A Letter to a Young Student
Freiburg i. Br., 18. June 1950
DEAR MR. BUCHNER:
Thank you for your letter. Your questions are important and your argumentation is correct. Nevertheless it remains to consider whether they touch on what is decisive.
You ask: whence does thinking about Being receive (to speak concisely) its directive?
Here you are not considering "Being" as an object, nor thinking as the mere activity of a subject. Thinking, such as lies at the basis of the lecture ("The Thing"), is no mere representing of some existent. "Being" is in no way identical with reality or with a precisely determined actuality. Nor is Being in any way opposed to being-no-longer and being-not-yet; these two belong themselves to the essential nature of Being. Even metaphysics already had, to a certain extent, an intimation of this fact in its doctrine of the modalities—which, to be sure, has hardly been understood—according to which possibility belongs to Being just as much as do actuality and necessity.
In thinking of Being, it is never the case that only something actual is represented in our minds and then given out as that which alone is true. To think "Being" means: to respond to the appeal of its presencing. The response stems from the appeal and releases itself toward that appeal. The responding is a giving way before the appeal and in this way an entering into its speech. But to the appeal of Being there also belongs the early uncovered has-been (ἀλήθεια, λόγος, φύσις) as well as the veiled advent of what announces itself in the possible turnabout of the oblivion of Being (in the keeping of its nature). The responding must take into account all of this, on the strength of long concentration and in constant testing of its hearing, if it is to hear an appeal of Being. But precisely here the response may hear wrongly. In this thinking, the chance of going astray is greatest. This thinking can never show credentials such as mathematical knowledge can. But it is just as little a matter of arbitrariness; rather, it is rooted in the essential destiny of Being, though itself never compelling as a proposition. On the contrary, it is only a possible occasion to follow the path of responding, and indeed to follow it in the complete concentration of care and caution toward Being that language has already come to.
The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of its inexhaustible nature. Since Being is never the merely precisely actual, to guard Being can never be equated with the task of a guard who protects from burglars a treasure stored in a building. Guardianship of Being is not fixated upon something existent. The exiting thing, taken for itself, never contains an appeal of Being. Guardianship is vigilance, watchfulness for the has-been and coming destiny of Being, a vigilance that issues from a long and ever-renewed thoughtful deliberateness, which heeds the directive that lies in the manner in which Being makes its appeal. In the destiny of Being there is never a mere sequence of things one after another: now frame, then world and thing; rather, there is always a passing by and simultaneity of the early, and late. In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, ἀλήθεια presences, though transmuted.
As a response, thinking of Being is a highly errant and in addition a very destitute matter. Thinking is perhaps, after all, an unavoidable path, which refuses to be a path of salvation and brings no new wisdom. The path is at most a field path, a path across fields, which does not just speak of renunciation but already has renounced, namely, renounced the claim to a binding doctrine and a valid cultural achievement or a deed of the spirit. Everything depends on the step back, fraught with error, into the thoughtful reflection that attends the turnabout of the oblivion of Being, the turnabout that is prefigured in the destiny of Being. The step back from the representational thinking of metaphysics does not reject such thinking, but opens the distant to the appeal of the trueness of Being in which the responding always takes place.
It has happened to me more than once, and indeed precisely with people close to me, that they listen gladly and attentively to the presentation of the jug's nature, but immediately stop listening when the discussion turns to objectness, the standing forth and coming forth of production—when it turns to framing. But all this is necessarily part of thinking of the thing, a thinking that thinks about the possible advent of world, and keeping it thus in mind perhaps helps, in the humblest and inconspicuous matters, such an advent to reach the opened-up realm of man's nature as man.
Among the curious experiences I have had with my lecture is also this, that someone raises the question as to whence my thinking gets its directive, as though this question were indicated in regard to this thinking alone. But it never occurs to anyone to ask whence Plato had a directive to think of Being as ἰδέα, or whence Kant had the directive to think of Being as the transcendental character of objectness, as position (being posited).
But maybe someday the answer to these questions can be gained from those ventures of thought which, like mine, look as though they were lawless caprice.
I can provide no credentials for what I have said—which, indeed, you do not ask of me—that would permit a convenient check in each case whether what I say agrees with "reality."
Everything here is the path of a responding that examines as it listens. Any path always risks going astray, leading astray. To follow such paths takes practice in going. Practice needs craft. Stay on the path, in genuine need, and learn the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring.
Yours in friendship,