“practical” thinking always to misjudge philosophy, whether by overestimating or underestimating it. Philosophy is overestimated if one expects its thinking to have an immediately useful effect. Philosophy is underestimated if one finds in its concepts merely abstract (remote and watered down) representations of things that have already been solidly secured in experience.
Yet genuine philosophical knowledge is never the mere addition of the most general representations, limping behind a being already known anyway. Philosophy is rather the reverse, a knowledge that leaps ahead, opening up new domains of questioning and aspects of questioning about the essence of things, an essence that constantly conceals itself anew. That is precisely the reason this knowledge can never be made useful. Philosophical reflection has an effect, if it does, always only mediately, by making available new aspects for all comportment and new principles for all decisions. But philosophy has this power only when it risks what is most proper to it, namely to posit in a thoughtful way for the existence of man [das Dasein des Menschen] the goal of all reflection and to establish thereby in the history of man a hidden sovereignty. We must therefore say philosophy is the immediately useless, though sovereign, knowledge of the essence of things.
The essence of beings, however, is always the most worthy of questioning. Insofar as philosophy, in its incessant questioning, merely struggles to appreciate what is most worthy of questioning and apparently never yields results, it will always and necessarily seem strange to a thinking preoccupied with calculation, use, and ease of learning. The sciences, and indeed not only the natural sciences, must strive increasingly and, it seems, irresistibly for a complete “technologizing” in order to proceed to the end of their course, laid down for them so long ago. At the same time, the sciences appear to possess genuine knowledge. For these reasons, the sharpest possible alienation with regard to philosophy and at the same time a presumed convincing proof of the futility of philosophy occur in and through the sciences.
(Truth and “science”: if, and only if, we believe ourselves to be in possession of the “truth,” do we have science and its business. Yet science is the disavowal of all knowledge of truth. To hold that today science meets with hostility is a basic error: never has science