to now helps as little as the hurried restriction to daily needs. Here only reflection saves us, and the inner choice as to whether we want to be exposed to the claim the essential makes upon us or not. The decision as to whether we are capable of making decisions about ourselves comes before everything. If we are, then the decision is whether we adhere to what we need or attend to what we can do without.
If we adhere to what we need, that means, in your present case, chasing after what is necessary for the most convenient possible arrangement of professional training.
By comparison, if we attend at the same time to what we can do without, when, as for many of our young friends at the front, it comes to the most extreme, then what alone remains essential comes into view almost of itself.
The mark of what we decide here does not consist in the fact that some enroll in a philosophy course and others do not. How the aforementioned decision is made, and if it is made, no one can establish immediately from any kind of mark or certificate. Here each person is responsible for himself, for his own delusions, and that for which he holds himself ready.
Thus one can note this reference to the crisis of knowing, grounded actually in the essence of modern history and not produced by the present emergency, with a certain satisfaction that such a thing is said. Such a one takes his misplaced smirk over this criticism already for an accomplishment. However, one then leaves everything the way it was, not wishing to know that what is at risk here is not the organization of the teaching system, but the most proper concern of youth: that it must take things into its own hands, that the best organization and the best curricula do not help here, because behind all of these stand decisions about what is essential. Whoever thinks he can find confirmations of his own decisionless discontent here is living in an illusion.
3. The inception as a decision about what is essential in Western history (in modern times: unconditional will and technology)
Of course it is especially difficult for modern manto find his way into the essential, because in another respect he is familiar with too much and