Wisser: Evidently everything depends for you upon the dismantling of subjectivity—not upon what today is written in capital letters: the anthropological and anthropocentric—not upon the representation that the human being, in the knowledge he has of himself and in the activity he accomplishes, has already grasped his essence. Instead, you direct the human being toward attending to the experience of Da-sein, in which the human being recognizes himself as a being open to Being, and Being grants itself to him as unconcealment. Your entire work is devoted to demonstrating the necessity of such a transformation of human existence on the basis of the experience of Da-sein.
Do you see signs that what is thought here as necessary is actually becoming real?
Heidegger: No one knows what the destiny of thinking will look like. In the year 1964, in a lecture in Paris—which I did not myself deliver, but which was presented in French translation—I spoke under the title: ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.’ Thus I make a distinction between philosophy—that is, metaphysics—and thinking, as I understand it.
The thinking that in this lecture I set apart from philosophy—which occurs above all through an attempt to clarify the essence of the Greek aletheia—is, in relation to metaphysical thinking, much simpler in substance than philosophy; yet precisely because of its simplicity, it is much more difficult in its enactment.
And it demands a new care for language—not the invention of new terminologies, as I once thought, but rather a return to the originary content of our own language, a language, however, that is constantly in the process of dying away.
A future thinker, who may perhaps one day be confronted with the task of genuinely taking up this thinking that I am attempting to prepare, will have to submit himself to a word once written down by Heinrich von Kleist, which reads: