CLOSED vs.

OPEN THINKING
We have said that closed thought, which is thought haunted by the ideal of absolute proximity, or
more generally PROXIMAL thought which strips thought of the notion that there is a distance
from what it sees, is left to choose between reflexive coincidence and intuitive coincidence. The
two attempts are equally futile. Collapsing point of view to a metaphysical zero-point reduces
the subject to nothing and also when thought looks for the outside, the world itself, it can only be
conceived as an opaque Being. These failures are avoidable only if the requirement of an
absolute proximity is recognized to be a prejudice. Then both the self identify of things and the
internal adequacy of ideas are recognized as myths. This is how these formulations seemed to us
inadequate. The originary is not recourse to the meaning of the language, or recourse to the
supposedly positively given essences. The novelty is that the meaning is prospective, i.e. it is
oriented on a contact with being ahead of itself. The philosophical interrogation is really radical
only if the hollow of non-being where it is pronounced is neither the pure absence, nor the pure
presence of the Being and the truth, if the answer is neither given with the question or absolutely
out of it, if the question opens a field or a horizon in such a way that one knows what it wants to
say and which side there is to look for, without in principle any of the beings from this field or
from this horizon exterminating the interrogation which opened it - if, in this, the interrogation
remains interrogation, remains as an intention which has not been filled, adds to the positive
beings a dimension of which they do not do not account and without which however they would
not be seen and would not be, and therefore be questioning about philosophy no less than about
them, questions about philosophy as far as philosophy concerns them, so that eventually the
question and all beings are like the other side or ARE the other side, it is implied in them no less
than they in it, - which means that it does not come to question them, that it is born in their heart,
as by invagination or folding of their mass, that the one who questions is really the world
questioning, a fold in this stuff, as my body is part of this visible it sees, yet sees it from within,
is something like what it sees, sees a world that is something for it who sees, who is flesh like
him, - and like me, a speaking subject, in the moment I question the others, I get along, I talk to
myself too, I challenge myself, I make myself the one spoken to by making myself a speaker,
another for myself by making another of me, so that I do not have speech as an attribute or my
product, or a construction or my thought; I speak from within and from the middle of Words, it is
the philosophical word that takes me at the very moment when I lend all my strength to make
myself understand - and, just as I am finally about to become a thinking subject just as I am
about to reach that thinking subject which is myself, I am gone… and there are thoughts that
produce themselves… and I never have the feeling of producing my thoughts: who has ever seen
the birth of one’s best ideas, who has constituted them, who has produced them?... a ray of
sunshine pierces the fog… it is undone… and an axis of our life unfolds… original thought bares
itself a crossroads where all things begin to exist for one another. The philosopher is like every
man in the crossing where the Being comes to itself, where it lives so that this leaving and this
re-turn are the depth in Being’s silence.