Heidegger taught thinking as digging down to roots without hauling them into the light.

Evidence

According to Gadamer, Heidegger’s trademark style was to raise up a ‘breathtaking swirl of questions’ which would billow forth until, finally, he would roll them up into ‘deep dark clouds of sentences from which the lightning flashed’, leaving the students stunned. There was something occult about this, so the students created another nickname for him: the ‘little magician from Messkirch’. Even amid the clouds and lightning, however, he usually focused his lectures on minutely close readings of the classical philosophers, demanding extreme concentration on the text. According to Hannah Arendt’s memories of studying with him, Heidegger taught them to think, and thinking meant ‘digging’. He worked his way down to the roots of things, she wrote, but rather than hauling them into the light he left them embedded, merely opening up exploratory routes around them — just as his beloved paths wound their way through the forest. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 190

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘digging’ metaphor for phenomenological method anticipates the reader’s existing notes on philosophical excavation and close reading as intellectual practice. — connects to: Heidegger taught thinking as open-ended excavation rather than retrieval of answers — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 190
• SEED: Could seed an essay on how obscurity functions as pedagogy — the ‘unfathomable teacher’ trope across Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and other figures.