118
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?

mostly stay within it, not giving it much thought. "To call" just simply means to give this or that name. In that signification, the word is current among us. And why do we prefer the customary meaning, even unknowingly? Presumably because the unaccustomed and apparently uncustomary signification of the word "to call" is its proper one: the one that is innate to the word, and thus remains the only one—for from its native realm stem all the other.

"To call," in short, means "to command," provided we hear this word, too, in its native, telling sense. For "to command" basically means, not to give commands and orders, but to commend, entrust, give into safe-keeping, keep safely. To call means: to call into arrival and presence; to address commendingly.

Accordingly, when we hear our question "What is called thinking?" in the sense that it asks, What is it that appeals to us to think?, we then are asking: What is it that enjoins our nature to think, and thus lets our nature reach thought, arrive in thinking, there to keep it safe?

When we ask in this way we do, of course, use the word "to call" in a rather unfamiliar signification. But it is unhabitual not because our spoken speech has never yet been at home in it, but rather because we are no longer at home with this telling word, because we no longer really live in it.

We turn back to the originally habitual significance of the word "to call," and ask: "What is it that calls on us to think?"

Is this return a whim, or playing games? Neither one nor the other. If we may talk here of playing games at all, it is not we who play with words, but the nature of language plays with us, not only in this case, not only now, but long since and always. For language plays with our speech—it likes to let our speech drift away into the more obvious meanings of words. It is as though man had to make an


Martin Heidegger (GA 8) What Is Called Thinking?