INTIMATIONS X PONDERINGS (II) AND DIRECTIVES
October 1931
M. H.
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Cf. pp. 19 and 132.2
What should we do?
1
Who are we?
Why should we be?
What are beings?
Why does being happen?
Philosophizing proceeds out of these questions upward into unity.
* * *
1
What we extol as blessing depends on what afflicts us as plight.
And on whether plight truly urges us on, i.e., urges us away from staring at the situation and talking it over.
Greatest plightâthat we must finally turn our backs on ourselves and on our âsituationâ and actually seek ourselves.
Away from detours, which merely lead back to the same beaten paths; sheer evasionsâremote and desultoryâbefore the ineluctable.
The human being should come to himself!
2
Why? Because a human being âisâ a selfâyet is in such a way as to lose or indeed never win himself and to sit somewhere otherwise captivated and transportedâwe still scarcely see all this great being and potential for being as we gaze at wretched imitations and dried up and incomprehensible exemplarsâproffered âtypes.â
But: how does a human being come to his self?
Through what are his self and its selfness determined?
Is that not already subordinated to a first choice!
Insofar as the human being does not choose and instead creates a substitute for choosing, he sees his self
1. through reflection in the usual sense;
2. through dialogue with the thou;
3. through meditation on the situation;
4. through some idolatry.
3
Supposing, however, that the human being had chosen and that the choice actually struck back into his self and burst it openâ
i.e., supposing that the human being had chosen the disclosability of the being of beings and by this choice was placed back into Dasein,3 must he then not proceed far into the stillness of the happening of being, a happening which possesses its own time and its own silence?
Must he not have long been silent in order to find again the power and might of language and to be borne by them?
Must not all frameworks and specialties be shattered here and all worn-down paths be devastated?
Must not a courage, one which reaches very far back, attune the disposition here?
4 Someone who sticks fast to the foot of the mountainâhow will he ever even see the mountain?
Only more and more rock faces.
But how to come upon the mountain?
Only through a leap from another mountain; but how to come upon that one?
Already to have been there; to be someone placed on the mountain and ordered to be there.
Who was already so? And is it still because no others can drive him away?
Beginning and re-beginning of philosophy!
2
5 We stand before nothingness*âto be sure, but in such a way that we do not put nothingness and this standing into effect, do not know how to put them into effectâcowardice and blindness before the opening of the being that bears us into beings.
* Indeed not before nothingnessâinstead, before each and every thing, but as nonbeings (cf. p. 50).
3
Must the great lone path be ventured, silentlyâinto Da-sein, where beings become more fully beings? Untroubled by all situations?
Has it not long been folly and confusion and groundlessness to run after the âsituationâ?
âSituationââat the beach and in the sand, small mussels are splashed about, into them we wriggle and see only wrigglers but never the waves and the upsurge of beings!
4
6
Nothingnessâwhich is higher and deeper than nonbeingsâtoo great and worthy for any individual or all together to stand before it.
Nonbeingsâwhich are less than nothingnessâbecause expelled from the being that negates all beings.
Lessâbecause undecided, neither amid beings, since these latter are more fully, nor amid nothingness.
5
A disregarding of the situation is to be set in motion, but out of the positive aspect of the ineluctableâthe disregarding of the situation and the justification for doing so.
We first are our situation when we no longer ask after it.
Back into the âunconsciousââi.e., not into âcomplexesâ but into the truly happening and necessary âspirit.â
This devilishâor rather deifiedâfarming of the situation! The semblance of seriousness.
6
7
Mankind no longer knows what to do with itselfâand consequently conjectures âeverythingâ in the end.
7
Mankind believes it must do something with itselfâand does not understand that Da-sein has already done something with it (beginning of philosophy)âfrom which mankind fled long ago.
Thisâthe fact that in Dasein beings have beingâi.e., become more fully beings and more fully nullifiedâis the mission [Auftrag] of humanity in this happening.
8
Being and Time I4 a very imperfect attempt to enter into the temporality of Dasein in order to ask the question of being for the first time since Parmenides, cf. p. 24.
9
Objection to the book: I have even today still not enough enemiesâit has not brought me a Great5 enemy.
10
8
Thoughtlessness toward the âtraditionâ and disdain of the contemporary belong to the keen-hearing diffidence before the past.
11
Jaspers writes three slapdash and uninformed volumes about that which philosophyâin creative individual works, and only soâbears in silence (silence-bearing), namely, the fact that philosophy goes to the issues. And thus every common barker and writer is handed the formula to talk on and on even about the philosophically ultimate. And thus the impotence of âcontemporaryâ persons for philosophizingâindeed even only for a return to antiquityâis not only proven but also justified. Even âbeingâ is now brought into the longest-winded idle talk, and each one may with equal justification maunder on about what strikes him.
12
Yet âsayâ it to yourself daily in your taciturnity: be silent about bearing silence. Cf. p. 17.
13
9
The essence of truth must first be transformed and must be transposed into a new sharpness and hardness so that beings may find admittance.
To admit beingsâlet them through âthroughâ Da-sein. Ambiguity of the âthroughâ [âDurchâ].
14
Therefore, it was a mistaken view that Being and Time could overcome âontologyâ directly. The appalling âresultâ is indeed only that the prattle about âbeingâ has increased and has become still more groundless.
14a
Everything is to be set still deeper; thus first made ripe for transformation.
Everythingâi.e., first and only the beginning of philosophy.
15
We are not strong and originary enough to âtalkâ truly through silence and diffidence. Therefore, one must talk about everything, i.e., prattle. (Cf. p. 93.)
16
10
Being is to be set more deeply into Dasein through the actual question of the essence of language.
Thus with Dasein a transformation of truth and being is to be compelled.
That is a happening of history proper; for this history the âindividualâ is inconsequential and counts only inasmuch as he secures for himself in effective work a possibility of repeatable impulses.
17
Being not without languageâbut precisely therefore not âlogical.â Language not without being.
18
The law-awakening must happen out of the depth of Dasein through the fully assumed conditionality of an individual human being.
What is human resides in trusting to the depth of Dasein! The adverse criticism of human partiality is to be endured.
What is effective is not that which is deemed worthy of agreement.
19
11
The one who must philosophize âtodayââand by that I mean someone under the irrevocable power of the beginning of Western philosophy in antiquityâhas the assignment of maintaining constantly effective a dual attitude in all hardness and decisiveness: on the one hand, the interpretation of the ancients, as if what mattered was nothing else than to let them alone come into words (beginning and history of the question of being), and then the attitude of the most broadly and deeply interpretive questioning out of the ground of Daseinâas if at issue was nothing other than to help âbeingâ to a bursting forth in actual work and in a first solitude (overcoming of the question of being).
This duality, however, is one (cf. p. 14)âthis one nevertheless is the grace of the cal...