Being and Truth

Looking backward, Hegel means completion; looking forward, he means the starting point for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

that history is not the past, but happening, both as a heritage and as a future;

If we now think over everything at once that philosophy is not, and remember at the same time its whole history from its inception with the Greeks to Nietzsche, then we reach the unsettling and provocative conclusion that in its history, philosophy has been precisely everything that we said is not its essence. It was and willed to be: science, worldview, foundation for knowledge, absolute knowledge, concern with existence. The history of Western philosophy thus turns out to be an ever steeper decline from its own essence. More than that—insofar as in its history philosophy appeals again and again to its start and inception among the Greeks, philosophy makes this inception ever harder to recognize and misinterprets it in terms of the later, degraded essence.

Philosophy—the passion of pressing forward and catching the scent that reaches the essence of things: the ceaseless questioning struggle over the essence and Being of beings.

means inclination, the passion of pressing toward something, staying with it, staying true to it, and protecting it. Philosophy—the passion of pressing forward and catching the scent that reaches the essence of things: the ceaseless questioning struggle over the essence and Being of beings.

is one who can taste, who has the right taste for what is worthy in things, who can select in advance, set limits and keep within them; who, in short, can catch the right scent and reach out to the essence of things.

is now a common opinion that “one’s” task is to spiritualize and ennoble the conclusion of the National Socialist revolution. I ask: to spiritualize it with what spirit? For there is no living spirit anymore, one no longer knows anything about what spirit is (breath, gust, astonishment, impulse, engagement). Today, spirit drifts around as empty “cleverness,” as the noncommittal play of wit, as the boundless pursuit of ratiocinative dissection and subversion, as the unbridled sway of a so-called world reason.