PATHMARKS
The following limits itself to pointing out one possibility through which the matter of thinking becomes visible. But why, then, this roundabout approach through Hegel and the Greeks in order to arrive at the matter of thinking? Because we need to take this path, which indeed, in its essence, is not a roundabout one; for the tradition, experienced in the right way, provides us the present that stands over against us as the matter of thinking and, for that reason, is at issue. Genuine tradition is so far from being the dragging weight of what is past that it much rather frees us for what approaches us as present, and thus becomes the enduring directive toward the matter of thinking.
Hegel and the Greeks — this sounds like: Kant and the Greeks, Leibniz and the Greeks, medieval Scholasticism and the Greeks. It sounds like this, and yet is nonetheless different. For it is Hegel who, for the first time, thinks the philosophy of the Greeks as a whole and thinks this whole philosophically. In what way is this possible? By virtue of the fact that Hegel determines history as such in such a way that it must be philosophical in its fundamental trait. The history of philosophy is for Hegel the intrinsically unitary and hence necessary process of the advance of spirit toward itself. The history of philosophy is no mere sequence of diverse opinions and teachings that supersede each other without any connection.
Hegel says in an introduction to his Berlin lectures on the history of philosophy: "The history which we have before us is the history of thought finding itself" (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hoffmeister 1940, vol. I, p. 81, note). "For only philosophy itself unfolds the history of philosophy" (ibid., pp. 235f.). Accordingly, for Hegel, philosophy as the self-unfolding of spirit toward absolute knowing and the history of philosophy are identical. No philosopher before Hegel gained such a fundamental philosophical position [257] as to make possible and require that philosophizing itself move at the same time within its history and that this movement be philosophy itself. But according to a statement of Hegel's from the introduction to his first lecture here in Heidelberg, philosophy has for its "goal": "truth" (ibid., p. 14).
As Hegel says in a marginal note to the manuscript of this lecture, philosophy is as its history the "realm of pure truth, - not the deeds of external reality, but rather the inner remaining-with-itself of spirit" (ibid., p. 6, note). "Truth" means here: what is true in its pure realization, which at the same time brings to presentation the truth of what is true, truth in its essence.
May we now take Hegel's determination of the goal of philosophy, which is truth, as hinting at a meditation upon the matter of thinking? Presumably so, as soon as we have sufficiently clarified the theme, "Hegel and the
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