Philosophical thinking does not tolerate exploitation. Because such thinking thinks what is most unique and strange, viz., beyng, which otherwise is what is most common and ordinary in the usual understanding of being, this thinking is therefore necessarily rare and alien. Nevertheless, because it involves this uselessness it must immediately and in advance summon and endorse those who can plow and hunt, do handcraft and hauL build and organize. It itself must know that it is always reputed to be unrecompensed exertion.
In the domain of the other beginning, there is neither "ontology" nor any "metaphysics." No "ontology," because the guiding question no longer delimits the measure and the sphere of inquiry. No "metaphysics," because the procedure is not at all to pass from beings as objectively present or objects as known (idealism) and step over to something else (cf. The interplay). Both are merely transitional names, for the sake of instituting a minimal intelligibility.
Which are the ways and modes of presenting and communicating the conjuncture of inceptual thinking? The first elaboration of the conjuncture (The resonating—The last god) cannot avoid the danger of being read and taken as a diffuse "system." The focusing on individual questions (the origin of the work of art) must dispense with a uniform opening up and elaborating of the entire domain of conjuncture.
To take both ways as supplementing each other ever remains only an emergency path. Yet are there other ways in the era of plight? What good fortune is here reserved for the poet! Signs and images are allowed to possess the poet's very heart, and what is essential to the "poem" can in each case be incorporated into its visible form.
Yet what about the way in which the concept is to fathom the necessity and in which the question strives to trace out its own paths?
24. The aberrant demand placed on inceptual thinking
is, for example, the claim that such thinking should immediately (without the plight having been withstood) say where the decision resides; should indicate what is to be done, without having radically grounded the historical locale of the history to come; and should immediately save us, even before such saving can encounter a far-reaching will aimed at a transformed positing of goals.
The position taken on thinking involves a double mis-valuation:
1. an over-valuing, in the sense that immediate answers are expected for an attitude that wants to spare itself the task of questioning (resoluteness for meditation and for withstanding the plight).