Abstract

Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real. No justifying reason could rediscover itself in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason; only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality. Philosophy which presents reality as such today only veils reality and eternalizes its present condition. Prior to every answer, such a function is already implicit in the question—that question which today is called radical and which is really the least radical of all: the question of being (Sein) itself, as expressly formulated by the new ontological blueprints, and as, despite all contraditions, fundamental to the idealist systems, now allegedly overcome.