essential is thereby said about philosophy or even about the creation of a future philosophy.
The expression "philosophy of a people" immediately proves to be most ambiguous and obscure. Quite apart from the indeterminateness involved in talking of a "people."
How does a people become a people? Does a people become only that which it is? If so, then what is it? How can we know: (1) What a people in general is? (2) What this or that people is? (3) What we ourselves are?
Here all Platonic ways of thinking fail, ones which would propose, to a body of people, an idea, a meaning and value, according to which that people is supposed to "become." Whence and how this posing in advance?
Meditation on what is proper to a people constitutes an essential passageway. As little as we could be permitted not to understand this, so much does it matter to know that a highest rank of beyng must be attained if an "ethnic principle" by which to measure historical Dasein is to be brought into play as something already mastered.
A people first becomes a people when its most unique members appear and when they begin to experience a presentiment. In that way a people first becomes free for its law (to be achieved through struggle) as the last necessity of its highest moment. The philosophy of a people is that which makes people people of a philosophy, grounds them historically in their Da-sein, and destines them to stewardship of the truth of beyng.
The philosophy "of" a people is that which is free and unique and comes just as much over as "from" a people: "over" insofar as a people already decides for itself, for Da-sein.
The philosophy "of" a people can therefore not be predicted or prescribed on the basis of some sort of natural aptitude or capacity of that people. On the contrary, thinking about philosophy is genuinely related to a people only if the thinking comprehends the fact that philosophy has to attain through a leap its own most proper origins themselves and that this can succeed only if philosophy still belongs at all to its first, essential beginning. In that way alone can philosophy set the "people" into the truth of beyng instead of the opposite, namely, being forcibly led into a distorted essence by an alleged people as an existing one.
16. Philosophy8
is the immediately useless but nevertheless sovereign knowledge arising from meditation.
8. Cf. Prospect, 7. Of the event, pp. 20-23; Überlegungen IV, p. 85ff.