"O que dá mais a pensar é que não pensamos ainda" (Thomson)

Thomson2025

The repetition of this now almost clichéd line obscures the fact that many who quote it seem never to have come to terms with the full measure of its intended provocation (as we will see when we return to it in Section 3). To wit, we are subtly given something extra to think by Heidegger’s second, immediately repeated “still not [immer noch nicht].” This colloquial “still not” adds an “immer” as it emphasizes the “not yet [noch nicht]” of thinking, thereby literally suggesting “always still not” and so hinting that what Heidegger calls thinking remains necessarily futural or always still to-come [Zu-kunft], i.e., not indefinitely postponed or deferred but, instead, perpetually arriving rather than ever having simply arrived (and so constitutively open to the futurity of the future). In English, the “still” of “still not” is potentially problematic, however, since for Heidegger (rather notoriously) “the nothing” does not stand still but rather does not (as it were), actively “noth-ing” (“das Nichts selbst nichtet,” as Heidegger notoriously said in 1929, “the nothing itself noths”). What Heidegger means by that rather infamous line is that the nothing (or that which is just beyond our current intelligible world or understanding of what is) inchoately beckons us into (and from) “futurity” by calling for us to respond to the phenomenological hints of what is not yet a thing (i.e., to what is partly but not clearly intelligible) in ways that creatively and responsively disclose this active “noth-ing” and so help bring what was not yet a distinct thing (hence a no-thing) into being. (For the details, see Thomson, “Nothing [Nichts],” in Mark Wrathall  , ed., The Heidegger Lexicon [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021], 520–528.) In a rather poetic English, it might be tempting to hear the critique that we are “still not thinking” in contrast with “dynamic not thinking,” as suggesting that we fail to recognize the active persistence of that verbal nothing whereby futurity beckons to arrive. Yet, the “still” of Heidegger’s “still not thinking” is not the absence of movement but, on the contrary, the active persistence of the question, an insistent persistence to which what Heidegger calls thinking (thereby designating what remains of philosophy after or beyond ontotheology) strives to remain vigilantly responsive. His “immer noch nicht” might thus better be conveyed not as “always still not” but as ever not yet, that is, as perpetually coming into being, thereby designating the ongoing arriving of futurity (or the “to-come,” Zukunft, of being) in which the creative disclosure of later Heideggerian thinking seeks maieutically to participate (as we will see). But that remains true, in good phenomenological fashion, only insofar as our thinking avoids the temptations of precipitous and prejudicial ready-made answers (which would foreclose the questionable with the secure answers of common sense) and instead attends to the stubborn and often inconspicuous persistence of the questionable. That, for Heidegger, calls for us to learn to vigilantly practice that “piety” of thinking which presses ahead into the future as thought’s own ontohistorical avantgarde. Such called thinking (to disclose one of the polysemic senses of his famous lecture title) endeavors to stay faithful to the ever-expanding horizon of finite time and history, which can never be closed so long as any Dasein continue to exist (or stand out into an open future). (I address that last point at length in Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024]).