its being, philosophical research is something a “time,” as long as it is not merely concerned with it as a matter of education, can never borrow from another time. Such research also is something that—and this is how it needs to understand itself and the nature of what it can possibly achieve in human Dasein—will never want to step forward with the claim that it be allowed to and is able to relieve future times of the burden of having to worry about radical questioning. The possibility that now past philosophical research will have an effect on the future of research can never consist in its results as such, but rather is rooted in the primordiality of questioning which is attained and concretely worked out in each particular case, through which past research can become a present in ever-new ways as a model that evokes problems.

[THE INITIAL POSITION OF LOOKING]

The object of philosophical research is human Dasein insofar as it is interrogated with respect to the character of its being. This basic direction of philosophical questioning is not externally added and attached to the interrogated object, factical life. Rather, it needs to be understood as an explicit taking up of a basic movement of factical life. In this movement, life is in such a way that in the concrete temporalizing of its being, it is anxiously concerned about its being, even when it goes out of its way to avoid itself. A characteristic of the being of factical life is that it finds itself hard to bear. The most unmistakable manifestation of this is the fact that factical life has the tendency to make itself easy for itself. In finding itself hard to bear, life is difficult in accord with the basic sense of its being, not in the sense of a contingent feature. If it is the case that factical life authentically is what it is in this being-hard and being-difficult, then the genuinely fitting way of gaining access to it and truly safekeeping it can only consist in making itself hard for itself. This is the only duty philosophical research can be required to fulfill, unless of course it wants to miss its object completely. All making it easy, all the seductive compromising of needs, all the metaphysical tranquilizers prescribed for problems having been for the most part derived from mere book learning—the basic intention of all of this is from the start to give up with regard to the task that must in each case be carried out, namely, bringing the object of philosophy into view, grasping it, and indeed preserving it. Accordingly, the history of philosophical research will be there as object in a relevant sense for present research on it when and only when the latter aims to provide not diverse historical curiosities but rather radically simple monuments that evoke thinking, i.e., only when it does not divert understanding within the present into the goal of merely enlarging knowledge about the past but rather forces the present back upon itself in order to intensify its questionability. However, and especially for a present in whose character of being historical consciousness has become constitutive, worrying about history and appropriating it in the above manner means: understanding radically what a particular kind of past philosophical research put forward at a particular time in