IN WHAT SENSE did the 1950s reveal a generally favorable, although unavoidably ambiguous, reception of Heidegger’s thought in France? Although one will discover it gradually in this chapter, one already detects that the principal criterion of this ambiguity could not reside exclusively in the division between the partisans and the opponents of that thought: that would be to confuse the scope of a philosophy with the kind of influence associated with an ideology or a political party. Of course, I will have to make room for the reservations or attacks. But one has to take other disagreements into account, and know also that one needs to differentiate between the orientations that motivated the different positions and the ambiguities they may have harbored. The existential theme would be accompanied or supplanted by other perspectives: the approach to the Sacred, the interpretation of metaphysics, and even (to a lesser extent) the question of planetary technology. This was a complex reception for a rich thought: increasingly, Heidegger’s thought invited numerous approaches. As one moved further away from Liberation and the existentialist fad, the question of the uniqueness of that thought appeared more clearly, which was a favorable factor for Jean Beaufret’s work. It is in this sense that one can speak of a certain “bright spell” (especially since the 1950s, which were devoted to economic reconstruction and the constitution of a new Europe resisting the Soviet threat, turned its back on the old demons of fascism and freed itself from the obsession with political purges). Undoubtedly the French university was still largely opposed to the dissemination of Heidegger’s thought, but new translations gradually revealed a “Heidegger II,” even though the masterpiece of 1927 was not yet translated. This was quite a paradoxical situation! A gap appeared between the interpreters who remained concerned with Being and Time1 and a new generation mainly interested in the critique of the metaphysical tradition. Jean Beaufret refused to take sides: he placed his influence in Paris at the service of Heidegger’s name and work, whose prestige grew (in a nonlinear expansion, provoking different kinds of resistance) before new divisions appeared in 1961–62. In the same way, indeed, as one could accept that the nineteenth century only ended in 1914, I will here argue—on a clearly more modest chronological scale—that the death of Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Pierre Faye’s revival of the political polemics, and the publication of Totality and Infinity made 1961 a caesura that concluded the period that we are now going to examine.
We may not have given enough attention, however, to the rejections or hostile reactions that accompanied the first waves of Heidegger’s reception in France. The reason is simple: even if pioneers like Georges Gurvitch or Rachel Bespaloff expressed reservations, curiosity or admiration was nonetheless predominant, which was also the case for the educated public. Only among the Marxists did one find an open hostility, and even then only after the USSR entered the war. In fact, it was at the time of Liberation that the fad of existentialism, almost automatically—through its very intensity—provoked reactions and rejections. Their immediate or raucous expressions in the press were not necessarily the most interesting or meaningful for the future.
It would be false to give the impression that these reservations or oppositions came only from the extreme left (even if it did maintain a “hard line” toward Heidegger).2 Thus, for example, Éric Weil, author as we recall of a remarkable article in Les Temps Modernes on “Le cas Heidegger,” published his thesis in 1951, called “Logique de la philosophie,”3 the style and contents of which made no concession to existentialism, in general, or to Heidegger in particular. He recognized the importance and “complexity” of Heidegger’s philosophy in passing,4 but only to situate them within the limits of the category of the finite and more precisely of a philosophy of transcendental reflection on the “conditions of possibility of existence.”5 Weil referred to Heidegger’s analyses of temporality, but not without emphasizing their “disputable” nature,6 due to the fact that their horizon was limited to individual consciousness. It would be difficult to find a stronger resistance, which is expressed so clearly and firmly, in the space of a few lines, to Heideggerian themes and to their dissemination into France.
But the hostility toward Heidegger’s thought has worn many different masks, including that of satire.
At the beginning of the fifties, Sartre paid attention only to his debate with the communists. Heidegger, on the contrary, knew enough not to expect anything from them. This is why, it seems, he was shaken by an unexpected attack (perhaps by its form more than by its content), from none other than Gabriel Marcel. During Sartre’s short visit, Heidegger would speak of nothing else than Marcel’s play.7 Indeed, it was in a play, La Dimension Florestan, that the Master found himself ridiculed, in a very unusual attack for a German academic who was not used to seeing his own character portrayed on stage!
In fact, it is quite unlikely that Heidegger could have heard the French radio program and have been acquainted with the play whose text was published only five years later. It is more likely that he was alerted by Jean Beaufret and all the more shocked since—unable to identify the words of the polemics—he was suffering an “assault” that was as strange as unexpected. The incident, which was quickly forgotten, seems really unimportant today. It is, however, interesting to refer to the text of La Dimension Florestan to reveal the “grievances” that fueled Gabriel Marcel’s caustic irony.
This comedy in three acts is located in a little town in South Germany, and the hero is Professor Hans Walter Dolch, “the most notable champion of contemporary atheism,”8 who is protected by a vigilant housekeeper, Fräulein Schmuck and surrounded by a little court: a countess, a certain Frau Melitta, and a priest, Father Plantille. This is how the latter defines the main work of the Master: “The profound work titled Die Wacht am Sein is only a set of precautions meant to protect the integrity of being from those who, in one way or another, infringe upon its sacred essence.”9 The purpose of the—more or less successful—lazzi of the play was thus first and foremost the sacralization of a de-theologized being by a Master who complacently maintained an esoteric “guard” [Wacht], around both being and his own person. The satire was reinforced by a more direct attack against the Heideggerian abuse of tautology. Let us examine this exchange:
THE COUNTESS: you said, the pear pears, and you added, with an even more imperious authority, that the apple apples.
FRAU MELITTA (SARDONICALLY): Somebody might be tempted to ask whether the peach is the act of peaching.10
What stinging sarcasm! Was this some kind of joke or some clever story? If it was a joke, it was too intellectual; in the other case, it was hardly funny; it just brought a smile to a small circle of friends in the know (the satire is a victim of the esotericism it denounces). One easily guesses why the play was never performed: there would have been no audience. It is highly unlikely that the listeners of the national channel would have been able to identify the subtle allusions to texts that were not yet translated. Presumably they were able to at least appreciate the facile anti-German nuances. Who at that time could understand the satire of Heidegger’s use of tautology? The allusion to the text called “The Thing,” which would be transparent today, would only have been missed by almost everyone: not yet translated, the lecture “Das Ding” appeared in Germany only in 1954.11 It was based on a lecture, first held in Bremen, then in Bühlerhöhe, and then again on June 6, 1950, at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Gabriel Marcel, whose German was excellent, was able to read it in the yearbook of that academy.12
The underlying philosophical stakes obviously escaped the readers. Nonetheless, this matter shed light on a strong Catholic opposition to atheist existentialism, as well as on reservations (undoubtedly more common) toward Heidegger’s hermeticism.13 Marcel also unwittingly revealed, through his violent reaction, a personal aversion (should we go as far as to say jealousy?) to both the style and the problematic of the later Heidegger. However, he insisted on qualifying his opposition.14 Similarly, the attitude of most of the Christian intellectuals had nothing in common with the monolithic approach of the communists. Heidegger found both support and opposition among the Christian intellectuals.
Christian intellectuals had no reason, in theory, to welcome a thought that was most often presented as an atheistic existentialism, destroying the metaphysical tradition and offering only resolute decision to assume finite freedom as a remedy to anxiety. Consequently, it is not surprising that a massive line of resistance would have formed on the basis of neo-Thomism. The very title of Étienne Gilson’s work L’être et l’essence, published in 1948, is significant. We can see it as an indirect, but quite firm, critique of Being and Nothingness. The main theme of the book is indeed the demonstration of the noxious character of the modern dissociation of essence and existence: the reaction against absolute idealism produced existentialism, and the intellectualistic excess provoked, almost mechanically, a backlash.15 It was necessary to go back to the Supreme Existence that gives sense to the essential determinations of life: “Existence is not the disease of essence; on the contrary it is its very life.”16 However, this refutation was directed mostly at existentialism and not at Heidegger in particular: he is barely named in the first edition of L’être et l’essence.17 Gilson would clarify later: “In fact, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy did not play any role in this story and I have only included it arbitrarily to respond to contemporary interests.”18
It is indeed, in a second appendix, published in 1962 but certainly conceived earlier,19 that Gilson felt it was necessary to answer “a few questions” concerning existentialism. He made an important terminological concession in this response. If he could rewrite the book, the author would translate ens by “étant.” This did not change anything essential, but it revealed the entry into the French philosophical vocabulary, in the 1950s, of a word whose introduction was clearly attributable to Heidegger’s translators and principally to Jean Beaufret (who identified this terminological development from 1946 on).20
Gilson confessed that he was unfamiliar with Heidegger’s thought, and his 1962 clarifications only confirmed this admission. Even if he confessed his hesitations and proceeded with “extreme caution,”21 Gilson distanced himself from a thought that puzzled him while he recognized its qualities and dignity. Although he continued to speak of existentialism with respect to Heidegger, without quite freeing himself from the “misunderstandings of that time,”22 he managed to dissociate Heidegger’s case from Sartre’s. Whereas he was quite severe when judging Sartre’s inconsistencies and “subjectivism,” he was much more circumspect with respect to Heidegger. Furthermore, his references proved that he had carefully read “What Is Metaphysics?” but also the postscript whose translation appeared in 1959 in the Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (published by the Dominicans of the Saulchoir),23 as well as the seminar on “The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics.”24
Gilson clearly discerned several features that distinguish Heidegger’s thought: the rootedness of his thought in the German language,25 the openness and motility of his questioning (it “may not have reached its limits”),26 the new and disconcerting (for a classical mind) problematic of the overcoming of metaphysics.27 Far from engaging in polemics, Gilson limited himself to preparing the ground and marking these distinctions with an unquestionable intellectual honesty. While accepting the definition of metaphysics as onto-theology,28 he acknowledged not understanding the goal of overcoming it, since he conceived of it only as unsurpassable. There was a radical disagreement (or misunderstanding) on the notion of “overcoming.” Gilson did not seem to discern the most singular specificity of the Heideggerian undertaking, for he reduced the historicity of metaphysics to a “given empirical fact.”29 However, what he did perceive remarkably was a twofold incompatibility between Thomism and Heidegger: on the one hand, in the former, there is no equivalent to an analytic of Dasein,30 and on the other hand, the latter thinks the ontological difference through a radical distancing from all beings, whereas Saint Thomas returned to the pure act of being starting from beings in order to ground them.31
Consequently, Gilson recognized Heidegger as a “genuine philosopher”32 (this is not insignificant coming from someone who had such high expectations); however, at the same time he did not agree with the German Master’s critique of metaphysics as overly dependent on representation. Heidegger should nonetheless know that he has “unknown friends”33 on the path of a negative ontology!
This mixture of enthusiasm and hesitation was already shared by the anonymous author of the presentation of the postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?” in 1959, in a journal edited by the Saulchoir Dominicans. The publication of this text, presented as a document, certainly qualified as a “milestone in the history of the growing influence of Heidegger’s work in France within the neo-Thomist circles.”34 This hesitation was due to being cautious: “In our presentation of this document, it is out of the question to take sides for or against Heidegger’s thought.”35 This caution excluded the all too quick parallels with Christian thought, whether Thomist or Pascalian;36 yet, it became interesting to the extent that the suspicions of atheism or nihilism had to be set aside. Avoiding the “hasty baptisms,”37 the author of the presentation noted both that the ontological difference had been accounted for—according to Thomist doctrine—in the analogy of being and that despite this important divergence, the thinking of being could never leave a Thomist indifferent. The reason for this was mentioned discreetly: redoubtable common enemies—rationalism, positivism, analytic philosophy—surrounded the horizon.38
Other signs testified to an attentive listening to Heideggerian themes in Christian circles. In March 1955, Recherches et débats, the journal of the Centre catholique des intellectuels Français (Catholic Center of French Intellectuals), welcomed Henri Birault, who gave a substantial, detailed, and documented presentation on “La foi et la pensée d’après Heidegger”39 (Faith and thought in Heidegger’s work): this impartial account, which was very attentive to all the published texts and even to the lecture “Theologie und Philosophie,” which was unpublished at the time,40 focused on showing that far from any militant atheism, Heidegger clearly delineated the respective domains of philosophy, guardian of the question of being, and of theology, science of the revealed Word.41 Birault went further (and one then could realize how much he was attuned to the thought he was presenting): it became increasingly clear that Heidegger endeavored to overcome, along with metaphysics, the theology that it produced (a theology that should be distinguished from the strictly Christian theology involving interpretation of the Word). Heidegger came to unmask metaphysical theology (or the theologizing metaphysics) as a “phenomenon of profanation.”42 There is a resource available to the believer, although the thinking of being does not pass judgment on the question of God. Though Birault remained cautious, his presentation was as favorable as possible to Heidegger and bound to encourage the Christian intellectuals to read him: “This thought leads us to the vivid sources of being and the Sacred: they express the original deity which, at a certain level, cannot be shared by the philosopher’s God and the Christian God.”43 Birault thus confirmed, though more discreetly, the both pedagogical and mediating breakthrough he had achieved as early as 1951 in a brilliant essay in which he presented Heidegger’s thought as a preparation for a “possible return of God” and concluded as follows: “It is a private matter for each person to determine whether this Return is still possible and whether this Protection appears sufficient.”44
Anecdotally, let us mention Jean Guitton, who visited Heidegger in October 1956 for a lecture in Freiburg on “Pascal and Leibniz.” His narrative, which was lively and picturesque, faithfully reporting the now consecrated ritual of the visit to the Master, revealed a respectful regard toward a meditative philosopher, who was attached to the poetical experience of thought, sensitive to the quality of light, the gravity of words, the message of the country path. There are no criticisms inspired by Catholicism. On the contrary, Heidegger’s return to the pre-Socratics along with his sense of the Sacred are perceived in their religious dimension (confirmed by the recourse to the mystics and mostly to Eckhart).45
In 1957, Roger Munier, who himself belonged to the Society of Jesus, thanked the Reverend Fathers Fessard and Jeannière46 for their assistance with the translation of the “Letter on Humanism.” During the winter of 1955–56, Paul Ricoeur gave a lecture at the Centre catholique des intellectuels français, on rue Madame. His lecture was devoted to Heidegger’s text, Nietzsche’s Word: “God is Dead”: he gave a conscientious but pedestrian reading of Holzwege, a text which had not yet been translated, leading to a confrontation between Jean Wahl and Jean Beaufret during the discussion.47 Some time before, in September 1955, Ricoeur agreed to participate in the Cerisy conference, at which Heidegger was the star and where several clergymen also attended: the Abbots Morel and Pépin, Fathers Fessard, Kleiber, and Léger,48 not to mention the canon priest and psychoanalyst Vergotte49. Gabriel Marcel was also present and was to play the role of Heidegger’s main interlocutor.
In this respect, an unexpected confirmation can be added to the story. Publishing La Dimension Florestan, in 1958, Marcel insisted on making a clarification in order to reduce the polemical character of his play. He first noted quite strangely that during his first meeting with Heidegger in Freiburg, he did not have the “slightest impression of being in the presence of a ridiculous character.”50 Then, referring to Cerisy: “I was impressed, as well as everyone there, by a certain simplicity or even modesty, almost a naivety that made a great impression upon us all. The grotesque character of La dimension Florestan does not look at all like the perfectly authentic thinker whose language has nevertheless given me the occasion of writing a comedy.”51 Is this a retraction? On the personal level, certainly; yet, Marcel remained critical, by focusing his attacks on the dangers of esotericism.52 This was a compromise position that allowed him to avoid a deeper debate (in particular, on the expected question of the approach to the Sacred). And he shot Parthe’s arrow by making an allusion, in a bittersweet way, to “a thought intoxicated with itself and victories all too often illusory.”53
Between Gilson and Marcel, and between Guitton, Ricoeur, and the Dominicans of the Saulchoir, the differences of form, style, and temperament were patent. However, with respect to the content, these Christian intellectuals shared the same reservations, mixed with interest or even fascination, toward a Heidegger who was then completely dissociated from Sartre and from existentialism. Perplexity won out over hostility; and when the latter simmered, it proceeded cautiously, for there is no worse ridicule in Paris, even in the religious circles,54 than to appear unable to understand a philosophy that is championed by many intellectuals, and that benefited in 1955 from a kind of discreet and unexpected consecration, thanks to the conference at Cerisy, which was the culmination of the Master’s surprise visit to France.
“One thing that struck Heidegger in Paris in 1955 was to have actually been there. Before he went through the gate of the gare de l’Est, he paused for a moment and said, pensively: Ich bin doch in Paris. Mrs. Heidegger asked him: And so, what’s your impression? He responded: Ich bin erstaunt—über mich!”55 It was with these words that Jean Beaufret began his recollection of Heidegger’s first stay in Paris. The significant events of such visit included encounters with René Char, Georges Braque, Jacques Lacan, then the conference at Cerisy.
The trip was carefully planned by Jean Beaufret with the collaboration of Kostas Axelos.56 To have Heidegger stay in Paris incognito, where everything is very public, was quite an undertaking; but the capital was deserted in August: the scheduling itself guaranteed the success of this operation. It was indeed an undeniable success since the Master was able to visit the Louvre and the château de Versailles in exceptional conditions, even having a drink on the sidewalk of the Café de Flore.57 In addition to sightseeing, Heidegger wanted to meet with Char and Braque,58 meetings that Jean Beaufret devoted himself to organizing. Kostas Axelos always served as the interpreter. Jean Beaufret had generously loaned his flat on passage Stendhal, in Ménilmontant, to the Heidegger couple. This is where the legendary dinner took place: “sous le marronnier” [under the chestnut tree], with René Char (and in the company of Axelos and Munier).
Most readers will be appropriately surprised that a chestnut tree could grow in the middle of a Parisian flat, which would be hardly more surrealistic than the presence of Heidegger in Paris. Let us clarify that at the time when this dinner took place, there were still some areas of greenery in Paris: the passage Stendhal (in fact a cul-de-sac) was one of them. Still spared by the property developers, those vultures of modernity, and mostly visited by sparrows and khâgne students, the place was quite calm due to its remoteness from all the busy centers of the capital. The modest apartment, wallpapered with books, located on the second floor of a building, included the use of a terrace that would have had no charm, even in summer, without the protection of the impressive foliage of a chestnut tree, which became famous thanks to a text written by Jean Beaufret, and published eight years later as a tribute to René Char.
Despite its title (“L’entretien sous le marronnier” [dialogue under the chestnut tree]), this text was not a narrative of that famous dinner. It took it as a pretext for a pleasant though quite solemn stylization of the meeting between the Poet and the Thinker. Some remarks, however,59 in addition to another short account by Beaufret,60 enable us to get a sense of a supper that could have been a fiasco: there was the language barrier (Char did not speak German and Heidegger refused to utter even one word in French), but there was above all the danger inherent in any “summit meeting” between great men who have to get to know each other (a formal atmosphere or shyness, and the fact that they had little in common). However, the heat in August, the simple charm of the place, and above all the kindness of Jean Beaufret and of his friends made the task easy: “We joyfully ate in the summer night, thoroughly enjoying Mrs. Heidegger’s cooking. Melville and Billy Budd happened to come up during the conversation and both discovered a common admiration. Char, who was so prompt to withdraw when faced with a disagreement, felt at ease and spoke while Heidegger listened. I can still hear him saying: “The poem has no memory. What I am being asked is to go forward.”61 For once, this was a fruitful exchange: the poet spoke boldly, the thinker listened; the casting of the roles suited the foreign guest, who was in fact quite shy and who had no desire to play the role of the great professor in such circumstances; moreover, his appreciation of a reciprocal listening and of the exceptional relationship—at once frank and fraternal—between the poet and thinker, was confirmed. The latter becomes the silent guardian of memory, “even if poetry remains a resource for the thinker.”62 Char was obviously flattered to have been invited and recognized, and appreciated not having to be lectured: “This is really the first time, he said referring to Heidegger, that a man of this stature has not attempted to explain to me what I am or what I do.”63
There is less to tell about his visit to Braque in his house in Varengeville, on a hill that dominates the sea, near Dieppe: the two great men hardly exchanged any words: “Take a stroll and look at everything. Braque’s frail condition confined him to an armchair. It is only when we left that he stood up to accompany his visitor as far as the middle of the green in front of the workshop.”64
Perhaps I should yield the floor to a poet who did not attend the meeting:
Braque
What was he thinking about
What was he dreaming of
in front of the sea, this nude model?65
The first castle Heidegger occupied for five or six days with Jean Beaufret and Kostas Axelos was Jacques Lacan’s manor house in Guitrancourt. It was a “very pleasant stay.”66 However, we wonder if meaningful discussions really took place between the psychoanalyst and the thinker. Axelos’s response was negative: they remained at the level of friendly small talk67 and pleasant walks (in particular, a picturesque visit to Chartres cathedral).68
Finally, the actual purpose of the Master’s visit to France was the meeting that took place from August 27 to September 4, 1955, in the castle of Cerisy, in Normandy. The program of those famed ten days was described only in vague terms, without giving the names of the directors or the participants. The theme was “What is philosophy?,”69 which was a skillful way to announce an event without revealing the well-kept secret: Heidegger’s participation.
Was it a stroke of luck for Jean Beaufret, who had proposed the idea of a meeting in France?70 Or was it a “master stroke” for Madame Heurgon, the owner, who sensed the “propitious moment”?71 The fact remains that this meeting took place and was a success, according to most of the participants,72 who numbered about fifty.73 Two incidents occurred, however: the complaint of Vladimir Jankélévitch, who would never set foot in Cerisy again;74 and the cautious, if not hostile, attitude of Lucien Goldmann, who would nevertheless attend all the sessions.
To fully appreciate the importance and the real influence of this exceptional symposium, one has to differentiate between the anecdotal and what is important. For Jean Beaufret, who was very sensitive to encounters and friendships, it was a consecration; he thought what mattered had been attained: Heidegger was recognized and accepted by the cream of the French intelligentsia, along with a text that quickly became a classic: the lecture “What Is Philosophy?”75 In fact, this meeting, mostly unknown to the public and quickly forgotten, probably had much less influence than Beaufret had hoped: with the passage of time, verba volant scripta manent. Translations or essays, favorable or unfavorable, would certainly succeed in impressing the philosophical memory more deeply. But the visit to Cerisy has taken on an almost sentimental, symbolic value. For Heidegger himself, who less than ten years earlier had been subjected to a process of “denazification” and deprived of his chair, this was quite a relief!
Anecdotally, can we mention that they went to Bayeux Cathedral to find a lectern for the Master? Or that the Heidegger couple was given the most beautiful room of the castle?76 Or that Gabriel Marcel was forced to work hard on the classical texts included in the program by Heidegger?77 Or that Alexis Philonenko was designated to operate the tape recorder? Or that Deleuze granted that he had spent “lovely days” at the meeting?78 Or that Lucien Goldmann found himself on the floor at Heidegger’s feet because of his refusal to get up from the bench with the other guests for the entry of the Master and his spouse?79
Obviously more significant was the content of the program proposed by the two organizers (Axelos and Beaufret), which provoked as early as August 27th a brief discussion during which Gabriel Marcel and Lucien Goldmann questioned the inclusion of commentaries on Kant’s and Hegel’s texts into the schedule (to follow the inaugural lecture by Heidegger, “What Is Philosophy?”). Both hoped that people would not feel restrained from asking questions on Heidegger’s work and the “entirety of his thought.” Jean Beaufret calmed things down, suggesting that the program was simply a guide that did not need to be followed to the letter: “What is important is that we manage to start.”80
On Sunday August 28th, Heidegger delivered the lecture: “Was ist das, die Philosophie?,”81 a very sophisticated text in which he remained silent concerning his own thought and confined himself resolutely to a meditation on the Greek origin of philosophy, whose point of departure was formulated in the following way: “The Greek word philosophia indicates the direction.”82 The following days alternated between discussions and close readings of the text. On August 29th, an intense debate between Marcel and Heidegger on the criteria of translation and interpretation took place: the former, while saluting the depth of Heidegger’s suggestions, questioned their “critical basis”: can there be incontestable criteria? Though Marcel and Heidegger first agreed to respond negatively, the latter emphasized the basic presupposition of his readings: to enter into dialogue with a discourse delivered by the tradition and precisely with its “unsaid” (he gave the example of the new perspectives he opened on the schematism and the “amphiboly” of the concepts of reflection in his Kantbuch). Marcel objected that this involved a certain kind of excessive and finally dangerous “generosity” toward the author. Heidegger replied with the example of the thought of place in Greek thought and its Galilean transformation into a conception of space: it is the play of presupposition that one should reveal in the interpretative dialogue. “Are we going to ask Braque what his criteria are?” Beaufret interjected, finally reminding everyone of the necessity to go back to specific texts. On August 30, the official program began with the explication of the beginning of Kant’s essay on The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God: “Vom Dasein überhaupt” (“Existence in General”).83 Heidegger led this seminar according to the very authoritarian method his former students (such as Biemel, himself present at Cerisy) knew well.84 The professor requested that the participants answer a series of apparently simple and academic questions: What’s the title? In what sense is the word Dasein used here? What about the word Gegenstand? The word objectum? And realitas formalis? The point was to understand why existence is not a predicate: but what is a predicate? Kant writes: “The concept of position or positing is totally simple and on the whole identical with the concept of being in general.”85 Paradoxically, the positive relation is to be understood from the relative position: what is posited is represented.
After this particularly austere session, Heidegger began August 31st with a clarification: he wanted to consider “a few difficulties” that had arisen; this was a euphemism to refer to the objections and resistances formulated in the very first session and then reinforced by his method, which was similar to that of an “elementary school teacher.” As a response to those who wished to study the theses of Heideggerian philosophy, he stated (a statement thereafter often quoted by Jean Beaufret): “There is no Heideggerian philosophy; and even if it existed, I would not be interested in that philosophy.” To the implicit criticisms he perceived, he replied that his method was not dictatorial, but represented an effort to answer the “dictate of being.” He then returned to Kant’s text and reasserted his interpretation: Kant conceived of existence as absolute position on the basis of the relative position consisting in the exercise of judgment. The following discussions remained quite “technical” and were not conducive to harmonizing the points of view: if he conceded to Jeanne Hersch that the pre-critical Kant of the 1763 essay had not yet made his “thesis about being”86 explicit, Heidegger resisted Ricoeur (who insisted that the thing in itself escapes the sphere of representation). As an object in general = x, it is not perceptible by the senses. What matters is to understand that, for Kant, the position of existence can be conceived only on the basis of the proposition formulated by judgment.
Gabriel Marcel opened the session of September 1st with a long presentation. He first expressed his surprise at having heard from Heidegger himself that there was no Heideggerian philosophy. While admitting and even approving of the absence of a system, he nonetheless maintained that Heidegger’s thought is a philosophy, if only for the fact that it is immediately recognizable and that it possesses that “unique quality” that allows it to be identified, just as one distinguishes Brahms’s style from Debussy’s. The question of the translation of the key words of Heidegger’s vocabulary was then posed. Thus zum-Tode-sein (“being-toward-death”) is stumm (“mute”) for a French ear; in French, être can be plural (one can speak of “un être,” or “des êtres”), which makes the difference between être and étant (being and beings) difficult to grasp. While admitting his agreement with the Heideggerian understanding of truth as unveiling and clearing (Lichtung), Marcel asked whether Heidegger could defend his absence of reference to any philosophy of values and his silence on the great Catholic tradition from Saint Augustine to Pascal. For him, as an ultimate recourse, the last word belongs “not to the wise, but to the saint.” As if echoing this intervention, Ricoeur insisted on this point, but more precisely asked whether it was possible to exclude the Hebraic tradition from philosophy. Of course, one should not have the prophets philosophize as was attempted during the nineteenth century; but the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was an event that had a deep significance and that one should reflect on. How can Heidegger help us in thinking these “two greatnesses” of Denken and prophecy, in order to rethink the difference between the philosophical path and that of divine calling?
To Gabriel Marcel, Heidegger responded that the assertion that there is no Heideggerian philosophy is rather a sign of humility [Demut] before the very question of philosophy as metaphysics. It would have been better to ask: “How can you characterize philosophy as metaphysics if your own thought is an overcoming of metaphysics?” Strictly speaking, it was from the perspective of a meditation on the temporal character of the being of beings that the overcoming of metaphysics was attempted, at least as a gesture, as early as Sein und Zeit. With respect to the question of universality, Heidegger limited himself to a purely historical clarification (the Greeks did not have the universal conception that classical philosophy attributed to them) that was immediately contested by Marcel (beyond the flat universalism of the Enlightenment, one has to be open to a genuine universality, as offered by great art). Heidegger replied that an authentic universality is never guaranteed in advance: to understand requires the productive translation of what is to be thought. To Paul Ricoeur,87 Heidegger responded briefly and cautiously that he could not follow him in a direct confrontation between Hebrew and Greek (having forgotten the little Hebrew he had learned during his studies in theology), but above all that it was necessary to consider the twofold character, both ontological and theological, of Aristotle’s metaphysics, without assuming that a word for word confrontation with the theology of the prophets would be possible.88
On September 2nd, after another very technical clarification concerning Kant (to reassert that the thing in itself, even if not scientifically knowable, is an object of representation), Heidegger approached Hegel through some apparently elementary observations: Wissenschaft (science) is synonymous with philosophy or metaphysics. And what does Begriff mean? Not a representation in the Kantian sense, but the free development of the absolute idea, that is to say, of being. What about God himself? His coming into being is not to be understood as if he went from nonexistence to existence, but as the auto-revelation of what was concealed in him. Why all those clarifications? To introduce the explanation of the “speculative proposition” in Hegel and more particularly in the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Was it with the intention of “restoring calm”?89 Heidegger proceeded in this way mostly to keep on course and to highlight his method in reading fundamental philosophical texts. The method would surprise specialists, for when Heidegger asserted that “the speculative proposition is itself being,” he seemed (or wanted to seem) to ignore that for Hegel being is “in fact nothing,”90 the most abstract and vacuous notion. However, Heidegger insisted on remaining literally faithful to Hegel’s thought by contrasting term for term—and in a very academic manner—the usual form of judgment and the speculative form. He recalled that in the ordinary predicative proposition (for example, “this tree is green”), the predicate qualifies the subject, without having any substantial meaning. Reconsidering on the contrary the very example Hegel gave of a speculative proposition, “God is being,” Heidegger underlined that “being” cannot be reduced to a simple predicate, but becomes in turn, subject. Hence a “counter-thrust” [Gegenstoss] undergone by thought, as Hegel indicated in a key sentence cited by Heidegger: “Formally, what has been said can be expressed thus: the general nature of the judgment or proposition, which involves the distinction of subject and predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition, and the proposition of identity which the former becomes contains the counter-thrust against that subject-predicate relationship.”91 Thus, as Heidegger explained, “God abides in the essence of being, and being is not a predicate of God.” Only two brief exchanges with Jeanne Hersch and Father Fessard departed from the doctoral style of the session on Hegel’s “correct doctrine” in speculative matters.
The session of Saturday, September 3rd, departed from this austere style. Those ten days concluded on a high note with the reading and commentary by Beda Allemann of Hölderlin’s hymn “Celebration of Peace” (Friedensfeier), which was discovered in its entirety in London in 1954. Composed after the treaty of Lunéville in February 1801, the poem enthusiastically celebrated the Prince of the Celebration (Bonaparte), but far from any prosaic banality—with a delicate emotion and an ineffable sense of the Divine. To present the poem, Allemann, who was a philologist and historian of German literature, proceeded methodically, carefully explaining the composition of the work: for example, the twelve stanzas of the hymn are divided into four triads of three stanzas. The first triad is devoted to Bonaparte, the second to Christ. To understand this opposition, one must understand that Jesus is, for Hölderlin, a demi-god who leaves this earth. The aim of his return—which animates the third triad—is to bring reconciliation. The fourth triad finally resituates this reconciliation with the Divine in the midst of the sojourn of the mortals. The theme of reconciliation [Versöhnung]—as well as that of the historic and almost sacred role of the hero—is of course common to both Hölderlin and Hegel, but the difference between poetry and philosophy appears in the transition between the third and the fourth triads. The very rhythm expresses the essence of the poem in its gathering of the Divine. Rhythm, the importance of which Hegel did not fail to recognize,92 is poetically enacted and yet in an undeniable proximity to idealistic metaphysics. Heidegger agreed with Beda Allemann. Gabriel Marcel and Jeanne Hersch were satisfied to ask for some clarifications. Only Ricoeur did not seem to agree, declaring himself disappointed that Hölderlin could have had such an excessive admiration for Bonaparte.
The last session of the conference took place Sunday, September 4th, and enabled Heidegger to make some final clarifications. Returning to the first inaugural lecture and to the question of the “philo-sophical” correspondence with sophia, he emphasized that Hegel’s wish to renounce the love of sophia in order to incorporate it into the form of the System could in no way be understood as a return to the pre-Socratics. What Hegel aimed at was instead the idealistic accomplishment of philosophy. Heidegger confessed that the published work by Walter Schulz93 convinced him that the accomplishment of idealism genuinely took place in Schelling’s late philosophy. The guiding question of philosophy bears on the being of beings. In contrast, the basic question that Heidegger posed concerns being itself, that is to say, the difference between being and beings. But this difference should not be assimilated to a relation. How is it possible to avoid that reduction? The difficulty lies in language. Heidegger reviewed matters the audience seemed to be familiar with, but in his own style, insisting upon them patiently. It is to be noted, however, that by so doing he responded to the original request: that the meeting should also concern his own thought. The justification of the detour through the study of the major texts was the following: for Heidegger, it was above all, here as elsewhere, a matter of maintaining “a constant dialogue with the tradition.” He then explained that the forgetting of the difference is not to be understood as a forgetting in the ordinary (negative) sense, but as the sheltering [Verbergung] of that which is not yet manifest. Anxious to clarify again what he meant by epoch or by destinal sending [Geschick], Heidegger then characterized the Grundstimmung of his own thought by the two following words: Offenheit (“openness”) and Gelassenheit (“releasement”). The first is openness to the dialogue with history, in the sense that was clarified earlier; the second seems to be its direct complement: thinking the “mutation of the forgetting of difference.”
Formulating his thanks to the hostess, Madame Heurgon, to Kostas Axelos for his translations, and to Gabriel Marcel for leading the debates [Gesprächführer], Heidegger asked the audience to excuse him for having possibly “shocked” them when he recalled his peasant origins. One final gesture is worth noting; beyond the participants, it was addressed to the French language; Heidegger dwelled on two French words that seemed to him laden with meaning: the verb penser (where one should hear peser [to weigh]) as well), and the substantive regard (which refers not only to vision but also to zurückbewahren, the guarding that preserves and restores). About this word, Heidegger even said that it is “marvelous” and does not exist in German. He was so often reproached for exclusively privileging the German language that this exceptional homage to the French language is worth mentioning. Finally, it was a quotation from Braque with which the Master concluded the conference: “Penser et raisonner font deux” [To think and to reason are two different things].94
Even if it is difficult and risky to try to make a definitive statement about those days, one has to recognize that the occasion was exceptional and that Heidegger’s “performance” was not insignificant: he came down from his pedestal, or from his hut, to dialogue in a very civil manner with some of his most distinguished French peers (this was a renewed recognition for Heidegger, the importance of which escaped no one in the European philosophical world) and, in this unexpected undertaking and with the efficient help of Axelos and Beaufret, he succeeded in imposing his method of reading and working. This achievement (due in large part to the devotion and skill of Jean Beaufret) was all the more remarkable since it occurred only ten years after the defeat of Germany, the destitution of Heidegger and the “denazification” process to which he was subjected. However, as we saw, there were also quite a few objections. They mainly concerned the particularities of Heidegger’s language, the difficulty of translating it and making it understood in French, its inability to be universalized, his silence with respect to biblical sources and even with respect to his political involvement of 1933.95 Jean Beaufret evoked these debates a few years later: a polemical text, admittedly, but so striking that I cannot resist the temptation to quote it: “Are you not in philosophy, Gabriel Marcel asked, a sworn enemy of universality? Don’t you skip over Jaweh? Ricœur said. And Lucien Goldmann, more unexpectedly: what happened in 1930, which you would like the naïve to believe was principally the date of the first divulgation of your question concerning the essence of truth? Heidegger answered in his own way with a counter-question. To Gabriel Marcel: Universality, how do you understand it, except in the sense of what Rivarol held to be the universality of the French language? To Ricœur: is the Bible really an epoch in the history of philosophy? To Goldmann: what are you insinuating? Following this, at the request of the majority, the debate returned to Kant and Hegel.”96
To a great extent, Heidegger managed to concentrate most of the effort of those present on the great texts of the philosophical tradition, making the debate less passionate and less personal. Was it solely a diversion to avoid embarrassing questions? One should not forget that this return to the basic texts had been at the heart of his method since his teachings in Marburg. Furthermore, the very choice of the title “What Is Philosophy?” implied a refusal to devote the seminar to the most innovative and personal developments of a thought that was perhaps considered (even in the eyes of its author) as overly secret and difficult. But one should be able to discern in this attitude a thesis that cannot in any way be reduced to a false modesty: the most urgent task that thought should impose on itself is to assume and meditate on the meaning of the metaphysical tradition. And this is why—as we saw—Heidegger was able to defend at Cerisy a surprising theme to which Jean Beaufret would thereafter continuously return: there is no Heideggerian philosophy.
This refrain could only have been irritating, for—reduced to a formula—it seemed excessively paradoxical. If one accepts the distinction between metaphysics (identified with philosophy) and thought (which thinks the “un-thought” of metaphysics and discloses new possibilities), one understands Heidegger’s position, which has an undeniable coherence. But should one accept it? Should one, in particular, validate his interpretation, at once unified and representative, historical and destinal, of metaphysics? The hermeneutic choice imposed in Cerisy was perfectly consistent. It corresponded, quite obviously, to the presupposition exposed in the “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics”:97 it is by returning from metaphysics back to its essence and by meditating on the scope of that essence that one begins to free oneself from the forgetfulness of the truth of being. However, to present this choice as obvious and Heidegger as the only thinker of the century, to dismiss any other attempt as an obsolete agitation, could only upset (rightly or wrongly) a large part of the philosophical community. It was thus the secondary effect—the doctrinal repetition by Jean Beaufret—that may have compromised, paradoxically and in the long run, the reception of a beautiful lecture that was translated with great care (in which, one should note, Heidegger only presented his own attempt as one possible path).98 In fact, and in spite of the denial from the translators,99 this lecture was a compendium of themes fundamental to the later Heidegger: philosophy is Greek “in its nature”;100 it is the source of the domination of sciences, established in the “atomic age”;101 the history of philosophy unfolds not according to a necessary dialectical process, but as a “free consequence”;102 only a meditation on language allows thought to be understood, in its proximity to and its distance from poetry.103
In spite of the advanced level and “consensual” character of the inaugural lecture, despite the psychological and “social” success of the meeting, Cerisy did not lead to the overwhelming support of the Heideggerian position. After all, how could it be the case? Of course, this event represented a symbolic milestone that was very significant in the diffusion of Heideggerian thought into France.104 The bright spell would continue for a few years with a series of new translations, most of them more intelligible, while others were disconcerting, along with interpretative advances breaking with the philosophical order of the past.
In the decade with which we are concerned, a French translation of Heidegger appeared almost every year, either as a book or in a journal.105 This profusion was doubly paradoxical, since Sein und Zeit was still not translated (except for the few paragraphs included in Corbin’s volume); in addition, a result of this feverish activity was that it was the later Heidegger who became the best known.106 As regards the difficulty that appeared early on—how was it possible to render such a singular philosophical language readable and intelligible?—each translator answered as he or she could, but two antithetical tendencies clearly emerged, and the opposition would only get worse and degenerate later into an open conflict: should the priority be given to readability (by making use of transpositions, periphrases) or, on the contrary, should it be given to a “faithfulness” that would lead to esotericism (due to the creation of neologisms)? Although he seemed to offer quite a legible text (compared to the “excesses” that have taken place since then), Corbin had already been accused of the latter tendency.
The conflict did not begin straightaway: for lack of sufficient linguistic skills or style, the Louvain school took a conservative path. Thus Alphonse de Waelhens and Walter Biemel, authors of the two translations that I have to first account for, proceeded cautiously, choosing—in fact—readability. They faced a particular difficulty in the case of the redoubtably complex and bold “On the Essence of Truth.”107
Accompanied by an introduction that was longer than the text itself and that was more of a paraphrase108 than a genuine explanation, this translation was not aimed at a general audience and would even confuse many specialists in philosophy. One should recall that Heidegger undertook, in this work discreetly published in 1943 (but reworked from a first version dating from 1930), a completely original overcoming of the traditional concept of truth as adequation. Not contenting himself with understanding truth as freedom and freedom as unconcealment [Entbergung],109 he boldly undertook an absolutely unprecedented movement of thought: to begin again from nontruth as concealment [Verbergung].110 One can thus read, among other things, a cryptic little sentence like this one: “concealment [obnubilation] deprives aletheia of disclosure.”111 Without claiming to elucidate all the riddles hidden here, I will wonder whether the word obnubilation renders in any way the Verborgenheit it is supposed to translate. Obnubiler means, literally, to cover with clouds, to envelop in darkness, and by extension, to hypnotize.112 Here the reader was given two false leads: Verborgenheit would come to obscure nontruth and would have a vertiginous or obsessional psychological nature. However, the Verborgenheit in question is not secondary: it refers to the most originary feature of Dasein’s ec-static freedom; it has nothing to do with a psychological state: to begin to understand it, one should refer to aletheia itself as unconcealment or uncovering, that is to say, understood in relation to its etymology, rethought by Heidegger on the basis of his return to a Heraclitean, pre-Socratic sense of withdrawal [retrait]. If we think of the withdrawal of phusis that, in Heraclitus, loves to hide,113 we are undoubtedly in a better position to engage the meaning of the passage. Consequently, it becomes obvious that Verbergung should not be assimilated to any “dissimulation” that would come from human beings.114 Instead, it belongs to a withdrawal that is here thought of as more originary than any fragment of truth that one could extract from it.
May the reader forgive me for having dragged him or her so abruptly into the center of an excessively disconcerting maelstrom! It was necessary to confront the difficulty that some courageous translators were willing to face. Their efforts had mixed success, as other examples could show.115 What is today even clearer, from the perspective of the reception of the translation in question, is that it surprised an audience, even among specialists, which was absolutely unprepared for these kind of difficulties, despite the review published in 1946 in Critique by Koyré and the article by Jean Beaufret in 1947 on the same issue.116 However, de Waelhens and Biemel were didactic enough to at least explain that a “significant evolution”117 had taken place in Heidegger’s thought; without already speaking of a “turn,” they showed how the emphasis was no longer placed on the existential understanding of Dasein itself, but on the ontological preconditions of its attunement to truth.
Retrospectively, the most surprising lacuna in this otherwise quite valuable work was the absence of any thematic justification of the translation choices, despite the prolixity of the commentaries on the text and the fact that the translators were aware of the dangers of misunderstanding that the reader would face due to the completely new vocabulary.118 There was a time when the translation choices of the Heideggerian texts were neither the object of a passionate debate nor sufficiently explicit: a kind of “underdevelopment” in the matter . . .
I will mention only in passing, however important it was, the translation that the same translators published in 1953 with Gallimard. Kant et le problème de la métaphysique [Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics] did not, indeed, present a level of difficulty comparable to the essay on the essence of truth. Even if the Heideggerian interpretation shook the conventional vision of Kant as a theoretician of knowledge, even if his reading of the first Critique on the basis of the role of the transcendental imagination and the schematism revealed an undeniable hermeneutic “violence” (explicitly assumed),119 the careful work on the texts remained within the terminological horizon of Kant’s critical philosophy. De Waelhens and Biemel prefaced their translation with a long introduction of fifty pages that presented the Heideggerian interpretation as an “authentic repetition”120 of the Kantian problematic. One finds no critical or polemical element in this serious commentary that aimed at—and would succeed in—including the work into the closed circle of recognized university bibliographic references.
In contrast, the important translations that appeared in rapid succession, in 1957 and 1958, attested more vigorously to the singularity of Heidegger’s thought by re-posing the question of its readability in French. Roger Munier121 and André Préau122 chose fluidity, indeed, elegance; Gilbert Kahn123 did not refrain from using neologisms and proposed a translation that was noted for its “strangeness.” Who was right? We should not ask the question in those terms, and Heidegger himself never weighed in. What is undeniable is that the “Letter on Humanism” would not have had the impact that it did if it had been only a collection of strange jargon. Without being Heidegger’s most obscure text, the “Letter on Humanism” offered real difficulties for the translator: however, the solutions adopted facilitated the reading more than they discouraged it.124 Roger Munier confided in me that François Fédier had reproached him for choosing intelligibility, a choice illustrated as well, and with undeniable success, by André Préau in his translation of Vorträge und Aufsätze, “so sober and so thoughtful.”125
Containing crucial contributions, though very different from one another, this volume (which offered a sort of a compendium of the later Heidegger’s thought, addressing contemporary technology as well as the pre-Socratics) was translated with utmost care by a scholar in German studies who included useful notes throughout the text, scrupulously limiting himself to explaining the translations and quoting the German text at each notable difficulty. From the outset, there is a surprising discovery: the use of Arraisonnement for Gestell, the essence of technology; this evocative word, borrowed from maritime vocabulary, immediately presented the advantage of suggesting the violence exercised by the scientific-technological destiny on nature and humanity itself, but the inconvenience of implicitly attributing this violence to reason, losing in the process both the gathering sense of the prefix Ge and any relation to the connotations of the verb Stellen (“to set up,” “to dispose”). It was almost more of a transposition than a translation, but its success assured it an apparently definitive status as the standard translation. Some other ingenious translations deserve our attention: the Quadriparti for das Geviert, the Quadrature for die Vierung, the Pose recueillante for die Lesende Lege.126 Of course, each of these options would deserve to be discussed in detail. What should be noticed here is the pedagogical effort of Préau and his concern not to “add on” to the word games that are sometimes vertiginous in Heidegger, especially in the lecture “The Thing” [La chose]: thus, le rassemblement propre à la chose (literally: the gathering proper to the thing) does not frighten the reader, as would the literal translation of das Dingen des Dinges: the “choser” de la chose (the thinging of the thing);127 similarly, the tautological expression Die Welt weltet, literally “the world worlds,” appeared in Préau’s translation as le monde . . . joue-le-jeu-du-monde (literally: the world . . . plays-the-game-of-the-world).128 It is obvious that if all of Heidegger’s translators had adopted the same policy, with comparable care and talent, the image of the Master would have been different: without being as “diaphanous” as the text on the back cover of Essais et Conférences wished and claimed,129 it would have nonetheless provoked less reticence and fewer accusations of jargon; it would undoubtedly have received a better welcome and would have been better understood in its genuine intentions. One could always object that a faithful translation does not necessarily have to be low key and that Préau’s Heidegger was almost too soft [TN: In English in the original]. He translated ereignet sich by se produit (to happen), which loses the decisive relation to Ereignis, translated (but partially betrayed) as Avènement (Advent). No translation is perfect, especially when the author has placed the bar so high: it is legitimate and necessary that the confrontation with the text should be pursued; whatever the degree of felicity of those choices, Préau never avoided it. What renders his work so praiseworthy is both its readability and the fact that the access to the original text was never occluded (the notes and the parenthetical comments keep referring to it).
For his part, Gilbert Kahn—whether or not he was being provocative—gave the impression of having pushed the opposite choice too far in the Introduction to Metaphysics, even though this was only a written course (Heidegger’s lectures were always more accessible). The presence at the end of the volume of a double glossary did not attenuate the shock caused by the neologisms, most of which were disconcerting. The list of bizarre translation choices never ceases to amaze. Let us consider, in alphabetical order, without any intention of being exhaustive, the following neologisms: l’adestance [Anwesenheit; presence], l’anté-spection [Vorblick; preview], la dé-latence [Ent-borgenheit; unconcealment], la discession [Auseinandertreten; setting apart from one another], l’estance [Wesend; essencing], la méversité [Verkehrtheit; positive pervertedness], la patéfaction [Eröffnung; manifestation], la per-spection [Durchblick, glance], la prépotence [Übergewalt, excessive violence], le pro-de-stin [Geschick, destiny], le pro-sister [entstehen, coming into being], le proventuel [Geschichtlich, fateful]. We need to understand how Gilbert Kahn, a confirmed German scholar and well-informed philosopher, came to this, after a long work conducted in large part with a team in Freiburg, among whom were disciples of Heidegger. In his introductory foreword, he maintained that he preferred a “certain linguistic brutality” (euphemistically speaking) to capture a “change in perspective”130 and that, in order to respect the author’s perspective and his proper movement of thought, he coined new words from Latin roots. He thus attempted to undertake a real work of transposition. The result, for those who made the effort to follow him, was a complete change of scenery. This shows that, although the value of this undertaking must be recognized (for some “transpositions” are justifiable or suggestive),131 this translation remains, on the whole, very strange, and perhaps contributed to marginalizing once more a great author whom others—at the same time—labored to render accessible.132
Incidentally, this seminar on the Introduction to Metaphysics had been analyzed in a very pedagogical manner, a few years earlier at the Sorbonne, by Jean Wahl, who re-edited—in this case from an already published text133—a sort of a pedestrian commentary that he had already undertaken in 1946 from the transcript of another seminar he had devoted to Heidegger.134 This commentary, with the ambitious title of Vers la fin de l’ontologie [Toward the end of ontology],135 deserves to be reconsidered, for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it has been noted136 that Jean Wahl deserved credit for not hiding his discomfort with Heidegger’s reprint of a sentence from 1935 on the “inner truth and greatness” of the national socialist movement and for not allowing this question to interfere with the properly philosophical commentary. He drew attention to that point in his introduction and did not return to it except for a brief final allusion on how “deeply distasteful”137 this sentence was. One could not blame him; yet, what is strange, and reveals once more Wahl’s amateurish approach, is his inaccurate quotation and translation of the infamous short sentence (mit der inneren Wahrheit und Grösse dieser Bewegung)138 with la grandeur ou la hauteur de ce mouvement [the greatness or the loftiness of this movement].139 Let us grant that the difference is small; but does such a delicate question not demand the utmost rigor? Wahl did note that the comment concerning “planetary technology”140 (which we now know did not appear in the course of 1935) is in parentheses. However, he did not include this parenthesis where it should be in the text; further, he translated Begegnung inaccurately by “union.” In sum, while this revision suffers from its oral, improvised, and unedited nature, the content also seems somewhat rushed. Wahl suggested that this parenthesis “perhaps diminishes the noxiousness and the unpleasant nature of the sentence,” due to the fact that “Heidegger does not like technology.” This is cheap psychology that overlooks an important difficulty: why open such a deep wound to immediately cover it with a bandage? The objection addressed to Wahl’s gloss does not absolve Heidegger. Let us admit, additionally, that Wahl’s commentary does not merely reveal a somewhat anarchic style; it also presents a subtle grasp of the four distinctions of being (in relation to seeming, becoming, thinking, and the Ought). Above all, it reveals an awareness that was uncommon at that time (revealed by the title that anticipates “the end of ontology”): far from limiting himself to introducing metaphysics, Heidegger undertook the “task”141 of questioning being as constant presence and thus prepared, as early as 1935, the turn toward another thinking.
From a completely different source, somewhat later, in 1959, the very readable translation of a course given only seven years earlier, titled What Is Called Thinking?,142 appeared. The brilliant and enthusiastic introduction by Gérard Granel, speckled with Greek and German, relying on the fact that a large part of that course was a translation of the first eight words of fragment VI of Parmenides, saluted Heidegger as the great tra-ducteur (trans-lator) of the metaphysical Tradition and brilliantly justified the upheaval of the linguistic scene and customs: “It is obvious that something changes in the Heideggerian language. Consequently, the entire Metaphysics of the Tradition, for the first time since Nietzsche and Kant, is put in perspective, including Kant and Nietzsche.”143 That same year, and in the same collection directed by Jean Hyppolite, the outstanding essay by the literary critic Beda Allemann appeared:144 establishing precise and sober correspondences between Hölderlin’s poetry and Heidegger’s thought, the “return to the origin” of the first and the “turn” of the second, he avoided the traps of systematic comparison and succeeded in approaching the intimacy of the dialogue that the thinker sustained more and more intensely with the poet. Well documented, deep and measured, this book offers an irreplaceable key for the understanding of the later Heidegger.145
Yes, something also changed in the French philosophical field: at the end of the decade, Heidegger’s influence grew considerably and in many respects. Jean Beaufret had already established himself, but the image of the Master of Freiburg had changed, as it continued to impose itself. Almost forgotten, the image of Heidegger as the father of existentialism was replaced by a new image: that of a major interpreter of the metaphysical tradition. Devil of the avant-garde not long before, angel of the bizarre at times, Heidegger became the keeper of Philosophy’s temple. Was that too much?
In the end, although impressive, the result of this decade was also very ambiguous. Heidegger’s magisterial image imposed itself, but was also blurred in the process. The disagreements in the methods of translation were only one of the axes of this ambiguity (this was discernable in Beaufret himself, as he wavered between an effort of pedagogical clarity and a certain esoteric research).146 The status of ontology, the interpretation of the history of philosophy, and in particular of pre-Socratic thought, the meaning and nonmeaning of a technology thereafter conceived of as planetary, represented the new stakes of the discussion. We saw it in Cerisy. These new developments were quite varied, but no major reading emerged that engaged the depth of the Heideggerian project. In addition to Le Poème de Parménide,147 a very personal essay, where Jean Beaufret applied his talent to the service of the Heideggerian theses in their entirety (the reinterpretation of Kant’s transcendental schematism was even retrospectively made to clarify the scope of the Parmenidean doxa), let us note the unexpected comparison established by Mikel Dufrenne between “primitive mentality and Heidegger”148 and the perplexity of Alphonse de Waelhens, who raised many questions at the end of a quite awkward presentation of the Holzwege.149 For his part, Kostas Axelos introduced the group of the journal Arguments to a progressive reception of Heidegger’s meditation on the essence of technology, by articulating a dialogue with Marxian themes:150 on four occasions, the journal published texts by Heidegger.151 Axelos initiated a debate in 1959 with Jean Beaufret, François Châtelet, and Henri Lefebvre on the theme of “Karl Marx and Heidegger”:152 a surprising consensus emerged to emphasize the convergences between the two most radical thinkers of modernity; Henri Lefebvre went so far as to claim that “Heidegger is indeed a materialist,”153 and Jean Beaufret, for his part, emphasized that Heidegger encouraged a debate with Marxism rather than against it.154 Finally, the Revue internationale de philosophie devoted a special issue to Heidegger,155 in which a beautiful text by Birault on Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude [Heidegger and the thinking of finitude] stood out.156 In this case, the relation to the Christian message was no longer at the center of the discussion. Beginning instead from a quotation by Kojève, who recognized Heidegger as “the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy,”157 Birault distinguished Christian finitude from Judaic finiteness [finité] or Hellenic completion [finition]: he sought to explain why “the notion of Endlichkeit or finitude was abandoned by Heidegger and what was the ultimate signification of this abandonment.”158 Insisting on the “step back” [Schritt zurück] of the thought of being with respect to metaphysics, it marked the disorientating originality of an approach that understood the nothing as the veil of being, and nontruth as an essential element for truth. This thought of being had “no worse enemy” than onto-theology.159
In 1960–61, Heidegger was thus omnipresent on the French philosophical scene and his stature more recognized than ever. In this respect, Jean Beaufret could not be more satisfied:160 He even managed to facilitate Heidegger’s visits to France after Cerisy with lectures at the Faculté des lettres of Aix-en-Provence,161 in 1956 and 1957, and above all in 1958, where the lecture “Hegel and the Greeks” was successfully given on March 20, “in front of a thousand captivated people.”162 Pierre Aubenque, who was then teaching in that university, reflected on the exceptional atmosphere of the lecture in these terms: “Heidegger’s entry was almost unnoticed because of his diminutive stature. At that moment, the Greek scholar Louis Moulinier, who was in charge of welcoming the lecturer on behalf of the dean, who was ‘unable to be present’ that day, found just the right words. He told the story that one day, in a gathering, somebody suddenly noticed the presence of J.-S. Bach, told his neighbor and then three words were whispered a hundred times, spreading through the crowd: Bach ist da.” Aubenque added that the connection with the famous cantor was not unjustified.163
The text of that lecture, “Hegel and the Greeks,”164 was so austere and formal that it demanded intense concentration from the audience: Hegel’s judgment on Greek philosophy—reconsidered on the basis of the four fundamental sayings (of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle)—was finally redirected by Heidegger toward the “truth” (aletheia) that remains to be thought within the destiny of Western thought. Heidegger disappeared, as it were, within Hegelian thought only to “subvert” it at the last moment. This was a subtle operation, but one that could only be lost on the majority of those in attendance. No doubt foreseeing this difficulty, Heidegger attempted to be especially “charming” in the foreword in which he declared his love for Provence and his admiration for Cézanne.
Why do I speak here in Aix en Provence?
I love the sweetness of its regions and its villages
I love the rugged terrain of its mountains
I love the harmony of both
I love Aix, Bibemus, the montagne Sainte-Victoire
And he concluded:
I love all that because I firmly believe that there is no essential spiritual work unless it is rooted in an original soil on which one must stand.165
It seems, indeed, according to all accounts, that he “won over” a patient audience, which then listened carefully to the German text, translated paragraph by paragraph by Pierre-Paul Sagave166 and Jean Beaufret.
Such breakthroughs and successes did not overcome the deep resistances that would soon be expressed in a quite virulent manner. As if he could anticipate it, Jean Beaufret accentuated the polemical nature of his interventions: he prefaced his beautiful translation of “Georg Trakl” with a warning in which he foresaw an “unavoidable misunderstanding,” and he resolutely separated Heidegger from “literary criticism, aesthetic delectation,” as well as “metaphysical reflection.”167 All the same, instead of presenting the content of the texts of the volume in detail—although so rich—he gave in his preface to the Essais et Conférences (Vorträge und Aufsätze), and not without panache, the resolute tone of a defense of the Master, apart from philosophy and from intellectuality, completely removed from cultural agitation: “This strange carnival, as Valéry would say, where theological virtuosity and humanistic passion, verbiage of values and scientific claims, dialectical conceit and phenomenological improvisation unfolded, in the wake of the death of God, such a rich collection of prestigious alibis: how could a peasant from Messkirch possibly feel at ease there?”168 This exaltation of the great thinker, alone against all, would irritate more than one reader and produce the opposite of the desired effect. Was this a backlash from Cerisy? Jean Wahl, who, as we saw, made an important contribution by making Heidegger’s thought known, seemed to harden his position and became quite critical: “There is a good deal of mythology in all this Heideggerian thinking”;169 while defending himself against the charge of “jealousy” or “negativity,” he launched a sharp attack about the political question: “It is only an appearance that Heidegger separated himself from Nazism after the first anti-semitic demonstrations.”170 Wahl did not conceal the fact that he thus aimed to respond to Kostas Axelos, who had claimed that Heidegger was the only genuine interlocutor of Marx and derided the hostile conspiracy of conservative institutions.171
The polemics would be revived in an unexpected and much more violent way, not by Axelos but by René Char. In Autres pages de journal, Wahl attacked two contemporary poets who appeared to him as unworthy of Claudel’s stature: “We ended up with Char and Ponge . . . I do not understand Char.”172 Heidegger seemed to have been forgotten. But he appeared again in the thundering reply that Char addressed to Wahl, reviving the surrealist tradition of insult for “a good cause”—a postcard that “well-intentioned” people published quickly in La Nouvelle Revue française entitled “Polemics and Violence”: “With you Sir, the shit no longer climbs up on the horse, as Kierkegaard enjoyed saying, it falls down to the pot.” Char also reproached Wahl for both his misunderstanding of Ponge and his “recent ugly comments against Heidegger.”173 In contrast, he wrote in his most inspired style a few lines of homage to Heidegger for the volume that appeared in Germany on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.174 The only other French figures present in the volume were Beaufret, Blanchot, and Braque.
Whether admiring or polemical, did these blows announce the brutal end of the bright spell of the fifties? The interview published in May 1959 in France-Observateur suggests a more nuanced interpretation: Jean Beaufret and Kostas Axelos engaged in an amicable discussion with François Châtelet and Henri Lefebvre on “Karl Marx and Heidegger.”175 Each side made an obvious effort at a rapprochement: Lefebvre said he had been “delighted and taken by a vision”176 during the reading of the Holzwege and asserted that “following Engels’ famous definition, Heidegger is indeed a materialist”;177 Axelos and Beaufret delineated the strict limits of the involvement of 1933 and insisted on the fact that Heidegger’s thought, thereafter turned toward the future, absolutely excluded any activism of that kind; Châtelet, the most hesitant, nonetheless conceded that Heidegger helped him in his reading of Marx;178 Beaufret went so far as to assert that “Heidegger essentially intends to help us understand Marx.”179 One can see that Heidegger remained persona grata within the intellectual left. However, it was with the university that relations were strained: Jean Wahl, one of its most influential representatives, had been the director of Beaufret’s thesis (never completed); he had then become his ideological adversary. The misunderstanding between them would only continue to grow.
The counterpart of the bright spell would soon itself be revealed: the unconditional defense of the Master’s theses, the very success of their diffusion (soon sustained by an exclusive contract with Gallimard) paradoxically made his thought—which had gained an almost classical stature—lose a part of the mysterious and prestigious aura it enjoyed and also contributed to violent reactions. Overall, the climate would change radically with respect to Heidegger in particular, but also more generally; new stars would twinkle in the intellectual firmament. The exposure of those contradictions obliged people to seriously consider questions that the closing decade had not managed to answer clearly: What was Heidegger’s true face? How could one deepen the understanding of his thought, and maintain a critical distance so as to avoid polemical rejections and hasty schematizations?
The first reception of a great thought is always uncanny in its singularity. First there is a name, a shell empty of intuitions that one supposes to be profound and original. This is how the three syllables of that heavily Germanic name struck my ears during the summer of 1954 (I was sixteen), as I leafed through textbooks and books to begin my education in philosophy. Unlike what would have been expected, retrospectively, it was not love at first sight. On the contrary, I did not succumb to its charms, any more during that summer than during my first year of Philosophy. I was taken with Bergson and I became Bergsonian, combining momentarily my Catholicism with a philosophy of vital dynamism. However, André Jacob, my professor at the lycée Lakanal, made me enthusiastic about Heidegger. I remember, not without emotion, the wonder I immediately felt before that young professor who was doing us the honor of thinking before us! For the first time, knowledge was not imposed on us: we were thinking for ourselves! André Jacob’s first words are almost literally engraved in my memory: “One traditionally defines philosophy as the love of wisdom. Heidegger proposed the opposite definition: the wisdom of love.” This initial reversal was not pursued: a paradox thrown to young minds, overly eager to go farther, it did not lead to any “Heideggerian” development. Jacob considered himself mostly as a follower of Piaget and he was quite eclectic. Thus, this allusion to Heidegger long remained a riddle (that even Jean Beaufret, when questioned later on that matter, could not decipher) until the publication of a course given by Jean Wahl in 1946 allowed me to find the origin of this allusion.
It was above all as a precursor of Sartre that Heidegger was presented, though still mysteriously. To this “atheistic existentialism,” I preferred Kierkegaard, even Jaspers or Simone Weil. A deep believer, I wrote a mystical interpretation of what I knew of Heidegger: I interpreted the opening to being as akin to Simone Weil’s concept of “décréation.” For a short while during the summer of 1956, I contemplated writing a “mystère” à la Péguy with, as an epigram, this thought of Heidegger’s: “The darkening of the world never reaches the clearing of being.” I debated the theses of Being and Nothingness with my friend Jean-Philippe Guinle point by point. The difference between being and beings and the radical encounter with nothingness are the themes I started to discover the following year, in hypokhâgne,180 studying Corbin’s book and consulting the volume from 1942 in which de Waelhens summarized Being and Time. My professor of philosophy in hypokhâgne and in khâgne, Jean Brun, who was an eloquent, efficient, and undeclared Protestant, could only have encouraged my attraction for Kierkegaard and Bergson: he had little taste for Heidegger, but did not suppress him or his work. After an oral presentation on “boredom and angst” in which, for the first time, I devoted myself to the reading of “What Is Metaphysics?,” he warned me: “Citing Heidegger from the outset and continuously as you have done could get you into trouble!” This was my first exposure to the disturbing nature of the “Heidegger case”!
I was no less astonished when I attended, dumbfounded, and unaware of all the stakes, a brief confrontation between Jean Beaufret and Jean Wahl at the end of a lecture by Paul Ricoeur on Heidegger and the death of God. This scene took place at the Centre catholique des intellectuels français located on rue Madame, most probably in February or March of 1956. Beaufret, whom I could only see from behind, was in the first row on the left; Wahl was seated in a symmetrical position on the right. The discussion did not bear on the lecture itself. It was a serious summary of the famous Holzwege text, which had not been translated yet. At the podium, Ricoeur seemed uncomfortable and out of his depth on the occasion of this strange confrontation between Beaufret and Wahl. Insisting on what Heidegger said in Cerisy (and repeatedly pronouncing this name that meant nothing to me at the time), Beaufret would say: “Philosophy is not out of date, it is dead”; Wahl responded: “Unfortunately.” Beaufret, in his soft and singular voice, replied: “Fortunately.” The misunderstanding was total and heads turned back and forth. I cannot remember how the moderator (Étienne Borne, I think) put an end to that bizarre duel.
I did not dare approach Beaufret that night. His personality intrigued me all the more as he was a mythical figure in my family: they told me about “cousin Beaufret” without my being able to know exactly what they meant, or how or why my parents had lost contact with him for such a long time. I was told he was a “maverick” who never responded to letters. This left me unsatisfied and curious to know more. The opportunity to satisfy this curiosity came, in the spring 1956, with the publication of one of his books, Le Poème de Parménide. One could hardly imagine the incredible impression that this little book made on me, among others, for there were many khâgne students, at that time, to devour it, dazzled perhaps more by the brilliant and enthusiastic insolence of a new tone than by the content itself, many elements of which remained out of reach (Parmenides’s Greek, the problem of the unity of the Poem, the interferences with the reinterpretations of modern philosophy and of Kant in particular). However, what stood out was the idea that Heidegger revolutionized thought through an unprecedented understanding of being itself (distinct from the being of metaphysics, the being of beings, which I discussed as the “God of philosophers”), thanks to the rediscovery of the pre-Socratics. What thus announced itself was a totally renewed interpretation of the history of philosophy. Impossible to classify, Heidegger seemed infinitely more profound to me than Hegel or Schelling.
This was Jean Beaufret’s perspective when I finally met him. Having waited for three months to answer a letter of admiration that I had sent him after much hesitation, he came to the house for lunch with his elderly parents in April 1957 (it was then because of philosophy that my family reconnected with him). On that day and during the meetings that followed (first in a class on Bergson at the École Normale, where Jean Beaufret brought me along with my friend, Jean-Philippe Guinle), we spoke little of Being and Time, but almost exclusively of the classical authors and the light Heidegger shed on them. Thus Heraclitus was reduced to a universal movement, and thoughtlessly opposed to Parmenides’s permanence, when his fragments shimmered with an incredible richness in which the first experience of being as “One-Whole” can be read, prefiguring metaphysics but without its onto-theological structure. Similarly, Aristotle was completely unknown to French idealism: this required a return to the texts, to learn to listen to the Greek with a Greek ear and to decipher the “multiple significations” of being. One had to free oneself from the conventional interpretations of metaphysics and even of their foundations: already the principle of identity was a “leap into being”; Cartesian objectivity was made possible by the cogitative reflection and not the contrary.
Heidegger appeared, in the course of long conversations with Jean Beaufret, as the only thinker of the twentieth century who was able to appreciate the “monumental continuity” of metaphysics from its Greek origins, and who, beyond conventional academic oppositions such as that between idealism and realism, made the texts as well as the tension they harbor with their “unsaid” speak again. Paradoxically, this patient teaching (which was also constantly polemical toward the standard university interpretations) led one to delve less into Heidegger, at least exclusively, than to reread the great texts of the tradition with new eyes (including Spinoza, on whom Heidegger himself was almost completely silent).
All those dialogues, which were conducted amicably, either at Sceaux or at passage Stendhal, advanced my knowledge of those authors significantly, encouraged me to study Greek and German, and made me progressively abandon my “early” Bergsonian and Kierkegaardian philosophy. It was through Jean Beaufret that I heard for the first time the name of Althusser, who also seemed to me an unapproachable and already mythical character (although he was not yet famous). I could not dare to imagine that I might be a Normalien181 and that Althusser would be my “caïman”;182 yet, this is what would come to be after the entrance exam of 1958: during the fall, Beaufret became one of my professors at the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm). It was thus my destiny to have met him. However, as far as the content was concerned, his “official” teaching did not change my philosophical orientation in any way: I pursued the same interest until I left the École in 1962. I often learned more in “freewheeling” conversations with Jean than through his classes, which were devoted to themes essentially dependent on the program of Agrégation (successively, if my memory does not betray me: Aristotle’s metaphysics, Descartes and Leibniz, Kant and his third Critique, Plato’s great dialogues), although his style was so unique (a binary rhythm: at times the dictation of a very carefully composed text, at times slow, brilliant, and casual improvisations—“divagations . . . in the Mallarmean sense,” Hyppolite would say).
As far as Heidegger himself was concerned, I read everything that appeared in French (including, as early as 1954, the first translations of the “Chemin de campagne” (Feldweg) and “Sur l’expérience de la pensée” (Die Erfahrung des Denkens) in the NRF edition); I was very impressed by the “Letter on Humanism” and I started to work through a few original texts. I engaged in passionate discussions with Michel Haar, who, in 1960 (I think), suddenly “converted” to become a Heideggerian after having heard a presentation on the Introduction to Metaphysics (organized, incidentally, by Jean Hyppolite, who in his classes almost spoke more often about Heidegger than Beaufret—though obviously in a more critical way). Should one interpret metaphysics as a forgetfulness of being? How is the Heideggerian reinterpretation of the essence of truth to be understood? Or his “overcoming” of metaphysics? How should one understand the essence of technology? All these questions preoccupied us and would become the themes of discussions that Michel Haar organized with Hubert Dreyfus and even Henri Birault, who was kind enough to join us.
A great event: during the winter of 1960–61, Sartre gave a private lecture to the philosophers-normaliens. Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty, and Canguilhem were seated in the first row; I think Jean Beaufret also attended. Althusser was in a corner on the right in the salle des Actes, surrounded by his friends. After having read one of his unpublished manuscripts on The Critique of Dialectical Reason for more than two hours, Sartre took questions. Althusser asked the most difficult questions. At the last moment, as the exchange of questions and answers was about to conclude, I gathered all my courage and dared to ask Sartre more or less the following: “You never responded to Heidegger’s critiques in his famous ‘Letter on Humanism.’ What is your current position toward those critiques?” I expected to be rebuffed in a few words, but to my great surprise, Sartre gave a benevolent and lengthy answer, conceding that he had really not followed the recent evolution of Heidegger toward a philosophy of thinking and poetical language, but that he maintained a great debt to Heidegger, that he still granted him a decisive importance and did not intend to take his objections lightly. He returned to the points of disagreement, but ended by almost apologizing for not having read Heidegger’s latest works as of yet. Later, I was told of this piece of Sartre’s conversation with Hyppolite and Merleau-Ponty in a café: “Perhaps I should read Heidegger?” Sartre had asked. Hyppolite answered: “But no, you are a genius: you should give priority to the pursuit of your own work.”
From these heights, I had to return to the duties of student life. The inexorable pressure of a foreseeable “fate” (the approach of the Agrégation examination) dampened my passion for reading Heidegger; it was, however, to resurge during my “supplementary year” at the École, in 1961–62: the time in my life when I probably worked most under the inspiration of Jean Beaufret, when I applied myself seriously to learning German and when I was led—almost in spite of myself—to finally meet Heidegger. This was an unquestionable caesura.