of its respective contemporary configuration and likewise independent of the duration of these directly visible forms. Yet how is it that such an essential affirmation is considered less important, or even of no importance, versus my earlier mere acquiescence, which was mostly superficial and at the same time distracted or even simply blind? In part, the blame rests on the vacuous presumption of the “intellectuals.” Their essence (or distorted essence) does indeed not consist in their vindication of knowledge and refinement over and against mere action and vulgarity; instead, it lies in the fact that they take “science” to be the authentic knowledge and the basis of a “culture” and want to know, and can know, nothing of essential knowledge. The greater danger of intellectualism is that it threatens the possibility and seriousness of genuine knowledge, not that it weakens action. Action can fend for itself. But the battle for knowledge and against science is today hopeless, because scientists do not have a sufficiently essential knowledge of themselves, of science, in order to place themselves seriously into an opposition.
Therefore, all fronts are thoroughly mixed up with one another: the universities manifest the purest form of this mix-up, and that is where the ground of their impotence is to be sought—and | also is the cause of their misguided claims. They themselves condition the irresoluteness which impedes the one single step which now must be taken: their explicit abolition and replacement by research activity and technical schools, i.e., chemical and Alemannic “institutes.” A further delusion was thus my opinion that the university could indeed still be transformed into a site of essential meditation, could assert an essence wherein Western knowledge might place itself back into its proper question-worthiness, and could thereby contribute to the preparation of another beginning of the history of beyng. A concept of “science” devised on this basis, both as seen in terms of the university and as appraised in terms of historical reality, is a pure “phantom.” Delusions—thought through and suffered in all their abysses—are paths to that which “is.” (Cf. p. 110.)
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How many victims will historicism still devour, i.e., how many people will it still seduce to the unprofitable opinion that because they as latecomers now have definitively behind themselves that which preceded themselves, they could claim they | have put it behind—as if the gaze backward were already a gaze that overcomes? Essential history is in this way thoroughly concealed, because the historicists of thinking and of poetizing maintain that their respectively current timeliness