24
ZOLLIKON SEMINARS
SP: Isn't that arbitrary?
MH: Natural science posits conditions and then observes the result. We have not proceeded in this way. We have only seen the phenomena: θεωρειν means "to see." Causality is an idea, an ontological determination. It belongs to the determination of the ontological structure of nature. Motivation refers to the human being's existing [ek-sistence] in the world as a being who acts and experiences.
There is still the question whether the principle of ground is a self-evident principle or whether it can be reduced to the principle of contradiction. Is it a principle of thinking or of bang?
November 2 and 5, 1964, at Boss's Home
I. November 2, 1964
By Way of Introduction: An Anecdote about Socrates
A widely traveled sophist asks Socrates: "Are you still here and still saying the same thing? You are making light of the matter." Socrates answers: "No, you sophists are making light of it because you are always saying what's new and the very latest [news]. You always say something different. To say the same thing is what's difficult. To say the same thing about the same thing is the most difficult."*
Socrates was the West's greatest thinker insofar as he did not write anything. We will also endeavor to say the same thing about the same thing here. That seems odd to common sense. That's called a tautology.†
* This anecdote is also mentioned in M. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., and V. Deutsch, with an analysis by E. T. Gendlin (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1967): "The most difficult learning is to come to know actually and to the very foundation what we already know. Such learning, with which we are here solely concerned, demands dwelling continually on what appears to be nearest to us, for instance, on the question of what a thing is. We steadfastly ask the same question—which in terms of utility is obviously useless—of what a thing is, what tools are, what man is, what a work of art is, what the state and the world are."—TRANSLATORS
† Tautological" thinking in Heidegger's sense (as opposed to tautology [identity] in formal logic and in dialectical thinking, which moves between opposite "identities" [as noted by Hegel]), is the meditative-phenomenological thinking toward the hidden abyss and mystery of being in its unfolding and "epochal" withholding in Western philosophy. Such thinking of the selfsame is not a "representation" [Vorstellung] of being in a conceptual "identity," but rather a deepening of the sense that being as the abysmal, concealed ground of beings is always more than what can be conceptualized and represented. Being and beings, as well as being and the human being, "belong together" (zusammengehören) in a reciprocal, unifying-differentiating [Unter-Schied, dif-ference] relation. See Heidegger, Identity and Difference, pp. 27 ff., 64 ff., 133 ff.; The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans, and with an introduction by Q. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 57. Being is in excess of any articulation in terms of formal identity and difference, the inexhaustible non-ground [Ab-grund] of both (see Contributions to Philosophy, p. 249 : "The Overflow in the essential Sway of Be-ing" [Das Übermass im Wesen des Seins]). Silence, therefore, is the hidden source of such tautological thinking. In the Der Spiegel interview (1966), Heidegger said: "All great thinkers think the same—this same is so essential (deep) and rich that no single thinker accomplishes (exhausts) it; rather every thinker is bound even tighter and more rigorously to it."—TRANSLATORS