These modes of thinking have a character of concept that is different from the traditional logic. Power and sharpness of logic will not be removed with this, but precisely enhanced, insofar as the concepts are taken out of a false opposition, according to which the concept, that which is thought, is conceived as that which is rational-as distinguished from what is irrational. This distinction leads back to a particular conception of reason, this, in turn, to that of the human being as the rational living being. It is about the overcoming of the conception of the concept as a hull. The consequence is not the dismissal of the concept, but the higher necessity of the conceptual questioning.
Therefore, it would be a misunderstanding to want to find in our remarks an edifying call to take part in any kind of going along; rather, it is about the exposition of concepts, which are the essence of our forthcoming being and thereby concern ourselves.
b) That which is to be found out by questioning
does not let itself be settled immediately
The other misunderstanding would lie in the expectation that all that which we try to find out by questioning and to bring to an answer here is settled overnight, as it were. This questioning itself does not stand outside of history, but, set in its determination, it reaches beyond day and year; it is not bound to current contingencies.
We have thus attained the ground for the whole realm of the questioning that we have traversed. This ground is time itself as the power, which we pass or do not pass [Trans.: as in passing a test: die wir bestehen oder nicht bestehen]; this ground is our Dasein as temporality itself. We can no longer say that time may or may not be. We must comprehend that the understanding of being itself is taken from time. In the demarcation of becoming against being, being had indeed remained as constancy. From this remaining, the now was conceived as seed of time, so to speak, and future was taken as that which is not yet actual, and past [was taken] as that which is no longer actual. Being was constancy [Beständigkeit] and presence; of time, only the fleeting now was always actual.
By having determined now the temporalizing of time from the future and beenness, the present was jumped over as that which disappears. Therefore, a complete transformation of the essence of being becomes