III.

"in our thought-provoking time"

The second component is the phrase "in our thought-provoking time". Reflection o
n this phrase will go far in providing a home for many of the seemingly gratuito
us asides that intersperse Heidegger's text. The phrase suggests at least these
questions: Who is the "our"?, What is the time period?, What is thought-provokin
g about our time?, and Is our time more thought-provoking than other times? A lo
ok at the text with these questions in mind will show that Heidegger's discussio
n is not nearly as cluttered as might appear.
1. Who is the "our"? The "our" refers not merely to contemporary philosophers; i
t refers to we who are standing within the current of Western history. Heidegger
is thus not randomly dropping remarks about newspaper readers and that which is
cherished by public opinion. (12)
2. What is the time period? The primary time period that Heidegger has in mind i
s the present age. "What did the Second World War really decide?" (13) The prese
nt age is the technological age, the age in which brain currents are recorded bu
t the tree in bloom is forgotten. (14)
3. What is thought-provoking about our time? In the third component Heidegger cl
aims that what is thought-provoking about our time is that we are still not thin
king. But what is it about our time that explains why we are still not thinking?
Heidegger, in accordance with Nietzsche's "The wasteland grows", diagnoses this
age as the time of nihilism. The dominant characteristic of our time, then, is
the forgetting or withdrawal of Being, and it is this that explains why we are s
till not thinking--even as we attempt to mimic intelligence via computer program
s or connectionist networks.
4. Is our time more thought-provoking than other times? Yes. Heidegger's history
is opposite to Hegel's: we are finding ourselves more and more forlorn. We are
more distant from Being because the experience of thinking--in our technological
age--has been shrunk to that of using a tool to operate within an already-fixed
network of ends. This age, in other words, is more thought-provoking because in
it ratio has triumphed over legein; thinking has become so severed from the bei
ng-thoughtful that the thoughtful being is in danger of being entirely eclipsed.
IV. "we are still not thinking"
The third and final component requires the most analysis, more than could be giv
en in this essay. But what this essay can offer is a cursory introduction to key
themes bound up with this component.
We are still not thinking--despite Parmenides' directive--because we have missed
the object and source of thinking--Being. We will continue to miss this as long
as we merely use thinking and do not dwell as thoughtful. All genuine thinking
arises from and returns back to thoughtful existence; "thinking" that is not so
anchored is homeless "thinking", e.g., calculating, computing, or even reasoning
. Thoughtful dwelling is the existential ground of thinking; in such a mode we c
an hear what calls for thought. (15) Heidegger attempts to flesh out thoughtful
dwelling by looking back to the Greek thinking experience in order to recover th
at which has been lost in the translation of the Greek legein into the Latin rat
io. He finds that legein carries with it two significations that are not preserv
ed by the Latin ratio: thinking as speaking and thinking as gathering. (16)
1. Thinking as speaking. Being calls for thinking, i.e., for articulation, and t
hus to let Being be in language, for Heidegger, is thinking. William Blake's "Nu
rse's Song" in the Songs of Innocence, for example, houses the carefree Being of
playing children. The language of thinking plays a crucial role for Heidegger,

and he develops the linkage between language and thinking in On The Way To Langu
age. That is a thorny text also, but a pivotal idea is that we are not thinking
because we are unheedful of the language of thinking. A full elaboration of this
idea is impossible here, but the claim, roughly, is that to be thoughtful is to
exist as authentically immersed in language.
The nature of the alleged connection between language and thinking can be somewh
at clarified, I suggest, by making a key distinction that I find missing in disc
ussions of what Heidegger means. The distinction is about the phrase "the langua
ge of thinking". This phrase is ambiguous, I note, and it will prove instructive
to identify the different senses. To begin, "the language of thinking" is ambig
uous in the way that "the idea of God" or "the call of Being" are ambiguous, and
thus one can assume that Heidegger intends the ambiguity. In other words, all o
f these phrases can be taken either in the subjective or objective genitive, and
those are possibilities on which Heidegger likes to play. The phrase, "the idea
of God", for example, means "God's idea" in the subjective genitive and "the id
ea about God" in the objective genitive. In like manner the phrase "the language
of thinking" means "thinking's language" or "the language found in thinking" in
the subjective genitive and "language about thinking" in the objective genitive
. The difference, then, is between the language found in thinking generally and
the language found in thinking about thinking. It would be a mistake, I suggest,
to regard Heidegger's claims on language and thinking as being merely or primar
ily about the language used in thinking; the words and metaphors "used" in talki
ng about thinking can also lead us away from thinking. (17)
2. Thinking as gathering. Legein signifies gathering and the gathered, and Heide
gger develops the nuance in this manner:
Thinking demands...that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go
together at all. (18)
But by thinking qua gathering Heidegger means not merely Kant's synthesis of con
cepts, and perhaps even something different than what Wilfrid Sellars had in min
d when he spoke of "numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aestheti
c experience and death." (19) Heidegger's gathering is of Being:
Thinking cuts furrows into the soil of Being. (20)
Thinking is the gathering of that which calls to be gathered--the modes of our e
xistence and Being as such. Thinking can begin when we hear that which calls for
thinking:
Joyful things, too, and beautiful and mysterious and gracious things give us foo
d for thought...if only we do not reject the gift by regarding everything that i
s joyful, beautiful, and gracious as the kind of thing which should be left to f
eeling and experience, and kept out of the winds of thought. (21)
Thinking, then, is not so much a matter of being an expert or technician in a fi
eld--even if the field be philosophy--as it is being responsive to the various m
odalities of who we are, and this points to the existential modality of "being t
houghtful" as the ground of thinking.