226
The earlier effort, in Being and Time, to move from a preconceptual understanding of being to a concept of being was not sufficiently original or necessary—on the contrary, it was superficial and formal, a perverse striving after “science.” Even insofar as something true does reside there, the conceptuality was not adequate. Moreover, the existentiell tonality of the “totalizing concept” remained insufficient and not inceptual enough—since the beginning and the arrangement were effective only extrinsically. (Cf. p. 104.)
The totalizing concept along with the self-throwing adrift did already happen | in a concealed way, signified an involvement in the essence, and developed first and normatively as an opening up of being in perceiving and saying—the world-event. Soon, however, the hiddenly governing totalizing concept for knowledge was dissolved into the order and koinonia [κοινωνία, “association”] of “ideas” and “concepts” and was then completely destroyed by the Christian renunciation of the world and division into creator [“creator”] and creatum [“created”]— precisely this even with the help of these ideas and concepts. The rest is then the ever-increasing flight into dialectics (Hegel) or into Schelling’s destitute separation into positive and negative philosophy, in which Christianity and retained antiquity and idealism (rationalism) are supposed to be tied together.
227
Precisely in its great beginning, philosophy did not ever have the hegemony we like to attribute to it by thinking of the sovereignty of modern science since Descartes.
The task is to philosophize philosophy out of this empty, unfruitful, merely semblant hegemony—in order to give back to philosophy the greatness of the certainty of its rank. This greatness | resides in leading through the superior ability to step back—back to the hearth of being. This is of course far from the now popular “restriction” and elimination of philosophy on the part of a supposedly renewed Protestantism— a fortiori it has nothing in common with the equally blind struggle against “intellectualism” and “rationalism.”
This revocation of philosophy, however, not something “negative” or even its self-emasculation—instead, the safeguarding of its power—even more—it is finding one’s way back into its essence and thus into the beginning—“happening of being. {Seinsgeschehnis}”