This breakthrough consists in nothing less than the radicalization of how we do philosophy, bending it back onto the hidden path of its authentic historical happening as this is manifested in the inner communion of the great thinkers.
Philosophy, then, is not a doctrine, not some simplistic scheme for orienting oneself in the world, certainly not an instrument or achievement of human existence. Rather, philosophy is this existence itself insofar as it occurs, in freedom, from out of its own ground.
Whoever, by hard research, has arrived at this self-understanding of philosophy is granted the fundamental experience of all philosophizing, which is this: the more completely and originally research comes into its own, the more surely is it “nothing but” the transformation of the same few simple questions.
But those who want to transform must bear within themselves the power of a fidelity that knows how to preserve. The only way to feel that power grow within oneself is to be caught up in wonder. And the only way to be caught up in wonder is to travel to the outermost limits of the possible.
Yet the only way to become the friend of the possible is to remain open to dialog with the powers at work in the whole of human existence. And in fact that is the philosopher’s way of being: heeding what has already been sung forth and can still be perceived in each essential occurrence of the world.8
Such a way of being lets the philosopher enter the heart of what is truly at stake in the task he has been given to do.
Plato knew of that and spoke of it in his Seventh Letter (341c):
ῥητὸν γὰρ οὐδαμῶς ἐστιν, ὡς ἄλλα μαθήματα ἀλλ᾽ ἐκ πολλῆς συνουσίας γιγνομένης περὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα αὐτὸ καὶ τοῦ σὐζῆν ἐξαίφνης, οἶον ἀπὸ πυρὸς πηδήσαντος ἐξαφθὲν φῶς, ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ γενόμενον αὐτὸ ἑαυτὸ ἤδη τρέφει.
“In no way can it be uttered like those other things that are able to be learned [in the sciences]. Rather, from out of a full dwelling that coexists with the matter itself, it suddenly occurs in the soul-like a spark leaping from the fire and flaring into light, so as then to grow there, alone with itself.”
8. The original German reads: “das Hineinhoren in den Vorgesang, der in allem wesentlichen Weltgeschehen vernehmbar wird.”
GA 16 pp. 59-60