GA77: Wille – vontade

Scholar: If then, after all that has been said, you are not opposed to science, then it would indeed be revealing and beneficial to the advancement of our conversation if you could say what it is that you really will to gain (wollen) from exerting yourself with us to illuminate the essence of cognition and especially thinking.

Guide : Since you so directly put me on the spot to say something, I must also directly, and therefore insufficiently, reply. What I really will (will) in our meditation on thinking is non-willing (Nicht-Wollen).

Scientist: Can one then will non-willing? With such willing, after all, willing is merely increased. And thus this willing works precisely and ever more decisively counter to that which it wills, namely, non-willing.

Guide : Against its will, by the willing of non-willing, willing entangles itself in itself and so loses precisely what it wills — namely, nonwilling.

Scholar: You yourself say this?

Guide: How should I not, since I was after all asked what I will.

Scientist: So then was it in fact my insistent question about what you will that caused your disconcerting answer?

Guide: Not really caused, but (52) elicited the discourse of willing. You are thereby running the risk of shifting our conversation on thinking to the topic of willing, while it is you who are continually and at times violently struggling to keep the conversation on its topic. The topic, however, is thinking and not willing.

Scholar: Yet it seems to me that willing belongs to thinking.

Scientist: The two are of course often named together when one enumerates the main faculties of the soul: thinking, willing, and feeling.

(34) Guide: So we would after all be nearer to thinking than we realize if we speak of willing.

Scholar: And hold in view the unified domain of the soul’s faculties.