"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought"
About this Quote
Heidegger throws a gauntlet at the West’s favorite idol: “reason” as the supreme instrument of human dignity. The provocation is deliberate. He’s not praising irrationality so much as accusing “reason” of becoming a managerial habit that pre-decides what counts as real. When reason is “glorified for centuries,” it stops being a tool and turns into a tribunal. Thought, in his sense, can’t happen under a tribunal; it can only happen when the verdict is suspended.
The phrase “stiff-necked adversary” is doing heavy work. It personifies reason as stubborn, proud, incapable of bending toward what exceeds its categories. That’s the subtext: modern culture’s confidence in rational explanation is also a refusal of vulnerability. Reason wants clarity, control, and final accounts. Heidegger’s “thinking” wants exposure to what resists being rendered into a concept: Being, finitude, the ordinary world before it’s processed into “objects” for a knowing subject.
Context matters. Heidegger is writing in the wake of centuries of rationalism and the scientific revolution, but also amid 20th-century technological modernity, when knowledge increasingly means calculation, prediction, and optimization. His critique isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-reduction. He worries that calculative reasoning colonizes everything, including humans, turning existence into standing-reserve: resources to be ordered and used.
The intent is to re-open a space for a different mode of attention: not the problem-solving brain, but the kind of thinking that asks what makes problem-solving possible in the first place. It’s a slap meant to wake the reader from intellectual autopilot, to make “reason” feel less like virtue and more like a cage.
The phrase “stiff-necked adversary” is doing heavy work. It personifies reason as stubborn, proud, incapable of bending toward what exceeds its categories. That’s the subtext: modern culture’s confidence in rational explanation is also a refusal of vulnerability. Reason wants clarity, control, and final accounts. Heidegger’s “thinking” wants exposure to what resists being rendered into a concept: Being, finitude, the ordinary world before it’s processed into “objects” for a knowing subject.
Context matters. Heidegger is writing in the wake of centuries of rationalism and the scientific revolution, but also amid 20th-century technological modernity, when knowledge increasingly means calculation, prediction, and optimization. His critique isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-reduction. He worries that calculative reasoning colonizes everything, including humans, turning existence into standing-reserve: resources to be ordered and used.
The intent is to re-open a space for a different mode of attention: not the problem-solving brain, but the kind of thinking that asks what makes problem-solving possible in the first place. It’s a slap meant to wake the reader from intellectual autopilot, to make “reason” feel less like virtue and more like a cage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (English trans. J. Glenn Gray), Harper & Row, 1968 — commonly cited source for this passage. |
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