The soul—i.e., that which animates—is the essence of the living thing insofar as ‘ensoulment’ means precisely this: that through it a being arrives and abides in such a manner of being that, as emerging, it unfolds into the open and, thus unfolding, gathers the open and what is encountered in the open to itself. However, due to a long tradition of thinking, we are certainly conditioned (and, for yet different reasons, also hastily inclined) to imagine any self-referential entity both as being a subject and as having the characteristics of an ‘I,’ whenever there is talk of a living thing that references itself and other things back to ‘itself.’ The point of reference, so to speak, into which the relation that we call ‘toward itself’ flows, is known as the ‘I,’ and the ‘I’ is like a point or a pole or a center. It is not by accident that Leibniz, who imagines every being as having the characteristics of a ‘subject’ or an ‘I,’ speaks of the singular, self-contained beings as the ‘metaphysical points’ that are then at the same time determined as the ‘inner’ over against the ‘outer.’ Accordingly, what pertains to the ‘soul’ is considered to be what is ‘inner’ and ‘internal.’ Furthermore, unmediated, intuitive opining (and this is true even for the Greeks) posits inner organs such as ‘the heart’ (καρδία—poetic form, κραδία) and ‘the diaphragm’ (φρήν, φρένες – φρονεῖν, φρόνησις) as the seat of fluctuations in the mind’s disposition, and of the mind in general. However, we must slowly learn to differentiate between what, on the one hand, intuitive imagining oft en prematurely grasps and at which it ultimately arrives, and what, on the other hand, is in truth meant by thinking and knowledge. The reference to this difference does not, however, mean that the intuitive and imagistic shall be pushed out over time in favor of the non-intuitive and non-imagistic. On the contrary, it means that everything imagistic and every image only appears and is brought into appearing from out of the non-imagistic, which beckons to the image. The more originarily and essentially the non-imagistic presides, the more it beckons to the image, and the more image-like is the image itself. [302] We easily recognize that the differentiation between the intuitive imagistic and the non-intuitive non-imagistic goes together with, and even coincides with, the differentiation between the sensible and the not-sensible (i.e., the non-sensible and the supersensible). However, this is the differentiation upon which all metaphysics is based. The question nevertheless remains—or, to be clearer, the question must first be asked—where this differentiation originates and to where it leads. The question thus posed concerning this differentiation and its essential origin directly addresses the origin of the imagistic and the non-imagistic in their interrelationship, as well as the foundation of this relationship itself.

If we now think a few more steps ahead, we can easily see to what degree the question concerning the origin and the difference between poetic saying and thoughtful saying lurks in the background of the question concerning the origin and the difference between the imagistic and non-imagistic, insofar as poeticizing (not to mention the other forms of art) is an imagistic saying. However, poeticizing is precisely not merely a sensible saying: rather, it utters a meaning, the same way in which thoughtful saying is not without images, but is rather imagistic in its own