Yet is there still anything, at this point, in which the human is not interested, namely, in the manner in which people today understand “being interested”?
Inter-esse means [heißt]: to be among and between the things [den Sachen], to stand in the middle of a matter [Sache] and to persevere amidst it. Except, for contemporary interest, only the interesting counts. That is what admits, in the next instant, of already being indifferent and superseded by another that concerns one just as little as the first. Today one often thinks something is especially appreciated when one finds it interesting. In truth, by this judgment one has devalued the interesting to the indifferent and pushed it away into what is soon boring.
That one shows an interest in philosophy does not in any way attest to a readiness for thinking. Even the fact that we studiously spend our time with the treatises and texts of the great thinkers does not yet afford the guarantee that we are thinking or are even merely ready to learn thinking. Busyness with philosophy can even lead us to believe most stubbornly that we are thinking, since we are “philosophizing.”
Nonetheless, it appears arrogant to maintain that we are not yet thinking. But the assertion runs differently. It says: what is most considerable shows itself in our considerable age in this: that we are not yet thinking. In the assertion, it was suggested that the most considerable shows itself. The assertion does not at all go so far as the contemptuous judgment that only thoughtlessness reigns everywhere. The assertion that we are not yet thinking also does not want to denounce an omission. The considerable is that which gives something to think about. Of itself, it lays claim to us, that we should devote [zuwenden] ourselves to it, namely, in thinking. The considerable is in no way first instituted by us. It never consists only in our representing it. The considerable gives; it gives us something to think about. It gives what it has.7 It
7 Third edition, 1967: [It gives what] there is
[The idiom in the text is like when we say in English, “I’ll give you whatever I have on me.”]