process that puts us at risk, and thus is compelling in advance. The future is the beginning of all happening. Everything is enclosed within the beginning. Even if what has already begun and what has already become seem forthwith to have gone beyond their beginning, yet the latter—apparently having become the past—remains in power arid abides, and everything futural encounters it. In all genuine history, which is more than a mere sequence of events, the future is decisive: i.e., what is decisive are the goals of creative activity, their rank, and their extent. The greatness of creative activity takes its measure from the extent of its power to follow up the innermost hidden law of the beginning and to carry the course of this law to its end. Therefore the new, the deviating, and the elapsed are historically unessential though nonetheless inevitable. But because the beginning is always the most concealed, because it is inexhaustible and withdraws, and because on the other hand what has already been becomes immediately the habitual, and because this conceals the beginning through its extension, therefore what has become habitual needs transformations, i.e., revolutions. Thus the original and genuine relation to the beginning is the revolutionary, which, through the upheaval of the habitual, once again liberates the hidden law of the beginning. Hence the conservative does not preserve the beginning—it does not even reach the beginning. For the conservative attitude transforms what has already become into the regular and the ideal, which is then sought ever anew in historiographical considerations.
RECAPITULATION
The question of truth is ambiguous. “We seek the truth:” that means we want to know the true upon which our acting and “Being” are posited. “We are asking the question of truth”: that means we are endeavoring to find the essence of what is true. Essence is understood here as that which makes whatever is true true. When we aim at the essence, individual truths do not matter.