every claim on the thinker. These careless ones are the ones who have become happy in putting behind themselves the care concomitant with belonging to a people of poets and thinkers. (In recent days it was publicly announced by the ministry of propaganda in a loud voice that the Germans no longer need "thinkers and poets" but "corn and oil.")
"Philosophy," as the heedfulness to the claim of Being on man, is first of all the care for Being and never a matter of "cultural formation" and knowledge. Therefore it is possible that many persons may possess a great amount of learned information about philosophical opinions without ever being "philosophical" and without "philosophizing." Then again, others may be touched by the claim of Being without knowing what it is and without responding to the claim of Being with appropriate thinking.
Of course a certain knowledge belongs to this thoughtful thinking and so does a carefulness in reflection and in the use of words, which essentially surpasses all demands of mere scientific accuracy. According to the experience of the Greek thinkers, this thinking always remains a saving of the unconcealed from concealment in the sense of veiling withdrawal. This latter is experienced more originally in thought than anywhere else. The thinker in particular must have drunk the just measure of water from the river "Carefree." "Seeing," in the sense of the gaze into the essence, the seeing of genuine thinking, does not come about by itself but is, in a different way than the usual "seeing" and "seeing-to," threatened on all sides by errors. But what about the one who not only drinks beyond the measure, but who drinks only this water?
Recapitulation
1) Field and lethe. The divine for the Greeks: the uncanny in the ordinary. The θεῖον in primordial ἀλήθεια and λήθη. Ἀλήθεια and θεά (Parmenides).
About the time that the Greeks departed from their essential history, they expressed once more the legend of the counter-essence of ἀλήθεια, the μῦθος of λήθη. This legend, which concludes Plato's dialogue "Politeia," ends with a tale about λήθη. This observation is correct, but in such a casual form it may easily occasion a misinterpretation of the essence of λήθη. In truth what is at issue here is τὸ τῆς Λήθης πεδίον—the field of withdrawing concealment. Plato does not say simply τὸ πεδίον τῆς Λήθης, but τὸ τῆς Λήθης πεδίον. Initially, the relation between the field and λήθη is left undetermined, because the linguistic