[255] The title of the lecture can be reformulated as a question. It reads: How does Hegel present the philosophy of the Greeks within the horizon of his own philosophy? We can answer this question by taking a historiographical look at Hegel's philosophy from a present-day standpoint, and in so doing investigate the relation in which Hegel for his part represents Greek philosophy historiographically. This way of proceeding yields a historiographical investigation into historiographical connections. Such a project has its own justification and usefulness.

However, something else is at stake, in play [auf dem Spiel]. With the name “the Greeks” we are thinking of the commencement of philosophy; with the name “Hegel,” of its completion. Hegel himself understands his philosophy according to this determination.

In the title “Hegel and the Greeks,” the whole of philosophy in its history addresses itself to us, and does so now, at a time when the disintegration of philosophy is becoming manifest; for philosophy is migrating into logistics, psychology, and sociology. These independent areas of research secure for themselves their increasing validity and influence at many levels as devices and instruments for the success of the political-economic world, that is to say, of what is, in an essential sense, the technological world.

But the incessant disintegration of philosophy, determined from afar, is not after all the end of thinking, but rather something else, yet something that has withdrawn from public ascertainability.