The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.
Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.
Man dies constantly until the moment of his demise.
Mere anxiety is the source of everything.
He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment.
But “nowhere” does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot come closer from a definite direction within nearness, it is already “there” – and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and takes one’s breath – and yet it is nowhere.
Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.
In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.
All questions that do justice to the subject are themselves bridges to their own answering.
Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.
Nature has no history.
What could be more alien to the “they”, lost in the manifold ‘world’ of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown in the “nothing”?
All the poems of the poet who has entered into his poethood are poems of homecoming.
As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.
Speaking a lot about something does not in the least guarantee that understanding is thus furthered. On the contrary, talking at great length about something covers things over and brings what is understood into an illusory clarity, that is, the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be mute... one who is mute still has the tendency to “speak.”... Authentic silence is possible only in genuine discourse. In order to be silent, Dasein must have something to say.
The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatuses of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in its essence. The rule of enframing threatens humanity with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.
The term ‘Being’ does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost when these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species: the ‘universality’ of Being ‘transcends’ any universality of genus.
Philosophy, then, is that thinkins with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time.
In its factical existence, any particular Dasein either ‘has the time’ or ‘does not have it’. It either ‘takes time’ for something or ‘cannot allow any time for it’. Why does Dasein ‘take time’, and why can it ‘lose’ it? Where does it take time from? How is this time related to Dasein’s temporality?
Do we know ourselves – our “self”? How are we supposed to be ourselves if we are not our selves? And how can we be our selves without knowing who we are, such that we are certain of being the ones we are?