HEIDEGGER’S SUDDEN CELEBRITY following the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927 did not go completely unnoticed in Paris, which was at the time, even more than today, the intellectual capital of Europe, and probably of the world. But to know a name is one thing; to enter into a thinker’s thought is another. While Heidegger’s masterpiece had to wait nearly sixty years before being translated in its entirety into French, reports and publications establish that distinguished university professors like Léon Brunschvicg and Xavier Léon quickly recognized, in this case, that a philosophical event had taken place in Germany.
An even more surprising fact is that in the years immediately following the publication of Sein und Zeit, a course was offered at the Sorbonne on contemporary German philosophy, published as Les Tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande.1 We do not have evidence that the last part, devoted to Heidegger, was delivered in 1928. In his foreword, the author, Georges Gurvitch, only mentions that the book he published in 1930 assembled four studies summarizing three courses that were delivered at the Sorbonne between 1928 and 1930. Clearly, since the two sections on Husserl, Lask, and Hartmann had already been published in journals, the chapter on Heidegger was the most recent.
Whatever the case may be, this confirms that Heidegger’s name was uttered at the Sorbonne before 1930 and that a first survey of his thought was presented. In retrospect, it is rather striking that this pioneering work was done by Georges Gurvitch, who was known later by generations of students only as a sociologist immersed in his own system, and who became quite distant from Heidegger’s thought. At the end of the 1920s, Gurvitch was not yet a full professor: he was only a lecturer and still affiliated with the Russian university of Prague.
The terms used to present Heidegger’s work were far from neutral. Léon Brunschvicg spoke of a “profound resonance,”2 and Georges Gurvitch presented the young German master as “the most popular philosopher in Germany today.”3 All this confirms that the impact of Sein und Zeit made Heidegger’s name known in Paris and elevated him to prominence, though he had barely reached the age of forty.
The thirty or so pages that Gurvitch devoted to Heidegger’s “descriptive analysis of existence” presented a surprising contrast between a conscientious and relatively faithful summary of Heidegger’s positions and some critical judgments that today appear peremptory, but whose coherence is worth reconstructing in light of the intellectual situation of the time.
First, the exposition adequately presented the originality of the new phenomenology, a phenomenology concerned with raising the question of being on the basis of existence alone. This questioning was not to be confused with an anthropology and was neither an idealism nor a realism.4 The being of the human being is care (Sorge), and it is through anxiety in the face of its own thrownness (Geworfenheit) that existence “finds itself again.”5 However, one must first understand how the existent is delivered over to everydayness in the reign of the “everyman” [monsieur tout le monde]: this is how Gurvitch translated das Man, in a quaint manner, but which at least avoided the jargon of the “They.” He showed clearly that humans’ existence in the world is involved—prior to the knowledge of the presence of things—in a relationship that he left untranslated [the Zuhandenes], and he recognized that the Heideggerian existent is in no way isolated in solipsism, but open to Fürsorge understood as “intentional sympathy” in Scheler’s sense. If an existence that is lost in the world is fallen [Verfallen], it is nonetheless an “indispensable mode” of human existence.6 However, “Anxiety . . . frees humans and returns them to themselves”;7 next, the theme of being-toward-death was invoked; anxiety is freedom for death: this existential interpretation leads the human being to Entschlossenheit, translated by the expression résolution résignée [resigned resoluteness], which is clearly inadequate, for the theme of moral resignation is absent from Heidegger’s text. This summary ended with several pages devoted to the theory of temporality and historicality: he showed convincingly that existence is concretized temporally and especially out of the future, and that the modes of temporalization determine the modes of existence, as well as the separation between the banal and the “genuine.” This finite temporality, reinterpreted especially on the basis of a parallel with Bergson’s theory of duration, is realized in historicality and is to be understood in terms of a truth that is prior to judgment and that is disclosed [Entdecktsein].8
Gurvitch did not conceal the schematic nature of his exposition, while emphasizing that Sein und Zeit was an unfinished work.9 Once again, one may be surprised by this last claim, but wrongly in this case, for Heidegger had indeed announced a second part that he never published.
The importance of this first account cannot be denied. But even as we acknowledge Gurvitch’s serious effort at understanding and his intellectual honesty and rigor (he also consulted Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, which had just appeared in 1929), the limits of his work are all too apparent. First, with respect to the translations, which were pedagogically inclined and devoid of jargon: some are acceptable (délaissement for Geworfenheit, malaise for Unheimlichkeit, dégradation for Verfallen); others are frankly insufficient: état émotif for Befindlichkeit, a notion that, just like that of Stimmung, was vaguely referred to “a rather emotive state of human ‘synaesthesia’”10; finally, it is clear that difficulties are merely circumvented, and not resolved: the problem of the translation of Dasein was not even raised; the Dasein des Menschen is simply “human existence”;11 we saw that the Zuhandenes was not even translated and that “resignation” was added to Entschlossenheit. In like manner, finite existence was presented as “humiliated,”12 without any textual reference that justifies this interpretation.
Beyond these problems of translation, all the more understandable given that the author was the first to really face them, what matters is to evaluate Gurvitch’s critical remarks on a philosophy he interpreted as an “existential idealism.” How is this expression to be understood? Certainly not in the Marxist sense, which is the first to come to mind. It is in the course of Gurvitch’s explication of section 43 of Sein und Zeit on the reality of being-in-the-world that the discussion of idealism and realism comes to the fore. But precisely, as Gurvitch himself seemed to recognize, Heidegger does not separate the world from human existence any more than he does human existence from the world: and he rejects the poorly formulated problematic concerning the reality of the external world. In this way, he rejects idealism and realism equally. If he seems at one point to favor idealism, it is inasmuch as idealism understands that being constitutes a “transcendental” for all beings, but he rejects the reduction of being to a pure “I” or subject.13 That is quite a tenuous basis from which to claim that Heidegger’s position is an “idealism”! Gurvitch nonetheless asserted just this, on the basis of the primacy of understanding [Verstehen], and by arguing from the fact that “all ‘understanding’ has pronounced idealist traits.”14 Nevertheless, this reintroduction of an “existential idealism” occurred at the price of a misunderstanding of the page of Sein und Zeit that was cited:15 Heidegger does not admit in any way that he is an idealist in this passage, because he denies that the a priori character of the Existent stems from any sort of consciousness in general; always placing “ideality” in quotation marks, he underlies that, just like the affirmation of “eternal truths,” such ideality, when applied to an absolute subject, belongs “to the remnants of Christian theology within the philosophical problematic that have not yet been radically eliminated.”16
One better understands Gurvitch’s aim, without for that matter being able to agree with it, when one realizes that he claimed to see a sort of Platonic dialectic in Heidegger (a reading that is all the more untenable since he attempted to justify it on the basis of Heidegger’s theory of truth: in fact, truth as “disclosure” arises prior to the idea or the ideal). This erroneous reading can be clarified in light of Gurvitch’s hermeneutic horizon, one that he himself elaborated in some “critical observations” that are not unimportant: the relation—which Heidegger did not thoroughly adopt—between phenomenal consciousness and the absolute in Fichte’s later philosophy. Situating Heidegger in this lineage (idealist but anti-Hegelian, constructivist but irrationalist), Gurvitch denounced phenomenology’s inability to ground its value judgments; the opposition between everyday existence and an existence that finds itself again seemed to him to be conditioned by a moralism that is unable to justify itself. An abyss separates the relative from the absolute.
However relevant these criticisms may be, they came too soon, so to speak, since they were addressed to an audience that was as yet innocent of any fascination with Heidegger. Paradoxically, they allow one to recognize in Heidegger—in a form still too indeterminate—a kind of ethical concern (and even a moralism) that will be later largely denied him. But there is a premonition in Gurvitch’s final judgment, when he identified “the dangers that seem to threaten Heidegger’s philosophy.”17
In the end, this very first reception reveals both an effort to read and a misunderstanding that was probably unavoidable. Despite an effort to recognize his originality, Heidegger was received as a prodigal son of German idealism who turned against Hegel but lacked the stature of a Fichte.
How does one let go of oneself so as to discover the other? The recognition of a great and difficult author is a long-term project that will require many more efforts and engender further misunderstandings.
Maurice de Gandillac, then twenty-five years old, had the privilege of participating, along with Léon Brunschvicg, Jean Cavaillès, and Emmanuel Levinas, in the famous philosophical gatherings in Davos, Switzerland, held during Easter in 1929. In his memoirs,18 he recounted with an admirable intensity the famous discussion between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger on Kant. He did not leave this grosse Disputation with a sense of uneasiness as a result of Heidegger’s allegedly arrogant (and somewhat anti-Semitic) attitude; he disagreed on this point with Mrs. Toni Cassirer, who seemed to him, in her own memoirs, to have retrospectively projected the image of a Heidegger compromised by his political activity of 1933. It is worth citing also Cavaillès’s enthusiastic reaction to this exceptional philosophical confrontation: “It was with a true intellectual joy that the listeners were able to hear Heidegger—whose enthusiasm was only strengthened by the questions and criticisms—define the meaning of Dasein in his philosophy in impressive formulations, situate the place and function of truth in metaphysical reality, and finally bring to light the role of anxiety as revelatory of human finitude and the presence of nothingness.”19
The French reader is fortunate to have been able to consult (although only in a library, since any reprinting of this “pirate” publication was unfortunately forbidden) a translation of this discussion, as well as related documents,20 which provide an idea of the intellectual grandeur and philosophical stakes of these exchanges. Heidegger defended his interpretation on the basis of the role of the schematism and transcendental imagination, and Cassirer criticized it on the basis of a conception of Kant’s architectonic that was at once more classical and more systematic, and that also emphasized practical reason (which Heidegger reduced, perhaps excessively, to the finitude of the Existent).
In the margins of this “summit,” as one might imagine, several other discussions took place in which Heidegger was also the star. Here is an anecdote that testifies to this: the young Levinas sat on a pile of snow and read some passages from Sein und Zeit out loud; it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and melted the snow; it turned out that Levinas had been sitting on a pile of manure.
Despite his youth, Levinas would also play an important role in the diffusion and explanation of Heidegger’s thought. It was in Strasbourg that he discovered Sein und Zeit, thanks to the pastor Jean Hering, a former student of Husserl.21 He became a student of Husserl22 and Heidegger23 at Freiburg in 1928–29. It was above all Heidegger who would soon fascinate him, as he went on to explain: “The great thing I found was the way in which Husserl’s path had been extended and transformed by Heidegger. To speak in the language of a tourist, I had the impression that I went to see Husserl and found Heidegger. . . . I knew right away that this was one of the greatest philosophers in history. Like Plato, like Kant, like Hegel, like Bergson.”24 The same enthusiasm was in evidence in an article published in 1931 in the journal Revue d’Allemagne.25 Beginning with an idyllic evocation of Freiburg, “the capital of phenomenology,” the text pays homage to Husserl, but celebrates Heidegger in incomparably more flattering terms: his name “is now the glory of Germany.” Levinas adds: “Endowed with an exceptional intellectual power, his teaching and his works offer the best proof of the fecundity of the phenomenological method. But already a considerable success manifests his extraordinary prestige.” The conclusion takes the praise to the extreme: “While contemplating this august gathering, I came to understand the German student I had met on the Berlin–Basel express train on my way to Freiburg. When I asked him his destination, he responded without blinking: “I am going to see the greatest philosopher in the world.”26 The course given by “the greatest philosopher in the world” that Levinas attended in the winter semester of 1928 was modestly named “Introduction to Philosophy,” but it was such a sensation that one had to arrive several hours in advance to find a seat!27 It was then that Levinas recommended that Blanchot read Heidegger. Blanchot confirmed this in the following way: “Thanks to Emmanuel Levinas—without whom, in 1927 or 1928, I would not have been able to begin to understand Sein und Zeit—reading this book really moved me intellectually. An extraordinary event just occurred: it is impossible to diminish its effect, even today, even in my memory.”28
In the conclusion of his 1930 thesis on Husserl,29 Levinas revealed the Heideggerian character of his interpretation of the “constitutional problems as ontological problems,” and he presented Heidegger’s philosophy as the bold interpretation of the “meaning of the very existence of being” as suggested by Husserlian phenomenology30: Heidegger raised the question of the ontological meaning of objectivity that Husserl had addressed without resolving it; the Husserlian overcoming of objectivism and naturalism tends in this direction, but “only Heidegger dares to face this problem deliberately.”31
In 1932, Levinas published an article, this time on the ontology of Sein und Zeit, with an absolutely laudatory preamble.32 In this article, Levinas no longer simply whets the appetites of his readers. He provided a substantial and conscientious introduction to existential ontology, and in a much different spirit than Gurvitch: the task was not first to combine some critical remarks with a schematic presentation of Heidegger’s theses, but to set aside any other point of view, so as to lay bare a radically new kind of thinking. Without mentioning Gurvitch by name, Levinas refuted him, maintaining that with respect to Heidegger’s ontology, “His undertaking is thus diametrically opposed to that of dialectical philosophy.”33 What followed were some very clear and pedagogical pages—devoid of any jargon or heavy-handedness (a fault that marred the translation of a certain Bessey, published in the same year34)—in which Levinas explained in succession: the difference between being and beings, the meaning of pre-ontological understanding, and the fact that the human’s mode of being is conceived of as Dasein in a radically finite way. Continuing with the relation to space and the world, Levinas accurately discerned Heidegger’s break with the Cartesian tradition: space is to be thought on the basis of the world, itself reconceived as an “environing” world, and any theoretical perspective on the world is drawn from a more original relation, handiness [maniabilité], or “readiness-to-hand” [Zuhandenheit]. Emphasizing the positive sense of the possible in Heidegger, Levinas next explained the role of affective disposition [Befindlichkeit] in its relation to facticity, and in particular in the exemplary case of the existential understanding opened up by anxiety, in contrast to everyday existence. He also noted that falling [Verfallen] must be interpreted in a radically nontheological sense. On all these points, Levinas’s article, without claiming to be exhaustive, exhibited a deep familiarity with Heidegger’s text and an unfailing competence, in particular with respect to the specificity of the phenomenological method (as a via negationis relative to everyday existence) and concerning intentionality comprehended within immanence (a point that was not lost on Sartre). We have already noted the absence of jargon from these translations; we may add that there are even some inventive renderings (for example, parlerie [idle talk] for Gerede).
The hermeneutic horizon here, in contrast to Gurvitch, involved the reception of a new thought. Levinas recognized the extent to which phenomenology—in Heidegger even more than in Husserl—broke with German idealism. Concerning the dynamic unity of care, he concluded: “This is indeed an excellent example of the Heideggerian mode of thinking. It is not a question of reuniting concepts by a ‘conceptual synthesis’ [synthèse pensée]. Modes of existence such as these are only accessible to effective existence itself. To think their unity is to realize it in existing.”35
Despite his perspicacity, Levinas remained nonetheless relatively conventional in comparison with the enthusiasm of Rachel Bespaloff. Unknown today, she was a friend in the 1930s of several leading intellectual luminaries, including Daniel Halévy, to whom she sent an inspired letter in the autumn of 1932. This letter, which was republished,36 first appeared at the end of 1933, thanks to Daniel Halévy himself, with the following circumspect note (suggesting that Rachel Bespaloff’s enthusiasm had surely been tempered by Heidegger’s political activity): “I believe I ought to make clear that this letter was written in September 1932.”37
The letter in question is imbued with an extraordinary spirit and intelligence: “The poignant grandeur of this philosopher is that, with an unparalleled audacity, he immediately places himself in the inextricable; he does not feign to cut the knot of Existence, but reveals its complexity to us. His conception of the world reveals this inextricable entanglement.”38 Confronting the untranslatable character of key terms in Being and Time, Rachel Bespaloff singled out Erschlossenheit (“unconcealment”? “revelation”? Perhaps rather, a “prior disclosure”) as the book’s central theme, in the sense of “a sort of immense Kunst der Fuge.” Indeed, it is in music that this ontological structure seemed to show itself most clearly to her, by unifying the two modes of disclosure (understanding and affectivity). That is why rapture [ravissement] seemed to her as important as anxiety in the revelation of ontological sensibility, the crux of which is being-toward-death. One must discern therein an opening onto “the imminent . . . possibility of existence.”39 In this way, the “voice of conscience” makes itself heard. The choice of authenticity is to be understood as the opening of the “visibility of being.”40 However, the state of total destitution to which Heidegger is led “does not go without provoking some resistance.”41 Must one accept that freedom refers only to itself? Rachel Bespaloff believed that what is lacking is a sense of a creative Fiat: “The freedom with clipped wings that unfurls its leaden flight beneath the vast and somber sky of Heidegger’s philosophy, as you know, is Necessity.”42 She concluded her letter with a magnificent allusion to the end of the second Faust: that which resonates in Heidegger with respect to Faust is the meaning of a finite temporality in which, as in music, “all that has been still resonates, in which all that shall be can already be heard.”43 A great poetic spirit permeates Heidegger’s world, a world that Rachel Bespaloff admired so profoundly, though without giving herself over to it entirely. Our description provides only an incomplete account of one of the most beautiful texts ever inspired by Heidegger, a text that testifies to the quality of this first reception, one that deserved to be retrieved from oblivion.
This enthusiasm raised expectations, only to be disappointed in the case of Benjamin Fondane: he had placed Heidegger among the “trail blazers of free thought” and discovered that the philosopher “only concerned himself with anxiety in order to describe it.”44 In sum, since Heidegger is “alas, neither a poet nor a madman,”45 it is better to turn away from existence with the courageous rationalism of Husserl. Not expressing himself as a professional philosopher, but with a freedom of tone that is still surprising, Fondane turned away from the laicized and academic version that Heidegger seemed to give to the existential anxiety of a Kierkegaard or a Dostoyevsky: “Tragedy—even that of the gods—is neither grand nor beautiful; human ‘finitude,’ its ‘abandoned and humiliated’ character, even in the mouth of a Heidegger, has a base and guttural accent that turns one’s stomach.”46
In 1932, Jean Wahl published some studies on contemporary thought, gathered under the title Vers le concret [Toward the concrete].47 This book had a certain impact, and particularly on Sartre.48 Although none of the essays in the book bear on Heidegger, he is cited approvingly and substantively several times. The figure of Heidegger is certainly present in the background of explicit discussions of James, Whitehead, and Marcel; what is important now is to verify in what terms and according to what perspectives it intervenes.
Jean Wahl’s approach was more cursory and allusive than systematic; his conceptualization was not always terribly precise, and the vagueness that affected his terminology conveyed the fortuitous character of a constant improvisation. The orientation of his book is nonetheless plainly perceptible in the preface. Against Hegel and the idealist critique of the sensible, it was necessary to return to the richness of immediacy and to the conditions of its emergence, which were not to be conceived in an “atomistic”49 way. There is an empiricism that is not naïve and that recovers, indirectly, “the feeling for the given.”50 In various though convergent forms, James’s pragmatism, Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, and Marcel’s ontological disquiet were all searching for a concreteness that occurs prior to intellectuality and which is already, at a more existential level, the discovery of the thickness of the world. It is easy to understand how much this anti-idealist and anti-intellectual inspiration was capable of seducing a whole generation surrounding Sartre.
What function do the references to Heidegger play in this reorientation of contemporary philosophy? Wahl clarified it in a somewhat curious way in the first of the notes devoted to Sein und Zeit, which is worth citing, for the German philosopher is praised less for his basic originality than for his representative role: “Heidegger became acutely aware of several aspirations of contemporary philosophy, and the clear consciousness of this obscure background, combined with his remarkable ability to translate his own observations or those of his predecessors—whether Kierkegaard, pragmatism, Dilthey or Spengler—into abstract terms, and combined as well with his grand mastery of the philosophical language he created for himself, established his work as an invaluable reference point.”51 Heidegger is commended as a great “translator,” the spokesperson of his time: while very favorable, this judgment misses the mark due to its oddly academic character, which was completely alien to the terms and themes that are most characteristic of Sein und Zeit. Readers of Gurvitch and Levinas had learned much more about Heidegger’s major work.
What most of all should be retained from Wahl’s attitude: his carelessness or his empathy toward Heidegger?
The carelessness can be easily explained by circumstances: in a preface to a work devoted to James, Whitehead, and Marcel, Wahl could not emphasize Heidegger’s originality without putting himself in some difficulty (if Heidegger is such an important philosopher, should not an independent work be devoted to him?).
The empathy is nonetheless clear, and what really matters is that by arousing the curiosity of readers, it would start them on paths of research that would sooner or later be followed, including the factical character of the a priori, the opening onto the phenomenon as it shows itself, the nonrepresentational spatiality of Dasein, the sense of immanence in the world, and the pragmatic rootedness of a profoundly temporal existence.52
Although scattered, these allusions and references are not entirely inaccurate: the pages cited concerning “existential spatiality” are more convincing than those concerning immanence (since the page referenced by Wahl concerns Befindlichkeit, which he neither cites nor explains). Heidegger’s “pragmatism” was mentioned too quickly without genuine attention given to equipmentality. Heidegger’s interpretation of time was not really considered.
On the whole, Wahl reaps more than he sows; one has the impression that he only skimmed Sein und Zeit. Yet, his book helped draw attention to Heidegger, in a sense that was quite different from the “idealism” emphasized by Gurvitch; rather from the perspective of new studies centered on the immanence of being-in-the-world and on the affective and pre-predicative conditions of existence. An allusive inspiration often offers more than an exhaustive exposition: Wahl pointed out a direction that younger talents (among whom we must not forget Merleau-Ponty) found alluring.
Yet, as if he recognized that he had not yet quite done justice to Heidegger’s originality, Wahl published—not long after Vers le concret—a very dense and important article53 that did not escape Sartre’s attention.54 Wahl correctly noticed that, however justified they may be, the connections with Kierkegaard (his critique of diversion, existential singularization through anxiety and care, a keen sense of a thrown and even guilty finitude, and an openness to an authentic temporality reconceived in the Augenblick) must be completed and counterbalanced by the role assigned to being-in-the-world and equipmentality. Nonetheless, as he did previously, he made a hasty connection with Whitehead and, moreover, his terminology (subjectivism and objectivism) was completely inappropriate. Did he nonetheless achieve his goal: to identify the “original elements” in Heidegger’s philosophy? Only partly, in the sense that he saw that existentiality and facticity are combined in a temporality that is at once “thrown” and anticipatory. In addition, he saw that Heidegger’s critique of the cogito allowed for a reappropriation of the Sum. Finally, he perceived that the sense of the world and of “environmentality” provides the possibility of overcoming both idealism and realism (an idea that we would find again in Sartre), an “existential light” dissolving pseudo-problems.55 The more interesting aspect of this article is probably not to be found in the positive effort it undertakes and leaves unfinished; it consists rather in the presentation of critical questions and remarks,56 questions that are in a sense premature (since they are addressed to a public that is incapable of fully appreciating them), but that reveal—at least some of them (in particular, concerning the reduction of spatiality to temporality, a point on which Heidegger will later rethink)—an undeniable perspicacity.
This strange hodgepodge of insight and rash judgment is suggestive: the final, but certainly debatable, presentation of the situating of Heideggerian ontological consciousness in the environing world (“familiarity, trust, communion of being with what surrounds it”57) would not fail to provoke, as a reaction, Sartre’s critique of “being-with.” Finally, the ultimate rapprochement with Jaspers (on the unity of subjectivism and objectivism) is the very kind of approximation Heidegger himself would decry as “the misunderstanding par excellence.”58
Nineteen thirty-seven and 1938 are important years in the history of the reception of Heidegger’s thought in France; 1937 could have taken on an even greater symbolic importance had Heidegger been able to realize his goal of presiding over the German delegation to the Descartes Congress. His absence did not diminish the influence of his philosophy in any way. What really mattered was Henry Corbin’s 1938 publication of the first volume of Heidegger’s writings in French, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?59
Before analyzing the composition of this volume, its choices of translation and the reasons for its success, it is useful to look back at the translator’s career. Corbin read Heidegger as early as 1930:60 “This was when Jean Baruzi planned to invite Heidegger to lecture at the ‘Union intellectuelle.’” This information, which Corbin provided much later,61 allows us to determine that at that time Heidegger was perceived not as an atheist existentialist (as would later be the case as a result of Sartre’s influence after Liberation), but rather as a thinker fulfilling a profound spiritual expectation: Baruzi was known for his work on mystics (Saint John of the Cross, in particular) and Corbin himself would not come to see any separation between his interest in Heidegger and his studies on Iranian spirituality and its “hiérohistoire.”62 In fact, a first translation of the lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” [Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?63], first rejected by the Nouvelle Revue Française,64 was published in 1931 in the journal Bifur (where Paul Nizan was an editor65); yet, although the translation was enthusiastically supported by Koyré, Corbin was unhappy with it and expressly requested that “this first attempt at translation . . . not appear in his bibliography.”66
It is worthwhile to dwell on this first attempt at translation, and first of all, on Alexandre Koyré’s introduction: “In Germany’s philosophical firmament, Martin Heidegger’s star shines with a brilliance of the highest order. Some would say it is not even a star: it is a new sun that rises.”67 Koyré next insisted on the originality of Heidegger’s philosophy, opposing (without naming him) Gurvitch, who had spoken of a weak “synthesis between irrationalism and dialectic.”68 Finally, Koyré was not afraid to praise Heidegger, in a nonconformist way (in keeping with the style of the journal), in the following terms: “For Martin Heidegger’s undertaking—and there lie its value and importance—is a formidable exercise in demolition. The analyses of Being and Time are a kind of liberating and destructive catharsis.”69
This provocative tone can be better understood by reading this journal more thoroughly, in order to realize that its orientation was anti-colonialist and avant-garde. A journal of high quality, though of an unfortunately short lifespan, Bifur included some quite beautiful photographs and some prestigious collaborations (James Joyce, Gottfried Benn, and William Carlos Williams numbered among its “foreign consultants”). An even more significant fact for us is that in the same issue as the translation of Heidegger the young Sartre published a piece called “Légende de la vérité,” an ironic allegory about rational and democratic progress that leads to colonial domination. This is not yet the great Sartre: the style remains rather academic, even if in the end an almost subversive thinking can be discerned. Why should this piece by Sartre, which in itself was so minor, attract our attention? Simply because it proves that by being published in the same issue of Bifur, Sartre could not in 1931 have been unaware (he was only twenty-six) either of the existence of Heidegger, or of the high opinion Koyré had of him, or of the emergence of the theme of the metaphysical discovery of nothingness through anxiety. This name and these themes came to stimulate his thinking long before he himself or his interpreters have tended to admit. An amusing aside: the list of contributors provided in the issue has a certain piquancy, whether deliberate or not: “Martin Heidegger. One of Germany’s greatest philosophers. Established the philosophy of nothingness. It is said that he had the idea while skiing. . . . Jean-Paul Sartre. A young philosopher. Completing a work of destructive philosophy.”
Returning to more serious matters, let us quickly examine the reasons that drove Corbin to disavow his first translation of the lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” The first version does not give the impression of carelessness when one limits oneself to the lecture’s “literary” passages, but the technical lexicon of Heideggerian ontology has clearly not been mastered: Dasein is translated as “existence” without any further clarification; the term l’existant [the existent] is also used to translate Seiende; more problematically, this same word is also translated as l’Être [being], which is definitely an error.70
A serious reworking of his translation and several meetings with the Master in Freiburg in 1934 and 1936 ultimately enabled Corbin to produce this “historic” work, whose virtues, limits, and considerable influence we shall now consider.
The first quality that stands out is that Corbin provides, in a single work of reasonable size, selections that were in a sense authorized by Heidegger, since he wrote a prologue for the translation that indicates he approved and sponsored it. Since the work in question is difficult, endowed with the prestige of originality and preceded by authorized complimentary assessments, one can imagine how timely this volume was: it became the only textual access to the Heideggerian mysteries. Above all, it is clear that the choice of texts received the author’s approval. Corbin explains these choices in his foreword, accompanied by warnings inspired or dictated by Heidegger himself, as though the texts presented were vulnerable from the outset to major misreadings or misunderstandings.
Concerning the 1929 lecture, two misreadings are to be avoided: it is neither a “philosophy of anxiety” nor a nihilistic work. Of course, these warnings, far from preventing such misreadings, would only provoke them, not to mention that the capitalization of the word “Nothingness” made its constant evocation fascinating. Corbin claims that the second piece in the collection, On the Essence of Ground [Vom Wesen des Grundes],71 which has today been unfortunately forgotten to some extent, enables one to better understand the “structure of transcendence.” In fact, it is a text that opens every foundation onto its groundless origin, with freedom being understood as Dasein’s instituting of its possibilities. Some passages from Being and Time follow, thirteen out of eighty-three sections: on this point, as well, Corbin highlights the author’s agreement as regards the difficult selection of the sections: sections 46 through 53 on “being-toward-death” and sections 72 through 76 on temporality and historicity. What is explicitly invoked here is the accessibility of these passages: and if, on the one hand, one can indeed understand why section 77 was left out (since Dilthey’s and Yorck’s correspondence is, as it were, overly specialized), on the other hand, nothing is said to justify the omission of the introduction and the first part of the work, which would have been very useful for understanding Heidegger’s new method and its connection with phenomenology. In his clarification, Heidegger insists on the fact that the truth of being is not an anthropological question and—even more decisively—emphasizes its rootedness, since the dawning of Greek philosophy, in the horizon of time, namely, “the experience of the present and of pure permanence.”72 It is unlikely that many readers realized that a whole reinterpretation of the history of metaphysics was engaged. The existential character of the sections included was more important than overly elliptical cautionary notes.
In the last four paragraphs of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger highlighted the reasons for his “repetition” of Kant’s questions in terms of a fundamental ontology. The translator sought to clear Heidegger of “any charge of anthropologism or anthropocentrism.” This is a new warning clearly suggested by the author himself, who would be so intent ten years later to distinguish himself from the tradition of humanism. But the irony of the situation is that by translating Dasein as “réalité-humaine” or “human-reality,” Corbin does not make the readers’ task any easier. A second ambiguity is added to the first, concerning metaphysics: in what sense is Heidegger still a metaphysician? With regard to these two crucial points, one must admit that the ambiguities outweigh the certainties, especially upon reading a phrase like this one: “The necessary question for a laying of the ground for metaphysics, namely, that of what man is, is taken over by the metaphysics of Dasein.”73
As for the lecture on Hölderlin that concludes the volume, Corbin emphasizes its character as an “existential analysis” and denies that it is only an excursus. Even here, his denial, hidden behind by a convenient phrase, highlights rather than conceals a significant difficulty. However cognizant we may be today of Hölderlin’s importance for Heidegger’s thought, in 1938 this reference could only have confused readers. It was not known that Heidegger had taught whole courses on Hölderlin74—a “revolutionary” innovation from a professor of philosophy, and successor to Husserl—during the winter semester of 1934–35, that is, within a very particular political context.75
If these few points facilitate our appreciation of the relevance and care that attended these “selected writings,” we can also begin to see the obverse of these qualities and circumstances: cuts, certain omissions, and most importantly, one particularly inopportune translation choice (which we will presently specify), all warped the understanding of texts that were already dense and difficult in their original language.
We should nonetheless take note of Corbin’s reservations, which he stated thus: “In the perilous passage from one language to another, the translator must efface himself and have only one concern: to be a thought’s faithful servant.”76 The intention is laudable, and one could not rightly claim that Corbin, with all the virtues of the pioneer, was completely unworthy of the initial project—quite the contrary. Yet, how does he justify his most debatable choice: “human reality” [réalité-humaine] for Dasein? He sought to avoid “unusual or irritating neologisms” as though he had a premonition of the whole future of excesses in this regard.77 This is a precaution that is in principle respectable and that he even reinforces by the use of a hyphen, arguing that Heidegger himself makes use of it systematically. Further, he explains that “human reality” in the quite specific sense of existentiality is precisely not one reality among others, first “posited” and then qualified with the predicate “human.” Despite these explanations, which invite the reader to understand the expression as an integral whole, Corbin paradoxically requires the reader to keep in mind—beyond this “human reality”—a transcendence that is precisely not an anthropological reality! His predicament is obvious, and he finds himself obligated to invoke the “intention” included in the expression as an apology of sorts. If only Corbin could have known that the ingenious compromise he believed he had found would be precisely the expression Sartre would use in a humanistic sense, he would probably have sought another solution or avoided translating Dasein.
It is a fact that the fate of certain translations, whether “good” or “bad,” escapes their authors. The translation of Dasein as “human reality,” one must admit, is atrocious. By contrast, Corbin ingeniously unearthed the Old French adjective historial,78 which, in addition to echoing existential (the ontological version of the existentiell), allows one to differentiate between what belongs to the study of history [historisch] and what is intimately linked to historicality properly speaking. This discovery was salutary and would not be contested until later. Other cases raise fewer problems, though without being completely satisfactory: for instance, Corbin does recognize that la réalité-révélée [revealed reality] for Erschlossenheit impacts la decision-résolue [resolute decision] for Entschlossenheit, but his reference to “reality” seems almost obsessional, for one encounters it again in his translations of Vorhandenheit as réalité-des-choses-subsistantes [reality-of-subsisting-things] and of Zuhandenheit as realité-ustensile [instrumental-reality].
The Corbin translation was groundbreaking in several ways: its chronological priority is not the most decisive factor; we saw how the author’s patronage, the translator’s scrupulousness, and the range of the texts he chose gave the event a kind of exceptional, almost solemn, character, which was further strengthened by the circumstances. With the war years, Liberation, and the task of reconstruction, new translations of Heidegger were neither encouraged nor solicited. The very success of Corbin’s book,79 while reinforcing further the aura surrounding Heidegger, helped produce the illusion that it could serve as a sufficient basis; an illusion whose provisional character would persist for a long time . . . In addition, Sartre’s rise to prominence would contribute further to this “unfortunate effect,” which was neither anticipated nor wanted.
With respect to the impact of this translation and its considerable influence upon generations of students, evidence abounds: Jean-Pierre Faye and Edgar Morin said they discovered Heidegger thanks to this volume, which Jean Beaufret referred to often without contempt,80 since it was for him, too, a first step in an initiation with Heidegger’s thought that he undertook in Lyon during the Occupation, with the help of Joseph Rovan.81 Sartre, for his part, wrote in February 1940: “Granted, if Corbin hadn’t published his translation of Was ist Metaphysik?, I shouldn’t have read it. And if I hadn’t read it, I shouldn’t have spent last Easter trying to read Sein und Zeit.”82 We will return later to the context and meaning of this “admission,” which confirms, at the very least, the role played by Corbin’s work, which was clearly more influential than Alphonse de Waelhens’s book, which should also be mentioned,83 since it served for a long time as the only access to Heidegger for non-Germanists who were cruelly deprived of a translation of Sein und Zeit—a situation that would persist for a long time. A straightforward summary, which was uninspired but conscientious, de Waelhens’s work was originally a dissertation defended at Louvain in 1938. It had success (it was even cited by Sartre84) and went through several printings, for the very simple reason already mentioned: by force of necessity, the “de Waelhens” became a kind of gift of Providence in the 1950s for professors and others.
In his foreword, de Waelhens is unfairly and peremptorily harsh with respect to the first French reception of Heidegger, and particularly critical of Corbin, whom he criticized for his hermeticism and for the exclusively existential orientation of the texts that had been selected85 (as if he foresaw the existentialist fad): this was a first muted polemic, more convincing because of its good intentions than because of de Waelhens’s own performance. Let us concede, however, that Waelhens did not resort to jargon and was right to leave Dasein untranslated rather than give in to the temptation of “human-reality.”
Our epilogue will first take us back to the year 1937, although Heidegger is involved here only because of a missed opportunity that takes on symbolic value retrospectively as a result of the text he wrote for the occasion. The opportunity missed was a trip to Paris for the Descartes Congress, a trip that had to be canceled. The text, Wege zur Aussprache, was published in an obscure, locally produced volume86 that was unknown to the French public until relatively recently.
With respect to the Descartes Congress, what is certain is that Heidegger was officially invited and that he could not or would not accept the invitation. His version was that he was removed from the delegation by the German authorities: “This seemed so strange in Paris that the leadership of the congress there—Professor Bréhier at the Sorbonne—inquired on his own why I did not belong to the German delegation. I responded that the leaders of the congress should direct this inquiry to the Reich’s Ministry of Education. After some time, a request came from Berlin that I belatedly join the delegation. I refused to do so.”87 Victor Farias challenged this account on the basis of a letter of July 14, 1937, to Professor Metz, then rector of the University of Freiburg, in which Heidegger lays out his idea for German participation in the Congress: to respond to the French “liberal-democratic concept of science.”88 Did Heidegger himself make a discreet trip to Paris in 1935 in order to prepare for this conference to which he attached so much importance? Farias claims he did;89 but we have found no convincing evidence of this:90 Heidegger always claimed to have been to Paris for the first time in 1955, on Jean Beaufret’s invitation, as a stopover on his way to Cerisy.
What seems to have been decisive in his restated 1937 refusal to join the German delegation is the fact that the leadership of this delegation had been granted to Hans Heyse, and not to him; but it is not impossible that he realized that the “non-Aryan” professors were excluded, in particular Husserl; and that the “military” character of the said delegation threatened to put him in an awkward position with respect to his French colleagues and the international public. In this particular case, whatever the motives for his abstaining, it was prudent, and “he was saved some embarrassment.”91
For its part, the text develops the theme of the entente between France and Germany, based on the mutual recognition of their common heritage and their particular virtues. It is indeed a dignified work, but its style is edifying and somewhat solemn. Its content cannot be understood without reference to the Descartes Congress. Even the translation of the title was a problem: as always, Heidegger did not choose his words by chance. Ausprache can of course mean explanation, discussion, reciprocity, but we must also hear in it the emphasis of language, or one’s way of expressing oneself.92 The opening to the alterity of the Other on the basis of a mutual self-affirmation prefigures, to some extent, the orientation of the later “Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer.” Descartes and Leibniz were chosen as emblematic figures of philosophical modernity, but without any aggressive, “nationalistic” overtones. Today, in light of the courses on Nietzsche, how can we avoid reading, between the lines, what is suggested by the connection between the Cartesian conception of nature and the essence of technology? This suggestive thought reached well beyond the political circumstances of 1937. In any case, the call to meditate together on the legacy of Greece is made in terms that in no way correspond to the official exaltation of the unique German Lebensraum. Let the text speak for itself: “If we reflect upon the possible greatness and standards of western ‘culture,’ then we immediately recall the historical world of the early Greeks. And just as easily do we then forget that it was not by means of an encapsulation in their own ‘space’ that the Greeks became what they were. It was only due to the sharpest, though creative, confrontation with what was a most foreign and difficult world for them—the Asiatic world—that this people was able to become great in the brief course of its historical singularity and greatness.”93
It is an irony of history, in this case both mischievous and favorable, that this dignified (and quite discreet) message occurred in the context of Heidegger’s “absence” from the German delegation to Paris, in the very same year when the preparation of the volume that would assure his postwar glory in France was being completed. The philosopher’s absence, far from hurting him, produced some results for which the author had sagely prepared the ground. Until now, this fact has gone largely unnoticed. Of course, it is unfortunate—and this misfortune came with a heavy price, even too heavy—that Heidegger had not practiced this virtue of abstention a few years earlier. At the very least, he was beginning to learn the lessons from bitter experience and was indirectly compensated, over many years, by many expressions of friendship and support in France, while awaiting the belated return of the repressed.
But this return was also made possible by the limited knowledge in the first debates—which were already lively and thorough—about Heidegger’s political activity of 1933, which took place after Liberation. Furthermore, this return should not eclipse the philosophical issues or cause us to forget the richness of the first reception of Heidegger in France, a reception that is today largely unknown. As early as 1932, René Char had heard of Heidegger from Tristan Tzara’s wife;94 in 1936, Heidegger’s name even began to seep into Le Senne’s classroom in Paris.95
If curiosity and enthusiasm prevailed, some resistance was also beginning to take shape. Hence, in the 1930s, some Marxist intellectuals such as Georges Politzer,96 Paul Nizan, and Henri Lefebvre were rejecting Heidegger’s philosophical positions.97 At first attracted by these positions, Bataille later distanced himself from them and even became disgusted by them.98 Another axis of resistance, this one Catholic, was developing much more discreetly not far from our borders.99
Long before Jean Beaufret, and even before Sartre, brilliant minds and precursors whose perspicacity deserves to be commended produced pioneering works and interpretive advances that were for the most part remarkable. In different ways, Gurvitch, Koyré, Levinas, Wahl, Corbin, and even Aron100 laid the foundations for an understanding of this thought and lit the first fires of a paradoxical glory that Sartre, long after his time in Berlin,101 would brilliantly establish.