SCIENTIST: We would then need to keep separate that which is a non-willing and that which is not a willing, that is to say, not a will and thus nothing pertaining to will.
SCHOLAR: To what is not determined by the essence of the will belongs, among others things, thinking. I say, “among other things,” because after all various kinds of things, not only thinking, lie outside the essential sphere of the will.
SCIENTIST: The answer to my question regarding what you really willed in our meditation on thinking, must therefore, precisely grasped, say “not a willing,” and in no way as you said, “a non-willing.” This expression seduced us into demanding a clarification of willing and its relation to thinking, while, in fact, with the question about the essence of thinking, what is a matter of will should not come into view at all.
GUIDE: Even though I do not presume to know something conclusive about the distinction between willing and will, you may still trust that I know what I say when I nevertheless use the expression “nonwilling.”
SCIENTIST: I do believe that you know this. But I cannot get over the impression that you used the expression “non-willing” intentionally in its ambiguity. [80]
GUIDE: That may be. And the intention was to lead ourselves into this ambiguity.
SCIENTIST: Yet what is problematic with your answer remains, namely that it has a negative character and does not extend any further than does the sentence: The stone is not a living being.
GUIDE: The answer is ambiguous and also negative, and yet this is a case where everything depends on the positive traits of the essential domain in which thinking belongs showing themselves to us unambiguously.
SCIENTIST: If you yourself so precisely realize the one thing that is necessary, then why did you answer in a manner that led us to wander about without a sense of direction in what is indeterminate?
GUIDE: Because I myself am only a seeker, and I would like to truly find the essence of thinking, not to establish it with the power of my own authority.
SCIENTIST: The joy of discovery, and of being the discoverer, is indeed a powerful incentive for scientific research.
GUIDE: Yet in the case of finding, it is a matter of what we are together seeking, not a matter of discovering.
SCHOLAR: Because our seeking is presumably not a scientific researching.
SCIENTIST: And the kind of finding is determined by the manner of seeking.