Heidegger on the coming of thought

It is hardly surprising that a philosopher is concerned with thinking. However, we humans often have the funny assumption that we come up with our thoughts. However, it is much more important to understand that it is not we who come to our thoughts, but they who come to us. Heidegger also noticed this.

"We never come to thoughts. They come to us." 

– Martin Heidegger

Have you ever had the feeling that you have a new thought only to realize a few hours later that you have picked up your thought somewhere else? This happens to me at least more often, as our memory is relatively good at forgetting things. We only remember the content of what we experienced but not where or how we experienced it, which can lead to us mistaking thoughts that are not ours for our own.

But even if the original thought was ours, where did the input for this thought come from? After all, it is impossible to think about something that does not exist, or at least has its roots in reality. For example, you can think about alien life far out in space. But the universe is something that actually exists, and even the extraterrestrials that you can imagine usually have something of an animal or human quality.

Of course, this is not the end of the story, because both aliens and their spaceships have already been invented. So it takes a lot more than that to come up with something completely new. It takes the vision of a true visionary to conceive something unprecedented.

Our mind and the associated thought processes are mostly a projection of our surroundings. We see something and it suddenly appears in our thoughts. The same naturally applies to everything we hear, feel, taste or touch, in short, everything we can perceive through our senses.

So if we think that this thought has just popped into our heads, it is more likely because we have already come into contact with the thought, forgotten it and now remember it again. Because as Heidegger already knew; We never come to thoughts. They come to us.