SCIENTIST: We can define the essence of crime without ourselves having to be or become criminals.
GUIDE: That is the question.
SCHOLAR: But, in reverse, a person can surely be a criminal without knowing something of the essence of crime.
GUIDE: That too is a question.
SCHOLAR: Admittedly you may be right to have doubts where it is a matter of human behavior. However, what if we are determining the essence of plants?
SCIENTIST: After all, we define the essence of plants without ourselves being plants.
GUIDE: Even this I would like to doubt.
SCHOLAR: But a plant can surely live as a plant [68] without knowing or even thinking about the essence of plants.
GUIDE: Yet what does thinking mean here? What do we know of the essence of thinking?
SCIENTIST: But surely we can determine the essence of a jug or a bowl without ourselves being a jug or a bowl.
GUIDE: Even with regard to this question, I would not like to decide.
SCHOLAR: What is certain, however, is that the jug is a jug without itself thinking its essence; for indeed it cannot think at all.
GUIDE: We would do well to leave even this still open.
SCHOLAR: In order to let ourselves all the more freely engage in what you, in our meditation on thinking, think out toward.
GUIDE: Toward non-willing.
SCHOLAR: That is something which is presented to us through negation.
SCIENTIST: At the same time, through negation it withdraws from us.
GUIDE: But nonetheless, when we say “non-willing,” something is given to us.
SCIENTIST: Negation also has that enigmatic quality, which has previously often unsettled us.
GUIDE: Because nearness and farness prevail in negation, insofar as it withdraws and yet brings forth.
SCHOLAR: Only I find that discussions about negating, the no, and the not or non [das Nicht] do not contribute anything to the determination of non-willing so long as we leave the essence of willing undetermined. [69]
SCIENTIST: Yet we have already spoken in detail about this; which is why I would also like to admit now that our earlier discussion, despite the sense of having gone astray that may have adhered to it, was not entirely futile.
GUIDE: Nothing is in vain in such conversations.
SCIENTIST: Although now and then they become tremendous tests of patience.