of what has-been. It is this, what is already-essencing, and only this that comes to us. The past, however, recedes from us. For historiological calculation, history is what is past and the present is what is current. Yet the current remains the eternally futureless. We are flooded by historiology and only seldom find an insight into history. Newspaper, radio, television, and the paperback book industries are today the standard and planetary forms alike of the historiological calculation of the past, i.e., of its actualization in current events. It would be blindness if one wanted to do away with these processes, blindness, too, to blindly expedite them instead of considering them in their essence. For these processes belong to our history, in that which comes toward us.
We now also name as historical the incident by which thinking has entered into the dimension of dialectic.
What does this mean, that the dialectic would be a dimension? At first it remains unclear what dialectic is and what the talk of dimension employed here might mean. We are familiar with dimensions in terms of regions of space. Dimension can mean so much as extension: an industrial plant of great dimensions, i.e., size. But we also speak of the three-dimensional space familiar to us. As distinct from a line, a plane is another dimension. But the former is not merely stacked together into the latter; rather, in relation to the linear manifold, the plane takes this manifold up into itself. In so doing, it is another domain for a rule [Maßgabe] in regard to this manifold. The same holds for bodies in relation to the planar manifold. Bodies, planes, and lines each implicate a distinct rule. If we put aside the spatial restriction, then a dimension shows itself as the domain of a rule. Thus rules and domains are not two distinct or separate things, but rather one and the same. The rule each time yields and opens a domain wherein the rule is at home and can be what it is.
When we characterize the dialectic as a dimension of thinking and even have to recognize it as the highest dimension of thinking in the historical course of metaphysics, then this now says: By becoming dialectical, thinking reaches a previously closed-off domain of a rule for the delineation of its own essence. Through dialectics, thinking reaches a domain in which it is able to think itself completely. Thereby thinking first comes to itself. Within the dimension of the dialectic, it