8 Ponderings XII–XV [8–10]

of all beings and as the most eminent being is not simply to be posed
“objectively”; instead, thinking and intuition are to be transposed
nonobjectively into being itself, allowing it to be as the most eminent
being.
The Germanness of this “Idealism” (i.e., of this interpretation of
being as representedness), a Germanness Fichte never attained, be-
cause he simply carried out in an unconditional way the transcen-
dental thinking of Kant, consists in an originary experience of the in-
ceptual essence of beyng as φύσις. In other words, the essence of
Germanness is determined only thereby in its characteristic capacity
for such experience—. Metaphysics is not Germanized in a “folkish”5
8 [“völkisch”] way, but rather what is German attains | its essence for the
first time and for historical moments precisely through this meta-
physical exertion. The task here is not to justify, over and against the
mechanicism of “Occidental” thinking, the irrationality of “organic”
life—. German Idealism grasps both, in their correlation, out of a leap
into the unconditionality of beings as a whole. This idealism re-
nounces the “mathematical” and the rational so little that it precisely
brings them to their highest development and mastery and, in think-
ing through the idea of the absolute system, first grants them their
metaphysical rights. Yet even what was just said would remain merely
one historiological interpretation of German Idealism among others
if it did not arise on the basis of a historical confrontation in which
metaphysics is already placed in question in the whole of its history.
Such questioning, however, has only one “goal”—to grant meta-
physical thinking its still covert sovereignty regarding that which in
this thinking must remain unmastered and which thereby alone
could secure for it its essence as metaphysics, namely, the question of
the truth of beyng and of the grounding of that truth. Schelling and
9 Hegel will first become | essential German thinkers in the future, if the
unconditionality of their basic metaphysical position is taken up as a
question and carried over into futural thoughtful meditation. Histori-
ological cognition of the manifold conditionality of these thinkers
does not help here, as little as do, from the viewpoint of the “histori-
ology of problems,” the derivations of their basic positions. These

5. [Heidegger employs in these notebooks primarily three adjectives derived

from the noun das Volk, “people”: volkhaft, volklich, and völkisch. I have rendered
them respectively as “populist,” “communal,” and “folkish” and have placed the
German term in brackets at each occurrence. The term völkisch has racial over-
tones. It is up to the reader to determine Heidegger’s attitude toward the over-
tones of each term.—Trans.]
 Ponderings XII [10–11] 9

derivations on the part of the “historiologists of facts” may be refuted

with the same right as the “construction” with which the “historiol-
ogist of problems” can brand those “factual” explanations of the “fac-
tual” provenance of the “thoughts” as the epitome of thoughtlessness.
(—A Schelling-lexicon will soon follow the Hegel-lexicon;6 and if a
philosophy has once fallen into the pincers and compartments of lex-
icography, the strangulation of all thoughtful seriousness in being “oc-
cupied” with thinkers has reached its goal. This is so, even if masked
to make it seem that through such cataloging—which any arbitrary
person can arrange still “more exactly” to an arbitrary extent—the
presupposition for “scientific” work is first brought about. Perhaps—
indeed even certainly—for scientific work, but not for thoughtful
knowledge.)
Yet how are we supposed to protect the essential thinkers from such
a botching | of what is essential to them? No protection is possible 10
here—and to try and provide one is already to be mistaken about the
history of thinking. We indeed know only that, and why, ever and
again at work is this botching whose average wretchedness must never
claim that in relation to it the invaluable power of contempt would be
misused in the least. For the Futural—i.e., essentially clarified—Ger-
mans, German Idealism “is” a still reserved, unkindled struggle of
meditation; what German Idealism is in this way it must indeed first
become. If it does not become this, then Schelling and Hegel belong,
with the rest of the thinkers, in the equipment rooms of the histori-
cist Valhalla and remain well-reckoned occasions for contemporary
birthday or deathday “ceremonies.” Then some arbitrary person will
make mention even of the thoughts of Schelling and Hegel, with the
usual homage but also with timely reservations. The struggle of medi-
tation is the free venture of an essential transformation by which all
the now easy and usual supports and crutches are shattered. The
plight of the ground requires the grounders of that plight and does not
surround such a requirement | as a proposition and a proclamation 11
but, instead, unfolds into the space-time of humanity. For the Ger-
mans, and thus for the history of the West, German Idealism is a his-
tory that has not yet happened, in whose domain historiological erudi-
tion has nothing to seek, because it could never find anything there.

6. {Hermann Glockner, Hegel-Lexikon, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1935).}