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works of art, and only with respect to the question of the meaningfulness of being. Moreover, once he has defended his claim that primordial ontological truth involves ἀλήθεια, uncovering, and not “correctness,” the objections raised above become immediately irrelevant. If he can show what he aims to show with Hölderlin and Rilke, then there is no possible question like “should Being be meaningful in this way?” or “is it true that this is ‘what’ Being means?” or even a discursive, propositional paraphrase of “just what such meaningfulness amounts to.” This is what he means by speaking of Being’s Geschick or destiny or fate—something we are simply subject to—in the way we have described how mattering is not subject to human will or assessment. The fate of Being is the obvious descendant within Heidegger’s History of Being project of his earlier emphasis on thrownness.
This still leaves relatively open the question of what, if Heidegger is basically right, all this would mean in living out one’s life, in somehow being attuned to some disclosure of some intimation of possible meaningfulness, inseparable from the unclarity and confusion (not indeterminacy) of concealment. It might seem ironic to appeal to Nietzsche here, ironic because Heidegger, in his later Nietzsche lectures, wants to show that Nietzsche failed to be the first “post-metaphysical” thinker and was still complicit with metaphysics, but this passage from Twilight of the Idols might well serve as the beginning of a response. For what follows from a question like “what follows if Heidegger is right?” is clearly not something like a belief in something or a new position in ontology. It might be intimated in this passage.
Learning to see—habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend the individual in all its aspects. This is the first schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one’s control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language strong will-power [starken Willen]: the essence of it is precisely not to “will,” the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus—one has to react, one obeys a stimulus. In many instances, such a compulsion is already morbidity, decline, a symptom of exhaustion. ... To stand with all doors open, to prostrate oneself submissively before every petty fact, to be ever itching to mingle with, plunge into other people and other things, in short our celebrated modern “objectivity,” is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. (TI, 64–65)12
12. Cf. also the Heidegger resonances of “a person is necessary, a person is a piece of the whole—there is nothing that can judge, measure, compare or condemn our being, because it would mean judging, measuring, comparing and condemning the whole. . . . But there is nothing outside the whole” (TI, 182).