34 Ponderings XII–XV [42–43]

21
Battlers—divide on the one hand into those who always need an op-
ponent and if none can be found invent one and feign themselves and
others as opponents. Without an opponent, these battlers languish in
perplexity and goallessness, and in order to escape this, they basically
battle without cessation over the currently actual or merely semblant
presence at hand of opponents and make themselves dependent on
these opponents. On the other hand, there are those battlers who at-
tend only to that for which they battle and do not need opponents,
and if such exist, these battlers make the opponents dependent
on themselves, the battlers, and thus make themselves goalless.
The highest battle of such battlers—who of course do not designate
themselves this way—is the one that enables an enduring of the es-
sential decisions. The battle is not over possessions and results, and
62 not over power and enjoyment, but | over a beginning of the history
of being.

22
Someone is acting “politically” in the modern sense who, e.g., obtains
the payment promised, though at first withheld, for betraying another
country and obtains it specifically by utilizing the friendly mediation
of the very country he betrayed. Politics [Politik] no longer has any-
thing to with the πόλις [polis, “city-state”] nor with morals and least
of all with “becoming a people.” In the age of complete de-diviniza-
tion, politics is the only appropriate basic form of the forceful gath-
ering of all means of power and ways of violence, i.e., the only form
that acknowledges the authority of no court of law and derives every-
thing legitimate from “rights,” i.e., from the power claim to “life,” i.e.,
from the empowerment of power, indeed such that the talk of “rights”
is tolerated only as a vestige of overcome notions of order, so as to re-
accustom into the new order those who are ponderous and laden with
old prejudices. “Politics” is the genuine executor of the machination
of beings and can only be grasped metaphysically—every other valua-
tion does not reach far enough. And therefore the talk of “power poli-
63 tics” betrays a | misunderstanding in the form of a pleonastic expres-
sion, since politics requires power in order to be directed by it to the
empowerment of the machination of beings. This politics is “total”—
not because it encompasses everything, but because it by essence is
grounded in the execution of the beingness of beings. Notions such as
“nationalism” and “socialism” belong to an age in which modernity
still tarried in the preliminary stage of its consummation; now they
 Ponderings XII [43–45] 35

are simply historiologically employed titles for a quite different pro-

cess which can no longer be called “political” in the least.

23
In the age of unrestricted machination, the sciences take on the char-
acter of an industry dealing in the lore of nature and of peoples. This
industry is an institution of “technology” in the essential sense—i.e.,
at the same time an institution of historiology—for the empowerment
of nature and of the people. The products of this industry become
means of the power of machination. Every attempt to bring the sci-
ences into connection with “knowledge” in the sense of a grounding
of truth and a decision toward truth must fall prey to universal ridi-
cule. “Nature” and “people” are themselves merely machinational in-
stitutions in which the empowerment of machination plays out and
is constantly secured. Only “visionaries” and “philistines” will still
see here realities in which the emptiness of humanity could find a |
sustaining and surpassing fulfillment. 64

24
The history of Western humans—no matter whether they dwell in
Europe or elsewhere—has slowly advanced to a situation wherein all
otherwise familiar domains such as “homeland,” “culture,” “people,”
but also “state” and “Church,” and also “society” and “community,”
refuse to take shelter. And that is because these domains have been
degraded to mere pretexts and have surrendered to an arbitrary con-
nivance whose motive forces remain unfamiliar and divulge their op-
eration simply in compelling humans to habituation in an ever more
importunate massiveness whose “fortune” is exhausted in making do
without decisions and in becoming stupefied while intending to pos-
sess and enjoy this massiveness more and more, because what is worth
possessing is becoming constantly smaller and emptier. The sole and
also necessarily ungenuine anxiety such a situation still allows is the
fear that this human activity could suddenly be brought to an end by
new wars and everything could go astray; for where the adherence to
the present-at-hand counts as the possession and mastery of | beings, 65
there misfortune shrivels up to a state in which and through which
everything present-at-hand must be subject to elimination.
How could there still awaken in these circumstances a trace of the
anxiety which recognizes that precisely the supremacy of the
present-at-hand and the unneediness for decisions (the imperceptibly
growing strength of the destining toward this situation) are already