The flight from mindfulness in turn can run parallel with ignorance about the decisions, but it can also already be the consequence of a willful evasion of decisions; indeed the two can come together in it. In this case, that which is questionless has the almost unassailable form of that which is by all means self-evident.
5. Negativity is questionless both in the sys tem that constitutes the consummation of Western metaphysics and in the history of metaphysics in general. The questionlessness of negativity goes back to the questionlessness of thinking as the basic faculty of man, the positing of whose essence is itself beyond questioning. What does this questionlessness mean and what does it comprise as a whole?
Thinking “says” of a being what it is and how it is. Thinking maintains the determinative relation to the being of beings. Thinking thus also and in advance indicates the horizon within which being determines itself as such. Thinking is thus not only the mode of enactment of the representing determination of beings, but it is at the same time and before all the pregiven horizon for the essential definition of being. Being is the presence and permanence that is unconcealed for apprehension and in the apprehension. To the extent that apprehension (νοῦς) determines itself as thinking (λόγος—ratio, reason), being is thinkability. This determination of being underlies in advance both the “idealistic” and the “realistic” interpretation of the relation to beings.3 The self- evidence of thinking therefore basically means the questionlessness of the fact that thinking is the determinative and horizongiving relation to being.
Since thinking is the basic faculty of man, and the essence of the latter is considered to be self-evident from what was just said, the self-evidence of negativity and consequently the self-evidence of thinking means nothing less than the self-evidence of the relationship “between” man and beyng. From this a peculiarity arises that in various forms runs through the entire history of metaphysics: namely that man’s relation to the beings that he himself is not is doubted, interrogated, interpreted, and grounded in a manifold manner, while at the same time and before all man’s relation to being is beyond questioning, and this so “decidedly” that it is not even expressly considered but is asserted as the most self-evident of all that is self-evident. That which one is used to calling “ontology” is only the scholastic sealing of this self-evidence.
6. But the questionability of thinking in its essence and in its role as the pregiven horizon of the interpretation of being comprises something else that is equally questionless. Since thinking, which at first
3. Cf. Kant’s “technology” of “nature” {Kant, Critique of Judgment. §23.}