satisfy us? The answer to these questions is already nothing less than a return into the more original essence of truth, which indeed must first be put on its way by our very questioning. Similarly, we can already convince ourselves by a simple reflection on the traditional concept of truth that here we have in hand something worthy of questioning which has remained unquestioned.
RECAPITULATION
1) The question of truth as the most necessary philosophical question in an age that is totally unquestioning.
If we try to determine the present situation of man on earth metaphysically—thus not historiographically and not in terms of world-view—then it must be said that man is beginning to enter the age of the total unquestionableness of all things and of all contrivances. That is truly an uncanny occurrence, whose orientation no one can establish and whose bearing no one can evaluate.
Only one thing is immediately clear: in this completely unquestioning age, philosophy, as the questioning that calls forth what is most worthy of questioning, becomes inevitably most strange. Therefore it is the most necessary. And necessity has its most powerful form in the simple. The simple, however, is our name for what is inconspicuously the most difficult, which, when it occurs, appears to everyone immediately and ever again as the easiest and most accessible; yet it remains incontestably the most difficult. The simple is the most difficult, for the multiple admits and favors dispersion, and all dispersion, as a counter-reaction to the unification of man in his constant flight from himself —i.e., from his relation to Being {Seyn} itself—confirms and thereby alleviates and releases the heavy burden of existence. The multiple is the easy—even where concern over it seems toilsome. For progress from one thing to another is always a relaxation, and it is precisely this progress that is not allowed by the simple, which presses on instead to a constant return to the same in a constant self-enrichment. Only if we risk the simple do we arrive within the arena of the necessary. What is most necessary in philosophy—supposing that it must again become the strangest—is precisely that simple question by which it, in its questioning, is first brought to itself: namely, the question of truth.