SCHOLAR: But it seems to me as though the Greeks too had already always been co-attentive to the practical side of cognition and thinking. I can easily provide evidence of this with a saying from Heraclitus that occurred to me already during our first conversation. But at the moment I don’t want to hold up the [56] advancement of our conversation, which, by means of the perhaps somewhat intrusive question of what is really willed in this conversation, has taken such a favorable turn.
SCIENTIST: Yet what you find favorable is that, through my manner of questioning, willing was unexpectedly brought up for discussion.
SCHOLAR: After all, then, you also have the impression that we now suddenly, without a legitimate connection with what preceded, changed the topic?
SCIENTIST: It seems so at least; although I cannot deny that the reference to non-willing came forth entirely spontaneously as an answer to my question about what is willed in the conversation.
SCHOLAR: Then precisely the leaping quality of the transition—namely, from a discussion of thinking in physics to a meditation on willing and non-willing—was due to the manner of your question, which immediately occurred to you.
SCIENTIST: If you mean that the question I posed does not belong in the course of our conversation, then I cannot agree with you. What is more natural to a conversation than that in it something is willed? This belongs so originally to a conversation that I should have posed my question, what we really will in our conversation, right at the beginning.
GUIDE: Yet perhaps one could doubt whether a conversation is still a conversation at all if it wills something.
SCIENTIST: You mean, then, that we should leave a conversation to itself.
GUIDE: But what is the conversation itself, purely on [57] its own? You evidently don’t consider just any mere speaking with one another to be a conversation. A speaking with one another can be found in every chat, discussion, debate, or negotiation; in a broader and vaguer sense these too are “conversations.” Yet in the emphatic sense of this word we mean something else. Albeit what we mean is difficult to say. But it seems to me as though in a proper conversation an event takes place wherein something comes to language [zur Sprache kommt].
SCHOLAR: You understand this phrase, “to come to language” [zur Sprache kommen], quite literally.24
GUIDE: Indeed. I would like to say that the essence of an authentic conversation is determined from out of the essence of language. Perhaps, however, it is the other way around.
24. As an idiom, zur Sprache kommen means “to come up for discussion.”—Tr.