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WHAT IS CALLED THINKING?

word, here the word "thinking," gives a name? Then we attend to the word as word. This is what happened earlier with the word "to call." We are here venturing into the gambling game of language, where our nature is at stake. Nor can we avoid that venture, once we have become aware that—and in what way—thought and poesy, each in its own unmistakable fashion, are the essential telling.

According to the common view, both thought and poesy use language merely as their medium and a means of expression, just as sculpture, painting, and music operate and express themselves in the medium of stone and wood and color and tone. But presumably stone and wood and color and tone, too, exhibit a different nature in art, once get over seeing art aesthetically, that is, from the point of view of expression and impression—the work as expression, and the impression as experience.

Language is neither merely the field of expression, nor merely the means of expression, nor merely the two jointly. Thought and poesy never just use language to express themselves with its help; rather, thought and poesy are in themselves the originary, the essential, and therefore also the final speech that language speaks through the mouth of man.

To speak language is totally different from employing language. Common speech merely employs language. This relation to language is just what constitutes its commonness. But because thought and, in a different way poesy, do not employ terms but speak words, therefore we are compelled, as soon as we set out upon a way of thought, to give specific attention to what the word says.

At first, words may easily appear to be terms. Terms, in their turn, first appear spoken when they are given voice. Again, this is at first a sound. It is perceived by the senses. What is perceived by the senses is considered as immediately given. The word's signification attaches to its sound.


Martin Heidegger (GA 8) What Is Called Thinking?