Heidegger on Gelassenheit

Martin Heidegger’s Conversation On A Country Path About Thinking (1966a) deals with the concept of Gelassenheit experienced as the essence of thinking, a thinking that is not intended as representing, as self-determining thinking, but is conceptualized as “meditative thinking.” Meditative thinking is the kind of thinking that thinks the truth of being, that belongs to being and listens to it.  To understand Gelassenheit as the essence of thinking means to have a different and more radical insight into the essence of who we are. The aim of this paper is to investigate what Heidegger means by Gelassenheit, but not proposing an answer to a “what is” question. This paper is instead an attempt to enact a thinking transformation that through a close reading of Heidegger’s work will lead us on that path towards Gelassenheit, on which a different understanding of man’s innermost being can be glimpsed.