What is thinking?
“The common ideas and views must be shouted at when they want to set
themselves up as the judges of thought, so that men will wake up.”
At NWOU we often refer to the greatness of Western history as an alternative to the dumbed-down Progressive liberal Communist ideology of slogans, the attempt to make a science of history, the anti-human social sciences in the service of the world controllers, and the lame secular culture which is really anti-culture. But where exactly does the greatness of Western history lie?
Today we’ll begin to explore that greatness by pointing out how pre-Socratic Greek thought differs from modern habits of thought. Greece was great because its thinkers were great thinkers. No one has surpassed them in thinking. Modernism is corrupt because the way it thinks is corrupted. Modernist thinking relies on logic and dialectic, and both of these ways of thinking are corrupt because they miss something very important about thinking. Martin Heidegger found that important difference in the thought of Parmenides.
To understand how thinking has changed through the course of Western history is too big a subject for us to tackle in a post. Instead we are going to take you back 2500 years by quoting from Martin Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?
You may find this material difficult. Heidegger offers one interpretation of Parmenides; there are many others, and you will learn a lot by investigating them. But give these quotes your attention. You are not going to undo bad modern habits of thinking unless you go through a process of Undoing and rediscovery. It won’t get any easier than this. There is no system to learn, just absorb the variety of comments. If you feel more uncertain about thinking when you finish this post, you will probably have made progress. That is what Undoing false beliefs feels like. If you investigate Parmenides further, you will surely make more progress.
“The matter of thinking is always confounding…To keep clear of
prejudice, we must be ready and willing to listen. Such readiness
allows us to surmount the boundaries in which all customary views are
confined, and to reach a more open territory.”
“What is most thought-provoking for our thought-provoking time is
that we are still not thinking.” …”The reason is that this most
thought-provoking thing turns away from us, in fact has long since
turned away from man.”
“Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we are drawing
into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable
nearness of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he
is thinking…. All through his life and right into his death, Socrates
did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current,
and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of
the West.”
“All the sciences have leapt from the womb of philosophy, in a
twofold manner. The sciences come out of philosophy because they have
to part with her. And now that they are so apart they can never
again, by their own power as sciences, make the leap back into the
source from whence they have sprung.”
“The beautiful is not that which pleases but what falls within that
fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally
nonapparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly
apparent appearance.”
“Nietzsche, who from his supreme peak saw far ahead of it all, as
early as the eighteen-eighties had for it the simple, because
thoughtful, words: “The wasteland grows.” It means, the
devastation is growing wider. Devastation is more than destruction…
devastation establishes and spreads everything that blocks and
prevents. Devastation is the high-velocity expulsion of memory.”
“The essence of their sphere—history, art, poetry, language, nature,
man, God—remains inaccessible to the sciences. At the same time,
however, the sciences would constantly fall into the void if they did
not operate within these spheres…. The sciences are one-
sided…. When man no longer sees the one side as one side, he has lost
sight of the other side as well. Everything is leveled to one level.
Our minds hold views on all and everything, and view all things in
the identical way. …The one-sided view of things, which nowhere pays
attention any longer to the essence of things, has puffed itself up
into an all-sidedness, which in turn is masked so as to look harmless
and natural. …It reduces everything to a univocity of concepts and
specifications the precision of which not only correspond to, but has
the same essential origin as, the precision of technological process.
…A symptom of the growing power of one-track thinking is the increase
everywhere of designations consisting of abbreviations of words, or
combinations of their initials.”
“Most thought-provoking is … what makes the greatest demands on our
thinking; most thought–provoking is what inherently gathers and
keeps within itself the greatest riches of what is thought-worthy and
memorable.”
“Philosophy … has made it questionable whether the ideas inside
ourselves answer to any reality at all outside ourselves…the world is
my idea.” Schopenhauer: “For only after thousands of years of trials
with purely objective philosophizing did we discover that, among the
many things that make the world so enigmatic and so thought-
provoking, the closest and most immediate thing is this: that it is
the given individual consciousness in which it is constituted.”
“We have to leave aside the findings of psychology concerning what it
calls “ideas” not because these findings are incorrect but because
they are scientific findings. Within psychology it never becomes
clear in any way what it is to which ideas are attributed and
referred.”
“We stand outside of science.”
“Whence do the sciences derive the right to decide what man’s place
is, and to offer themselves as the standard that justifies such
decisions? And they will do so just as soon as we tolerate, if only
by our silence, that our standing face-to-face with a tree is no more
than a pre-scientifically intended relation to something we still
happen to call ‘tree.’ In truth, we are today rather inclined to
favor a supposedly superior physical and physiological knowledge, and
to drop the blooming tree.”
“Our own manner of thinking still feeds on the traditional nature of
thinking, the forming of representational ideas. But we still do not
think inasmuch as we have not yet entered into that nature which is
proper to thinking and which is still withheld from us.”
“Nietzsche’s words, ‘The wasteland grows,’ does not just throw light
on the stretch of the way and its surroundings, the tale itself
traces and clears the way, … even if we conceive of language in its
most superficial character … and take the view that it presses the
internal outward into the external and thus is expression.”
“The essence of idea-forming is probably the first thing that must be
put into the language of thinking. If we respond to that language,
not only do we come to know thinking in its historical nature and
destiny, we come to learn thinking itself.”
“We must never look for the superman’s figure and nature in those
characters who by a shallow and misconceived will to power are pushed
to the top as the chief functionaries of the various organizations in
which the will to power incorporates itself. Nor is the superman a
wizard who will lead mankind toward a paradise on earth.”
“The earth has become smaller, and on it hops the last man who makes
everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the
last man lives longest.”
“Is the man of today in his metaphysical nature prepared to assume
dominion over the earth as a whole? Has the man of today yet given
thought in any way to what conditions will determine the nature of
worldwide government? Is the nature of this man of today such that it
is fit to manage those powers, and put to use those means of power,
which are released as the nature of modern technology unfolds,
forcing man to unfamiliar decisions? …No, man as he is today is not
prepared to form and assume a world government. For today’s man lags
behind, not just here and there, in everything he is, in all his
ways, he lags curiously behind that which is and has long been. …That
common sense…is the shallow product of that manner of forming ideas
which is the final fruit of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth
century…these ideas are from the start incapable of holding
themselves open to what is.”
“Our institutions are good for nothing anymore. On this point all
agree. …Modern democracy is the form of decline of the state.”
“There must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, anti-liberal to
the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to
responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of
generations forward and backward.”
“The whole West no longer possesses those instincts out of which
institutions grow, out of which a future grows.”
“Men live for today, men live very fast, men live very irresponsibly:
precisely this is called ‘freedom.’”
“The two domains of being, animality and rationality, separate and
clash. This rupture prevents man from possessing unity of nature and
thus being free for what we normally call the real.”
“That thing that the superman discards is precisely our boundless,
purely quantitative nonstop progress. The superman is poorer,
simpler, tenderer and tougher, quieter and more self-sacrificing and
slower of decision, and more economical of speech. Nor does the
superman appear in droves, or at random.”
“All men are not equal.”
“Multiplicity of meanings is the element in which all thought must
move in order to be strict thought.”
“Sound common sense is the last resort of those who are by nature
envious of thinking.”
“The superman never appears in the noisy parades of alleged men of
power, nor in the well-staged meetings of politicians. The superman’s
appearance is likewise inaccessible to the teletypers and radio
dispatches of the press. …This well made-up and well-staged manner of
forming ideas, of representation, dissimulates and blocks from view
what really is.”
“The common ideas and views must be shouted at when they want to set
themselves up as the judges of thought, so that men will wake up.”
“What type of idea-forming is it in which the last men linger? The
last men blink. What does that mean? …That means to play up and set
up a glittering deception which is then agreed upon as true and valid…
a setup with whose help man carries on and degrades everything.”
“The more original the thinking, the richer will be what is unthought
in it. The unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow.
But to the commonplaces of common sense, what is unthought in any
thinking always remains merely the incomprehensible. And to the
common comprehension, the incomprehensible is never an occasion to
stop and look at its own powers of comprehension, still less to
notice their limitations.”
“If we wish only to go counter to a thinker’s thought, … we shift his
thought into the commonplaces of our know-it-all presumption.”
“The congresses and conferences, committees and subcommittees, are
they anything other than the blinking organizations of blinking
arrangements of distrust and treachery?“
“The will is the sphere of representational ideas which basically
pursue and set upon everything that comes and goes and exists, in
order to depose, reduce it in its stature, and ultimately decompose it.”
“As soon as we regard the common as the only legitimate standard, and
become generally incapable of fathoming the commonness of the common,
…that is part of the high and dangerous game and gamble in which, by
the nature of language, we are the stakes.”
“All anthropology continues to be dominated by the idea that man is
an organism. Philosophical anthropology as well as scientific
anthropology will not use man’s essential nature as the starting
point for their definition of man. … Man is not an organism but a
human being.”
“Language is not a tool. Language is not something besides itself.
Language is language.”
“Logic considers thinking to be the assertion of something about
something. Dialectic is logic and defines thinking in terms of the
proposition. Logic and dialectic are not thinking. Thinking is a call.”
“The word ‘thinking’ directs us to the essential sphere of memory,
devotion, and thanks. Linguistically, the word is related to thought,
memory, and thanks.”
“Our thinking still remains totally without mission in terms of the
destiny of its own being. The more completely our thinking regards
itself merely in terms of its own comparative written history, …the
more decisively it will petrify in fatelessness.”
“Our age rages in a mad, steadily growing craving to conceive history
in terms of universal history.”
“A fragment of Parmenides, which has been given the number 6, begins
with these words: ‘One should both say and think that Being is.’”
“Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining
underway. Only when we walk it by thoughtful questioning are we on
the move on the way. …The way of thought depends… on an enigmatic
solitude.”
“The misunderstandings to which thinking falls victim occupy those
who do not think.”
“Thinking clears its way only by its own questioning advance.”
“It is far more difficult to say that the tree is than it is
to say something specific about the tree.”
“The phrase ‘Being is’ holds the most completely fulfilled secret of
all thinking.”
“One cannot enter into a dialogue with a thinker by addressing him
out of thoughtlessness.”
“Every confrontation of two different interpretations of a work is in
reality a mutual reflection on the guiding presuppositions [of that
work].”
“We notice only the monotony of the sentence ‘Being is.’ We are
offended by the elusiveness of the apparent generality and
abstraction it expresses.”
“Abstract considerations are the fabrications of the age of technology.”
“What is the ‘it’ in statements such as ‘it is windy, it is snowing,
it is thawing, its is dawning’?”
“Language at one great moment says one unique thing, for one time
only, which remains inexhaustible because it is always originary, and
thus beyond the reach of any kind of leveling.”
“The time may finally have come to release language from the leash of
common speech and allow it to remain attuned to the keynote of the
lofty statement it makes.”
“In fragment 7 Parmenides warns against mistaking the common view,
which has a judgment ready beforehand on all and everything, for the
way of thinking, just as though the habit of generalities were bound
to be true.”
(Parmenides contrasts unreflecting gawking and ear-cocking and chatter
with reflection.)
“Our models for thinking lie close by, but normally we fail to see
them in their presence.”
“Thinking occurs first, then saying, and the saying bears the
relation of what is to what we have made appear in language.”
“Perceiving involves taking to heart, taking to memory.”
“What we lay before others in telling in language joins what already
lies before us.”
“Every statement remains in a mysterious manner related to all that
can be called up by the term ‘Being’ or ‘There is.’”
“Perceiving by taking into mind and heart (also called “scenting” or
“divination” meaning gathering and guarding) joins with ‘laying out
before us’ to become thinking.”
“Thinking involves gathering what we have taken to heart. This
thinking historically preceded apprehension through reasoning in
Western history (ratio, logic). The medieval and Enlightenment
explanation of reason blocks and obscures the origin of thinking.
Thinking does not begin with doubting, logic, or dialectic. Thinking
is, keeping safeguarded in the heart that which exists.”
The aggressive nature of thinking (grasping, forced conclusions from
propositions) comes later in history.
“Aristotle thought nonconceptually. This does not mean, vaguely, it
means ‘as befits the matter.’ In Aristotle, thinking keeps to the way
of thinking.”
“Aristotle remains with the question, What is Being? and so avoids
falling into the counterfeit of Aristotelianism that characterized
later thinking about Aristotle.”
“Aristotle’s question is fundamental, and he believed it
unanswerable. But counterfeit Aristotelianism after Aristotle
considered questioning weak, hence gave itself over to strong-minded
conceptual thinking.”
“What is the nature of Being? It is what is here at this moment,
including you, perception with a guarded heart exercising perception
and reason. It is not subject and object but being meeting being.”
“Let lie before you, and take to heart, this particular being’s
relation to Being.”
“Being is the participle which gathers all the other participles into
itself.”
(That which shows its face to us, what we call the physical, is for
the Greeks the physical and psychic and spiritual.)
“This investigation does not answer a question, it leads us to the
question, What is thinking? Being is not an idea, it is the term
which makes holding onto any idea impossible.”
“It is not enough for any man merely to inhabit the world of his own
representational ideas, and to express only them. For the world of
this expression is shot through with blindly adopted and unexamined
ideas and concepts. How could this confused manner of forming ideas
be called thinking, however loudly it may claim to be creative?”
“Whatever has been seen can be demonstrated only by being seen and
seen again. What has been seen can never be proved by adducing
reasons and counter-reasons. Such a procedure overlooks what is
decisive, the looking. If what is seen is put in words, its mention
by name can never compel the seeing look.”
“Presence means what is with us, and that means to endure in the
encounter.”
“The essence of technology stems from the presence of what is
present, that is, from the Being of beings. If Being of beings did
not prevail, in the sense of the being here and thus objectivity of
the inventory of objects, airplane engines would not exist. If the
Being of beings did not already prevail, beings could not have
appeared as objects, as what is objective in objects, and only by
such objectivity do they become available to the ideas and
propositions in the positing and disposing of nature by which we
constantly take inventory of the energies we can wrest from nature.“
“Presence is a rising from unconcealment. The Greeks experienced such
duration as a luminous appearance in the sense of illumined, radiant
self-manifestation.”
“Subsequent European thinking … loses track of the traits of presence
to favor other traits. Western logic finally becomes logistics, whose
irresistible development has brought forth the electronic brain,
whereby man’s nature and essence is adapted and fitted into the
barely noticed Being of beings that appears in the nature of
technology.”
“Thinking is thinking only to the extent to which it remains
dependent and focused on Being. …The duality of beings and Being is
what gives food for thought.”
Key terms: the wasteland grows, devastation, the last man, Being is, aggressive thinking, “taking to heart, taking to memory,” the habit of generalities
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? Harper Perennial, 2004.
About The Author
Thank you for the good post as always, looking forward to your next one!
Metaphysics