Heidegger’s ideal of thinking is confinement to a single thought, not open appetite

Evidence

Reading Heidegger again, I feel the same gravitational pull. But even while I’m sliding back down into his dimly lit world of forest paths and tolling bells, I find myself struggling to get free, for reasons that have nothing — and everything — to do with his Nazism. There is something of the grave in this vegetative world. Give me the open sea of Jaspers, I now think, or the highways frequented by Marcel’s travellers, filled with human encounter and conversation. Heidegger once wrote that ‘To think is to confine yourself to a single thought’, but I now feel that this is the very opposite of what thinking ought to be. Thinking should be generous and have a good appetite. I find life far too valuable these days to shut out most of its variety in favour of digging down into the depths — and remaining down there, as Hannah Arendt described the Heideggerian method of inquiry. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1010

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crystallizes the contrast between the Heideggerian method (focusing down into one deep thought, ‘digging down and remaining there’) and the pluralist engagement of Jaspers and Marcel.
• XREF: Connects to readings of Hannah Arendt’s critique of Heidegger as a style of inquiry — relevant to later Continental thought’s split over Heidegger. — connects to: Heidegger’s later philosophy drained Dasein of human agency and action — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 595; Heidegger taught thinking as open-ended excavation rather than retrieval of answers — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 190