we are easily drawn by any emphatic mention of thinkers such as Parmenides. We then adopt the view that the early thinkers, being first in point of time, are first and fore-most in every respect—for which reason it is then deemed advisable to philosophize only in this pre-Socratic manner, and to pronounce all the rest a misunderstanding, a retrogression. Such childish ideas are actually in circulation today. We mention them only in view of the way which we are trying to take.
"When we take this way, we come to the point where we, in thought and inquiry, retrace the questioning of a thinker by starting from his own thinking and from nowhere else. This task differs in every respect from the frequently heard demand that we must understand a thinker in his own terms. That is impossible, because no thinker—and no poet—understands himself. How then could anybody else dare claim to understand a thinker—even to understand him better?
The wish to understand a thinker in his own terms is something else entirely than the attempt to take up a thinker's quest and to pursue it to the core of his thought's problematic. The first is and remains impossible. The second is rare, and of all things the most difficult. We shall not be allowed to forget this difficulty for a single moment, in any of the lectures to follow. To speak of an "attempt at thinking" is not an empty phrase meant to simulate humility. The term makes the claim that we are here taking a way of questioning, on which the problematic alone is accepted as the unique habitat and locus of thinking.
But in view of the rashness of our public, let us note also something else. It 'may easily happen that soon—even tomorrow—the slogan is promulgated: "Everything depends on the problematic!" That cry seems to identify the crier as one of those who are inquirers. Today every statement either becomes stale and irrelevant at once, or else