PATHMARKS
and accordingly a co-responding (saying) to that which shows itself, then it will become evident to what extent poetizing too is a pensive saying. And the proper nature of this saying, it will be admitted, cannot be determined by means of the traditional logic of statements about objects.
It is this insight into the interrelation of thinking and saying that lets us see that the thesis that thinking and speaking as such necessarily objectify is untenable and arbitrary.
(e) In what sense do thinking and speaking objectify, and in what sense do they not? Thinking and speaking objectify, i.e., posit as an object something given, in the field of natural-scientific and technical representation. Here they are of necessity objectifying, because scientific-technological knowing must establish its theme in advance as a calculable, causally explicable Gegenstand, i.e., as an object as Kant defined the word. Outside this field thinking and speaking are by no means objectifying.
But today there is a growing danger that the scientific-technological manner of thinking will spread to all realms of life. And this magnifies the deceptive appearance that makes all thinking and speaking seem objectifying. The thesis that asserts this dogmatically and without foundation promotes and supports for its part a portentous tendency: to represent everything henceforth only technologically-scientifically as an object of possible control and manipulation. This process of unrestrained technological objectification naturally also affects language itself and its determination. Language is deformed into an instrument of .reportage and calculable information. It is treated like a manipulable object, to which our manner of thinking must conform. And yet the saying of language is not necessarily an expressing of propositions about objects. Language, in what is most proper to it, is a saying of that which reveals itself to human beings in manifold ways and which addresses itself to human beings insofar as they do not, under the dominion of objectifying thinking, confine themselves to the latter and close themselves off from what shows itself.
That thinking and speaking are objectifying only in a derivative and limited sense can never be deduced by way of scientific proof. Insight into the proper nature of thinking and saying comes only by holding phenomena in view without prejudice.
Hence it just might be erroneous to suppose that only that which can be objectively calculated and proven technically and scientifically as an object is capable of being.
This erroneous opinion is oblivious of something said long ago that Aristotle wrote down: ἔστι γὰρ ἀπαιδευσία τὸ μὴ γιγνώσκειν τίνων δεῖ ζητεῖν ἀπόδειξιν καὶ τίνων οὐ δεῖ. "It is the mark of not being properly
60