Indiana University Press

Philosophy—the passion of pressing forward and catching the scent that reaches the essence of things: the ceaseless questioning struggle over the essence and Being of beings.

If we now think over everything at once that philosophy is not, and remember at the same time its whole history from its inception with the Greeks to Nietzsche, then we reach the unsettling and provocative conclusion that in its history, philosophy has been precisely everything that we said is not its essence. It was and willed to be: science, worldview, foundation for knowledge, absolute knowledge, concern with existence. The history of Western philosophy thus turns out to be an ever steeper decline from its own essence. More than that—insofar as in its history philosophy appeals again and again to its start and inception among the Greeks, philosophy makes this inception ever harder to recognize and misinterprets it in terms of the later, degraded essence.

that history is not the past, but happening, both as a heritage and as a future;