be dictated to us by this judge; or whether we are resolved to try something else, i.e., whether we wish to put ourselves, our being human, on the line. Is it really so sure that the interpretation of human existence [Dasein] in which we move today—according to which, for example, philosophy is one so-called cultural asset among others, and perhaps a science, something that needs to be cultivated—is it so sure that this interpretation of existence [Dasein] is the highest? Who can guarantee to us that man in this present-day self-conception has not raised some me diocre aspect of himself to the status of a god?

Thus far, we have attempted to grasp philosophizing itself—albeit only in a provisional way—in contrast to our initial detours. We have done so in two ways. First, we clarified philosophical questioning by way of our interpretation of a word of Novalis: philosophizing is homesickness, the urge to be at home everywhere. Second, we characterized the unique ambiguity proper to philosophizing. From all this we may conclude that philosophy is something autonomous that stands on its own. We may neither take it as a science among others, nor as something that we find only whenever we question the sciences with respect to their foundations. Philosophy does not exist because there are sciences, but vice-versa: there can be sciences only because and only if there is philosophy. Yet the grounding of the sciences, i.e., the task of furnishing their ground, is neither the sole nor the principal task of philosophy. Rather philosophy permeates the whole of human life (Dasein) even when there are no sciences, and not only in such a way as to merely gape belatedly at life (Dasein) as something at hand, ordering and determining it according to universal concepts. Philosophizing itself is rather a fundamental way of Da-sein. It is philosophy which, in a concealed way for the most part, lets Da-sein first become what it can be. Yet the Dasein concerned never knows what the Da-sein of man can be in individual epochs. Rather its possibilities are first formed precisely and only in Da-sein. Such possibilities, however, are those of factical Dasein, i.e., of the confrontation it must have with beings as a whole.

Philosophizing is not some belated reflecting on nature and culture as something at hand, nor is it a thinking up of possibilities and laws that can subsequently be applied to whatever is at hand.

All these are views which make an occupation and a business out of philosophy, albeit in a very exalted form. In contrast to this, philosophizing is something that lies prior to every occupation and constitutes the fundamental occurrence of Dasein, something autonomous that stands on its own and is quite different in nature to the kinds of comportment within which we commonly move.

The philosophers of antiquity already knew this and had to know it in their first decisive commencements. A word handed down to us from Heraclitus reads: ὁκόσων λόγους ἤκουσα, οὐδεὶς ἀφικνεῖται ἐς τοῦτο, ὥστε