LETTER ON "HUMANISM"
language," a usage destined to language, thinking only that and nothing further, to the extent that we retain this thought in the heedfulness of saying as what in the future continually has to be thought, we have brought something of the essential unfolding of being itself to language.
What is strange in this thinking of being is its simplicity. Precisely this keeps us from it. For we look for thinking — which has its world-historical prestige under the name "philosophy" — in the form of the unusual, which is accessible only to initiates. At the same time we conceive of thinking on the model of scientific knowledge and its research projects. We measure deeds by the impressive and successful achievements of praxis. But the deed of thinking is neither theoretical nor practical, nor is it the conjunction of these two forms of comportment.
Through its simple essence, the thinking of being makes itself unrecognizable to us. But if we become acquainted with the unusual character of the simple, then another plight immediately befalls us. The suspicion arises that such thinking of [193] being falls prey to arbitrariness; for it cannot cling to beings. Whence does thinking take its measure? What law governs its deed?
Here the third question of your letter must be entertained: Comment sauver l'element d'aventure que comporte toute recherche sans faire de la philosophie une simple aventuriere? [How can we preserve the element of adventure that all research contains without simply turning philosophy into an adventuress?] I shall mention poetry now only in passing. It is confronted by the same {GA 9 363} question, and in the same manner, as thinking. But Aristotle's words in the Poetics, although they have scarcely been pondered, are still valid — that poetizing is truer than the exploration of beings.
But thinking is an aventure not only as a search and an inquiry into the unthought. Thinking, in its essence as thinking of being, is claimed by being. Thinking is related to being as what arrives (l'avenant). Thinking as such is bound to the advent of being, to being as advent. Being has already been destined to thinking. Being is as the destiny of thinking. But destiny is in itself historical. Its history has already come to language in the saying of thinkers.
To bring to language ever and again this advent of being that remains, and in its remaining waits for human beings, is the sole matter of thinking. For this reason essential thinkers always say the Same. But that does not mean the identical. Of course they say it only to one who undertakes to meditate on them. Whenever thinking, in historical recollection, attends to the destiny of being, it has already bound itself to what is fitting for it, in accord with its destiny. To flee into the identical is not dangerous. To
275