speech only as correctness and dependability? Is it because man's ecstatic sojourn in the openness of presencing is turned only toward what is present and the presenting of what is present? But what else does this mean than that presence as such, and together with it the opening granting it, remain unheeded? Only what ἀλήθεια as opening grants is experienced and thought, not what it is as such.
This remains concealed. Does this happen by chance? Does it happen only as a consequence of the carelessness of human thinking? Or does it happen because self-concealing, concealment, Λήθη, belongs to Ἀ-Λήθεια, not just as an addition, not as shadow to light, but rather as the heart of Ἀλήθεια? And does not even a sheltering and preserving rule in this self-concealing of the opening of presence, from which unconcealment can be granted to begin with, so that what is present can appear in its presence?
If this were so, then the opening would not be the mere opening of presence {Anwesenheit}, but the opening of presence {Anwesenheit} concealing itself, the opening of a self-concealing sheltering.
If this were so, then with these questions we would reach the path to the task of thinking at the end of philosophy.
But isn’t all this unfounded mysticism or even bad mythology, in any case a ruinous irrationalism, the denial of ratio?
I ask in return: What does ratio, νοῦς, νοεῖν, apprehending, mean? What do ground and principle and especially principle of all principles mean? Can this ever be sufficiently determined unless we experience ἀλήθεια in a Greek manner as unconcealment and then, above and beyond the Greek, think it as the opening of self-concealing? As long as ratio and the rational still remain questionable in what is their own, talk about irrationalism is unfounded. The technological scientific rationalization ruling the present age justifies itself every day more surprisingly by its immense results. But this says nothing about what first grants the possibility of the rational and the irrational. The effect proves the correctness of technological scientific rationalization. But is the manifest character of what is exhausted by what is demonstrable? Doesn’t the insistence on what is demonstrable block the way to what is?