Book: What Is Called Thinking?

Central Question
Martin Heidegger presses a single, urgent question: what is called "thinking" and what calls thinking to come into being. He refuses the easy identification of thinking with mere calculation, conceptual manipulation, or logical inference, and asks instead after the deeper source and character of thought. Thinking, for Heidegger, is not a neutral instrument but an event in which something shows itself and summons a human response.

Two Modes of Thought
Heidegger contrasts "calculative" thinking, which measures, plans, and manipulates toward ends, with a more original "meditative" or reflective thinking that listens and responds. Calculative thought is indispensable for technology and science, yet it risks eclipsing the capacity to think in the meditative sense, where thinking remains open to meaning rather than subsuming it under utility. Meditative thinking attends to being and lets what is essential disclose itself, resisting the urge to reduce every question to a problem to be solved.

Thinking as Listening and Responding
For Heidegger, true thinking resembles listening: something "calls" and the thinker must answer. This summons is not merely an external prompt but the way in which beings and Being make themselves present as intelligible. To think is to remain attentive to the calling of things and of the historical questions that shape understanding, allowing what matters to gather rather than imposing predefined categories upon it.

Language, Saying, and Silence
Language occupies a central place because thinking takes place where saying and letting-speak intersect. Words are not mere instruments to report facts but the medium through which truth emerges and withdraws. Silence is equally crucial: the thinker must know when not to force expression, since silence can preserve the depth from which speaking must spring. Poetry and thoughtful speech therefore become privileged sites for the disclosure of being.

Historical and Philosophical Retrieval
Heidegger engages ancient Greek thinkers and poets to recover an original intimacy between thought and Being that later philosophy and modern science have obscured. Names such as Parmenides and Heraclitus, and poetic voices that still resonate, serve as manifests of a thinking that stays with the question rather than dissolving it. This retrieval is not antiquarian nostalgia but an effort to reawaken capacities for attentiveness that contemporary life tends to marginalize.

Practical and Existential Stakes
The stakes of Heidegger's account are both intellectual and existential. A civilization that privileges calculative thinking risks losing the capacity to ask why things are and what we owe to the world. Thinking, properly understood, cultivates a mode of dwelling in which human beings remain answerable to the truth of beings. It thereby calls for a reorientation of education, culture, and individual practice toward receptivity, restraint, and a renewed fidelity to questioning.