We can return to Heidegger's The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking (1969) to read in light of Nietzsche's concerns about nurturing new ways of thinking in Human, All To Human. How does Heidegger map the thinking of 'the new' after the end of philosophy? What is the matter that needs thinking, by we can add, Nietzsche's free spirits? What new is being created here?

In the earlier post we had got as far as Heidegger saying that the questioning in terms of philosopher's call to return to the things themselves helps us n become aware of something which it is no longer the matter of philosophy to think conceals. This 'something' is at itself precisely where philosophy has brought its matter to absolute knowledge and to ultimate evidence. Heidegger then asks: 'But what remains unthought in the matter of philosophy as well as in its method?' He answers in terms of a possible letting-appear---an 'opening':

Speculative dialectic is a mode in which the matter of philosophy comes to appear of itself and for itself, and thus becomes present [Gegenwart] Such appearance necessarily occurs in some light. Only by virtue of light, i.e., through brightness, can what shines show itself, that is, radiate. But brightness in its turn rests upon something open, something free, which might illuminate it here and there, now and then. Brightness plays in the open and wars there with darkness. Wherever a present being encounters another present being or even only lingers near it----but also where, as with Hegel, one being mirrors itself in another speculatively---there openness already rules, the free region is in play. Only this openness grants to the movement of speculative thinking the passage through what it thinks. . We call this openness that grants a possible letting-appear and show "opening.”

The forest clearing [or opening] is experienced in contrast to dense forest and to open something means to make it light, free and open, e.g., to make the forest free of trees at one place:

The free space thus originating is the clearing....It is necessary for thinking to become explicitly aware of the matter here called opening.....we must observe the unique matter which is named with the name "opening" in accordance with the matter. What the word designates in the connection we are now thinking, free openness, is a "primal phenomenon"... All philosophical thinking that explicitly or inexplicitly follows the call "to the thing itself" is already admitted to the freespace of the opening in its movement and with its method. But philosophy knows nothing of the opening. Philosophy does speak about the light of reason, but does not heed the opening of Being.

start