What Calls Us to Think?

The provocation that opens the lectures is deliberate: in an age that prizes intelligence, information, and analytical sophistication above all things, Heidegger asserts that we are still not thinking — not yet truly underway in thought. Thinking, in his sense, is not calculation, not problem-solving, not the manipulation of concepts and data. It is a kind of following: following what calls, attending to what claims us, remaining with a question rather than rushing to an answer that dissolves the question. Most of what passes for thought in modern intellectual culture is, on this account, a variety of sophisticated not-thinking.

What calls us to think is, Heidegger argues, precisely what withdraws — what is not immediately present, not available, not graspable. Being itself, in its tendency to conceal itself even in the act of disclosing beings, is what summons thought without giving itself to thought as an object. A hand that points us toward something does not require us to look at the hand; but to learn to follow the pointing, to see where the gesture directs rather than staring at the gesture itself, is the task of thinking. The more deeply thought follows what withdraws, the more genuinely it is thinking.

Heidegger devotes much of the lecture course to Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power and the eternal recurrence, not to refute it but to read it as the situation in which thinking finds itself: at the end of Western metaphysics, with no tradition that can be simply inherited, facing the nihilism that the tradition has produced. The task of thinking in this situation is not to construct a new metaphysics but to stay with the difficulty — to remain in the question rather than jumping to a solution that covers it over. This patient dwelling in difficulty is what Heidegger calls the memory that thinking requires.

What Is Called Thinking? (Was heißt Denken?) was published in 1954 from lecture courses given at Freiburg in 1951–52. It is the most sustained treatment of the activity of thinking in Heidegger's later work, and one of his most direct engagements with Nietzsche outside the four-volume Nietzsche lectures.