27. Inceptual thinking
(Concept)
"Thinking," in the ordinary determination that has been usual for a long time, is the representing of something in its ἰδέα ["look"] as the κοινόν ["common"], the representing of something in its generality.
On the one hand, this thinking is related to the objectively present, to what has already come to presence (a determinate interpretation of beings). Yet this thinking is therefore always subsequent, in the sense that it merely provides to the things that have already been interpreted their most general features. Such thinking prevails in various ways in science. The expression "generality" is ambiguous, especially since the designation of what is thought as the κοινόν is already not based originally on what is itself seen but on the "many," on "beings" (as μὴ ὄν ["nonbeing"]). The postulation of the many and the basic relation to them are decisive, at first in such a way that even from the standpoint of consciousness the "many" are the "over and against" without properly and previously being determined in their truth and grounded therein. That is precisely supposed to be accomplished by what is "general." The way this view of thinking is then coupled to the introduction and acquisition of "categories" and the way the "form of thinking" characteristic of the assertion becomes the standard.
This thinking was once—in the first beginning, in Plato and Aristotle—still creative. Yet is was precisely this thinking that created the domain in which the representing of beings as such later came to prevail and in which the abandonment by being then unfolded in ever-greater concealment.
Inceptual thinking is the original carrying out of resonating, interplay, leap, and grounding in their unity. "Carrying out" here means that these—resonating, interplay, leap, and grounding in their unity—are taken up and borne only in the human way and that they themselves are always essentially other and pertain to the occurrence of Da-sein.
The precision of speech in this thinking and the simplicity of the Incising word are measured against a conceptuality that dismisses all mere cleverness as empty importunity. What is grasped, what is here always and only to be grasped, is beyng in each case simply in the joining of those junctures. The sovereign knowledge of this thinking never allows itself to be uttered in a proposition, but just as little can what is to be known remain abandoned to an indeterminate and unsteady representing.