to do, or would do, if common sense were ever to inquire further into what is self-evident. This is indeed how the matter looks, but in fact it is nothing like this. All great and genuine philosophy moves within the limited sphere of a few questions which appear to common sense as perennially the same, although in fact they are necessarily different in every instance of philosophizing. Different not in any merely external sense, but rather in such a way that the self-same is in each case essentially transformed once more. Only in such transformation does philosophy possess its genuine self-sameness. This transformation lends a properly primordial historicity to the occurrence of the history of philosophizing, a historicity which makes its own demands (sacrifice, being overcome). We cannot comprehend this historicity and will never be able to get a grasp of it if, for instance, we associate it with the notion of history derived from the sensational historical accounts we find in the newspapers. The historicity of the history of philosophy, and correspondingly, albeit in quite a different way, the historicity of the history of art and of religion are intrinsically and wholly divergent. Yet on the basis of this divergence they are nevertheless entirely connected with one another in a way which still remains entirely obscure to us . Yet what we have called transformation does not mean what the vanity of the literati understands by the word, namely striving always and at any price to say the opposite of what has been said before or, should they always arrive too late to participate in this enterprise, explaining in hindsight that this is what they have said long ago. The self-sameness of philosophy does not, however, consist in the fact that everyone thinks the same thing and says yes to everything. Since ordinary understanding with its self-complacent ideal looks for just such a self-sameness in philosophy and then factically fails to find it, the only alternative remaining to it is to regard the history of philosophy as a kind of madhouse in which everyone attempts to obliterate his opponent and produce some new opinion of his own. For this reason the very idea of the philosophia perennis is merely a means by which ordinary understanding organizes the history of philosophy from a standpoint outside of philosophy itself. For this history remains utterly unintelligible and inaccessible to such an understanding if it cannot perceive identical problems eternally handled in identical ways throughout the history of spirit—just as everyday life always deals with identical problems in identical ways.
Thus the three questions are not only familiar with respect to what they deal with, they are also familiar as questions or themes within the history of philosophy. These questions find themselves beleaguered by the tradition and sound common sense alike. Yet both these forces serve only to level down such questioning, to rob our questioning of its edge and thus to prevent an insight into the necessary exertion of thought in which alone these questions can come to fruition.