4. The increasing apathy toward the simplicity of essential meditation and the lack of perseverance in questioning have led to a disdaining of every proceeding and path that do not, with their very first step, produce "results" with which we can "make" and "experience" something.
Therefore, the charge of "powerlessness" is not so much an objection that applies to "thinking" as it does to the detractors of thinking.
To be sure, the genuine power of thinking (as inventive thinking of the truth of beyng) tolerates no immediate determination and evaluation, especially since this power must transpose thinking into beyng and bring into play the whole strangeness of beyng. Accordingly, the power of thinking can never depend on its having objective results in beings.
That is the most hidden ground of the solitude of thoughtful questioning. The often-cited solitude of the thinker is merely a consequence. In other words, the solitude is not a matter of self-withdrawal or seclusion. Instead, it arises from the provenance of thinking out of the realm of beyng. The "impact" or "effect" of a thinker will therefore never do away with this solitude but will only increase it, provided it makes any sense here to speak of increase.
19. Philosophy
(On the question: Who are we?)
is, as meditation on beyng, necessarily meditation on oneself. The salient exposition of the ground of this connection differs in essence from every sort of establishing of the "self"-certainty of the "I" that would be carried out precisely for the sake of "certainty" and not for the sake of the truth of beyng. Yet the exposition of this ground reaches back into a still more original realm than is the realm which had to be broached in the transition by the initial determination of Da-sein in the "fundamental ontology" of Being and Time, a determination which even now has not been sufficiently unfolded and made prominent in the knowledge of those who are questioning.
Now insofar as, according to the originary exposition of the ground of the essence of meditation as meditation on oneself, "we" ourselves are transposed into the realm of questioning, then from this point of view the philosophical question can be posed in the form: Who are we?
Disregarding the question of the "who," which ones do we mean in speaking of "we"? (Cf. s. s. 34, Logik10 ) Ourselves, those at this moment
10. Lecture course, Über Logik als Frage nach der Sprache, summer semester 1934 (GA38).