One can speak of this only within a circle such as this one, from which I assume that individuals will carry these matters further within themselves and assume responsibility for the youth standing before an age that will probably be immense — apart from the possibility of war — an age in which transformations must prepare themselves, or in which initially only this enormous process of the Europeanization of the planet comes to completion.
So now I have led you somewhat onto the reverse side of my lecture and have myself once again delivered a small lecture. But now, presumably, you would like to ask questions.
BEDA ALLEMANN: You distinguished poetry and thinking. On which side would you place philology, provided that it at all penetrates into the dimension in which that distinction takes place?
HEIDEGGER: When I speak of poetry and thinking, I have in view emphatic thinking, the thinking of thinkers. Thinking in the broader sense — as representing something as something — in this sense not only everyday circumspection but also research is thinking. But in the strict sense of thinking, as the thinking of thinkers, I would venture the proposition: science does not think. Yet it researches, that is, it already moves within a region of what is more or less thought — or, to its misfortune, unthought. Thus researchers think, without making much essential issue of it, and your teachers are thinkers within their science and thus stand, as it were, in an intermediate position. Where lies the ultimate ground and necessity for a literary-historical investigation of poetry? What sense does that have? That is what I would ask you.
We must not fall into the danger of saying: “science.” What science discovers is correct. But the correct is not yet the true. The correct is only that which corresponds to a predetermined projection of the domain of objects and of its language.