1. Apprehending is not a mere process, but a de-cision.
2. Apprehending stands in an inner essential community with logos. Logos is an urgent need.
3. Logos grounds the essence of language. As such, logos is a struggle and it is the grounding ground of historical human Dasein in the midst of beings as a whole.
On 1. Νοεῖν, apprehending, is not yet adequately conceived in its essence if we simply avoid lumping it together with the activity of thinking and even with judging. We have characterized apprehending as taking up a position to receive the appearing of beings.74 As such, it is nothing other than setting out upon one’s own, distinct way. But this implies that apprehending is a passage through the crossing of the threefold way. Apprehending can become this passage only if it is fundamentally a de-cision for Being against Nothing, and thus a confrontation with seeming. But such essential de-ciding, when it is carried out and when it resists the constantly pressing ensnarement in the everyday and the customary, has to use violence. This act of violence, this de-cided setting-out upon the way to the Being of beings, moves humanity out of the homeliness of what is most directly nearby and what is usual.
Only if we grasp apprehending as such a setting-out are we immune to the error of misinterpreting apprehending as an arbitrary human behavior, as a self-explanatory use of human spiritual faculties, or even as one more mental process that just happens [129|177] to occur. Instead, apprehending is wrested from the usual hustle and bustle, in resistance to it. Its belonging together with the Being of beings does not come about automatically. To name this belonging-together is not merely to ascertain a fact, but to indicate that struggle. The sobriety of the saying is a thoughtful sobriety, that emerges and shows itself is unconcealment.
74. See p. 153 above.