any scientific terminology or pretensions, a commonplace discussion—and yet be of the most rigorous philosophical comprehension through and through.

Thus philosophy parades in the marketplace in manifold illusory forms or even disguises. One moment it looks like philosophy and is not philosophy at all, the next it looks nothing like philosophy and yet is precisely philosophy. Philosophy can be recognized only by whoever becomes intimately acquainted with it, i.e., takes trouble over it. This is so in a quite special sense in the case of our own undertaking in this course.

§5. The ambiguity in our philosophizing here and now in the comportment of the listener and of the teacher.

The ambiguity of philosophy always becomes more acute, however,-rather than vanishing—wherever we are explicitly concerned with it, as is the case in our situation here and now: philosophy as a subject to be taught, an examination subject, a discipline in which people do their doctorates as in other disciplines. For those who study and lecture, philosophy has the appearance of a general subject on which lectures are held. Accordingly, our comportment toward such a lecture is that we take it in or pass it by. In this way nothing else happens at all, it is simply that something fails to happen. After all, what do we have academic freedom for? We can profit even further and save ourselves the ten Marks enrollment fee. True, that is not enough for a pair of skis, but it will provide a pair of decent ski poles, and perhaps these are indeed far more essential than a philosophy lecture. The lecture could indeed be a mere deception—who can know?

Perhaps, however, we have also passed by an essential opportunity. The uncanny thing is that we do not notice this at all and perhaps indeed never notice it; that it makes no difference to us at all if we pass it by, and that here in the halls of the university we can nevertheless hold just as important speeches as others who listen to philosophy and perhaps even quote Heidegger. And if instead of passing it by we attend the lecture, is the ambiguity then removed? Has something obvious changed? Is not everyone sitting there just as attentively or just as bored? Are we better than our neighbour because we comprehend more quickly, or are we merely more skillful and eloquent, perhaps because we have the philosophical terminology more at our fingertips than others on account of a few philosophy seminars? Yet maybe, despite all this, we lack something essential that someone else—it might even be some female student—perhaps precisely possesses.

We—you as listeners—are incessantly surrounded and watched over by something ambiguous: philosophy. And even the teacher—what can he not prove, what a forest of concepts and terminology he can move around in,