78
Country Path Conversations [119–121]

GUIDE: I carried out the (transitive) naming just as little as you did.

SCHOLAR: Who then was it? None of us? [120]

GUIDE: Presumably, for in the region in which we stay everything is in the best order when it has been no one’s doing.

SCIENTIST: An enigmatic region, where there is nothing for which we can answer.

GUIDE: Because it is the region of the word that alone answers for itself.

SCHOLAR: For us it remains only to hear the answer befitting the word.

GUIDE: That is enough; even when our telling is only a retelling of the answer heard.

SCIENTIST: And nothing depends on he who first attained to such retelling, especially since he often does not know whose tale he retells.

GUIDE: So we don’t want to quarrel over who first introduced the name “releasement” into the conversation; we just want to consider what it is that we so name.

SCIENTIST: Speaking from the previously mentioned experience of mine, it is waiting.

GUIDE: And so not something nameless, but rather something already named. What is this waiting?

SCIENTIST: Insofar as it relates itself to the open, and the open is the open-region, then we can say: waiting is a relationship to the open-region.

GUIDE: Perhaps even the relationship to the open-region, insofar as waiting lets itself be involved in the open-region and, in letting itself be involved in it, lets the open-region purely prevail as open-region.

SCHOLAR: A relationship to something would accordingly be the true relationship if it is brought into its own essence and held therein by that to which it relates itself. [121]

GUIDE: The relationship to the open-region is waiting. And “waiting” means: to let oneself into an involvement in the open of the open-region.

SCHOLAR: And so: to go into the open-region. Scient ist : That sounds as if we were previously outside the open-region.

GUIDE: That we were, and yet we were not. We are not and are never outside the open-region, insofar as we stay, after all, as thinking beings— and that means as transcendentally representing beings—in the horizon of transcendence. The horizon, however, is the side of the open-region turned toward our representational setting-before. The open-region surrounds us and shows itself to us as the horizon.

SCHOLAR: I find that the open-region rather veils itself as horizon.

GUIDE: Certainly. But nevertheless we are in the open-region as we, representing transcendentally, step out into the horizon. And yet


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