SCHOLAR: One could, for example, imagine the possibility that a thinker would be a thinker solely on account of the fact that he reintroduces into linguistic usage a single, long-familiar word—for example, the Greek word ἀλήθεια.
GUIDE: Such a thing seems to me to be quite possible.
SCIENTIST: But I could not really allow this to count as research work and as creative achievement, which are after all the predicates we want to use to distinguish all genuine philosophy.
GUIDE: Perhaps this tending to a single word would be neither work nor achievement.
SCHOLAR: What else would it be then?
GUIDE: Perhaps only a waiting upon the coming [Einfall] of the word.
SCHOLAR: Which suddenly comes in [einfällt] like the wind.
GUIDE: Into the tree towering in stillness.
SCIENTIST: Then would work not be what is highest?
GUIDE: Neither work nor discipline. [100]
SCIENTIST: But rather?
GUIDE: Thanking and attentiveness.
SCHOLAR: Whenever I have been able to be attentive, I have long heard the word “thanking” [»Danken«] in the word “thoughts” [»Gedanken«].
SCIENTIST: So would thinking be a thanking?
GUIDE: Presumably we could tell if we were to know what thinking is.
SCHOLAR: We are yet still on the way to this.
SCIENTIST: And in such a manner that even the byways always have something to offer.
SCHOLAR: What do you mean by this?
SCIENTIST: We just touched on the relationship of thinkers to linguistic usage. Assuming that within single words dwells the carrying capacity [Tragkraft] to gather within themselves the thinking of a thinker, then these words would also have to be understood in the fullness of their saying capacity [Sagekraft].
SCHOLAR: Which entails that a thinker says more with such words than we others think with the word.
GUIDE: The thinker even says more than he himself can know, such that he is surprised and above all surpassed by the inexhaustibility of his own word.
SCHOLAR: So the word “transcendental” carries the entirety of Kantian metaphysics.
SCIENTIST: And by the “transcendental” Kant always also means the horizonal.
SCHOLAR: Why do you make special note of this?
SCIENTIST: Because, according to my admittedly in no way [101] expert knowledge, Kant characterizes the horizonal neither as clearly nor certainly as specifically as he does the transcendental.