μεθέπεις

follow, follow a path

to follow after, follow closely

A mere thing is, to take an example, this block of granite. It is hard, heavy, extended, massive, 
unformed, rough, colored, partly dull, partly shiny. We can notice all these features in the stone. 
We take note of its characteristics. Yet such characteristics represent something proper to the stone. 
They are its properties. The thing has them. The thing? What are we thinking of if we now call the 
thing to mind? Obviously the thing is not merely a collection of characteristics, and neither is it 
the aggregate of those properties through which the collection arises. The thing, as everyone 
thinks he knows, is that around which the properties have gathered. One speaks, then, of the 
core of the thing. The Greeks, we are told, called it τό υποκείμενον. This core of the thing was 
its ground and was always there. But the characteristics are called τὰ συμβεβηκότα: that 
which always appears and comes forth along with the core.

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Color is not an accident in the sense of something that might not be, e.g., that the spine of a 
book is light blue, but could as well be maroon. Rather, it is a priori in the proper Kantian sense 
(and not the absurd sense of British thought, as in Quinne: mere nomos or convention: 
there is nothing in the Bachelor who stands there before us to make us say, he must be 
unmarried. Nothing necessitates this out of the glance or looking-at, anschauen 
[On a side note: British thought is the result of a radical lack of knowledge concerning 
philosophy, this extends as much into American "philosophy", so-called]). 
If the book is what “lies under”, the hypo-keimai, it is essentially what is colored. 
For color is the surface of a thing and a book can not be without a surface. 
The book, etwas, something, as: something. The (as) something: that which 
essentially must have a surface. Ergo, in the proper sense one speaks here of 
something necessary: a “condition for the possibility of” a book.   

“It is hard, heavy, extended, massive, unformed, rough, colored, partly dull, partly shiny.”

One might reflect on how and to what extent these are conditions for the possibility of a 
block of granite. It is easy enough to raise objections. Is every block of granite 
necessarily brought forth as what is “rough”? Could it not be universally smartly 
polished? We approach here a case of the limit of form. In saying, the block of 
granite is rough, one at the same time sees the ground of the is, which is the 
something is something. Which is to say, in the polishing, the smoothness 
and the block of granite go together, such that the polished thing would no longer 
be the block, but an artifact made of granite would emerge. In the shattering of the 
artifact, again, the inner roughness would bring the granite into being. Where is the 
being? The pieces of granite in the broken artifact, as the rough surfaces, 
show us the place of being where being means the being of a being. 
Being is said “in many ways”: this one must not forget in this path.

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Bare discussion of the three regions of the thing begins.

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The interpretations of the thingness of the thing which predominate in the history of Western 
thought have long been self-evident and are now in everyday use. They may be reduced to three.

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When one, according to habit, speaks of the physical thing, it is as if in order to say, not whatever is less serious. 
Yet, in any thing, no one ever set the shapes and colors aside, and let them be what was there, without 
what was there, being what it was. For example, a building. Never is a building merely a set of homogeneous 
mass, in a dispersal as in the abstract game of the mathematical physics with its (vestigial, yet still living in what is now 
the history of its own becoming) metaphysical notion of matter. In this sense, the European sciences 
(which are everywhere now become planetary) dupe human beings, presenting themselves as what is more serious, 
over and against some incidental other sphere of activity, perhaps fit for entertainments, which, after all, one 
would hardly think of doing without. Though they are harmless enough nonsense. At the same time, what is 
most serious in the European Science, which is Science of Nature, is the fancy and eatheriality, the play 
of the fact, as what all things are for folksense. 

For folksense there are facts, not things, and for science there is the metaphysical region of “matter”, and, 
on the other hand, there are the properties of the facts, colors smeared with the remembrance of their basic 
core of facticity. The human being precedes in a trance, growing increasingly more stupid, and absorbed in 
its writhing twist that seeks to find the last moral edict, the demand not to be captivated by utter idiocy. 
This idiocy "quotient" is supposed to increase, by several points, year by year, among the many,
according to its own denominations.

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Note in Passing

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Now it is well-known that, since antiquity, as soon as the question was raised as to what beings as 
such are, it was the thing in its thingness which thrust itself forward as the paradigmatic being. 
It follows that we are bound to encounter the delineation of the thingness of the thing already 
present in the traditional interpretation of the being. Thus all we need to do, in order to be 
relieved of the tedious effort of making our own inquiry into the thingliness of the thing, is to 
grasp explicitly this traditional knowledge of the thing. So commonplace, in a way, are the answers 
to the question of what a thing is that one can no longer sense anything worthy of questioning lying 
behind them.

———

Insofar as muthos must precede the thing (for thinking is not first particular and isolating, 
nor does it first ask about the grounds, e.g., in ousia), as the place of the generation of the thing, it is the 
extending of the powerful region. Speech, logos, already does all one’s thinking in the time of Plato. 
Instead what is wanted, in the question, Why are we not yet thinking?, is language. It’s clear that 
only sensing (which never means "experience" or something of the sort, as though in  
opposition to reasoning) can bring one into this region of the question, where sensing too, says nothing.  

Of course in Greek glossa says language in the sense of this and that language, but not in the 
sense of what precedes the thing. Investing language with all the weight that logos brings to 
what is outside itself, is the most heretical being. Heretical here says: it seems an unworthy 
nonsense. For the most part, these days, the lack of knowledge even of what philosophy is, 
i.e., the letting being seen what logos thinks, the rising outside the deranged learning that 
always avoids its ground, towards a self-thinking, predominates. Even philosophy, as a 
showing of ways in thought, is no longer known. Instead philosophy becomes a name 
for a practical problem solving which never inquires even into the basic ground of the 
practicality! How far can one withdraw from all public proclamations concerning 
problems, into investigation, without loosing the thread of what one is in the End of Metaphysics?

Being strained to extend the powerful region, that of confrontation with the work

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So sehen wir uns aus dem weitesten Bereich, in dem alles ein Ding ist (Ding = res = ens = ein Seiendes), 
auch die höchsten und letzten Dinge, auf den engen Bezirk der bloßen Dinge zurückgebracht. 
Das >>bloß,, meint hier einmal: das reine Ding, das einfach Ding ist und nichts weiter; das »bloß<< 
meint dann zugleich: nur noch Ding in einem fast schon abschätzigen Sinne. Die bloßen Dinge, mit 
Ausschluß sogar der Gebrauchsdinge, gelten als die eigentlichen Dinge. Worin besteht nun 
das Dinghafte dieser Dinge? Aus ihnen muß sich die Dingheit der Dinge bestimmen lassen. 
Die Bestimmung setzt uns instand, das Dinghafte als solches zu kennzeichnen. So 
ausgerüstet, können wir jene fast handgreifliche Wirklichkeit der Werke kennzeichnen, 
worin dann noch etwas Anderes steckt. 

We thus see ourselves returned from the broadest domain in which everything is a thing 
(thing = res = ens = a being) - including even the "first and last things" - to the narrow 
region of the mere thing. "Mere," here, means, sometimes, the naked thing which is simply 
a thing and nothing more. But then it also means "simply a thing," in an almost disparaging 
sense. It is the mere thing- a category which excludes even the things that we use which 
counts as the actual thing. In what, now, does the thingliness of things such as this consist? 
It is in reference to these that it must be possible to nominate (to title) the thingliness of the thing. 
Such a determination puts us in a position to characterize thingliness as such. Thus equipped, 
we will be able to indicate that almost tangible reality of the work in which something other is kept.

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The interpretation can not stay only with what is distinctly expressed in the text but in circling this it 
avoids the vague meanderings of personal interpretation by letting what is in the work with the title 
Heidegger come to life in the interpretation. Such a standard can not be adequately set aside on 
the grounds that the standard is not objective in the passing sense of the moment. What only stays 
with the text is simply decay and never speaks for the work. Rather, it speaks, e.g., for a regime of 
classics, which itself is the work of an age, its forces and specific tasks. The fundamentally 
mysterious unity of any work is not alive when the text is thought as a thing to be defended 
against false interpretation, vivified for linguistic currentness, and made fluent for the appreciative 
reader of the classics and great texts of the philosophic tradition. Philology is set aside in all 
confrontation which aims at reaching the matter of the work of a text. 

Broad domains always threaten to become generalizations. Ergo, to no longer speak to us from 
what is extended to us as our being. In this sense, seeking this region is always connected to 
a being that thinks language as speaking one. Language as speaking one is as much being as 
being one. Ergo, being is never what avails for the human being, what the human being uses. 
The thing is linked to thinking oneself as what has available to oneself that which avials in being, 
as what is there as the bare thing. Instead, here, thinking attempts to think as being, 
as being being = language speaking. This never means, however, a acting out as a performing 
of being. Rather, it means: the thing is not available. Nothing is to be known in the work, when 
it is art, for knowing is connected to the demand that the thing avail as what “works”. 
What works is most of all technology, which works in that it shows the inmost lack in the 
human when the work of technology improves, when it “gets better” as what is left of Progress 
(i.e., in what has long lain hidden under a dark layer, unobserved and lost to thought, 
in the Enlightenment thinking which ceased to exist when reason ceased to 
be animus apart from anima, intellect as apart from passion, phusis as what is not ratio, and so on.) 

The Essence of Technology is never a mere tool, like logos as what would avail man. 
Even when this is thought, and most of all when logos does not mean Nietzschean tools, 
as of the morbid monkey that blushes. Most of all when the heightened logos, as Sophia, 
is the universal morality, as what transcends local (cultural in the modern sense) relativity. 
The Essence of Technology, as much as it is a metaphysic, as the End of metaphysics, 
as the energia of the world (the natural laws as the Science of Nature, as the  
a priori knowledge of what all else depends on), is no mere mistake in the sense 
that it changes, new findings upset old ones, it is not wisdom proper, one can still 
go on with the old searching, rather, it is the culmination of power, of what avails, 
of the inner unity of the west, now the planetary motivation of a being, the human 
being, as Da-sein, come to hear what it was most of all drawn to in the call of its 
essential history. This is why, in thinking away from the thing, though while still thinking 
with the essential history, one must be touched by the leading string of this history in 
order that one may sense the power of its furthermost movement as what is not thinking.