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The Principle of Reason [96-98]
which means to our persistence in staying "under way." The paths of thinking that belong to the situating discussion have the peculiar character that when we are under way on them we are nearer to the site than when, in order to become ensconced there, we convince ourselves that we have reached the site; for the site is of a different nature than a station or a place in space. What we call the site—here the site of the principle of reason—is what assembles what comes to be essential of a matter.
Second, that everything rests on the path suggests that everything we must bring into view shows itself only under way on the path. Whatever is to be brought into view lies on the path. Within the purview opened up by the path and through which the path leads, whatever can be brought into view at any given time is gathered from some point along the path. However, in order to reach the path of the discussion situating the principle of reason, we must leap. The leap makes itself known when we listen carefully to a change in the tonality in the principle of reason. In what follows it will become evident why no gradual transition from one tonality into the other is possible here, but that a leap is necessary. Precisely why something lies between what the principle of reason means when it is understood in the customary sense and what the principle of reason says as a principle of being remains a question—a question which at once asks what this "between" is that in some sense we leap over in the leap or, more correctly, that we leap through as through a flame.
However, there is something else we must initially bear in mind in order to keep in view the full breadth and course of the path of the situating discussion. The leap is always a leap from. . . . That from which the leap of thinking leaps is not abandoned in such a leap; rather, the realm from which one leaps first becomes surveyable when one makes the leap—surveyable in a different way than before. The leap of thinking does not leave behind it that from which it leaps; rather, it assimilates it in a more original fashion. According to this view, thinking in the leap becomes a recollective thinking, not of the bygone, but of what has-been. By this we mean the assembling of what does not pass away, but which comes to be essential, that is, lasts, inasmuch as it vouchsafes to recollective thinking new insights. In all that has-been there is harbored a vouchsafing whose treasures often remain unmined through long periods of time, treasures that nonetheless place recollective thinking again and again before an inexhaustible wellspring. Seen in terms of Geschick, the greatness of an era is measured not in terms of what of it has passed away and what remains, rather in terms of what of it is transitory—for instance, everything capable of being planned—and, on the contrary, what of it, even before it has come to be, belongs to what has-been insofar as it is something vouchsafed. Only what is vouchsafed holds in itself the guarantee to last.[36] But to last here means to remain as what is vouchsafed rather than simply to persevere as some transitional