17
Ponderings XII [20–21]

the gloomy appearance of emptiness and detachment. Such appearances inevitably adhere to this question in its previous metaphysical configuration, due to the long transmission of the basic words and the abrading of the basic concepts. No sufficient protection against this is offered even by the most deft cleverness in reflection—such cleverness merely leads astray in ever new “consequences,” to the effect that thoughtful questioning is rooted in being a thinker; but according to the previously given determination, this might still easily be falsified and externalized. One could believe that “being a thinker,” versus mere arbitrary, playful reflection proceeding on paths of pleasurable thought, emphasizes that the thinker “draws his thoughts from life” and relates to life and makes this his rule, so that this thinking— issuing from “life” and transforming itself into it—then might be of help to life. Such thinkers who do not disappear in the detachment of their thoughts, but take their thoughts back into “life” and thus make themselves “existent,” are commonly called “existentiell” thinkers, and their “philosophy” is named the “philosophy of life” | or even the “philosophy of existence.” The fact that the thinker is here degraded to a serf of much-extolled life and its praxis, i.e., a serf of beings, already shows to what extent the “existentiell thinker,” who not without reason is today required and esteemed in various configurations, never comes to be a thinker—i.e., is never able to enter the domain of the decisions regarding the truth of beyng over against the supremacy of the beings abandoned by being (the supremacy of machination).

To be a thinker involves the decisive knowledge that meditation, as the disclosive questioning of this decision, projects into “life” the most dangerous disturbance of “life” and renounces justifying itself to this “life.” For such doom links the age to the distorted history of its “life” (a history which arises with the increasing power of historiology): the absence of the meditative, thoughtful convulsions which could set that life with its egotistical self-certainty into discord and into conflict with itself. Instead, the “spirit” of the age hastens to suppress the “spirit” as the adversary of the “soul”8—i.e., the adversary of the “body” and thus of the animal—at which | striving, the doctrines of individual authors and metaphysicians remain inessential over and against the power to renounce meditation and also over and against the aversion which, out of the machinational essence of beings as a whole, spreads at once over them and over the subjectum [Subjektum] as the predatory animal.



8. {Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Barth, 1929ff.).}


Ponderings XII-XV (GA 96) by Martin Heidegger