SCHOLAR: This nothingness of the jug is really what the jug is.
SCIENTIST: This emptiness is, however, also that which the potter does not and altogether cannot manufacture. Emptiness is the ungraspable [das Unfaßliche]. [131]
GUIDE: But the potter grasps, that is, contains [faßt] precisely the emptiness and only the emptiness in the shape of sides and bottom and rim.
SCIENTIST: So he does not shape the clay, but rather the emptiness.
SCHOLAR: He must shape this, if indeed it is that of the container which contains [das Fassende des Gefäßes].
GUIDE: But we would like to speak of the jug as container and not of the container as a construct.
SCIENTIST: Your signal to remain with the meditation on that of the container which contains, gives me the opportunity I had wished for to bring up something decisive—something from which we will easily gather that we merely let ourselves be deceived for a moment by the appearance of something astonishing.
GUIDE: I am eager to hear what you will bring up.
SCIENTIST: It is almost as obvious, even if not nearly as illuminating, as what you said about emptiness.
GUIDE: Namely?
SCIENTIST: That the jug, even when it seems to be empty, is not truly empty, and can never be empty. Even the allegedly empty jug is filled with air and with all the mixture that makes up the air and with what that mixture itself is composed of.
SCHOLAR: You are now talking about the jug not as a drinker of a drink, but rather as a physicist.
GUIDE: And, according to your statement, physicists have the advantage of being able to always sit before full jugs.
SCIENTIST: Your friendly mockery cannot dissuade me from asserting that what is actual is first grasped and determined by means of [132] the observations of physics. This assertion will make more sense to you when I add that the filling of a jug does not consist in filling out an emptiness.
SCHOLAR: But rather in what?
SCIENTIST: In an exchanging of the full. When we pour wine into the jug, the air that fills its alleged emptiness is displaced by a liquid.
GUIDE: I do not deny that your statement is correct, nor at all that your correct statement grasps what is actual. But I offer for consideration the question of whether or not what we are talking about has anything to do with what is actual.
SCIENTIST: Then you doubt that the jug is something actual?
GUIDE: In no way. But I doubt whether the actual is the jug.
SCIENTIST: I cannot attach any weight to this question.