rather in the spiritual poverty of those who practice it—or, what amounts to the same, of those who seek to resist it. Thus, a philologist, with all due industriousness, can occupy himself for his entire life with the Greek language and command it, without ever being touched by the spirit of this language. On the contrary, he dutifully and conventionally allows his everyday world and the common way of thinking—even if modified ‘historiographically’—to preside in place of the spirit of language.)
The saying of fragment 51 clearly indicates what can also be gleaned from [149] other statements of Heraclitus’s: namely, that he knew of the difference between, and the manifest irreconcilability of, conventional thinking and essential thinking. One can see from this that the manifest irreconcilability with conventional thinking belongs to the very essence of essential thinking. The latter is, in its essence, entirely ‘incomprehensible’ to the conventional understanding. However, we would once again draw an all-too-hasty conclusion were we to maintain, as a result of the above, that anyone who states incomprehensible things is already thereby a thinker. Essential thinking is not incomprehensible because it is too complicated, but rather because it is too simple. Essential thinking is alienating not because what is thought by it lies too distant, but rather because it lies too near. The difference between conventional thinking and essential thinking is irresolvable. To know this and to know the reason for such irresolvability, and thereby to know the essence of manifest irreconcilability, are tasks that themselves belong to the knowledge of essential thinking. This difference is therefore expressed in various ways according to the fundamental position of a thinking within its history.
Seen from the perspective of conventional thinking—a perspective that is, for us, always the most familiar—every declaration of a thinker concerning the relation of essential thinking to conventional thinking is either taken as an arrogant dismissal of the ignorance of the masses, or as an irritated and petulant complaint concerning conventional thinking’s ‘deliberate’ misunderstandings regarding the thinker, and by extension the aggression the mob feels toward the thinker.
The vehemence of the thinkers’ comments regarding their relation to conventional thinking does not, in truth, arise from the minor irritation of one who is insulted merely as a result of a common lack of understanding. However, one can (because one can do this anywhere and anytime) very easily explain the defensive words of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Kant, [150] Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche as resulting from anger: for, conventional thinking understands such an explanation most easily, and precisely thereby takes it to be the only true one. In truth, however, behind the thinkers’ defensive words is concealed an entire range of connections whose essence has still not been questioned. What is at stake here is not the ‘psychology’ of the ‘personality’ of the thinkers and their particular way of responding to the public and its lack of understanding: rather, what is being questioned is the essentially manifold relation in which the human essence stands to the truth of beings. Phrased still more