SCIENTIST: But after all, a conversation [Gespräch] presupposes language [Sprache].
GUIDE: Presumably not language, though indeed the word.
SCHOLAR: Such that language arises from the word.
GUIDE: And authentic conversation first brings the word to language.
SCIENTIST: Although I don’t understand much of what the two of you just said about word and conversation and language, could authentic conversation and what you understand by that be any different from what one customarily conceives of as “dialogue”? After all, it belongs to a conversation that it is a conversation about something and between speakers.
GUIDE: Yet a conversation first waits upon reaching that of which it speaks. And the speakers of a conversation can speak in its sense only if they are prepared for something to befall them in the conversation which transforms their own essence. [58]
SCIENTIST: Then in fact my question, what we will in the conversation, would be contrary to the essence of the conversation, since at best it wills something with us.
SCHOLAR: Assuming that it wills at all. Your question, what we will in the conversation, would at least be such that one could only answer it, as previously happened, by saying that one wills non-willing.
SCIENTIST: But then even with this answer, which indeed concerns the definition of any genuine conversation, nothing is yet resolved with regard to the topic of our conversation. Or is perhaps the nonwilling named in the answer at the same time supposed to more narrowly delimit the topic of our conversation?
SCHOLAR: If, however, this delimitation was co-intended in the answer, then I cannot help but fear that we have come to this delimitation of the topic of our conversation at the expense of the necessary clarity of speaking, and at the expense of the necessary carefulness of hearing.
GUIDE: I agree. And I would like to hear if you have in mind the same difficulty that relentlessly burdens our conversation.
SCHOLAR: When asked what you really will in our meditation on thinking, you answered: non-willing.
SCIENTIST: And right away it became clear to us that this, what is in this case willed, is itself a kind of willing.
SCHOLAR: Certainly.
SCIENTIST: And thereby willing moved into our field of vision.
SCHOLAR: But we did not go any further into the answer that was given to us, which after all speaks of non-willing. [59]
SCIENTIST: It seems to me that we did this thoroughly enough, in that with a few steps of thinking we were able to show that the willing of non-willing contains a contradiction, and therefore also can