its own powers of comprehension, still less to notice their limitations. To the common comprehension, what is incomprehensible remains forever merely offensive—proof enough to such comprehension, which is convinced it was born comprehending everything, that it is now being imposed upon with an untruth and sham. The one thing of which sound common sense is least capable is acknowledgment and respect. For acknowledgment and respect call for a readiness to let our own attempts at thinking be overturned, again and again, by what is unthought in the thinkers' thought. Someone who knew better, Kant, here spoke of a "falling down." But no one can fall down who does not stand upright, and standing upright walks, and walking stays upon the way. The way leads necessarily into face-to-face converse with the thinkers. It is not necessary here, however, to conceive of this converse historically. For instance, if we were to give out grades by the standards of the history of philosophy, Kant's historical comprehension of Aristotle and Plato would have to get a straight "F." Yet Kant and only Kant has creatively transformed Plato's doctrine of ideas.
One thing is necessary, though, for a face-to-face converse with the thinkers : clarity about the manner in which we encounter them. Basically, there are only two possibilities: either to go to their encounter, or to go counter to them. If we want to go to the encounter of a thinker's thought, we must magnify still further what is great in him. Then we will enter into what is unthought in his thought. If we wish only to go counter to a thinker's thought, this wish must have minimized beforehand what is great in him. We then shift his thought into the commonplaces of our know-it-all presumption. It makes no difference if we assert in passing that Kant was nonetheless a very significant thinker. Such praises from below are always an insult.