Bearing silence is the prudent lawfulness of the silence-bearing activity (σιγᾶν ["to be silent"]). Bearing silence is the "logic" of philosophy inasmuch as philosophy asks the basic question out of the other beginning. Philosophy seeks the truth of the essential occurrence of beyng, and this truth is the intimating-resonating concealment (the mystery) of the event (the hesitant withholding).
We can never say beyng itself immediately, especially if beyng is leaped to in the leap. For every saying arises from beyng and speaks out of the truth of beyng. All words, and thereby all logic, stand under the power of beyng. The essence of "logic" (cf. s. s. 3417) is therefore sigetics in which the essence of language is first grasped as well.
Yet "sigetics" is a label offered only for the use of those who still think by "pigeonholing" and who believe they possess knowledge only if what is said has been categorized.
38. Bearing silence
The expression "sigetics," a foreign borrowing, is meant in correspondence to "logic" (onto-logy) only as transitionally retrospective and in no way as part of a mania to replace "logic." Since the question of beyng and of the essential occurrence of beyng stands, the questioning is therefore still more original and accordingly can even less be pent up in an academic pigeonhole and suffocated. We can never say beyng (event) immediately and therefore not even mediately in the sense of the heightened "logic" of dialectics. Every saying already speaks out of the truth of beyng and can never immediately leap over itself to beyng itself. The laws of bearing silence are higher than those of any logic.
Ultimately, however, bearing silence is not an anti-logic, for the latter is indeed afortiori a logic and wants to be one but is simply unable to. On the other hand, the will and knowledge of bearing silence have a completely different orientation. And just as little does bearing silence have to do with the "irrational," with "symbols" and "ciphers"; all this presupposes the previous metaphysics. Bearing silence, however, does include the logic of beingness, just as the basic question incorporates the guiding question.
Bearing silence arises out of the essentially occurring origin of language itself.
The basic experience is not the assertion or the proposition. Nor, consequently, is it the principle, whether "mathematical" or "dialectical."
17. Lecture course, Über Logik als Frage nach der Sprache, summer semester 1934 (GA 38).