Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)

This remaining absent is all the more uncanny the longer churches and forms of divine service survive (and seem permanent) and yet are unable to ground an original truth.

That title came from clear knowledge of the task: no longer beings and beingness, but being; no longer “thinking,” but “time”; the priority no longer given to thinking, but to beyng. “Time” as a name for the “truth” of being; and all this as task, as “still on the way,” not as “doctrine” and dogma.

Precisely therefore, however, transitional thinking must not succumb to the temptation to simply leave behind what it grasped as the end and at the end; instead, this thinking must put behind itself what it has grasped, i.e., now for the first time comprehend it in its essence and allow it to be integrated in altered form into the truth of beyng.

For transitional thinking, however, what matters is not an “opposition” to “metaphysics,” since that would simply bring metaphysics back into play; rather, the task is an overcoming of metaphysics out of its ground.

Da-sein is the grounding of the truth of beyng.

But what if the essence of thinking has been lost to us and “logic” has been predestined to commandeer “thinking,” even though “logic” itself is indeed merely a vestige of the powerlessness of thinking, i.e., of unsupported and unprotected questioning in the abyss of the truth of being? And what if “thinking” retains validity only as the faultless drawing of conclusions within the correct representation of objects, i.e., as the avoidance of that questioning?

What is “more sure”: the immediate, naive description or the exact experiment? The former, because there theory is presupposed “less”!

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.

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.

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.