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The Principle of Reason [149-150]

misused language, the word "problem" when, for example, the auto mechanic, an honorable man, cleans the dirty spark plugs and remarks: "That's no problem." It certainly isn't.

When the being of beings proffered itself as the abjectness of objects, the Geschick achieved a previously unprecedented decisiveness and exclusiveness. But the decisiveness with which the essential provenance of being withdraws also corresponds to this proffering. Namely, if ratio as Reason, that is, as subjectivity is the wellspring of ratio in the sense of ground/reason and its demand to be rendered, then the question of the essential provenance of being as objectness cannot find a site within the domain of ratio. Why not? Because through ratio as subjectivity we see the fact that and how Reason implies the fullness of every possible rationes, of every possible reason, and thus Reason harbors in itself the ground/reason for every foundation. What is transcendental about Kant's transcendental method is the cognition that responds to the rendering of sufficient reasons, and that means the cognition that is based upon the demand to render these reasons. The transcendental is in no way a procedure invented by human thinking. just as what is transcendental about this method peeps back into the cpvm􀁹 of the Greeks, so it points forward into the newest epoch of the Geschick of being. For the dialectic which one finds in the metaphysics of German Idealism is grounded in the transcendental method implied by the objectness of objects—that is, by the being of experienceable beings. When one thinks this dialectic in a being-historical manner as transformed into historical-dialectical materialism, one sees that it determines the contemporary history of humanity in a manifold manner. In our age the world-historical conflict has come closer than the short-sighted, political and economic power struggles would like us to think.

The most radical withdrawal of being begins with the proffering of being as objectness insofar as the essential provenance of being can never come into view as a question and as worth questioning. Why not? Because the complete founding of beings as such is also contained and concluded in the domain of ratio as Reason and subjectivity, a domain which is the be and end all.

{When speaking of the Geschick of being, "being" means nothing other than the proffering of the lighting and clearing that furnishes a domain for the appearing of beings in some configuration, along with the contemporaneous withdrawal of the essential provenance of being as such. The age in which Western thinking was setting up the principle of reason as the supreme fundamental principle was an age at play in an epoch of the Geschick of being that even now orients our contemporary historical existence, orienting it even if, for our part, we only know the names of the thinkers of this epoch—Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling—and no longer experience their inner affinity and common destiny.}

Nevertheless the history of Western thinking shows 􀊔tself as the Geschick of being when and only when we glance back upon the whole of Western thinking from the point of view of the leap and when we recollectively preserve it as the


The Principle of Reason (GA 10) by Martin Heidegger