To thinking there remains only the simplest saying of the plainest image in purest reticence. The future first thinker must be capable of that.
33. The question of beyng
As long as we do not recognize that all calculation in terms of "purposes" and "values" arises from a quite determinate interpretation of beings (as ἰδέα), as long as we do not grasp that the question of beyng is not even surmised thereby, let alone asked, as long as we finally do not testify, by carrying it out, that we know of the necessity of this unasked question and accordingly are already asking it, as long as all this remains outside the horizon of that which still deports itself like "philosophy," that is how long all vociferous fussing over "beyng," "ontology," "transcendence" and "paratranscendence," "metaphysics," and the supposed overcoming of Christianity is groundless and empty. One is still unwittingly moving in the ruts of the same neo-Kantianism that is so often reviled. For nowhere is thoughtful work accomplished; not a single step of a revelatory questioning is carried out.
Precisely the one who has grasped the question of being and has actually at one time tried to traverse its course can hope to receive nothing more from "antiquity" and from its lineage except for the frightful admonition to transfer questioning back again to the same ground of necessity—not of that initial, definitively past necessity which only thus occurs essentially. Instead, "repetition" here means to let the same, the uniqueness of beyng, become a plight again and thereby out of a more original truth. "Again" means here precisely "altogether otherwise." But that frightful admonition still lacks a hearing and a willingness to sacrifice, to stay on the scarcely opened-up next stretch of the course.
Instead, one deludes oneself and others, evading one's own perplexity, by means of a noisy fanaticism for the "antiquity" suffered by Nietzsche.
How far removed from such goings-on are, for example, the figure and work of Hermann Lotze, the most genuine witness to the easily reviled, and much reviled, nineteenth century?
34. The event and the question of being
The event is the self-eliciting and self-mediating center in which all essential occurrence of the truth of beyng must be thought back in advance. This thinking back in advance to that center is the inventive