72
DISCOURSE ON THINKING

Scientist: . . . and when it doesn't matter in this if there is a first retelling or who does it; all the more since one often doesn't know whose tale he retells.

Scholar: So let's not quarrel over who first introduced the name, releasement, let us consider only what it is we name by it.

Scientist: And that is waiting, as the experience I referred to indicates.

Teacher: And so not something nameless, but what is already designated. What is this waiting?

Scientist: Insofar as waiting relates to openness and openness is that-which-regions, we can say that waiting is a relation to that-which-regions.

Teacher: Perhaps it is even the relation to that-which-regions, insofar as waiting releases itself to that-which-regions, and in doing so lets that-which-regions reign purely as such.

Scholar: Then a relation to something would be the true relation if it were held in its own nature by that to which it relates.

Teacher: The relation to that-which-regions is waiting. And waiting means: to release oneself into the openness of that-which-regions.

Scholar: Thus to go into that-which-regions.

Scientist: That sounds as if before then we had been outside that-which-regions.

Teacher: That we were, and yet we were not. Insofar as we as thinking beings (that is, beings who at the same time re-present transcendentally) stay within the horizon of transcendence, we are not and never could be outside that-which-regions. Yet the horizon is but the


Conversation on a country path about thinking (GA 13) by Martin Heidegger