when even Da-sein (whose one steadfastness must lie in inventive thinking) is ap-propriated first and only by being, then the thinking, i.e., philosophy, attains its most proper and highest origin from itself, from what in it is to be thought. Only now is such thinking utterly invulnerable to appreciations and valuations which measure according to goals and uses, i.e., which mistreat philosophy (just like art) as a cultural accomplishment or in the end as a mere cultural expression and which place upon it demands that seem to exceed philosophy but in truth remain profoundly beneath it. These demands drag the essence of philosophy down into comprehensibility and thereby displace philosophy into the domain of things merely tolerated and made light of
Seen from such low ground, how arrogant must it be to claim an unconditioned origin for philosophy. Yet even seen from a higher level of assessment, indeed from any level ever sought, we attain no view of the essence of philosophy which would not by necessity also concomitantly have in view the "titanic." In metaphysics, and throughout its history, the titanic remains veiled and is ultimately diminished to a mere epistemologically suspect overstepping of limits. Nonetheless, if thinking in the transition from metaphysics must decide in favor of the inventive thinking of beyng, then the danger of the unavoidable presumptuousness is raised to what is essential. To be sure, the knowledge of this danger also changes, in the sense that the essential endangerment goes into hiding as soon as it is named. This reference pertains to the ambiguity of the transition, wherein meditation must ever and again touch on that which, in the carrying out of the transition, at once and increasingly transposes itself into simple action. This ambiguity maintains an especially tenacious grip in philosophy because philosophy, as thoughtful questioning and precisely insofar as it is of an unconditioned origin, and indeed the more originally it is so, must by necessity take itself into its own knowledge. In the transition from metaphysics, which takes beyng as the most general and most ordinary, the uniqueness of beyng will come to occur essentially in a correspondingly unique strangeness and obscurity.
In transitional thinking, everything that pertains to the history of being possesses the unusualness of the current and the nonrepeatable. Where and when it does succeed, the inventive thinking of beyng thus attains a hardness and sharpness of historicality; speech still lacks the language for this historicality, i.e., lacks the naming and the ability to hear which would be adequate to beyng.
The inventive thinking of beyng does indeed not simply think up a concept; instead, it gains that liberation from mere beings which makes appropriate the determination of thinking on the basis of beyng.