the Greek thinkers neither illuminated nor even justified. Plato and Aristotle simply move about in the tracks of this relationship between λόγος and category. Why this was possible, and even necessary, is something that we will someday have to ask when an insight into the essence of λόγος has become a pressing necessity for us.
If for now we only think-after the relationship between category and λόγος in a provisional way, we learn to understand what is otherwise incomprehensible: namely, that the highest determinations for [257] beings are called ‘categories,’ that is, ‘assertions’ in the already elucidated sense. The name and the matter ‘category’ later formulated itself, in part, along the lines of an inversion, so that the term ‘category’ only designates a superficial ‘schema’ and ‘pigeonhole’ to which and in which something can be said to belong. Since Plato and Aristotle—that is, since the beginning of metaphysics as the fundamental feature of Occidental thinking—it remains the task of this thinking about beings as a whole to create a doctrine of categories in accordance with which the most universal determinations of being—that is, categories—may be ordered. However, only seldom in the history of metaphysics does the relationship between category and logos in the sense of assertion and judgment become visible.
It is no coincidence that in Kant’s thinking, in which metaphysics undergoes its last decisive shift, this relationship between category and assertion comes to light once again. It appears Kant’s choice that “the logical function of the understanding in judgment” (that is, λόγος as assertion) serve as the “guiding thread for the discovery of all pure concepts of the understanding”1 (that is, of the categories) is arbitrary, and many of his readers and critics agree on this point. But this fact, that λόγος becomes the guiding thread for the establishment of the categories, only makes visible something already at work since the beginning of metaphysics: namely, that logic is the guiding thread, and in fact the authentic horizon, of metaphysical thinking. This role accorded to logic was beyond question for Kant, which is why he himself never pondered the connection between λόγος and κατηγορία, or even the origin and reason for this connection. But logic can only be the guiding thread and the horizon for metaphysical thinking because, for its part, logic is nothing other than the metaphysics of λόγος, with this understood as assertion in its authentic sense—that is, as κατηγορία understood as ἰδέα and εἶδος. [258] If one accepts metaphysics as the highest form of the deepest thinking, a conclusion that tradition has made inescapable, then the essence of λόγος must be thought the deepest in ‘logic,’ especially if the latter is the metaphysics of λόγος . Seen in this way, pre-Platonic thinking becomes pre-metaphysical thinking, the kind of thinking that is still incomplete and is still on its way toward metaphysics. What the pre-Platonic thinkers said about λόγος can only be thought from out of
1 Kant, Werke, III, 89–92.
196 The Inception of Occidental Thinking