WHAT CALLS FOR THINKING?
We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves are thinking. If our attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking.
As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such learning we have admitted that we are not yet capable of thinking.
Yet man is called the being who can think, and rightly so. Man is the rational animal. Reason, ratio, evolves in thinking. Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but can't. Ultimately he wants too much when he wants to think, and so can do too little. Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking. For we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline toward something only when it in turn inclines toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as what holds us there. To hold genuinely means to heed protectively, for example, by letting a herd graze at pasture. What keeps us in our essential being holds us only so long, however, as we for our part keep holding on to what holds us. And we keep holding on to it by not letting it out of our memory. Memory is the gathering of thought. To what? To what holds us, in that we give it thought precisely because it remains what must be thought about. What is thought is the gift given in thinking back,
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 3-18; 113-121. The German text is Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954), pp. 1-8, 48-52, and 79-86.
369