From the first draft [214-15] 181

selves and will tolerate no dissent, and as certain as history is grounded only in the overcoming of the historiographical, that is how little we can detach ourselves from all previous history and place ourselves, as it were, in a void.

We must insist over and over that what is at stake in the question of truth as raised here is not simply an alteration of the previous concept of truth, nor a supplementation of the usual representation, but a transformation of humanity itself. This transformation is not the result of new psychological or biological insights. For man is not here the object of any sort o f anthropology. On the contrary, man is here in question in the most profound and the most extensive respect, the one properly foundational; i.e. we are questioning man in his relation to Being, or, after the turning, we are questioning Being and its truth in relation to man. The determination of the essence of truth is accompanied by a necessary transformation of man. Both are the same. This transformation signifies the dislocation of humanity out of its previous home–or. better, from its homelessness–into the ground of its essence, in order for man to become the founder and the preserver of the truth o f Being, to be the "there," as the ground employed by the essence of Being itself.

The dislocation of humanity–to be this ground–turns man away from himself the furthest and into a relation to Being itself. But only out of this furthest distance can man truly find himself back, i.e., be who he is.

We have been speaking of "man," expressing ourselves as concisely as possible. But the man that concerns us is historical man, which means the one who creates history, is sustained by history, and is beset by history. This historical man is not a separate "individual," dragging his past behind himself. Nor does it mean several individuals, belonging together in the form of a society. Individuation and society are themselves only possible and necessary modes of historical humanity and do not at all exhaust it. Historical man: that shall mean for us the unexhausted unique fullness of essential human possibilities and necessities, specifically–which is decisive here–ones arising from man's relation to the truth of Being itself. Questioning on the basis of such a pre-view, we would represent precisely the possibility of the beginning of an entirely different history, in which the destiny of the single individual as well as of society would be determined differently, so differently that the previous representations could no longer suffice.

Thus the dislocation of man back into his ground has to be carried out in the first place by those few, solitary, and uncanny ones, who in various ways as poets, thinkers, as builders and artists, as doers and actors, ground and shelter the truth of Being in beings through the transformation o f beings. Through the rigor of the decisions which lie ahead, they become, each in his way and unknown to~the many, a silent sacrifice.

If we appraise the reflection on this dislocation [Verrückung] of man from the standpoint of sound common sense and its predominance, we


Basic Questions of Philosophy (GA 45) by Martin Heidegger