And nevertheless it remains the best work in this domain. What you have now brought forward belongs not only to philology but to reading — and indeed, we all err. I once made a note to myself: “Whoever thinks greatly must err greatly.”7 I do not wish to compare myself with Burckhardt, but I may say that I am exposed to incomparably greater errors than you are in your activity. These indications are withdrawn from arbitrariness, although one must note that there is no such thing as a state of affairs “in itself.” What you told me at the end convinced me; nevertheless I am still not certain how that “then” must be understood. What matters now is that the sentence “one can prove anything” is not a carte blanche, but rather an indication of the possibility that wherever proving occurs in the sense of deduction from axioms, this remains possible in a certain sense at all times. This is the uncanny riddle whose secret I have thus far not succeeded in lifting even by a corner: namely, that this procedure works in modern natural science. And yet we do not know whether what science objectively represents to us is nature itself. One might even arrive at the thought that, when a science leads to such possibilities of destruction, then something therein is not right.
And preparing the turn toward this relation through thinking (not proclaiming the relation in the manner of a prophet) that is the unspoken sense of my entire thinking.
When yesterday I sought to indicate to you that what one calls the being of the human being is “dwelling,” and that much worthy of thought naturally still conceals itself therein, then the embarrassment of such thinking manifests itself precisely in the fact that it can help itself no otherwise than by, as it were, taking refuge in such a text and such words.
7 "From the experience of thinking," GA 13, p. 81.