“It is said that the dancer’s hardest task is to leap straight into the pose” (Søren Kierkegaard) “We are a sign that is not read, We feel no pain, we almost have Lost our tongues in foreign lands” (Friedrich Hölderlin)

Martin Heidegger’s “Was Heißt Denken” has been called, perhaps with no small amount of irony, “the only systematic presentation of the thinker’s late philosophy” (Arendt). The book, however, defies systematization before it even begins, the title itself rings out in ambiguity, it is usually translated as “What is Called Thinking”, but could just as easily be translated as what calls for thinking, what has been called thinking, or what is called for in order to think rightly. Heidegger asks his reader to stay with the ambiguity of the question in the title, which “can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition.” Instead, he wants to lead us to where we can make the leap ourselves into thinking. He likens this to learning to swim, which we may be able to get an idea of from a book, but “only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming.” Heidegger's “Was Heißt Denken” seeks to lead its reader to the cliff where she can jump into the current of thinking and thereby learn to swim, that is, to think.

Heidegger sets out to establish a pathway to the region where we can ourselves make the leap into Thinking. This pathway takes us through language in a very peculiar way; Heidegger does not provide us with definitions of terms, in fact, he warns us that definitional thinking conceals Thinking. Definitional thinking treats words as the conjunction of “sound-structure and sense-content”, words are just the containers of meaning, “mere kegs and buckets”. Instead of providing definitions and proceeding from these abstractions, Heidegger simply uses language. He repeats a word again and again, in slightly different contexts with slight variations of meaning. This circling gathers the multiple meanings of a word without privileging one meaning over another, the meanings of a word are gathered together in ambiguity. This ambiguity is characteristic of the pathway to Thinking, words standing in a multiplicity of meanings are signposts pointing us on our way.

Heidegger refuses to come out and tell us what it means, in any definite sense, to Think. He does, on the other hand, supply us with plenty of examples of what Thinking is not, but that we may think that Thinking is, because thinking has been thought of in various ways throughout history. Rational thought, representational thought, dialogical thought, and all this thought amounts to what Heidegger calls “ratio about ratio”; which means quite simply, that we may call our thinking “thinking”, but, we do not know what it is to Think. If we want to understand what it is to Think, with a capital T, and not merely with the lower case t, as this difference is usually represented in Heidegger scholarship, then we need to go backwards into history and look at the formation of thinking about Thinking.

One of the ways that thinking has been analyzed throughout history is as the formation of representational ideas. This is what happens when we stand before a tree in bloom and form in our heads an image of the tree; where, we can ask, is this tree? Heidegger asks, “does the tree stand ‘in our consciousness’, or does it stand on the meadow? Does the meadow lie in our soul, as experience, or is it spread out there on earth? Is the earth in our head? or do we stand on the earth?” The progress of science only furthers this conundrum by stating “what we see and accept is properly not a tree but in reality a void, thinly sprinkled with electrical charges … that race hither and yon at enormous speeds”. Science tells us, it seems, that the tree is not really out there, that the tree we see is already a created representation, formed by light bouncing off of a sparse collection of particles floating within a void, sparking a chain reaction that leads from eyes to brain to the formation of the tree as a mere appearance of a tree. Our actual face to face encounter with a tree in bloom is but a prescientific naivety, “something that we still happen to call ‘tree’ … and to drop the tree in bloom”.

The forming of representational ideas was elevated to the highest form of thinking by Plato. The representational idea that appears in ones mind is compared with the universal idea, the eternal essence of the thing as the specific thing that it is. Introductory Philosophy courses often resort to questions about chairs, what exactly about this particular chair makes it an instance of “chairness”, and Plato’s answer is that the actual chair is but an imperfect instantiation of the Ideal Chair. Plato establishes a duality between the chair that appears, the physical chair, and the metaphysical Chair through which all chairs receive their chairness by participating in the ideal Chair. Thinking, for Plato, does not deal with the actual physical chair in front of us, the truth of the chair does not reside there, but somewhere else, somewhere eternal and unchanging.