conversance is originally a response to exploring. To explore, however, is necessarily to adopt a course. It is always the choice of one way by giving up others. It is likewise the assuming of one position and the forgoing of others. This inner boundary belongs to conversance; the adopting of one course of exploring, and thus the simultaneous emergence of other courses which remain unexplored. This inner boundary is also the ownmost power of conversance. Therein lies the potential assurance of greatness in the venture of human existence.
But what has been said so far is only an indication of the direction of the question and the kind of problem whose resolution will clarify for us the divisive essence of λόγος. The clarification of this will likewise show how it is and why it is that λόγος, at one with its divisiveness, must be dispersed into a multiplicity of expository sayings and assertions; or better, why it is always already found split up and scattered in this way. The unity of conversance is always a winning back.
All λέγειν, gathering, is selecting. It is a relation to one and thereby to others, whether it be to the one and the others or to one or the other. Because λόγος is originally a selecting, it is the basic activity which guides every relation to the ἔργον as that which is selected, the τέλος. And it is only because this selection of what belongs together is gathered in the εἶδος and likewise demarcates from out of itself a material to be selected and its determinate ways, its preparation, that every producing is gathered in itself in terms of how it is in its ownmost meaning. Only because being gathered into one belongs to every work, no matter how unimportant and trivial, can producing a work be disseminated and careless and the work be disorderly, that is, a non-work.
The being-gathered-together of production is at play in the gathering (λέγειν) of the discussion and of the cognizance that discusses what is or is not suitable. This is that talking to oneself which for the most part goes on silently or as a commentary which gets lost in the work and is often seen only from outside as a bunch of disconnected words. Producing is intrinsically a talking to oneself and letting oneself talk. To tell oneself something does not just mean to form words but to want to proceed in a certain way, that is, to have already gone there in advance.