Thinking (as) philosophy

I would like to follow up on some brief, unfinished reflections I laid out in the previous post, in which I discussed how the cinematic representation of thinking signifies more poeisis than praxis.  Here I would like to take a step away from the film per se to discuss instead how thinking is theorized and aestheticized in the film. To avoid an inconveniently long text, the post will consist of two or three parts. 

In "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger notes that "Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells" (Basic Writings 217).

Heidegger continues to explain that, whereas Plato and Aristotle viewed thinking as techne, "a process of reflection in service to doing and making" his text proposes a way of understanding reflection "from the perspective of praxis and poeisis" (218). Thus Heidegger insists that, taken as such thinking is not necessarily practical. He goes so far as to regard "The characterization of thinking as theoria and the determination of known as theoretical behavior" as a reactionary position that attempts "to rescue thinking and preserve its autonomy over against acting and doing" (218).    

For Heidegger, the need to press argumentative exigency upon the autonomy of thinking apart from that of acting and doing stems from philosophy's ongoing struggle to legitimate itself vis-a-vis the solid standing of the sciences, to which truth and logic are immediately attributed. Philosophy justifies itself and its main activity by stressing the fact that thinking is not structurally tied in to action or deed, nor it is merely a premature phase that becomes fulfilled upon the subsequent completion of acting and doing. Heidegger's explanation for rejecting this reactive attempt to think philosophy's position always in relation to that of the sciences centers on the following point:    

"Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man" (217).

Heidegger's essay carries the implication that philosophy should examine thinking at the heart of philosophy while firmly sustaining that philosophical thinking is not unscientific for not being science. And to show that it is not unscientific does not mean that it ought to be discursively and methodologically scientistic. The tragic consequence of failing to dislodge philosophical thinking from the imperious place of the sciences would be, Heidegger specifies, that "Being, as the element of thinking, is abandoned by the technical interpretation of thinking" (219).