beginning. Does not this concealment of the ground of the truth of being also mean that the history of Greek Dasein, a Dasein determined by this truth, was placed on the shortest path and that the present was completed in a great and unique creative moment?
Does it not also mean, on the other hand, that what follows the first beginning is delayed and has to withstand a self-refusal of being all the way up to the abandonment by being?
The transition to the other beginning needs to prepare a knowledge of this historical destiny. The confrontation with the first beginning and with its history also belongs here. Platonism dominates this history and determines a certain manner of dealing with the guiding question, a manner that can be indicated by the title: being and thinking (cf. lecture course, s. s. 359).
But to understand this title correctly, it must be noted:
1. The word being in this title refers to beingness and not, as in Being and Time, to being itself originarily interrogated in its truth; beingness as what holds "in general" for beings.
2. Thinking is meant in the sense of the representing of something in general, and this representing is understood as presentifying and thus anticipating the sphere in which beings are grasped with respect to constant presence, though without the temporal character of this interpretation ever coming to be recognized. Indeed it is recognized so little that even after the unprecedented interpretation of οὐσία as constant presence in Being and Time and the grasping of presence in its temporal character, people still speak of the timelessness of "presence" and "eternity." They do so because they adhere to the common concept of time, a concept that is taken merely as the frame for the changeable and thereby is unable to find fault with what is constantly present!
Thinking, as νοεῖν, λόγος ἰδεῖν ["seeing"], here means reasoning: the comportment by which and in whose sphere beingness is determined, even if in a quite ungrounded manner. To be distinguished from this is "thinking" in the broader and still to be determined sense of philosophizing (cf. inceptual thinking). In this regard, every apprehension and determination (concept) of beingness and of beyng is a matter of thinking. Yet the decisive question remains: in what domain of truth does the uncovering of the essence of being take place? Basically, even where, as in the history of the guiding question, beingness is grasped on the basis of νοεῖν, the truth of this thinking is not what is thought as such but is time-space as the essential occurrence of truth wherein all representing must abide.
9. Lecture course, Einführung in die Metaphysik, summer semester, 1935 (GA40).