In this 1964 lecture, Heidegger tries to answer two questions: (1) What does it mean that philosophy has entered its final stage in our time? and (2) What task is reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy?
The end of philosophy is not a mere stopping, but has to be understood as completion. Philosophy is metaphysics, and metaphysics is Platonism. Friedrich Nietzsche achieved the most extreme possibility of philosophy in his reversal of Platonism. The completion of metaphysics is the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of the scientific-technological world and its social order.
The end of philosophy is the complete actualization of the metaphysical possibility of thinking. In the Greek beginning of thinking, however, a first nonmetaphysical possibility of thinking remained concealed. It is the task of nonmetaphysical or being-historical thinking to explore this first possibility, and so prepare for the other beginning of thinking.
In philosophy’s beginning, Parmenides speaks about the clearing of being, as such, although it would remain unthought in philosophy. Ἀλήθεια, unconcealment, was equated with truth as the correspondence of knowledge with entities or truth as the certainty of knowledge. Unconcealment is, however, not the same as this modern concept of truth. We must think ἀλήθεια as the clearing, which first grants being and thinking their belonging together to and for each other. The task of thinking is the surrender of metaphysics to the determination of the matter of thinking, that is, Ereignis.