PATHMARKS
we trying to go back into the ground of metaphysics in order to uncover a hitherto overlooked presupposition of philosophy, and thereby to show that philosophy does not yet stand on an unshakable foundation and therefore cannot yet be the absolute science? No.
It is something else that is at stake with the arrival of the truth of Being or its failure to arrive: it is neither the state of philosophy nor philosophy itself alone, but rather the proximity or remoteness of that from which philosophy, insofar as it means the representation of beings as such, receives its essence and its necessity. What is to be decided is whether Being itself, out of its own proper truth, can come to passa in a relation appropriate to the essence of human beings; or whether metaphysics, in turning away from its own ground, continues to prevent the relation of Being to man from lighting up, out of the essence of this very relation, in such a way as to bring human beings into a belonging to Being.
In its answers to the question concerning beings as such, metaphysics operates with a prior representation of Being. It speaks of Being necessarily and hence continually. But [199] meta physics does not induce Being itself to speak, for metaphysics does not give thought to Being in its truth, nor does it think such truth as unconcealedness, nor does it think this unconcealedness in its essence.b To metaphysics the essence of truth always appears only in the already derivative form of the truth of cognitive knowledge and the truth of propositions that formulate such knowledge. Unconcealedness, however, could be something more primordial than all truth in the sense of veritas.c Ἀλήθεια could be the word that offers a hitherto unnoticed hint concerning the unthought essence of esse. If this should be so, then the representational thinking of metaphysics could certainly never attain this essence of truth, however zealously it might devote itself to historical studies of pre-Socratic philosophy; for what is at stake here is not some renaissance of pre-Socratic thinking: any such attempt would be vain and absurd. What is at stake is rather an attentiveness to the arrival of the hitherto unspoken essence of unconcealedness that Being has announced itself to be.d Meanwhile the truth of Being has remained concealed from metaphysics during its long history from Anaximander to Nietzsche. Why does metaphysics not recall it? Is the {GA 9: 370} failure to recall it due simply to the nature of metaphysical thinking? Or does it belong to the essential destiny of metaphysics that its own ground withdraws from it because in the rise of
a Fifth edition, 1949: Usage [Berauch].
b Fifth edition, 1949: Gathered, revealing-sheltering granting as Ereignis.
c Fifth edition, 1949: Veritas in Thomas Aquinas always in intellectu, be it the intellectus divinus.
d Fifth edition, 1949: Being, truth, world, Being, Ereignis.
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