reflect on it subsequently) lets emerge in order to bring its essence to truth therein. With Plato and Aristotle, who speak the beginning of metaphysics, the word becomes λόγος in the sense of assertion. In the course of the unfolding of metaphysics this is transformed into ratio, reason, and spirit. Western metaphysics, the history of the essence of the truth of beings as such and as a whole, the history expressed in thinking from Plato to Nietzsche, comes under the title "Being and ratio." That is why, in the age of metaphysics and only in it, "the irrational" also appears and, in its wake, "lived experience." As regards the title "Being and time," "time" means here neither the calculated time of the "clock," nor "lived time" in the sense of Bergson and others. The name "time" in this title, according to its clearly expressed affiliation with Being, is the given name of a more original essence of ἀλήθεια and designates the essential ground of ratio and of all thinking and saying. In "Being and time," no matter how strange it must sound, "time" is the given name of the primordial ground of the word "Being and word," the beginning of the essential history of the West, is thereby experienced more primordially. The treatise Being and Time only points to this event in which Being itself bestows on Western man a more primordial experience. This more original beginning can only occur as the first beginning to a historical people of thinkers and poets in the West. These statements have nothing in common with a swaggering missionary consciousness; quite to the contrary, they have to do with the experience of the confusion and the difficulties with which a people can only slowly fit itself into the place of the destiny of the West, a destiny that conceals a world-destiny.
Therefore we need to know that this historical people, if the word "victory" is appropriate here at all, has already been victorious and is invincible, provided it remains the people of poets and thinkers that it is in its essence, and as long as it does not fall prey to the terrible—always menacing—deviation from and mistaking of its essence.
I am not saying anything new here, as no thinker at all may be the slave of the pleasure to say the new. To find new things and to search for them is a matter of "research" and technology. Essential thinking must always say only the same, the old, the oldest, the beginning, and must say it primordially How is this expressed by Hölderlin, who is the most German poet became he poetizes inspired by the Western history of Being itself, and who is therefore the first poet of the Germans to appear, how is it expressed in his poem entitled "The song of the German"?1
1 Hölderlin, Werke (Hellingrath), IV, p. 129 Even the genitive in this title is already enigmatically equivocal.