90
Why does the proclaimed and the extolled (in short, what is in some way public) attain so often the rank of “truth”? Perhaps because “publicness” is still a paltry remainder from the lost and past essence of truth as the openness of beings? Because—the less the latter itself still prevails, all the more insidiously does the former proliferate, behave as a stronghold of correctness, and entrench itself in various configurations.
91
Entrusted to philosophy, the thinker stands in opposition to an enemy (the distorted essence of beings, which belies itself in coming to be), an enemy that, without ever abandoning its malevolence, shows itself as appertaining to what the thinker must radically befriend (the essence of beyng). And because | there is no way of avoiding the enemy, and because reliability toward the friend is everything, the thinker has an ambivalence toward a unique homeland, an unbearable ambivalence that indeed does precisely bear him. Indigenousness in the homeland is an unconditioned one, because it is rooted in the spatio-temporal field of beyng. (Cf. p. 92f.)
All who approach philosophy only from the outside, nibble on it or grumble at it, make use of it or fret over its uselessness, must wonder how a thinker can stand at all, since they never find his stand”point”— and never suspect that the “point” bearing the thinker might indeed be that ambivalence. How can someone stand within an ambivalence, in the “either” and in the “or” at the same time, unless he pertains to those who ground the abyss at whose edges all things valued and proven preserve what is most proper to them as first assigned and can bestow their magic in the span of time remaining to them out of the duration of the taciturnity of their essence. (Cf. p. 35.)
The standpoint of philosophy, of every philosophy that finds itself in its essence, is visible and attainable only if philosophy, as indeed is | proper, is grasped philosophically. To be sure, one can today, and today more comprehensively than ever, easily verify every philosophy that at any time emerged in Western history—by verifying its anthropological presuppositions and others related to its worldview.
Especially since Montesquieu, this frivolous hunt has become a very accomplished and self-evident practice. Such reckoning up of presuppositions, which today is promptly carried out by anyone preparing a “dissertation,” gives our contemporaries a stronger and stronger impression that this is the proper way—as digging into the “depth” and “background”—to come close to a philosophy and even