GUIDE: Thus thinking and willing also belong together.
SCIENTIST: Yet you said, however, that what belongs together is the selfsame.
GUIDE: That I did say.
SCIENTIST: Then are thinking and willing the selfsame?
GUIDE: This may well be the case.
SCIENTIST: Now, then, there is no doubt at all anymore that our conversation, which is concerned with thinking, has finally gotten a grasp on its topic with this view of willing.
SCHOLAR: One thing remains strange, which I pursued only in passing.
SCIENTIST: Namely? Scholar: The farther we roamed from the starting point of our conversation, the nearer we came to our topic.
GUIDE: Perhaps this is connected to the enigma of nearness and farness.
SCIENTIST: That I don’t see. But I grasp now more easily why you are so averse to orienting our inquiry into the essence of thinking to scientific cognition.
GUIDE: In your opinion, what warranted this aversion?
SCIENTIST: Firstly, the path through an analysis of a science, especially physics, is demanding [55] and thus tedious. Yet if we examine thinking in its relation with willing, then right away we find it there where it actualizes itself directly and thus is also actual. Secondly, if we refrain from the previous orientation of the conversation, we escape the danger of holding thinking too one-sidedly in view, looking only at its epistemic side [Wissensseite] and thus overlooking its volitional side [Willensseite]. Besides its theoretical moment, thinking also has in itself a practical moment.
SCHOLAR: Also, already in our first conversation about cognition we unanimously stated that the achievement-character of the sciences has fortunately come ever more clearly to the fore, and that in our time it has earned its due recognition.
SCIENTIST: Scientific research is an essential form of work, which is testified to by its increasingly operational character. Contrary to this, Aristotle reportedly said that theoretical behavior is the highest form of leisure.23
SCHOLAR: Aristotle only gave expression to what the ancient Greek world always thought about the proper essence of thinking.
SCIENTIST: How far have we today then gone beyond the Greek world? If we now illuminate the connection of thinking with willing even further, the modern conception of science as a kind of work will at the same time gain its philosophical grounding.
23. See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1177b; see also his Politics, bk. VII.—Tr.