Most things age quickly, for they only seek to be measured against the latest novelty and immediately fall behind this novelty. Very few things become old, for only a few things find their way to the path leading to the old. That is the erstwhile. Having previously been, it alone returns futurally.
Leaving out is therefore difficult because we are actually only capable
of it once we possess the simple in such a way that what has
been left out is still contained within it inconspicuously. Leaving out
is also based in the secret of letting, a secret that consists of not being
a secret; for the letting of thinking is an open indulgence that corresponds
to the attribution of beyng.
In the “Essence of Reason” I thought, though in a manner still sufficiently unthought, toward the ground-less. (p. 59).
Ἀλήθεια is not a name for veritas, rather for esse. (pp. 61, 71, 74).
Thinkers are sages pointing toward the hint of beyng; they are not
sages who spread the teachings of their wisdom. The sages gather
into the unrelenting element of the simple. Thus, if we say that X is a
“sage,” then that sounds ambiguous. X can be the failed founder of a
religion. Whoever preaches a “philosophical faith” has never experienced
what thinking is. It is the invisible cold flame of the sacrifice of
language leading into beyng. (p. 55).
A method is a technically determined and correspondingly circumscribed means, but not a path, and even less so a track of movement. Whoever proceeds methodically no longer moves forward, but instead preestablishes the method in advance and lets it run its course. Then he only attends to the proper functioning of a functionary.15 The more methodical the sciences become, and that is their genuine goal, the more decisively does any course of thinking come to a standstill within them. Ultimately thought-lessness becomes the conditio sine qua non of the enterprise of science at its culmination. The fact the one finds oneself in the midst of this culmination, now commencing, is revealed by the sciences’ frantic interest in morality and faith.—Maybe someone will one day catch onto how an attempt was made in the Address of 1933 to think out in advance of this process of the culmination of science in the perishing of thinking, in order to bring knowledge as essential knowledge back to thinking, but not to surrender it over to Hitler. | Why did the party arrange for the speech to be attacked in all the training camps for university instructors [Dozentenlager]? Not
15. [Heidegger genders this term with the feminine “Funktionärin.”— Trans.]