Indiana University Press

Philosophy—the passion of pressing forward and catching the scent that reaches the essence of things: the ceaseless questioning struggle over the essence and Being of beings.

If we now think over everything at once that philosophy is not, and remember at the same time its whole history from its inception with the Greeks to Nietzsche, then we reach the unsettling and provocative conclusion that in its history, philosophy has been precisely everything that we said is not its essence. It was and willed to be: science, worldview, foundation for knowledge, absolute knowledge, concern with existence. The history of Western philosophy thus turns out to be an ever steeper decline from its own essence. More than that—insofar as in its history philosophy appeals again and again to its start and inception among the Greeks, philosophy makes this inception ever harder to recognize and misinterprets it in terms of the later, degraded essence.

that history is not the past, but happening, both as a heritage and as a future;

Looking backward, Hegel means completion; looking forward, he means the starting point for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

The hex cast by technology and by its constantly self-surpassing progress is only one sign of this bewitchery that directs everything toward calculation, utility, breeding, manageability, and regulation. Even “taste” now becomes subject to this regulating and is entirely a matter of being “high class.” The average becomes better and better, and thanks to this betterment the average secures its dominance ever more irresistibly and unobtrusively.

Even if a crude interpretation of the idea of creation is foregone, the fact that beings are caused remains essential. The cause-effect connection comes to dominate everything (God as causa sui). That is an essential deviation from φύσις and is at the same time the transition to the emergence of machination as the essence of beingness in modern thought. The mechanistic and the biologistic modes of thinking are always only consequences of the concealed machinational interpretation of beings.

The historical thinker is just as essentially different from the historiologist as from the philosopher, and least of all may the historical thinker be brought together with that pseudoformation we are used to calling “philosophy of history.”

The “universities,” as “sites of scientific research and teaching” (as such, they are formations of the nineteenth century), are becoming sheer business establishments. In these establishments, which are ever “closer to reality,” nothing is decided. They will retain the last vestiges of a cultural decoration only as long as they must also and for a while still remain a means for “cultural-political” propaganda. Nothing resembling the essence of “universitas” will be able to unfold out of them any longer: on the one hand, because the commandeering of everything into political-ethnic service makes such an unfolding otiose, and also because science itself as a business can hold its course more securely and easily without what is “proper to a university,” i.e., without the will to meditation. Philosophy, understood here exclusively as thoughtful meditation on truth, i.e., on the question-worthiness of beyng, and not as historiological and “system”-building erudition, does not have a place in “universities” and certainly not in the business establishments they will become. For nowhere at all does philosophy “have” a place, unless it is the place it itself founds, to which indeed no path could lead immediately, starting from any established institution.

This “development” of modern science, its coming into its essence, is visible today only to a few and will be rejected by most as nonexistent. It cannot be proven by matters of fact; instead, it can be grasped only out of a knowledge of the history of being.

Sheer idiocy to say that experimental research is Nordic-Germanic and that rational research, on the contrary, is of foreign extraction! We would then have to resolve to number Newton and Leibniz among the “Jews.” It is precisely the projection of nature in the mathematical sense that constitutes the presupposition for the necessity and possibility of “experimentation” as measuring.