of Heraclitus, the “doctrine” of Parmenides, Plato’s Phaedrus, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Ζ–Θ, Descartes’s Meditations, Leibniz’s Monadology, Kant’s (threefold) Critique, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Schelling’s treatise on freedom, Nietzsche’s “posthumous writings” as his “main work.” Need to have these ever present in dialogue in their uniqueness, without falling into historiological erudition and calculation. Such | mastery can arise only from an originary questioning that has become necessary due to the plight of beyng itself and primarily due to the abandonment of beings by being. A complete detachment from every previous form of philosophy is the result.
In the meantime, “interpretation” has become the fashion in today’s bustling about with philosophy. The whole world “interprets”—and becomes ever more forgetful of meditation, on the basis of which, out of the necessity of which, and with the justification of which, the interpretation is carried out.
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If the motives to continue on with this bustling disappeared suddenly, and so did the possibilities of producing something “new” through the modification of the past as calculated in various ways, and if what counted was to question on the basis of the essential necessity of philosophy itself, then at one stroke the puffed-up bustling about with philosophy would cease. And it would have to come to light how little was grasped of the great history of philosophy and how much (namely, everything) was considered only in the horizon of “science,” “worldview,” or “conduct of life” and not at all on the basis of the essence of philosophy itself—i.e., on the basis of the fact that | beyng at times flashes up, only to become extinguished once again in beings.
All production of “works” will make us ever more unfit for grasping the question of being—because the evasion into erudition is at once urged upon us.
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If it is in the form of objectivity that beings are primarily referred to being, and especially if this objectivity is meant in a “realistic” sense and beyng is snatched up just like a glove found on the roadside and is investigated straightforwardly, then it first comes to light that beings have already long since been tacitly degraded to presence at hand and that thereby the essential volition has been suppressed, the volition for what the truth of being harbors, for work and deed, for meditation and self-renunciation.