FROM THE FIRST DRAFT
I. Foundational issues in the question of truth.
1. The compelling power of the need arising from the abandonment by Being; terror as the basic disposition of the other beginning.
It is transformed into mere curiosity within what is accessible to everyone. Philosophy is still “done,” because it was once supposed to belong to the assets of culture, and caring for culture would presumably impede barbarism. The primordial questioning knowledge and the holding firm before the concealed have been replaced by a domination over everything, since everything has become obvious. That first luminosity of wonder, which had knowledge only of the darkness, has become the transparency of all knowing and doing, accessible to everyone and satisfying everyone.
Beings are—that is not worth a question, indeed it is not even worth mentioning. And to say what beings are, precisely as beings, is empty talk. For everyone knows what “Being” means, especially since it is the most general and most empty determination of everything. In this wasteland of utter indifference, what in the beginning produced the highest wonder has been lost—and the fact that here and there academic philosophy is still done diligently does not refute this loss but corroborates it.
There are only a very few who in the course of this history of the dissolution of the beginning have remained awake and surmise what has transpired. Insofar as they are still compelled to question, the compelling need must change in form and must be more undetermined, since the uniqueness of the first wonder has been lost and the subsequent tradition of questioning and thinking has forced itself in. What need compelled Kant to the Critique? What need compelled Hegel to the system of absolute knowledge? After even this questioning was abandoned and everything was left to calculating experience, slowly and in certain places something like the imminent irrelevance and meaninglessness of all beings flared up. And when an attempt was ventured to think anew (Nietzsche),! starting from an admission of this irrelevance, the former
1 Cf. Winter semester 1936-37 and Summer semester 1937. [I.e., Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, GA, Bd. 43, and Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im abendliindischen Denken: Die Lehre von der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, GA, Bd. 44—Tr.]