is not an arbitrary critique, stemming from empty hair-splitting, but is the turning of our thinking and questioning about truth toward the beginning of the history of truth. And we today still dwell in this history, indeed precisely insofar as we unwittingly and as a matter of course in all our thinking and acting move within the domain of the traditional concept of truth.
Just what have we gained thereby? What else than the historiographical cognition that for us today, and for the West since long ago, the original essence of truth has been lost because of the predominance of truth as correctness. Hence we have gained the recognition of a loss. But it is not at all decided that we have here a genuine loss. For that would be the case only if it could be shown that the not-losing, the preservation, of the original essence of truth (ἀλήθεια) is a necessity and that we consequently need to gain back what was lost.
Yet, even assuming this were demonstrated conclusively, can we gain back what was lost? Is the past not irreparably gone? And even if we wanted to adhere to this past in memory, would that not lead to the opposite of what is necessary? We do not want to turn back history, and of course we cannot; instead, we must think and act out of our present (or future) necessity. For the shocks (world war, world revolution) or, rather, that of which these shocks are merely the historical consequences have forced us—not any single individuals, nor the still more arbitrary “many,” and not individual peoples or nations and states for themselves, but the entire West—into the question of whether or not we are still in the truth, indeed whether we still want and can want the truth at all.
In view of this task, is not the merely retrospective remembering of earlier times—no matter how essential these times may have been—yet still “historicism,” an adherence to the past from some sort of ill-concealed “romanticism” or from some “humanistic” predilection, now basically antiquated, for the Greeks and the Greek world and its philosophy? Or does the retrospection originate merely in an antipathy toward the degeneration of what today, under the venerable name of philosophy, postures in an unbridled and uninhibited writing of books and blabbering, the extent and content of which stand in a reverse relation to the power to raise essential questions? But can we be permitted to