無為

We measure and evaluate and judge. We distinguish and classify and categorize. We hypothesize and test and infer. By doing these things repeatedly, we construct a perfectly objective world that we can perfectly understand and perfectly control.

The thing itself is no longer simply the being in its obscurity, as an object presupposed by language and the epistemological process; rather, it is auto di’ho gnōston estin, that by which the object is known, its own knowability and truth. The thing itself is not a thing; it is the very sayability, the very openness at issue in language, which, in language, we always presuppose and forget, perhaps because it is at bottom its own oblivion and abandonment.

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.

λόγος means ‘to glean’ [lesen], that is, to harvest, to gather, to add one to the other, to include and connect one with the other. Such laying together is a laying open [Dar-legen] and laying forth [Vor-legen] (a placing alongside and presenting) [ein Bei- und Dar-stellen]: a making something accessible in a gathered and unified way. And since such a gathering laying open and laying forth occurs above all in recounting and speaking (in trans-mitting and com-municating to others), λόγος comes to mean discourse that combines and explains. λόγος as laying open is then at the same time evidence [Be-legen]; finally it comes to mean laying something out in an interpretation [Aus-legen], ἑρμηνεία. The meaning of λόγος as relation (unified gathering, coherence, rule) is therefore ‘prior’ to its meaning as discourse.