them, as though what is essential for the human must simply ‘be’ ‘present’ for him, and not the other way around? We do not measure up, in a historical way, to the demand that history places upon on us simply by filling our calendar with numerous commemorations, [123] only to forget all ‘commemorating’ the following week because we then have to race out to see the latest film. The flight in the face of this demand is not an invention of the present: it begins rather with Christianity, and only changes its form with the emergence of the present. The planet is in flames. The essence of the human being is out of joint. A mindful consideration that is sufficiently world-historical can only come from the Germans, provided that they find and safeguard ‘the Germanic.’ This is not arrogance, but rather the knowledge of the necessity of bearing out an inceptual poverty. We must learn to let our thinking span from the most ephemeral flickering of the fleeting day—the pedestrian, the ‘is’—all the way into this poverty so that it may experience a single fate in its entirety.
Previously, when we pointed out that in the saying it is said that emerging is in and of itself a submerging, conventional understanding was brought to a standstill. Now that we are presented with the saying draped in the clothes of conventional understandability, perhaps it is the understanding of those who have already attempted to think essentially and to persevere in the vicinity of the inceptual thinkers that must stand still.
Thus, for all of us, the understanding stands still. Let us allow it to stand still as we leave hasty thinking aside, instead opening our eyes and ears as we prepare ourselves simply to hear the word. We will no longer assail the saying with our haphazard thinking, and will instead allow the saying to speak the following word to us:
φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.
Emerging to self-concealing gives favor.)
If we repeat it according to its faithful translation, the word configuration τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε says: “the not ever submerging.” This combination of words contains a two-fold negation: 1) the explicitly articulated μή (‘not ever’); 2) the negation that
92 The Inception of Occidental Thinking