Wasn’t there some essential usefulness to it? I don’t want to dodge the major reason people give for maintaining and encouraging this logic. People say and think and believe, in an agreement that goes without saying, that [15] studying scholastic logic teaches you how to think and helps you reach a higher level of learning and a greater exactitude in thinking. So it’s something we should strive for right from the beginning of our scientific studies.
This is a basic misunderstanding. Thinking, and especially scientific thinking, can be learned only by getting involved with the subject matter. It would be the greatest mistake to think that a collegium logicum could make up for a lack of methodical, conceptual hard work in a science or the communication of that work through teaching.
The objectivity of scientific questioning and the precision of conceptual definition grow out of an increasing familiarity with the area of a given science’s subject matter. What is more, such familiarity is possible in a positive sense only when an individual, at the core of his or her human existence, has gained a basic relationship to this subject matter, whether by an inner choice and decisive struggle or by an unexplainable inner calling.
This holds not only for theoretical scientific thinking but also for the field of practical undertakings and political power, where scholastic logic has nothing to say. It even misleads when it turns into mere drill and blind learning, and especially when it becomes a hair-splitting and empty form of arguing, cut off from the subject matter.
Conversely, understanding what scholastic logic has to offer presupposes a very comprehensive and well-developed philosophical thinking, especially when this logic is simply presumed, apparently naïvely, instead of going back into the vital origins of its settled formulae and theorems.
It’s a fool’s errand to expect that traditional logic will teach us how to think. But on the other hand we certainly can clarify scientific work and academic study—in a word, the whole form of existence that they encompass—but only by way of a philosophizing [16] logic, that is to say, only through a living and effective connection with the concrete practice of a given science.13
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Transparency in one’s scientific comportment and one’s scientific life means having a relationship of understanding with the whole of a science and its basic components and their interconnections. For now let us simply note those components in a list:
13. [Here ends Heidegger’s lecture of 6 November 1925.]