whereby a καταστροφή [“catastrophe”] has become unrepresentable in the abyss of beyng?
Beyng itself is “tragic”—i.e., it begins out of the downgoing qua abyss and tolerates such beginnings only as that which does justice to its truth—the knowledge of beyng is therefore always reserved to the unique ones and specifically to those of them that necessarily must remain unrecognizable in all historiological cognition. The limit even of genuine historical meditation therefore does not lie in the extent of the capacity for confrontation—but in the essential misrecognition which spreads over those unique ones, expanding out from a determinate circle of solitude.
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That which an age, indeed perhaps an integrated series of ages (such as the history of the West), has to endure in the ground of its history is seldom put into words and known by that age. For, an age always moves within the language and the thought of what it has attained
31. {Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft. Werke, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1921), p. 156.}