Our immersion [not to say lostness]24 in the prior view and insight that sustains and guides all our understanding of Being is all the more powerful, and at the same time all the more concealed, because the Greeks themselves no longer shed light on this prior line of sight as such. For essential reasons (not due to a failure), they could not shed light on it. But the unfolding of the separation between Being and thinking plays an essential part in forming and consolidating this prior line of sight in which the Greek understanding of Being already moves.
Nevertheless, we have placed this separation not in the first, but in the third position. At first we will try to elucidate its content in the same way as we elucidated the first two.
Once again, we begin with a general characterization of what now stands opposed to Being.
What does it mean to think? We say: der Mensch denkt und Gott lenkt <man proposes, God disposes: literally, human beings think and God controls>. Here, to think means to devise this and that, to plan; to think about something means to set one’s sights on it. “To think evil” means to intend evil; andenken means not to forget something. Here, thinking means memory and remembrance <das Andenken und das Gedenken>. We use the turn of phrase: just to think something up, that is, picture it, imagine it. Someone says: I think it’s turning out all right, that is, that’s the way it seems to me, I look at it that way and am of this opinion. To think in an emphatic sense means to think something over, to deliberate on something, a situation, a plan, an event. “Thinking” also serves as the title for the labor and work of the one we call a “thinker.” Of course, all human beings think, as opposed to animals, but not everyone is a thinker.
24. In parentheses in the 1953 edition.