Heidegger Revisted

For Martin Heidegger, "[t]he font of genuine thought is astonishment, astonishment at and before being. Its unfolding is that careful translation of astonishment into action which is questioning. For Heidegger, there is a fatal continuity between the assertive, predicative, definitional, classificatory idiom of Western metaphysics and that will to rational-technological mastery over life which he calls nihilism...In Heidegger's 'questioning of being,' an activity so central that it defines, or should define, the humane status of man, there is neither enforcement nor a programmatic thrust from inquisition to reply (a thrust unmistakably encoded in syllogistic and formal logic). To question truly is to enter into harmonic concordance with that which is being questioned. Far from being initiator and sole master of the encounter, as Socrates, Descartes, and the modern scientist-technologist so invariably are, the Heideggerian asker lays himself open to that which is being questioned and becomes the vulnerable locus, the permeable space of its disclosure."

--George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (1989), 54-55.