Heidegger Views on Thinking

Paul Daniels 1
5/15/03
Heidegger Views on Thinking
A common element that brings history and human knowledge together is the tendency of human beings to formulate heart-felt questions about the nature of their own existence, about life and death, joy, suffering and the place of humanity in a grander scheme of things. For centuries now, thoughtful individuals have looked both within themselves as well as at the world in order to find the answers to these basic questions. Where once humanity looked to shake up religious leaders for guidance, today, most of the questioning that humanity undertakes is guided by scientific thinking and specialists whose answers are designed by whatever field happens to be their specialty.
Martin Heidegger, one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, referred to this sort of thinking as "calculative thinking," that is thinking that is directed toward gaining some sort of specific result. This is the sort of thinking estab...