mindfully considerate thinking is that it at least ask whether what holds true for actions of thinking also already pertains to being itself, and indeed is even capable of pertaining to it: it must ask whether all thinking can only be thinking if it beforehand, and in the first place, is addressed by being. The competency of ‘logic’ to illuminate being itself is in every respect questionable.

However, one can raise the following obvious counterargument, which says in short: contesting the competency of logic for the illumination of the essence of being, or even calling it into question, is hypocritical—for in truth, any illumination of being that is articulated in propositions must proceed according to the rules ‘of logic,’ and must take place through actions of placement and displacement. One may respond to this objection in the following way: the actions of thinking in the sense of the placement of propositions may be necessary conditions for the execution of essential thinking and its saying: however, they are not thereby shown to be the ‘sufficient’ conditions and the originary bolstering support for this thinking. The claim that ‘logic’ is not competent to illuminate the truth of being says something other than the claim (supposed in the objection above) that the illumination of being can do without ‘logic.’

The dismissal of the competency of ‘logic’ has the following purpose: to make clear that the actions of placing, placing-forth, and displacing, taken on their own as the actions that they are, can neither ground, establish, nor even constitute [157] or ‘replace’ the domain within which ‘being’ itself becomes clear. It is one thing to carry out thinking interpreted in terms of ‘logic’ (in the sense of the placing of the presentation of things) directly and ubiquitously, and another thing entirely to set forth blindly this ‘logical’ thinking as the guideline along which the question of the being of beings is placed and considered decided. The appeal to a ranking of priority between the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’ is, in a manifold sense, ‘logically’ correct: however, it does not guarantee the relation to being itself, because it (and the mere pointing out of the formal representational placements) not only presupposes the relation of being to us, but also at the same time obscures and disguises it. The positing proposed by ‘logic’ is able to accomplish much within thinking, but this placing is not able to accomplish precisely that ‘positing’ that already lies in the so-called presup-positions, and it is in truth something other than a positing. Thus, in the very moment we clearly and distinctly interpret what emerges before and comes before as being presup-positions, ‘logic’ has already besieged and battered us with a blindness that can never be remedied by means of that which carried out the blinding itself (i.e., logic). Logic, as an authority over the decision concerning the essence of being, is not only intrinsically questionable and lacking a grounded competence, but this authority, and thus also the relation of the ‘positive’ to the ‘negative,’ is nowhere to be found in inceptual thinking. We force φύσις and κρύπτεσθαι into what is for them a thoroughly foreign relationship when we interpret the jointure, in and as which both are in essence united, as the chain of logical connection between the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative.’

118    The Inception of Occidental Thinking