"We do not know what thinking is: Five Heideggerian statements": An essay by Grant Farred (Keywords: Language;Negation;Being; Thought;Attention;Practice)

From The Philosopher, vol. 109, no. 4 (Thinking Otherwise).

You can order the digital copy of all our previous issues here.

If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.

The Philosopher is unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

I

“We do not know what thinking is. But we do know when we are not thinking.”

Let us consider this first statement, the most resonant one in Martin Heidegger’s Was Hei§t Denken?

We could understand this as a declarative statement by Heidegger that depends entirely on a negation. “We do not know what thinking is”. And, because “we do not know what thinking is” we are free to assume that the only way that we can even hope to come to know “what thinking is” would require us, paradoxically, to know what we do not know. What, in all probability, we cannot know. We cannot know “thinking”. We must begin, then, from what it is we do not know.

Heidegger’s imperative, moreover, has the effect of asking of us the wherewithal to not know what it is we must know, or, at least, ought to know. That is certainly the implication: that we ought to know thinking. After all, we have no compunction about of our use of the term thinking. We use it routinely in our everyday speech. We say, “I think I’ll be home by 7pm”. Or, “I think I’ll have a sandwich for lunch”.

The way in which Heidegger formulates his statement dislodges us from our presumed familiarity with the term. In its stead, Heidegger makes of thinking nothing less than that “activity” which must be thought. We must think about thinking.

This injunction, to think about thinking, is by no means native to how it is we generally comprehend thinking. And it certainly has nothing to do with how it is we ordinarily use the word “thinking”. In short, according to Heidegger’s conception, how it is we understand and deploy the term “thinking” is decidedly inadequate.

Heidegger thus brings us to a difficult and demanding realization. We can only know that we are even in proximity to thinking when we make ourselves aware of a negation. We can only know ourselves to be thinking when we ourselves know that we are not doing what it is we should be doing.

And so, in order to think, the first order of business is always negative. But, negative in a positive sense. To teach ourselves to think we must begin by ensuring that we know when we are not thinking. It is only with this constant awareness that we can undertake to learn thinking. By guarding against falling into a bad habit, not thinking, we are now freed to undertake the work of thinking. Heidegger’s statement is, so understood, less a negation – although, as we have seen, he works through negation – than it is that most open-ended of invitations. Heidegger is inviting us to learn thinking.

II

“Only when man speaks, does he think – and not the other way around.”

Such an insight, that it is only through “speaking” that we “think”, would seem to run contrary to the “logic” or commonsense of our everyday speech. Counter-intuitive, we could even say. After all, in the wake of a misspeaking we are quick to offer the following as advice: “You should think before you speak”. The implication is clear. The reason why the speaker is now subject to reprimand is because, let us say, he spoke too quickly. Or her poor phrasing gave offence because she spoke rashly. And we accept this as something on the order of age-old wisdom. Speech follows thought. That is the proper order of linguistic business.

Once more, Martin Heidegger, the contrarian. Heidegger seems to suggest that it is only in and through speaking that we can command a language that can bear thinking. How could that be? Do we come to, or into, thinking only when we speak?

By guarding against falling into a bad habit, not thinking, we are now freed to undertake the work of thinking.

To speak is to command language. It is to take language into our care. It is to take care with language. And, it is only when we understand that it is only language that can bear the weight of thinking that we make ourselves responsible to our speaking. And, in so doing, we compel ourselves into a completely felicitous relationship to our speaking. This “new” relationship to language, our giving ourselves over to the Heideggerian demand, emerges out of a critical recognition: when we speak we are teaching ourselves how to think.

In this way, Heidegger establishes a different order of things, a new order of thinking. Instead of a sequential order which is always cautionary (and so prophylactic) – “think before you speak” – a different recognition is achieved. Because Heidegger makes “man” the custodian of language, there is no longer a temporal gap – or lapse – between our speaking and our thinking.

By making language the bearer of our thinking, we commit to speaking our thinking. No longer do we allow ourselves recourse to the “logic” of commonsense. Now, in our tending to language, we think as we speak. It is through speaking that our thinking comes into presence. When we speak we are doing nothing other than bringing our thinking into language. To speak is, to render the matter in the vernacular, to hear the self think.

To speak is to hear our thinking. To speak is to hear our thinking come into audibility. To speak is to take care with how it is we form our thoughts.

So conceived, we can say that even when we respond “viscerally”, when we speak “out of turn”, we are doing nothing so much as giving voice to a thinking that has been long in gestation. In such a moment, it may be that our thinking already has structural form, a grammar, that has been awaiting its articulation. Our speaking is a thinking that already knows how it must speak. In speaking, thinking. Speaking brings our thinking into being.

III

“Any kind of polemic fails from the outset to assume the attitude of thinking.”

All polemic is articulation in search – in need – of engagement. Polemic can only stand through validation from outside. Thinking can stand in itself because it is in no way contingent upon the dialectic. The polemic provokes. Thinking states itself as that speaking through which language voices the difficulty that is thinking.

Only when polemic has been responded to can it be recognized as public iteration. Because of this, the intent of the polemic is to do violence through language. It uses language in order to bring about destruction – of the social order, of a political opponent, of a way of being in the world. This does not mean, contrary to what we might expect, that polemic takes no care with language. In fact, even though we recognize its intent, the polemic is an exercise in linguistic precision. And, as such, the polemic must, because of its precision, be recognized as that speaking that potentially allows for the emergence of thinking.

Therefore, if to think is to take care with language so that we can come to truth through language then we must acknowledge – as Heidegger does early in Was Hei§t Denken? – that we must include the polemic as containing within the possibility of thinking.

Thinking can stand in itself because it is in no way contingent upon the dialectic.

We find ourselves, then, simultaneously wary of polemic and unwilling to dismiss it. When language is asked to bear thinking, it must turn against any propensity for dependency. The language which takes up the work of thinking must, at all costs, find its truth in itself. As itself. Thinking, according to Heidegger, is inherently sovereign. Thinking is that which requires, not always, but in critical moments, the kind of solitude that Heidegger enjoyed in his hut in the Black Forest.

Dare we say that the dialectic is the unthought in Heidegger’s thinking? After all, Heidegger thrusts us firmly into the dialectic with his pronouncement that “we do not know what thinking is but we know when we are not thinking”. From the very first, then, we are engaged in an undertaking where push-and-pull is the modus operandi. We can come to know thinking only when we put ourselves on notice – we must teach ourselves to know what it is to know not thinking.

IV

“Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”

If Heidegger was allergic to technology before World War II, we could say that he was well-nigh a pacifist in its aftermath. I exaggerate, of course. However, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan had a profound effect on him. The German philosopher, as mindful as he would ever be of his role in fomenting National Socialism (which is to say that he stopped well short of outright apology), feared for planetary destruction. Heidegger had, after all, just seen how Robert Oppenheimer’s technological advancement could devastate the earth. This was Heidegger’s frame of mind – his “mood”, his (best) biographer Rüdiger Safranski might say – when he presented the lectures that would become Was Hei§t Denken?

How could humanity not, under these “most thought-provoking of times”, give itself over to thinking? What, we are surely now duty-bound to ask, would Heidegger make of this, our own thought-provoking time? A pandemic in which access to a life-saving vaccine is available to some and not to (many more) others; the threat of a planetary destruction that is of our own making – a threat that, with species destruction, with global warming, with the degradation and loss of natural habitats, is now approaching apocalyptic proportions. Ours is a world in which historic levels of inequality obtains. Racism is rampant. Autocrats in power in every one of the continents. The polemic is very much the order of our day. A polemic now empowered by the very technology that Heidegger so feared – a social media that, while it can function as a space for genuine human interaction, is at least as prone to hatred and is, consequently, not in the least “social”. On social media and in what remain of the conventional media outlets, we encounter languages intent on producing violence in the world.

And “we are still not thinking”. And because of our “not thinking”, we fail to distinguish between the polemic and thinking. When we “do not think”, we suspend our capacity to do the work of judgment.

But is that the truth of our moment? Is being, if not Being, not at the core of the kind of questions that scientists, geologists, climate activists are asking? Is science in this moment not doing exactly what Heidegger would ask all of us to do? To think? Is thinking now only to be found in the sciences? Has history decided to turn the tables on Heidegger’s declaration that “science does not think”? Is it science only that is now asking how it is that we are in the world, what the effects of being in the world are, and how it is we think our world?

The language which takes up the work of thinking must, at all costs, find its truth in itself.

Is it science, above all the other disciplines, philosophy prominent among the delinquents, that is now taking up the question of Being, the first question of philosophy, even if it is in a register unfamiliar to Heidegger?

Our time, more than any other, feels precipitous. And the source of our sense of fragility is indisputable. It is science which is not only most readily to hand, it is also science that seems most prepared to take on the multiple difficulties which our moment is confronting. The question that is our being in the world is what animates science.

How are we to think through science? How are we to give ourselves to thinking our being scientifically? Is that not what is “most thought-provoking” in our “thought-provoking time”? If we are to tend to our world as it is, it may be that we must proceed from provocation And if we are to proceed in such a manner, then we can no longer decree the provocation to be tantamount to polemic. Unless, that is, we make of that renowned Heideggerian provocation, “science does not think”, the first matter for our thinking.

V

“We never come to thoughts. They come to us.”

“They come to us” – our thoughts because we are open to them. “They come to us” – our thoughts, because, having lived with them, when the moment is propitious our thoughts come out of concealment. Our thoughts “come to us” not because we lack volition. No, they “come to us” because in our undertaking the work of thinking we have made it possible for our thoughts to come into presence. They “come to us” because we have let them be; we have let them come before us. We have opened ourselves to the arrival, always punctual, true only to its own schedule, of that thinking of which we have been in need.

When we do not think, we are in no danger of such an arrival. That is to say, only when we think about thinking are we made the gift of the thought which “comes to us”.

Grant Farred is the author of An Essay for Ezra: Racial Terror in America and Only A Black Athlete Can Save Us Now (both University of Minnesota Press, 2021). His previous work includes Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

 First published online on 12th April 2026.

---

If you enjoyed reading this, you can purchase the digital copy of this issue or any of our previous issues or consider becoming a Patreon member or making a donation.

The Philosopher is unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.