[28] § 2. The word in the inception of thinking



a) The ‘obscurity’ of essential thinking: the essential self-concealing of the to-be-thought (i.e., being)

When we measure the nobility of the word in terms of what remains to be said in it, what could be more joined to what is to be said than a saying of Heraclitus’s? Where, after all, does a higher concern for the word speak? To be sure, the reason for the inceptual nobility of this thoughtful speaking lies not in a special linguistic ability belonging to the thinker, but rather in the essence of what is thought in this thinking and what remains the to-be-thought, and which, as the to-be-thought, calls forth the word in such a way that the thinker is merely summoned to echo this call. In the inception of the saying, the word has not yet degraded into a mere ‘linguistic expression’ and ‘turn of phrase,’ such that any arbitrary phrase can replace any other. The word here still preserves its inceptual essence—i.e., the word—without the inceptual poet and thinker possessing or even needing knowledge of this concealed essence.

The to-be-thought of inceptual thinking, as the ground of the nobility of the word, is of course at the same time also the reason for the obscurity of this thinking. Hegel would certainly not be the thinker he is if he had stopped at the superficial declaration concerning the obscurity of Heraclitus mentioned in the previous lecture, and had not also said the following about the latter’s philosophy:1 “The obscurity of this philosophy lies mainly in the fact that a profound, speculative thought is expressed in it”: for the concept, i.e., the idea, is contrary to the understanding and cannot be grasped by it, whereas (for example) mathematics is very easy for the understanding to grasp. In order to understand this declaration



1 Ibid., XVII, 348.

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