Ao saudar o pensador no Ser, o Ser transmite-se a ele como dom, e este dom é o que constitui a essência do pensador, a dotação pela qual ele é. Além disso, o Ser não só concede o dom, mas conserva, preserva, sustenta-o, ou seja, continua a ser o “sustento” permanente do pensamento. Este dom repousa naquilo a que Heidegger escolhe agora chamar o “coração” do homem.
In hailing the thinker into Being, Being imparts itself to him as gift, and this gift is what constitutes the essence of the thinker, the endowment by which he is. What is more, Being not only bestows the gift but conserves, preserves, sustains it, sc. remains the abiding “sustenance” of thought. This endowment reposes in what Heidegger now chooses to call the “heart” of man.
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How precisely Heidegger comes to choose the word “heart” is worth noting, though it is perhaps not essential to the analysis. He proposes it when dealing with the first of his studies of the word “thought” itself. The German word for thought, he says, derives from Gedanc, which suggests not only Denken (”to think”), but Gedächtnis (usually translated “memory”) and Danken (“to thank”). It is apropos of Gedächtnis that we come upon the term “heart.” For the primary sense of this word, the author insists, is not “memory” but “(re-)collection,” sc. a collectedness in the sense of gathered-togetherness into a center that abides by what it (re-)collects. But what does it (re-)collect? That “… which sustains us, insofar as it is thought by us, thought, that is to say, inasmuch as it remains (always) as that which is to-be-thought. …” In other words, this “center” (re-)collects Being, and, indeed, as it comes-to-presence in beings.
(600) This “center,” we are told, is what in Latin would be called animus, as opposed to anima; it is what Meister Eckhart called the Seelenfünklein. Heidegger calls it the “heart” of man, understanding by the term that “innermost core,” sc. the essence of man, insofar as it is in ec-static relationship to Being, hence man’s ek-sistence. Ek-sistence here is considered as that constitutional open-ness to Being that in SZ we called an “antecedent” comprehension of Being. “… All (subsequent) re-collection of the think-able dwells itself already in that gatheredness [in man’s heart] through which everything that remains to be thought is hidden and concealed.”
It is by reason of this antecedent comprehension of Being in man’s heart that he is empowered to think. In fact, to speak of a “power” for thought is simply to express under a different aspect the dynamic character of ek-sistence. This same dynamic character we called in SZ a “drive-toward-Being.” It is not too awkward, then, to speak of it now by saying that There-being “wants” Being. In fact, the affective overtones of “wanting” are coherent with the connotation of the metaphor “heart.” In any case, we can see that in the dynamic ecstasis that constitutes man’s essence, the “power” (Vermögen) to think and the “wanting” (mögen) to think are profoundly related. We have here, then, it would seem, the key to such ploys as the following: “… Only when we want (mögen) what is in itself thought-worthy do we have the power (vermögen) for thought.”
If the play on words (mögen-vermögen) dissipates in English, we may nevertheless discern a genuine significance in speaking of There-being, sc. structural thought, as “wanting” Being. For we recall that the reason why thought comes-to-pass in the first place is that Being “wants” thought, hence the correlation between Being and thought comes to expression as a mutual “want-ing”:
(601) … We have the power only for that which we want. But in turn we truly want only that which for its own part wants us … insofar as it addresses itself to our essence as that which sustains this essence. …
The want in There-being for Being, then, reposes in the want of Being for There-being (thought). That is why Being is the ground where man’s heart in its essence is sustained in an ultimate dwelling-place. We have here, it would seem, another evidence of what in discussing GA9:HB we suggested as the “adhesion” of Being to itself.
Briefly: thought, as the gathering-together by which man (re-)collects Being, rests in the center of man’s Being, in his “heart.” In order to suggest these nuances with a single word, we translate Gedächtnis by a derivation of the Latin word for “heart” (cor, cordis) and say that thought thus understood is “re-cord.”
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