others, also lack any ambition to avert their gaze quickly from the bald-faced contradiction and merely to parrot that it is emerging and submerging, just because they have heard it is fashionable to think dialectically. To think ‘normally’ means: to think according to the norm of all thinking. This norm is, however, the axiom and the principle that holds for all thinking and, according to Kant, “for all cognition in general.” This principle is the principium contradictionis, the principle of contradiction, which Kant formulates in the following way: “To no thing belongs a predicate that contradicts it.”1 To apply this to the ‘present case’: to emerging, the predicate ‘submerging’ cannot belong, owing to the fact that the latter directly contradicts the former. φύσις (‘emerging’) and κρύπτεσθαι (‘self-concealing,’ ‘submerging’) contradict one another. If they are at all able to be brought into a relationship, then it cannot be one of φιλεῖν, of love, but rather can only be one of ‘hatred’. Whoever thinks against this principle violates the law that establishes the doctrine of thinking.
Ever since Plato—that is, ever since metaphysics—appeared, so too did that determination of the essence of thinking that one calls ‘logic.’ It was not just the name “logic” (ἐπιστήμη λογική), but also the matter designated by it, that arose in the ‘school’ of Plato, a matter that was then advanced in an essential way by that great student of Plato’s, Aristotle. ‘Logic’ is an offspring of metaphysics—perhaps one could even say a misbirth. If it were the case that metaphysics itself were a mishap of essential thinking, then ‘logic’ would indeed [114] be the misbirth of a misbirth. In this lineage, the strange consequences and implications to which logic has led and has brought itself perhaps hide. But, with what right do we speak here so ‘contemptuously’ of ‘logic’? Even if the preceding statements about ‘misbirth’ and ‘mishap’ judged and evaluated the misfortune in an essentially historical (and not merely historiographical) sense—one that has the appearance here of being derogatory—it cannot be overlooked that, despite this purported misfortune ‘of logic,’ we everywhere are bound to ‘the logical.’ Thus, the thinkers—Heraclitus no less than Plato, Aristotle no less than Leibniz, Kant no less than Hegel, Schelling no less than Nietzsche—cannot escape the bondage of ‘the logical.’ Moreover, one tends even today to invoke the following as the ultimate arbiter about a matter: namely, that it is ‘entirely logical,’ whereupon one eliminates every contradiction.
And yet, what does one mean when one says that ‘something is logical,’ an expression that one hears more and more frequently? ‘Logical’ can here mean: correctly inferred from premises. ‘Logical’ can also mean: ‘reasonable,’ and therefore thought in a manner that corresponds to, and follows upon, fundamental principles.
When we in this way make use of the oft-invoked ‘logical,’ we make use of a bindingness that consists merely of consistency. However, many and various things can be consistent. The merely consistent (i.e., ‘the logical’ strictly considered) entails no bindingness, and lacks in any case the distinctiveness and weight of the
1 Kant, Werke, III, 149.
86 The Inception of Occidental Thinking