Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
This is the third in a series on Martin Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? Please read the first, Why We’re Not Truly Thinking. And the second, The Death of Deep Thought: How Poetry Saves Meditative Thinking.
Heidegger’s Challenge: What It Really Means to Think
Martin Heidegger saw thinking not as a skill that we could practice but as an event we encountered. He said it was a call to thought.
In What Is Called Thinking?, he doesn’t just explore what we mean when we use the term thinking, but he issued us a challenge.
He saw the world as being dominated by calculative thinking, which suppressed meditative thinking, and he challenged his students and, by extension, us as readers to answer this challenge.
Thinking, in its deepest sense, is not an activity we participate in or a skill that we can master. It is something that calls to us as an event, it interrupts our routines and demands our attention.
Ultimately, it forces us to confront the nature of our existence.
The Call to Thought and the Confrontation With Mortality
Much like in his earlier philosophy in Being and Time, where anxiety causes a fall from das Man, the they-self, into authenticity, here in his later philosophy, this call to thought forces us to confront our own mortality.
This call to thought is not a logical process or an intellectual activity we participate in, but an event, a rupture in the ordinary world which causes a genuine reflection in us.
And this is not some abstract thing that preoccupied a dead continental philosopher, but something that makes up the very fabric of our lives. It is something we are all familiar with and have personal experience with.
Nothing sends a shockwave through our own lives like a death in the family.
But through all the grief and sadness, there is something deeper that is calling to us—the confrontation with death.
We may come to this recognition through a personal loss of a loved one, or perhaps a personal encounter with death like being in an accident, or we may even come to it through an abstract recognition of our own finitude and mortality.
But this confrontation with death breaks through our own illusions of stability and forces on us a different mode of thought.
Again, as I’ve said previously, the calculative mode of thinking is necessary.
Not one of us would be able to function in the world if we were crushed under the heaviness of our own mortality all of the time, so I want to be clear here that Heidegger doesn’t see this line of thinking as bad in any sense of the word.
But an awareness of our own fragility of existence is something we all must come to terms with.
When we lose someone close to us, the weight of their absence shifts our entire perception of time, meaning, and self.
Much like a near-death experience destroys the assumption that life will simply continue on, bringing a feeling of radical uncertainty to every moment.
This event of our own mortality is a call to thought in meditative thinking because we recognize that existence is not a guaranteed thing.
It disrupts everything, making the familiar seem strange and unsteady.
The pressing concerns of a moment before or the day prior now seem odd to consider.
Getting the latest fashion or iPhone, which might have been the most pressing thing in our thought life, suddenly loses focus, and a clarity of what we truly value begins to emerge.
This confrontation with death forces on us a reevaluation of everything making up our life.
It seems like most people push this experience or this call to thought away as quickly as possible, but for those who let it in, death becomes a transformation of things, not an end to them. It is something that can shatter the habitual ways of seeing the world, forcing us into a deeper engagement with life itself.
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Moments of Crisis: When the Structures of Life Collapse
Death isn’t the only event that a call to thought can come through—it can happen whenever the structures we rely on to make sense of the world collapse.
Think of being fired, even if this has never happened to you. In one moment, your career, something that can make up a significant portion of a person’s identity, is upended.
This thing you have used to structure the world and make sense of it is now gone, so you are forced to reevaluate everything.
This crisis of meaning can come through a betrayal, a personal failure, a loss of a relationship, or an identity crisis, but in all these moments, the fragility of the narratives we tell ourselves is exposed.
But this doesn’t just have to be portrayed in a negative light.
Think of some sort of breakthrough, maybe an experience with a book or film or artwork, where we are exposed to something we had never considered before, making us question everything we had assumed to be true.
And on an even larger scale, consider a cultural shift where inherited beliefs are called into question, and new demands are placed on thinking.
All of these are moments of what Heidegger terms unconcealment.
What was hidden in the background of our lives suddenly steps forward into our sight, and we can no longer ignore it or push it under the rug.
In these moments of unconcealment, thinking is no longer an optional activity we can engage in or an exercise we can use to develop a skill.
Suddenly, thinking is demanded of us to reorient our world. This is why Heidegger emphasizes unconcealment as essential to thinking.
As long as we remain comfortable, our habitual modes of thought allow us to move forward without cause. But when the familiar breaks down, and all meaning suddenly slips from the world, we are forced to stop and think.
The Sublime and the Power of Wonder
Just as death or change can spark this call to thought, an experience with the wonder and awe of the sublime can awaken it.
I’m sure all of us have stood at the edge of the ocean or stared into the night sky full of stars and thought, what could this all mean?
An experience with the sublime is both an overwhelming awareness of beauty as well as the strangeness or even horror of how vast something is in relation to us.
Staring at the ocean, which goes on past our line of sight, or even being on a boat in the middle of the ocean where the only thing on the horizon is more ocean, are moments where nature itself exceeds our ability to comprehend.
Suddenly, we are caught in wonder.
Just as in these moments, a piece of art can hold us in the same grip.
Even a simple realization, unremarkable in itself, that everything exists when it just as easily could not, stops us in our tracks and demands our immediate attention.
I remember when I was a child, and I would hold my pet cat and just be struck by the fact that I was alive and experienced the world, and here was another being that was alive and separate from me, experiencing the world in a completely different way.
This is a moment of wonder, where our normal ways of explaining the world fail to penetrate deeply enough.
Heidegger saw the Greeks as the original thinkers because they allowed themselves to be seized by wonder in these moments—not rushing to analyze or explain, simply letting Being itself speak.
But our modern life conditions us to dismiss wonder, as it breaks the flow of the everyday. We are prey to things constantly demanding our attention, entire technologies having been released upon our attention, like social media, which makes it impossible to dwell in mystery since the next post or reel is pulling us out of this wonder.
If this resonates, dive deeper into The Poetics of Fulfillment—a field guide for those restless for more than fleeting happiness. Not quick fixes, but lasting meaning. If you crave depth over dopamine and want fulfillment that endures, this is your next step.
Read The Poetics of Fulfillment: Why Chasing Happiness Is Killing Your Fulfillment (And How to Stop)
Poetry as the Ultimate Call to Thought
This is why Heidegger placed so much attention on poetry.
He saw language itself as the house of Being because of its ability to draw us into thought itself.
Think of a phrase you overheard or a line from music where it lingers long after it has passed, revealing meaning continuously.
Or something very close to home for Heidegger, a single word whose etymology reveals a forgotten way of seeing the world.
Most of the time, language functions automatically to help us navigate the world. We give orders, we exchange information, we make small talk.
But there are always moments, if we are listening, where language itself is a call to thought—where it ceases to be transparent but forces us to engage with it as something strange and profound.
This is why Heidegger turns to poetry as a mode of thinking.
Poetry itself uses language as a call to thought—it forces us to slow down and listen and let language speak in a way that cannot be reduced to a simple meaning.
Can We Still Hear the Call to Thought?
Every moment of our lives, stillness seems to be filled with noise, notifications, or endless streams of information to which we react, consume, or use to move forward.
Everywhere, our world insulates us from the call to thought.
We engage with the world, but we rarely just stop.
And yet, the call to thought remains.
It arrives in moments of loss, crisis, wonder, and poetry.
The question is not whether this call to thought still happens in our modern world—the question is whether we are still capable of listening.
For Heidegger, thinking is not a skill or a processing of information—it is to be claimed by something beyond ourselves.
It is an event.
When it comes, it does not ask—it demands.
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