SCHOLAR: And so the festival belongs to the open-region and thus also assists in bringing the jug to abide in its abiding-while. It is perhaps for this reason that you also said that the jug is something festive.
SCIENTIST: The more hesitantly I think along with you, the more wonderful [137] and perhaps also the more enigmatic the jug—and in it the thing—becomes for me.
SCHOLAR: And I have a sense of how thinking itself could be a festival.
GUIDE: The festival of sobriety.
SCIENTIST: Thus, at the risk of not entirely understanding what you mean, I maintain that a sober ascertainment [Feststellung] is now necessary, which may be of use to our conversation about thinking. Moreover, I cannot bear for long this reveling in inklings of the wonderful. I need exact determinations.
GUIDE: If this is how you take what is festive [das Festliche] of thinking, then probably even your will to exactness is not yet sober enough. Although your pressing for order has indeed often helped us.
SCIENTIST: I only wish to make sure of all that we have discussed up to this point. For the sake of clarifying the essence of the open-region, we delved into the relation of the open-region to the thing. In pursuing the relation of the jug to the open-region, there appeared at the same time—and indeed across the open-region—a relation of the jug to the human; and the human in turn has his relation to the open-region in releasement, a relation that is enregioned by the open-region. In addition to this tangle of relations then also comes the immediate relation of the jug to the human, to which we did not pay any further attention.
GUIDE: Yet perhaps we did—indeed constantly—pay attention to this last-named relation. It is just that we did not immediately represent it; nonetheless, we did consider it.
SCHOLAR: But this indication of the intertwined relations—between open-region and thing, open-region and releasement, releasement and human, [138] human and open-region, thing and human— seems to me to indeed be important.
GUIDE: At once important and correct; and nevertheless dangerous, because we tend to represent these relations objectively in a system, instead of waitfully letting ourselves be involved in what is named as open-region and releasement, open-region and thing. Perhaps the enigmatic character of the simple conceals itself behind the appearance of an indeterminate tangle.
SCIENTIST: Which is why you are probably of the opinion that we should enhance this enigmatic character still further, instead of covering it up with a hasty ordering.
SCHOLAR: How can the enigmatic, which indeed gathers itself in what we call the open-region, be further enhanced?