In the interim, however, thinking has become so completely alien from beyng that the requirement for philosophy to renounce science produces only the misunderstanding that philosophy is either arbitrary opinion or a belated, substantively unimportant, formal cleansing and sharpening of “concepts.” Actions indeed change the world, and the greater the masses of humanity become, all the more must everything depend on the enhancement of the power to act so that the massiveness might constantly provide anew its appropriate domains of activity. But actions never ground a world, if indeed a | world assembles in itself the holding sway of beyng and only in virtue of this assemblage holds sway at all, be it merely so poorly that beings as such still remain experienceable in all actions and operations, rather than finally being incorporated, swallowed, and again repelled brutishly as mere concealed occasions for the conservation and enhancement of life in the course of a vital process and in the surrounding field of its expressions. Yet insofar as a world (which is “more” and essentially other than the mere sum of beings) qua the productive holding sway of beyng can be founded only in poetizing and grounded only in thinking, it can also be destroyed only through a breakdown of thinking and through an incapacity of poetizing. The breakdown and incapacity of both are already testified, however, where thinking and poetizing are simply admitted into the service of the sovereignty of beings.
The basic happening of modernity, that of the emergence of “world-views,” is the start of the destruction of the world within the historical domain of Western metaphysics. In the sphere of the sovereignty of modern humanity, an originary thinking is therefore necessarily | abandoned to unrecognizability, which, in terms of essential thinking, does not count as a lack and hindrance, but as abundance and safeguard. For all essential thinking needs the freedom to err, the long useless straying out of which only those who are destined to thinking and disposed to it “learn” what is most essential to themselves. The history of philosophy is indeed not the “history” of errors in the sense of a historiological series of one mistake after another; but the history of philosophy is indeed in itself an erring in which the errancy is experienced and in each case a fissure of the truth of beyng is surmised. Here we have for a long time not been proficient enough in travel to wander through this history without ending in the identification of what is false, or, which is of the same value, in empty praises of the philosophers. We can venture the decisive unscientificity of philosophy only if we are capable of wandering through the errant paths of the history of philosophy—i.e., only if we are radical questioners and only as such attempt to think. On this basis we might surmise a