Nevertheless, if we are to remain underway we must first of all and constantly give attention to the way. The movement, step by step, is what is essential here. Thinking dears its way only by its own questioning advance. But this clearing of the way is curious. The way that is cleared does not remain behind, but is built into the next step, and is projected forward from it.
Now it always remains possible, of course, and very often actually is the case, that we dislike a way of this sort from the start, because we consider it hopeless or superfluous, or because we consider it foolishness. If that is our attitude, we should refrain from looking at the way even from outside. But perhaps it is not fitting anyhow to let the way be seen in public. With this hint, we shall break off our general remarks about ways of thinking.
We shall now try to walk the way of our question, by asking it in the sense of the decisive fourth, but in the mode of the second manner.
The initially proposed version of the second question ran : what do we understand by thinking according to traditional doctrine, logic? At first it appears that the question inquires historically what we have hitherto had in mind and taught about thinking. But now we ask:
"What is the call to which Western-European thinking is subject, the thinking whose roads we, too, follow as soon as we let ourselves get involved in thinking?"
But even so, the impression unavoidably remains that the question amounts to no more than a historical description of the beginnings of Western philosophy. The treatment of the question may retain this peculiarity, that it will remain forever implausible to the scholarly research in the history of philosophy and its principles of interpretation.
In the writings of Parmenides, a Greek thinker who lived around the tum of the sixth into the fifth century B.C., we read the saying: