GUIDE: I don’t want to take any action against science.
SCIENTIST: That would indeed be a vain undertaking. [51]
GUIDE: I don’t want to go forth “against” anything at all. Whoever engages in opposition loses what is essential, regardless of whether he is victorious or defeated.
SCIENTIST: Then your stance is not at all so revolutionary as it appears.
GUIDE: Everything revolutionary remains caught up in opposition. Opposition, however, is servitude.
SCHOLAR: If then, after all that has been said, you are not opposed to science, then it would indeed be revealing and beneficial to the advancement of our conversation if you could say what it is that you really will to gain [wollen] from exerting yourself with us to illuminate the essence of cognition and especially thinking.
GUIDE: Since you so directly put me on the spot to say something, I must also directly, and therefore insufficiently, reply. What I really will [will] in our meditation on thinking is non-willing [Nicht-Wollen].22
SCIENTIST: Can one then will non-willing? With such willing, after all, willing is merely increased. And thus this willing works precisely and ever more decisively counter to that which it wills, namely, non-willing.
GUIDE: Against its will, by the willing of non-willing, willing entangles itself in itself and so loses precisely what it wills—namely, nonwilling.
SCHOLAR: You yourself say this?
GUIDE: How should I not, since I was after all asked what I will.
SCIENTIST: So then was it in fact my insistent question about what you will that caused your disconcerting answer?
GUIDE: Not really caused, but [52] elicited the discourse of willing. You are thereby running the risk of shifting our conversation on thinking to the topic of willing, while it is you who are continually and at times violently struggling to keep the conversation on its topic. The topic, however, is thinking and not willing.
SCHOLAR: Yet it seems to me that willing belongs to thinking.
SCIENTIST: The two are of course often named together when one enumerates the main faculties of the soul: thinking, willing, and feeling.
22. The verb wollen can be translated as “to want” or “to will.” While “to want” would in many cases be a more colloquial rendering, in this context wollen is translated as “to will” in order to indicate the problem of willing and the paradoxical tension of “willing non-willing” that is at issue. For example, even though “what do you want in our conversation” would be a more idiomatic and less awkward translation of “was wollen Sie bei unserem Gespräch” than is “what do you will in our conversation,” the latter is more appropriate here since it is precisely the problem of “willing” (das Wollen) that is at issue.—Tr.