Traçaríamos uma imagem bem estranha dos pensadores se achássemos que eles pensam sem errar. Os pensadores essenciais são precisamente aqueles que pensam o verdadeiro, apesar dos vários erros que lhes “ocorrem”. Por isso, também a discussão entre pensadores possui um caráter e sentido diversos da crítica e polêmica, tão necessárias e habituais no campo das ciências. A discussão entre pensadores não negocia criticamente se o dito é correto ou incorreto. Sua discussão é o pronunciamento, sempre diverso, a respeito do modo em que se pensa originariamente o pensado, o modo em que este se aproxima ou afasta da origem, a ponto de manter-se sempre numa distância, e da experiência de que tudo aquilo que cada pensador pensa é, no fundo, sempre o uno e o mesmo. A “originalidade” de um pensador consiste no fato de lhe ser dado pensar, na maior pureza, o mesmo e apenas o mesmo que os primeiros pensadores “também já” pensaram.
Aqui, seria possível objetar que os pensadores se tornariam superficiais na sua própria “originalidade”, já que todos sempre dizem o mesmo. É assim que de fato concluem todos aqueles que se comprazem com “conclusões” apressadas, porque não têm coragem para “ver”. O mesmo permanece o mesmo até para nós, apenas quando e enquanto vemos o mesmo como ele mesmo, conservando-o na visão sem esquecê-lo. Uma vez que, por várias razões, os homens preferem se entregar ao novo e ao mais novo de uma progressão, o que sempre e rapidamente se esgota, porque se torna o mesmo, não passa de enfadonho. De tempos em tempos surge, então, um pensador para que no percurso histórico de um povo não seja esquecido esse absoluto, ou seja, o mesmo enfadonho.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Heráclito. A origem do pensamento ocidental Lógica. A doutrina heraclítica do lógos. Tr. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1998, p. 55-56
However, we would paint for ourselves a fairly absurd picture of the thinkers were we to claim here that their thinking is totally without error. Indeed, they are essential thinkers precisely because of the fact that they, despite the many errors that ‘befall’ precisely them, think the true. Because of this, the confrontation between thinkers has a character and sense that is different from the criticisms and polemics that are customary and necessary for the sciences. The confrontation between the thinkers does not deal critically with whether what is said is correct or incorrect. Their confrontation is the reciprocal enunciation concerning in what way what is thought is thought inceptually and nears the inception, or whether it distances itself from the inception in such a way that, even in that distance, what is thought remains essential and thereby (42) remains the one and the same thing that each thinker thinks. The ‘originality’ of a thinker consists solely in the fact that it is given to that thinker to think, in the highest purity, the same and only the same as what the early thinkers have ‘also already’ thought.
One could reply to this that, in that case, the thinkers, precisely through their ‘originality,’ make themselves superfluous, if all they ever do is say the same thing. Most people, owing to their desire to reach a swift ‘conclusion,’ have concluded precisely this, all the while lacking the courage ‘to truly look.’ The same remains the same for us only so long as we behold the same as itself, holding it in view and not forgetting it. But because human beings now concern themselves, for various reasons, with the continually new and up-to-date, whatever exhausts itself in always and only being the same is completely boring to them. It is precisely in order to ensure that this absolute (i.e., the boring same) will not be forgotten through the course of the history of a people that a thinker occasionally arrives. Admittedly, this is perhaps not the sole reason, and certainly not the true reason, that the thinker arrives. Why do we now say such things about the thinkers? So that we, when the moment calls for it, remember all the more that the thinkers and their thoughts belong in a peculiar atmosphere to which we attain neither through vain admiration nor through empty criticism. We must therefore heed the uniqueness of this atmosphere: for it happens all too easily to us through the course of a lecture that a word said against a thinker appears as a flippant criticism, while perhaps it is only the attempt to enter into a discussion with that thinker. So understood, the comments given here in the last hour on the danger of dialectic, and the compulsion toward a dialectical interpretation of Heraclitus’s thinking, are anything but a dismissal of the essence of dialectic. In and through dialectic, whose beginning goes hand-in-hand with the beginning of metaphysics (with Plato), an as yet illuminated relationship to λέγειν (i.e., to saying, to the word) conceals itself. The word of inceptual (43) thinking is essentially other than the language of dialectic. The full consideration of this will certainly only happen after we have first heard the word of Heraclitus’s. If within the region of essential history it is no coincidence that the history of thinking belongs first and foremost with that of poetry, then such a situation must have its peculiar explanation in the way and the form in which the inceptual word of Heraclitus speaks to us.
HERACLITUS. Tr. Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen. London: Bloomsbury, 2018