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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.

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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?