48
Country Path Conversations [75-77]

SCHOLAR: Then you do not disapprove of meditating on the conversation during the conversation.

GUIDE: Quite to the contrary—assuming, of course, that meditating on and planning are fundamentally different matters.

SCIENTIST: But the two are not, after all, mutually exclusive.

GUIDE: In certain cases they challenge one another.

SCHOLAR: Above all when planning threatens to engulf all meditating. [76]

GUIDE: And meditating merely stands in service of planning.

SCHOLAR: Instead of planning serving meditating.

GUIDE: At times the latter is even sufficient unto itself.

SCIENTIST: Which, in your opinion, is the case with our conversation.

SCHOLAR: So let us meditate.

GUIDE: Where do we stand?

SCIENTIST: We are about to let ourselves engage in non-willing.

SCHOLAR: At the same time, if I understand correctly what was just said, we should think about it unthematically.

GUIDE: By thoughtfully pursuing non-willing.

SCHOLAR: And so then, after all, by thinking about what it is. Scient ist : It would be difficult to pursue it otherwise.

GUIDE: But perhaps we come to know what non-willing is only once we have reached it.

SCHOLAR: And yet the question of what non-willing is stands at the beginning of our reflection.

GUIDE: At least in the sense that we reach an understanding among ourselves concerning what we properly mean with the expression, “non-willing.”

SCIENTIST: It seems to me that attaining clarity about this is urgently needed, because various kinds of things can be so named.

SCHOLAR: We speak of non-willing when, for example, someone explains to someone else: “I do not will that [77] which you will of me.” Non-willing here is a refusing.

SCIENTIST: Which can become an opposing.

SCHOLAR: That is, opposing a command found in the other’s will.

GUIDE: Such that perhaps in general the essence of the will conceals itself in the command.

SCIENTIST: This seems to me to be indicated by another manner of non-willing, which appears when someone says: “I do not will that this happen.”

SCHOLAR: In this case non-willing is a forbidding.

SCIENTIST: If we think of refusing, opposing, and forbidding as manners of non-willing, then it is quite apparent that they are at the same time really manners of a decided willing.


Country Path Conversations (GA 77) A Triadic Conversation by Martin Heidegger