PATHMARKS


venture into discordance in order to say the Same is the danger. Ambiguity threatens, and mere quarreling.

The fittingness of the saying of being, as of the destiny of truth, is the first law of thinking — not the rules of logic, which can become rules only on the basis of the law of being. [194] To attend to the fittingness of thoughtful saying does not only imply, however, that we contemplate at every turn what is to be said of being and how it is to be said. It is equally essential to ponder whether what is to be thought is to be said — to what extent, at what moment of the history of being, in what sort of dialogue with this history, and on the basis of what claim, it ought to be said. The threefold issue mentioned in an earlier letter is determined in its {GA 9 364} cohesion by the law of the fittingness of thought on the history of being: rigor of meditation, carefulness in saying, frugality with words.

It is time to break the habit of overestimating philosophy and of thereby asking too much of it. What is needed in the present world crisis is less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature, but more cultivation of the letter.

The thinking that is to come is no longer philosophy, because it thinks more originally than metaphysics — a name identical to philosophy. However, the thinking that is to come can no longer, as Hegel demanded, set aside the name "love of wisdom" and become wisdom itself in the form of absolute knowledge. Thinking is on the descent to the poverty of its provisional essence. Thinking gathers language into simple saying. In this way language is the language of being, as clouds are the clouds of the sky. With its saying, thinking lays inconspicuous furrows in language. They are still more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the field.


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Martin Heidegger (GA 9) Letter on Humanism