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II. Echo [152-154]

20. “Universities" as "sites for scientific research and teaching" (in this way they are products of the nineteenth century) become merely operational institutions — always closer and closer to actuality — in which nothing comes to decision. They will retain the last remnant of a cultural decoration only as long as for the time being they must continue to be the instrument for "culture-oriented political" propaganda. Anything like what is ownmost to the "university" will no longer be able to unfold from them—on the one hand, because the political-national mobilization renders superfluous such an ownmost: but on the other hand because scientific operation maintains its course far more sccurely and conveniently without the will to mindfulness. Understood here as thinking-mindfulness of the truth and that means question-worthiness of be-ing. and not as historical erudition that constructs systems, philosophy has no place in the "university" and finally in the operational institution that it will eventually become. For philosophy "has" no such place at all, unless it be that place that philosophy itself grounds: but no way that proceeds from any established institution is capable of immediately leading to that place.

21. The preceding characterization of "science" does not arise from a hostility to it, because such is simply not possible. In all its present gigantic expansion and certainty of success and sturdiness, "science" does not at all meet the presuppositions of an essential rank on the basis of which it could ever move into opposition to the knowing of thinking. Philosophy is neither against nor for science but leaves it to its own mania for its own usefulness—for securing, always more easily and quickly, increasingly more useful results, and thus for making using and needing always more inextricably dependent upon the particular results and their surpassing.

22. If it comes, as it must, to recognizing the predetermined essence of modern science, of its pure and necessarily serviceable operational character and the organization necessary for that, then in the perspective of this recognition one must expect, nay even reckon with, a gigantic progress of sciences in the future. These advancements will bring exploitation and usage of the earth as well as rearing and training of humans into conditions that are still inconceivable today and whose onset can neither be hindered nor even held up in any way, by any romantic remembering of what was earlier and different. But these advancements will rarely be noted as something surprising and conspicuous, as cultural achievements, for example; rather, they will follow one after the other as trade secrets, as it were, and will he used up and then banished in their results. Only when science reaches this operational conspicuousness of unwinding is it at that place where it is driving itself to: then