The difficulty in hearing or reading the lecture belongs in a strange way to the simplicity of the matter under discussion. Thus it is above all important to attain to the simplicity in view.
Taken in the old sense of the word, the expression "matter," "matter of thinking," which occurs frequently in the lecture means the contested case, what is contested, the matter in question. For the thinking not yet determined, the matter is what gives thought, that from which this thinking receives its determination.
With the required caution and the necessary reservation, what Hölderlin writes in a letter to Böhlendorf (Fall 1802) could be related to the provisionalness of Heidegger's thinking which we often touched upon:
My dear friend! I think that we shall not comment upon the poets before our time, but that the mode of song will take on a different character in general, ...
The discussion in this session concentrated primarily on the expression "It gives" which is the word which decisively carries the movement of the lecture. We attempted to clarify the customary usage of this word.
The way in which the "It gives" (es gibt) occurs in ordinary language already repeatedly points back behind the theoretical, general, faded meaning of mere things, of mere occurrence, to a wealth of relations. If we say, for example, there are trouts in the brook, the mere "Being" of trouts is not being confirmed. Before that, and at the same time, a distinction of the brook is expressed in this sentence. The brook is characterized as a trout brook, thus as a special brook, one in which we can go fishing. In the simple use of "It gives," "there is," there already lies the relation to man.
This relation is usually that of being available, the relation to a possible appropriation by man. What is there is not merely in front of us, it concerns man. On account of the accompanying relation to man, the "It gives" names Being more clearly in simple language usage than the mere "being" which "is." But the "is," too, does not always and exclusively have the theoretically impoverished meaning