The other beginning is not a counter-trend to the first; rather, as something utterly different, it stands outside of the "counter-" and outside of all immediate comparison.
Therefore this confrontation is also not an opposition, neither in the sense of crude rejection nor by way of a sublation of the first in the other. The other beginning, on the basis of a genuine originality, procures for the first beginning both the truth of its history and thereby its inalienable, most proper otherness, which becomes fruitful only in the historical dialogue of thinkers.
93. The great philosophies
are towering mountains, unconquered and unconquerable. Yet they bestow on the land its highest, and they point into its rocky depths. As they stand they focus the gaze, and in each case they form a sphere of vision; they endure visibility and concealment. When are such mountains that which they are? Certainly not when we have supposedly conquered them by climbing their peaks, but only when they truly stand there for us and for the land. Yet how few of us are capable of letting the most alive heights rise up in the stillness of the mountain range and of standing in the sphere of this over-towering. The genuinely thoughtful confrontation must strive only for this accomplishment.
The differentiating confrontation [Aus-einander-setzung] with the great philosophies-as basic positions of metaphysics within the history of the guiding question-must be constructed in such a way that every philosophy, as something essential, comes to stand in the manner of a mountain among mountains and thereby gives standing to what in it is most essential.
To achieve that, the guiding question must in each case be newly developed (out of the reticent basic question) according to its full structure and in the direction of the respective impetus (cf. Prospect, Inceptual thinking).
94. The confrontation of the other beginning
with the first beginning can never mean showing up the previous history of the guiding question—and thus "metaphysics"—as "erroneous." For then we would have misconceived the essence of truth just as much as the essential occurrence of beyng, both of which are inexhaustible because they are what is most unique for all knowledge.