“violent.” All this points to a completely ill-bred thinking and to a profound incapacity for distinguishing levels of questioning and maintaining standards.
Therefore, even a disputation with such misunderstandings of historical meditation is futile and above all an abandonment of the proper levels.
Pupils always understand their teacher only historiologically; he is for them precisely still the present, yet already the passing and the past, that they follow up. In order to grasp the teacher historically, one must be a nonpupil. Nonpupils are to be sure also all those who have never gone through school and therefore | even lack the presuppositions for understanding merely “historiologically” what the “teacher” says.
The true nonpupil is the one who is not merely a pupil but one who would himself—by himself—be an essential teacher. Yet such are rare. And therefore a philosophy, e.g., is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz. And what still lies in between and altogether before that?—
Nevertheless, the historiologists of philosophy naturally already know everything precisely and even have already prepared titles and labels for most things—; thus my endeavors supposedly belong to the “philosophy of existence,” and the following historiologists will gladly utilize this label, since indeed the contemporaries of this alleged “philosophy of existence” must have known best what was actual at that time.
In this way, historiology is a constant and indeed necessary falsification and obstruction of history.
Only one who “makes” history is also capable of awakening it.
79
Whence the ineffectiveness of philosophy? The prior question would be to decide whether we do still have a philosophy at all. But this supposes that an essential questioning is starting and quite other realms are opening and therefore other positions are taken—yet an unreceptiveness for all this exists at the same time—an aversion which cannot be explained as mere unrefinement. Another force must be at work here, one we miss by pointing to the excess of practical-technical “interests.” For these “interests” are primarily the results of a transformation which perhaps must be grasped and experienced as the complete abandonment by being—as the decisive outbreak of that abandonment.
In the field of this outbreak, which is the field of beings as a whole, nothing is spared.