“Logic” and “the logical” are simply not the ways to define thinking without further ado, as if nothing else were possible. On the other hand, it was no accident that the doctrine of thinking became “logic.”

Be that as it may, to appeal to logic for purposes of delimiting the essence of thinking is already a questionable enterprise, because logic as such, and not just its individual doctrines and theories, is still something worthy of questioning. Thus, “logic” must be put in quotation marks. We do so not because we want to abjure “the logical” (in the sense of correct thinking). In the service of thinking, we seek to attain precisely that which determines the essence of thinking, ἀλήθεια and φύσις, Being as unconcealment, and this is precisely what was lost due to “logic.” When did this logic begin, the logic that still rules our thinking and saying today, the logic that from early on plays an essential part in determining the grammatical conception of language and thus the fundamental Western orientation to language in general? When does the formation of logic begin? When Greek philosophy comes to an end and becomes a matter of schools, organization, and technique. It begins when ἐόν,²⁵ the Being of beings, appears as ἰδέα, and as ἰδέα becomes the “ob-ject” of ἐπιστήμη <scientific knowledge>. Logic originated in the ambit of the administration of the Platonic-Aristotelian schools. Logic is an invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers. And wherever philosophers took it up, it was always under more original impulses, not in the interests of logic. It is also no accident that the great, decisive efforts to overcome traditional logic were made by three German thinkers, indeed by the greatest:

25. Ἐόν is the variant of ὄν that is used in the dialect of Parmenides (for instance, in fragment 8, quoted on p. 105 above).