POSTSCRIPT TO "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"
For this reason, it now also becomes necessary to ask the question, which is barely posed, of whether this thinking already stands within the law of its truth when it merely follows the thinking whose forms and rules are conceived by "logic." Why does the lecture place this term [104] in quotation marks? So as to indicate that "logic" is only one interpretation of the essence of thinking, indeed the one that, as its very name shows, rests upon the experience of being attained in Greek thought. The suspicion regarding "logic," whose consequential development degenerates into logistics, springs from a knowledge belonging to that thinking which finds its source in the experience of the truth of being, but not in contemplating the objectivity of beings. Exact thinking is never the most rigorous thinking, if rigor indeed receives its essence from the kind of rigorous effort whereby knowledge in each case maintains itself within a relation to what is essential in beings. Exact thinking merely binds itself to the calculation of beings and serves this end exclusively.
All calculation lets what is countable be resolved into something counted that can then be used for subsequent counting. Calculation refuses to let anything appear except what is countable. Everything is only whatever it counts. What has been counted in each instance secures the continuation of counting. Such counting progressively consumes numbers, and is itself a continual self-consumption. The calculative process of resolving beings into what has been counted counts as the explanation of their being. Calculation uses all beings in advance as that which is countable, and uses up what is counted for the purpose of counting. This use of beings that consumes them betrays the consuming character of calculation. Only because number can be infinitely multiplied, irrespective of whether this occurs in the direction of the large or the small, can the consuming essence of calculatdon hide behind its products and lend to calculative thinking the semblance of productivity - whereas already in its anticipatory grasping, and not primarily in its subsequent results, such thinking lets all beings count only in the form of what can be set at our disposal and consumed. Calculative thinking compels itself into a compulsion to master everything on the basis of the consequential correctness of its procedure. It is unable to foresee that everything calculable by calculution - prior to the sum-totals and products that it produces by calculation in each case - is already a whole, a whole whose unity indeed [105] belongs to the incalculable that withdraws itself and its uncanniness from the claws of calculation. Yet that which everywhere and always from the outset has closed itself off from the intent behind calculation, and yet, in its enigmatic unfamiliarity, is at
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