WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY
CONCEPT OF THINKING AND WHAT IS NEEDED TO THINK?

Introduction

Martin Heidegger is without doubt the most incomprehensible German philosopher that
ever lived. Heidegger tells us some simple, even at times homespun truth beneath the
difficult phrases/ language about the meaning of our lives, the sickness of our time and the
routes to freedom. He diagnosed modern humanity as suffering from a number of diseases
of the soul. Firstly, we have forgotten to notice we’re alive. The second problem is that we
have forgotten that all being is connected, and the third problem is that we forget to be
free and to live for ourselves. Heideggar is neither pessimistic or optimistic about the times
in which we live it. Only that the nature of our technological age requires thinking more
than earlier ages for modern man conceives himself prepared to take dominion on the
earth and his capacities for good and ill are vastly argumented.
Defining Thinking:
We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think. We are not yet
capable of thinking. Man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to, perhaps he he
wants to much when he wants to think and so can do too little. We are capable of doing
only what we are inclined to do. We truly inclined only toward something that in turn
inclines towards us. What keeps us in our essential nature holds us only so long however as
we for our part keep holding to what holds us by not letting it out of our memory. Only
then are we capable of of thinking. We learn to think by giving out mind to what there is to
think about. For example, we may question what is essential in a friend is what we call
friendly and in the same sense we call thought provoking as what in itself is what remains
to be thought about always because it is at the beginning before all else.

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking. Man has for centuries now acted
too much and thought too little. Preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else
may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly
philsophizing. Most thought provoking in our thought provoking time is that we are still not
thinking. Some things make an appeal to us to give them thought to turn toward then in
thought to think. What is thought provoking, what gives us to think is then not anything
that we determine, nor anything that only we are instituting, only we are proposing.
According to our assertion what of itself gives us most to think about (most thought
provoking) is this that we are still not thinking.

What really must be thought keeps itself turned away from man since the beginning. Man is
not capable of really thinking as long as that which must be thought about withdraws. Now
the entire discussion that is to follow has nothing to do with scientific knowledge especially
not if the discussion is to be a thinking. Science itself does not think and cannot think.
There is nothing but mischief in all the commerce between thinking and the sciences.

To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address

themselves to us at the given moment. In order to be capable of doing so we must get
underway. It is important above all that on the way on which we set out when we learn to
think, we do not deceive ourselves and rashly bypassing the pressing questions, on the
contrary, we must allow ourselvesto become involved in questions that seek what no

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inventiveness can find. To be precise, learning can be done only if we always ulearn at the
same time. We can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been
traditionally. The event of withdrawal could be what is most present in all our present and
so infinitely exceed the actuality of everything actual. Pointing into the withdrawal, man
first is man as his essential nature lies in being such a pointer. Man is a sign yet points not
so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal without interpretations.

The early Greek thinkers Parmenides fragment eight are precisely the ones to use the
mythos and logos in the same sense. Neither mythos nor logos can keep to its original
nature. In platos work nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic, it is destroyed only by
the gods withdrawal. Memory is the gathering and convergence of thoughts upon what
everywhere it demands to be thought about first of all.

Memory is the gathering of recollection, thinking back. It safely keeps and keeps concealed
within it that to which at each given time thought must be given before all else, in
everything that essentially is, everything that appeals to us as what has being and has been
in being. Surely as long as we take the view that logic gives us any information about what
thinking is, we shall never be able to think how much opposing rests upon thinking back.
Mnemosyne quotes, “long is the time”, for which Heideggar continues the time in which we
are assigned a sign that is not rare.

Heidegger asked, What is thinking as defined by philosophy up until now? Since Plato and
onward, the essence of thinking in philosophy, Heidegger thought, is logos, and its dual
component legein. Logos, he said, is a word, or expression. “The cat sat on the mat” is
composed of six logos. The sentence itself is legein, a proposition. Taken this way, the
proposition “The cat sat on the mat” states that there is a cat on the mat.

Philosophy until Heidegger sets out to deal with logos and legein in a “logical” manner, by
which we mean the forming of correct statements and propositions, by applying judgments
to the world. To say Kant was a thinker who thought, for instance, is to say he formulated a
philosophical worldview through judgments and propositions. In short, what has been
called thinking in philosophy heretofore is the forming of judgments through propositions
in a logical way.

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Finally, Heidegger asked, What is needed for thinking? He quotes the Presocratic
Parmenides, who wrote, “One should both say and think that Being is.” The meaning of this
quote, and of thinking itself will finally be answered presently. In the meantime, what is
needed is openness. To think, one must be open. In short, what is needed for thinking is
openness and both saying and thinking that Being is.

Conclusion:
We live in an unthinking age. Technology is ubiquitous, and science dominates the
intellectual world. While the universe keeps getting bigger, the world keeps getting smaller,
shrinking with advances in technology, a form of Being whose nature, Heidegger believed,
is to conceal itself, to make itself something exploitable. Crouched in our seats, fingers
tapping rapidly at the keyboard, kept alive by coffee and other drugs, we live our lives
unthinkingly, without examining life, without taking time to just sit, no distractions present,
nothing over which to worry, but just to sit alone and think, to give thanks and appreciate
what is present.

Heidegger was amazingly prescient when predicting today’s maladies which afflict us every
single day. Ignorance is one of the greatest dangers we face—but a greater danger yet is
not thinking. The path to thinking is not an easy one, he says, but it is one we must
undertake. It is our simplest, and therefore hardest, task. There is no bridge between
unthinking and thinking; no, there is a leap, a leap from which there is no returning, and for
which there is no net. Only a handful of people have truly thought. As such, we must, as a
new generation, in order to create a better future, a sustainable one, an educated one, slow
down, stop acting, and think. Just think. There shall be a new beginning. And we are it. We
shall usher in a new thinking age if only we will all take this leap together.

KEERTHANA S KUMAR

192613

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