And now my private opinion is that the turning of the destiny of the human being can presumably only proceed from the very place from which this terminal condition of the contemporary planet has arisen. The practical test is this: when one enters into conversation with Americans. This is not said critically, and every encounter is somehow accidental — one discovers that these people (apart from religion), the moment one speaks with them about what is today, do not know where they are; and that only we can do this (said without presumption), and that we ourselves have not yet noticed it.
FIFTH QUESTION: Is it correct that you also use other names for the “ontological difference”?
HEIDEGGER: It is entirely correct that I today name quite differently that which stands within the ontological difference, because these names and concepts belong to metaphysics, and that I also see the matter itself differently.
It is correct that this difference — dia-phora, this carrying-apart [Austrag] of Being and beings, has to do with what I call the clearing [Lichtung], truth, unconcealment [Unverborgenheit]; not in such a way that unconcealment abolishes concealment, but rather that it has its essence from concealment — that it lives from it. The alpha privativum of aletheia is grounded in letheia.
SIXTH QUESTION: Do you acknowledge Rickert’s distinction between individuating and generalizing concept-formation?
HEIDEGGER: I grew up with it. I would not wish in any way to touch the name of my esteemed teacher. But this distinction really is primitive. This thinking stands far behind Schelling, Hegel, or Leibniz. And yet — for 1900–1910, for us — it was a liberating matter at a time when experimental psychology was attempting to be scientific philosophy.