Thinking can first be found in memory, literally “thinking back.” An action which is a re-examination of past beings, previous thinkings, what would be worthy of re-collecting, “thought-provoking”? “Only when we are so inclined toward what in itself is to be thought about, only then are we capable of thinking,” but to be inclined toward is to be outside of, we must be at a distance from what is thought about. Reaching toward, acting as “the pointer,” we must chase what is thought-provoking. Thinking withdraws from us, or perhaps leads us on.
We feel no pain, we almost have/ Lost our tongue in foreign lands.
Heidegger quotes frequently lines from a poem by Hölderin, Mnemosyne (memory). We are a sign that is not read. This line is drawn out, our drawing toward the withdrawing thought; this is how man becomes the pointer. What does it mean to be a pointer; a laying down of direction, a yearning without arriving. “But since this sign points toward what draws away, it points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal.” Again we are pointed toward an understanding not of the thought, the object, but instead toward the thinking, the ongoing action. Thinking, as something to be learned, places the import not on the individual thoughts, or later, on the individual thinker. “For the laws of thought are after all valid independently of the man who performs the individual acts of thinking.” Any performer may play a role on stage, and each one will make the character different. Thinking is a means, without a prescribed end. The sign is not read because it does not point to a destination, but to a movement. The role is as yet un-written. We must perform thinking, act on and engage with it. We, Da-Sein, have engaged ourselves in the act of signifying an absence-becoming. Even Da-Sein is a duality; we are the being-here as well as being-there, our existence again pointing toward an object outside of ourselves, toward, perhaps, the ever withdrawing thought. In pointing toward an absence, is it to be that our Being is then highlighted? I think, therefore I am. Or, not conjugated and universal, to think and so to be. Denken also sein. The continuous movement, the stream which, while never, as Heraclitus knew, the same from moment to moment, somehow remains the stream by virtue of its current.
It is from Heraclitus as well that we have learned to take account of the logos. Heidegger shows the coquettish play between logos and mythos. They both expose the doubled edge of alethia, revealing through our willingness to take the part of sign and concealing as we then give up hope of possessing the constantly withdrawing thought. We feel no pain, we almost have/ Lost our tongue in foreign lands. In the Greek mythology, the river which separated the living from the dead was called Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness. If death is a crossing of forgetfulness, Mnemosyne, memory must be what is crossed by life. Thinking then, the Mother of the Muses, becomes the means by which we experience life. “Surely, as long as we take the view that logic gives us insight into what thinking is, we shall never be able to think how much all poesy rests upon thinking back, recollection.” Without logic to form our thinking, what then? Here, Heidegger prompts us to learn to leap so that we might learn thinking. The stream which remains stream because of continuous, conscious change, so must we be willing to take the leap “to where everything is different, so different that it strikes us as strange.” The estranging difference comes not from the external, but from a change within our own understanding, a new way of looking which allows us to see differently. As though we had traveled to foreign lands and sought to learn the language there.
Heidegger never confronts the second and third lines of Hölderin’s poem directly. At the culmination of the essay he approaches the meaning concealed and revealed through poesy. He examines language, calling us to re-evaluate “what language really says when it speaks.” Is this even a valid question, can we ever say what is really being said? We feel no pain, we almost have/ Lost our tongue in foreign lands. The danger to thinking, to learning is the “common terms,” when one is no longer directing the understanding at the words used, but instead accepting them with little thought. We must constantly view language in new lights, to tease out what our words are concealing and revealing to us. This non-thinking acceptance of language as an object and not as a means to understanding, leaves us truly in the danger of losing our tongue. Active engagement in the process of language seems, conversely, to allow us to loose our tongue. In thinking, and thinking about language and where alethia dwells within, we return to our role (our performance or act) of sign pointing toward absence-becoming. We are placing our being into strangeness, other-worldliness. Intentionally (intensionally) alienating to better see clearly. We are the sign that is not read because we have only now, in this moment (each moment), begun to learn the language of thinking. The question remains, which tongue will we be most in danger of losing, the un-thought-provoking tongue which alienates us from the meaning of speech/thinking or the language of Da-Sein, of being-here, being-there?
Thinking, the coquette, flirts with us to entice us to follow. What calls for(th) thinking? “Man is called the being who can think . . .” And later, finally, “So called by name, called into a presence, it in turn calls. It is named, has the name. By naming we call on what is present to arrive.” Arriving, as with inclining, has the movement of the internal reaching out to the something-else. We are now being-here and in the process of pointing toward being-there. In the French; la raison d’être: the reason for being. It is not different from the Cartesian principle, reason calls us into being, and conversely and in the same movement, we must call for thinking. If to be is to think, then being itself becomes that movement outward, the enticing withdrawal.
Some other synonyms suggested by MSWord: describe; baptize; phone; give a buzz; shout; plea; arrange; assemble; call on; summon; cry; noise; song.
From Charles Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 29 FN: logos, saying, speech, discourse, statement, report; account, explanation, reason, principle; esteem, reputation; collection, enumeration, ratio, proportion.
