The ever-increasing anxiety in the face of “thinking” rests on an incapacity for experience. Genuine experience does not require “empirics” and resides in the disposedness through being. Here arises the insight that there is a phantasy of concepts which contracts all beings into the essentiality of being and precisely does not “abstract.” The “abstract,” as the bugaboo of the publicly noisy “heroes,” will once again arise as testimony to the wretchedness of an age which up to this very hour has not created the least of what the much-slandered nineteenth century has deposited in the essential ground of history. Only the fact that this century saw the consummation of Western metaphysics gives it an essentiality distinguishing it from what preceded and endowing it with the historical destiny to remain historically essential beyond the hubub of the twentieth century, even when that century was supposed to carry out the endeavor to withdraw from recollection everything genuinely past in history and to offer only its bustle and the | meaninglessness of the various Americanisms.
It is said that the motorized battle has now overcome the mere battle of superior matériel, especially by reintroducing “movement.” In truth, the battle of matériel is now first brought to its essence; the matter partakes more of matériel and thereby becomes more exclusive. The human being is completely subservient to machines, although he believes and pretends he is their master. Moreover, matter, as a being, does not and never did have its essence in the physical; instead, its being can be designated, following the metaphysical way of thinking, as “spirit.” Matter comes into its essence through movement and motility and thus becomes “more spiritual” and so precisely partakes “more of matériel”; and thereby matter first shifts into its violence and becomes appropriate to the kind of being (brutalitas) that is basically already sovereign. The mark of the reality of everything real at the end of metaphysics is the capacity for brutalitas. Therein exists the “mastery” over technology.
With the approaching end of metaphysics, the works of the thinkers are becoming more and more noninceptual. On the other hand, what is inceptual is small in extent and requires no “proportions.” Nevertheless, not everything quantitatively | meager is already a beginning or even only a predelineation of one.
In an age that has become groundless, to hear from its spokesmen that genuine thinking would move in a “form of thought” which “belongs to the past” could be a good confirmation of the correct path, in case