true. What is ‘logical’ need not be true. The manic errancy of history can be arranged ‘logically.’ The endlessly invoked ‘logical’ is never able to give or establish the true. A criminal also thinks logically—indeed, perhaps even more ‘logically’ than some honest men. We should guard against [115] taking the ‘logical’ that results in wrongdoing as the true only because it, as one thoughtlessly says, is ‘logical.’ The invocation of the ‘logical’ as the authority of the binding is always the sign of thoughtless thinking. It is the ‘uneducated’ human being in particular who exhibits a special fondness for the use of the expression ‘logical.’ The ‘uneducated’ human being is the one unable to get a grasp of the matter under discussion, and who is ignorant of how a relation to things looks and how this relation must always be won anew, and can only be won through the articulation of the matter from out of that matter itself. The popular expression ‘that is logical’ is, for the most part, characteristic of an ignorance of things. To think ‘logically,’ to comply with ‘the logical,’ does not yet entail a guaranteeing of the true. Additionally, the ‘illogical’ can also harbor the true. ‘The logical’ may be in accordance with the standard of thinking: however, this standard, which is thus also the common and the conventional, can never rise up to the authority of the true.

The statement ‘the light is the dark,’ when viewed with respect to the tin-god whose name is ‘the logical,’ means the same as ‘A is the opposite of A,’ which is clearly ‘illogical.’ The statement ‘the emerging is the submerging’ is similarly ‘illogical.’ Were ‘the logical’ also already the true, and ‘the illogical’ already ‘the false,’ then normal understanding would have to judge Heraclitus’s saying regarding φύσις to be false.

However, the ‘normal’ thinking of the understanding that thinks ‘logically’ is able to decide nothing regarding Heraclitus’s saying, owing to the fact that, precisely by and through its appeal to the authority of the logical, it precludes the possibility of a decision, for such thinking renounces in advance the bringing of what is said in the saying into essential view. The decision of conventional thinking concerning the saying of the thinker is in essence more reckless than a judgment made about color by one who is colorblind. Conventional [116] thinking, in its initial grasp of Heraclitus’s saying, focuses only on the apparent fact that emerging is just emerging, and self-concealing is just self-concealing (i.e., ‘submerging’ thought in a Greek sense). The singular focus of conventional thinking finds that emerging itself by itself, insofar as it is emerging, does not tolerate submerging: the two are incompatible with one another. Against this obvious incompatibility, the saying of Heraclitus’s says that emerging indeed tolerates self-concealing, and in such a way that it gives its favor to it. Accordingly, emerging, precisely insofar as it is an emerging, is a submerging. For conventional thinking, the understanding comes to a standstill in the face of this saying. We all—those of us here who come from conventional thinking—must first actually reach that place where our understanding stands still: only then, when this everywhere bustling and at the same time ‘normal’ understanding (which jostles about with the phrases