failure to question it not a neglect? In other words, did the thinking power of the Greeks fall short here?
§30. Their fidelity to the destiny meted out to them as the reason the Greeks did not ask about ἀλήθεια. Non-occurrence as what is necessarily detained in and through the beginning.
No. The reason the Greeks did not inquire here is that this question runs counter to their ownmost task, and therefore it could not at all enter their field of view. Their failure to question was not a consequence of a lack of power but was due precisely to their original power to remain faithful to the destiny meted out to them.
What was the task assigned them? How can we tell? We are not capable of calculating it. If we try to, we end up merely with a list of their opinions, we end up with a report on the views they held. For the curious, for those who love to know a thinker’s “standpoint,” the “views” of a philosopher are indeed all that is desired; for a philosophy, however, this is completely a matter of indifference. The task assigned to the primordial thinkers is accessible only through a reflection on their primordial questioning. The past counts for nothing, the beginning for everything. Hence our ever more penetrating inquiry back into the beginning. Hence even our reflection concerning the ground for what did not occur at the beginning. For what did not happen in history in the essential moments of history—and what would be more essential than a beginning?—must still come to pass, not as a mere repetition but in the sense of those jolts, leaps, and bounds, in the sense of that momentary and simple, which we must concentrate upon and be prepared for, if we are really to expect of future history something essential.
In the realm of what is essential, what does not occur is even more essential than what does, for it can never become a matter of indifference but instead always stands, and ever more firmly, within the possibility of becoming more necessary and more compelling. On the other hand, the occurrence of the essential is almost inevitably followed by its being covered over and submerged by the unessential. As is clear, then, the non-occurrence