OUR STORY HAVING reached its chronological end, that is to say, the end of the twentieth century, it would be possible and tempting to draw some lessons and already reach some conclusions. It seemed to us, however, that the work would be incomplete and would leave the reader particularly frustrated if we were not able to stop and cast a careful glance at the landscape we have crossed after this long journey. A philosophical accounting? This is indeed what we should attempt, not without being aware of the limits of the word “accounting,” since we will never manage to establish a definitive and unquestionable inventory of the “losses” and “profits” concerning the reception of such a complex and subtle philosophical thought.
Rather than attempting this impossible accounting, we will propose a wide-ranging meditation on the different perspectives that appear at the crossroads we have reached. The idea that motivates us, as one can guess, is neither “to be done with Heidegger,” nor to pretend that the future of thought will exclusively depend on him. Less authoritatively, less prophetically, more philosophically, and always in terms of the French reception, let us wonder about the sensitive questions that enable us to better delineate certain decisive limits of Heideggerian thought. Let us also envisage the limits from which a new departure is possible. “When you are able to see my limits, you will have understood me. I cannot see them”:1 as we reflect on those remarks (half-confidences or half-suggestions), let us clarify that they should be understood literally, at least as clues, even if we are aware that it is unlikely (and also beyond the scope of this book) that we could completely answer this question. We will instead and more appropriately suggest some perspectives on the basis of works or books that seem decisive to us, by disrupting, to some extent, the chronology. This rupture as regards the course of linear time will also allow us, at the same time, to complete or compensate for some of the deficiencies of our previous “narrative.”
There is no limit to the possible topics that would lead to a final dialogue between French interpreters and Heidegger’s thought. We have gathered the themes—in the contemporary context—that seemed the most significant and with respect to which the debate is far from being closed: the question of phenomenology, the relation to the Hebraic tradition with its connections with the possibility of a new ethics, the role of hermeneutics, the theological debate, and the legacy of a complete rereading of metaphysics.
Although Heidegger’s thought is generally associated with phenomenology, a manifest fact should be mentioned: properly speaking, in the French context, a “Heideggerian phenomenology” did not develop on its own. Clearly, Heidegger’s influence was not totally absent from phenomenological research: far from it. But what form did it take? This complex question requires a clarification.
It is in the very evolution of the phenomenological project in Heidegger’s work that we should look for the origin of the dissociation that we will identify within recent French thought. Until Sein und Zeit, and even until the beginning of the 1930s, Heidegger still presented his thought as a phenomenology, as a phenomenological ontology, or as a “hermeneutical phenomenology.” Although Heidegger inherited phenomenology from Husserl, he questioned a number of Husserl’s presuppositions, principally his conception of intentionality. In fact, Heidegger never explicitly disassociated himself from the phenomenological project; he even claimed it as his own in his 1963 lecture: “My Way into Phenomenology,”2 in which he carefully reconnected, though in a mostly autobiographical way, with this guiding thread of his work. This work of self-interpretation and self-justification was necessary because of a double rupture: the first one is obvious and relates to Husserl’s legacy; the second one, which was more subtle but understandable in the context of the “turn” that decidedly guided Heidegger from 1936 and after, refers to the confrontation with Nietzsche and the entire metaphysical tradition. We have to realize that for the later Heidegger, who was a “hermeneutician” as well as a “deconstructor” of the metaphysical tradition, phenomenology (considered as an autonomous project) seemed to have lost most of its importance (such is, for example, the impression one gets when reading The Principle of Reason, one of the masterpieces of the later Heidegger). He opposed those who would doubt his (singular) faithfulness to phenomenology, since he himself adopted a “phenomenology of the inapparent” (or “tautological” phenomenology) and encouraged the practice of a meditative gaze enabling insight into the essential, including its very withdrawal. Realizing that “the time of phenomenological philosophy seems to belong to the past,” Heidegger reasserted that the profound reach of phenomenology transcended a mere trend or a school: “The comprehension of phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility.”3 Heidegger certainly managed to show the coherence of the path of thought that took him from his idiosyncratic reading of the sixth Logical Investigation to his “insight into that which is” (whether concerning the scope of technology or the givenness of time as such); however, he could not conceal the unintended consequences: inspiration more than method, phenomenology loses the specificity proper to the Husserlian school. Far from being an autonomous project and corpus, it is nothing but the very opening of the philosophical gaze. Heidegger recognized it explicitly: “That which phenomenological investigations rediscovered as the supporting attitude of thought proves to be the fundamental trait of Greek thinking, if not indeed of philosophy itself.”4
It is not surprising that this legacy would lead to a dispute. The most faithful will claim that Heideggerian thought is phenomenology par excellence; the opposite position, sustained with no less conviction and even more argumentatively, is that Heidegger’s thought produced a genuine “catastrophe” in the phenomenological field. In the first case, the Master’s positions are addressed literally, illustrated primarily with examples, but avoiding any methodological engagement with other styles or methods belonging to the phenomenological field.5 In the second case, on the contrary, while trying to do justice to the internal coherence of the Heideggerian quest for an original language that frees the gift of Ereignis (the event of appropriation, unapparent in its very appearing), one formulates very serious doubts: “Is to speak in that way not to expose oneself to ambiguity pure and simple?”; and are we not allowed to assume that “the tautological transformation of phenomenology involves . . . a disastrous or catastrophic character?”6
Courtine was able to raise the question with a frank acuity, but he would leave it unanswered, requiring his readers to discover the rationale and envisage the consequences of the “disastrous character” of the Heideggerian transformation of phenomenology. The question would of course deserve a comprehensive study, but our concern strictly bears on the observation and analysis of the impact of the Heideggerian “upheaval” within the recent French reception.
Phenomenology as such does not belong to anyone, and phenomenological inspiration takes many forms. Hence, it is not surprising that the opposition to Heidegger, in this context, did not challenge his “right” to practice—in particular in his late seminars—some simple “phenomenological exercises” whose pedagogical virtues were to explain, for instance, the difference between the physical body (Körper) and the lived-body in the phenomenological sense (Leib),7 or the distinction between the direct appearance of the phenomenon (The Lubéron! René Char!) and the Cartesian (or Kantian) representations of such phenomena: “For the Greeks, things appear. For Kant, things appear to me.”8 It is not just by chance that the reference to the Greeks constantly accompanied “exercises” of the phenomenological gaze that Heidegger sought to conduct and share.
Heideggerian phenomenology thus became a “path of access to the Greek world”—an approach that was in no way nostalgic, but that rather supposed an incredible hermeneutical daring to understand the Greeks better than they understood themselves. “It is a phenomenological inquiry that should lead to an understanding of what is Greek in the Greeks.”9 The main risk is thus not anachronism; it is found in the circularity that connects the two projects, namely, listening to the Greek and the gathering of the phenomenon: “To go from the Greek to the Greek is to go from the phenomenological to the more phenomenological.”10 The first readers of Sein und Zeit had not detected this reciprocal implication of the two gestures: the relationship between the critique of the ontology of presence-at-hand [Vorhandenheit] and the “destruction” of the classical reading of Greek philosophy. This questioning recasts the problem: the hermeneutical fecundity of this new practice in phenomenology cannot be separated from the critical reinterpretation of the whole of tradition: “The Heideggerian operation thus consists in reading the reality of the metaphysical in terms of the possibility of the phenomenological.”11
By identifying the complex radicality of the Heideggerian undertaking, Brague avoided speaking of a “disaster,” but he clearly detected that the consequence of the hermeneutical challenge initiated by Heidegger was that phenomenology became “the method for all philosophy” (that is to say: for any philosophy worthy of this name), thereby losing the specificity and the autonomy of its Husserlian features. One understands, then, how Heidegger could continue praising the phenomenological inspiration while destroying the framework and the determinations of what constituted it as a “scientific” project. The close connection in Heidegger’s work between his new “phenomenological” practice and the “step back” (from metaphysics) does not just prevent phenomenology from being an autonomous corpus, but it seizes its “possibilities” in a sense that is quite different from the development of research oriented toward the multiple and complex faces of intentional experience and its transcendental roots or specific expressions (logical, cognitive, emotive, etc.). Any development of phenomenological research in a positive sense is abandoned or left fallow.
The result seems obvious: did not recent French phenomenology seek a way out of the Heideggerian path? Certainly, but the situation proves more subtle: Heidegger remains in view, but as sort of a negative catalyst. In fact, phenomenological research develops, above all, in opposition to his presuppositions or suggestions.
Is this a clear opposition or a more discreet divergence? It depends. However difficult it may be to establish the definitive record of such a still-shifting terrain, it seems that the former is the case—from Levinas to Henry, from Marion to Loreau and Richir. Despite all their differences, all of these authors rejected Heidegger’s presuppositions concerning phenomenology. Levinas set the tone by subordinating his faithfulness to “phenomenological inspiration” and his sustained attention to Sein und Zeit to his radical rupture from the phenomenology of the “there is” as well as from any philosophy of the Neutral.12 The differend concerning the Heideggerian phenomenological “possible” is no less radical in Michel Henry: constantly denouncing the “overwhelming”13 connection between the phenomenological method and Greek phenomenology (the primacy of seeing), he devotes the first part of his last work to the “reversal of phenomenology,” and he criticizes, in particular, “the ontological indigence of the appearance of the world” in Heidegger.14 Marion undertook an intense discussion of Heideggerian themes throughout Reduction and Givenness, by placing the “pure form of the call” beyond Heidegger’s existential reduction.15 He pursued his search for a radical phenomenology of givenness in Being Given and went as far as to avow that the later Heidegger claimed that givenness “disappears in the advent [Ereignis].”16 For his part, although Max Loreau—in what was to have been his final work17—gives serious attention to Heidegger’s thought, in which he finds all the possibilities of phenomenological ontology,18 he nevertheless devotes himself to overcoming its limits (“the spirit of retrocession”19) and to sketching—beyond Heidegger—a thinking of the “becoming-body-of-the-world”20 and of its imaginary genesis in phenomenal diversity. Finally, when Richir reconsidered some of the analyses of affectivity in Sein und Zeit (whose genius he did not intend to contest), he reproached them for their quasi-pathological schematization under the influence of an “existential solipsism.”21 Consequently, he tried to build a “versatile” phenomenology, sensitive to the extraordinary complexity of affective life and of the dynamical structures of the experience of thinking, in a completely different way, by returning to Husserl’s passive syntheses and continuing Maldiney’s research.22
The divergences from the Heideggerian heritage were more discreet in the works of a new generation of French phenomenologists. Thus, Jocelyn Benoist, while attentive to the Heideggerian “ruptures,” essentially focuses on the articulation between phenomenology and logic as it unfolded in Husserl, himself questioned on the basis of the debates that shed light on his first studies on the philosophy of arithmetic and the status of judgment.23 For his part, Renaud Barbaras, author of a thesis on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, and already locating it “beyond Husserl and Heidegger,”24 retains the latter’s critique of transcendental phenomenology and his confrontation with nothingness. However, he orients his new phenomenology of perception in terms of the motion of life and of subjectivity as desire, which places him finally closer to Erwin Strauss (and Jacques Garelli25) than to Heidegger.26 Finally, if Claude Romano at first glance seems to follow Heidegger’s thematic of Ereignis with the term “event,” he on the contrary distances himself from it, preferring to find his inspiration in the Stoics and in Nietzsche in order to understand the event in relation to birth and to the temporal diversity of human adventure, instead of reducing it to the mere question of being.27
The phenomenological opening of the unpredictability of the event is precisely one of the major themes of a discreet scholar whose name has not yet appeared in this book and who deserves particular attention: Henri Maldiney. His relation to Heidegger was obvious, constant, and recognized; but it was never exclusive. Inspired by plastic arts and poetry, an erudite connoisseur in Ancient Greek thought, he often referred to Heidegger, without ever simply repeating him or agreeing entirely with his views. A striking example of this free inspiration that maintains its critical distance can be found in Maldiney’s book Penser l’homme et la folie.28 Presenting his method as strictly phenomenological, Maldiney deals with psychotic and depressive behavior on the basis of a “reduction” that brackets them. However, beyond any anthropology, it is indeed the being-there [Dasein] that he questions; and he takes into account not only the existential analytic itself but also the entire tradition of Daseinsanalysis.29 The extent of this debt to Heidegger only serves to make the question of the différend, in relation to the question of destiny more apparent. For Maldiney, Heidegger’s ontology “is a ‘heroic’ ethics that interiorizes being’s destiny in a legitimacy unknown to it, and which replaces the arbitrary blindness of its sheer exteriority.”30 The opening to the unpredictability of the event challenges, on the contrary, any destiny. Maldiney calls this welcome of a nondestinal novelty, transliability [transpassibilité], in distinction from the melancholic mood that dominates the analyses of Sein und Zeit. Contrary to “care,” it is necessary to allow the lightness of an Angelus Silesius—reread, to be sure, with Heidegger, but from a different perspective—soar.31
Risking a metaphor drawn from contemporary physics, one will thus notice that the field of French phenomenology is still subject to the intense radiation of Heidegger’s thought, whether it tries to escape or gain distance from it, or whether it tries to benefit from it. One has just seen that this latter case is illustrated by Maldiney’s work, in the context of both psycho-pathology and aesthetics. In these domains, and especially in the second, the fecundity of research inspired by Heideggerian phenomenology continues.
Is there a link between the silence Heidegger observed with respect to the Hebraic tradition and his refusal of any positive ethics? Is it not logical that Levinas would rediscover the former thanks to the latter? Should ethical concern not be rethought in the more subtle terms of a deconstructive thought? These questions are now going to be articulated.
Whereas in her earlier book, Marlène Zarader had followed Heidegger in his return toward the primordial words of pre-Socratic thought,32 her subsequent approach became more radically critical and inventive.33 She begins with Paul Ricoeur’s statement concerning Heidegger’s silence with regard to the Hebraic tradition.34 Far from finding arguments in Ricoeur to fuel a direct criticism of this “omission,” Marlène Zarader employed an original method that sought to respect the specificities of the case: the elaboration of the Heideggerian questions bearing on the un-thought of the Greek tradition, as well as the listening to the Judaic reading of the biblical text.
By following three leading themes (language, thought, interpretation), Zarader undertakes an inquiry that allows one to recognize troubling analogies. For Heidegger: the questioning of origin establishes a double level of inauguration (unknown and manifest) on the basis of which the Greek beginning is extracted from the traditional linear schema of the history of philosophy in order to be rethought as inaugural for the Western world as such. This hermeneutical daring is justified by a new theory of interpretation (texts speak only provided they are questioned) that makes a new approach to language possible. The latter is no longer understood principally or primarily as an instrument of signification: to name the thing is to “bring it into presence”; language makes being itself be. Thought (Denken) is no longer conceived as an expression of the categories of presence; it is essentially memory and welcome of what “gives” itself to it; it is gratefulness and giving thanks [Dank] for what is thus offered to it and withdrawn from it. Finally, interpretation cannot be reduced to a search for signification: its reading of the great texts is guided by the quest of the un-thought (in the case of metaphysical texts) and of the un-said (in the case of poems); it then penetrates a region “opened up by Heideggerian thought.”35
Following these three themes, and almost word for word, one can identify a series of analogies. The Hebraic tradition does not conceive of language as an instrument; it practices it by exploiting its polysemic riches: speech [davar] is creative, not in the sense of a technical or dominating relationship with beings, but by virtue of the rhythmic plenitude of a coming into presence.36 Language, structured by the twofold categories of call and listening, is given over to the care of a mediator: the prophet. Zarader shows that the distinguishing features of the prophet (the welcome of language, the opening to the future, the foundational role in history, the response and submission to a divine call, and the gathering of these signs so as to share them with the human community) allow close analogies with the role of the poet in the sense that Heidegger understands it.37 As far as thought is concerned, one certainly does not find in the Bible a theoretical aim that would allow the determination of its definition and its methodical exercise: its exercise reveals itself as call, listening, memory, and faithfulness. “Hear, O Israel”:38 this call is addressed to human beings prior to any theoretical certitude; it even destabilizes it, just as Heidegger detects a call proper to thought that is more intimate than direct questioning.39 Finally, the Judaic conception of interpretation implies an essential co-belonging of the text and the interpreter: Jewish hermeneutics does not refer to a “preexisting” set of signifieds, and even less to intangible dogmas; it inscribes itself within the scope of an infinite, inexhaustible quest; it awaits a future: for Jewish hermeneutics (just as for Heideggerian thought), the text is a potentiality.40
Is this an excessive comparison; does it try too hard to prove its point via the texts? Such were the main dangers to which this research was exposed. Marlène Zarader was quite aware of it. Far from trying to adjust the Hebraic tradition to Heideggerian thought, she continually emphasized, on the contrary, their differences and their specificities, and even suggested objections (the most important of which was the unquestionably Greek nature of philosophical questioning as such—a central point of the Heideggerian thematic). But she transforms what could have remained a timid attempt into an undertaking that invites further reflection: the overwhelming nature of Heidegger’s silent denial of the Hebraic tradition parallels the striking accumulation of the analogies carefully identified, which include the question of the nothing and the truth of being as “withdrawal.”41
This critical work in no way challenges Heidegger on his favorite ground (the Greek and Western traditions). On the contrary, if we take him at his word, and follow him to the heart of the un-thought of this tradition, he reveals another ground, another tradition that is profoundly analogical. This other tradition does not operate in the usual or “classical way” where a radical difference is maintained between the question of being and that of God (Heidegger reasserts this caesura and exploits it in relation to the radical difference between Christian faith and philosophical thought). This analogical register thus created does not oppose Heidegger in any way. But—by circumventing the Western-Greek monolith thanks to a new listening to the biblical tradition—it widens the horizon and enables not the formal repetition of the question of being, but a relaunching of the Heideggerian questioning concerning the origin, while unexpectedly disrupting the claimed “purity” of the Greek source (at least the one that Heidegger identifies as the most “proper”).42
Henceforth, apart from the problems of influence,43 Heidegger’s denial of the Hebraic sources is questioned anew. We can now realize the progress we have made from the initial question (why this silence?). Ricoeur was the one who posed it; it is repeated with an intensified acuity. If Zarader is right,44 Heidegger has, deliberately or not, concealed a close proximity with essential features of the biblical tradition. Zarader does not exclude the possibility that this silence (which is not total, however)45 is “unforgivable” (one can discern a relation with the political question);46 but her contribution to thought is greater than simply adding to the voices of those who accuse Heidegger the man: rather, her contribution is to reveal in his thinking the decisive feature of an un-thought debt. Is it an exaggeration to assert that revealing this feature improves the interpretation? We are going to verify this in the dialogue with Levinas on the question of ethics.
Levinas stubbornly wanted to have it both ways: to recognize his debt toward Heidegger, on the one hand, and to mark his irreducible opposition to the neutrality of his ontology, on the other hand. Should the delicate status of this conflicting relation not be reexamined in light of Marlène Zarader’s book? If Heidegger’s thought—in spite of its undeniable specificities—maintains a proximity and an unavowed “debt” to Hebraic thought, the problem becomes increasingly complicated. However, the hermeneutical situation thus created, while subtle, enables one to approach the ethical question, such as Levinas formulated it, on a new basis.
Literally indefensible, Levinas’s interpretation of the later Heidegger is philosophically rich. What is literally indefensible is this “constant reduction of Heidegger’s thought to the tradition from which it diverges,”47 as if Heidegger only recapitulated and added to the ontology that on the contrary he constantly put into question. The irony of this situation is that Levinas unleashed an interpretative violence against Heidegger, the very behavior he attributed to Heidegger himself (a radicalization of difference, turning the tradition against itself), going as far as twisting key words (among others, in the very title Autrement qu’être, “Otherwise Than Being,” the word “essence” rendered as essance, etc.).48 One can only agree with Zarader when she noted “the strange alchemy” to which Levinas submitted the Heideggerian text, while adding: “It seems to me to amount to filling an abyss on one side in order better to mark the separation on the other.”49 All of Levinas’s passionate talent was required to accomplish the acrobatic operation consisting in erasing the abyss Heidegger had always cultivated between the onto-theological tradition and his own thought.
When looking at it more carefully, we realize that Levinas is much closer to Heidegger than he claims, but Heidegger himself is much “closer to the Biblical tradition than he says”50 (and the first clarification is all the more necessary in relation to the second). Isn’t this a double misunderstanding? How can the promise of philosophical fecundity that we discerned in this conjunction be clarified on an ethical terrain, where Levinas excels and where Heidegger is more lacking?
One must first reconsider the question of ethics in Heidegger without neglecting the letter of the texts: although it is true that a traditional ethics in the sense of a rule-based discipline is rejected, as is the approach to ethics in terms of “values,” the ethical concern is in no way sidelined.51 On the contrary, what is proposed is an “originary ethics,”52 rethought in terms of the (nonmetaphysical) truth of being, and a new access to the possibility of the mortals’ dwelling on this earth, cultivating the sense of the sacred. Zarader rightly notes that Heidegger associates this concern with an “originary ethics” with “structures of otherness” (welcome and passivity, memory and gratitude, promise and salvation).53 One should take this into account when engaging in dialogue with Levinas.
The latter also raised the ethical question again while eschewing any procedural, regulatory, or even practical (in the Kantian sense) consideration: he situated himself at the level of an originary call, animated by a radicalism that rivaled Heidegger on his own ground, since the claim of an infinite Transcendence directly challenges the sameness of being and its neutrality. One could even add (following Ricoeur) that the ethical command in Levinas’s work only opposes the primacy of being with another “great genre” (as in Plato’s Sophist): the Other. And yet, one should not ignore that Levinas in no way meant to separate the alterity of the Other from his or her face and flesh or from all the gestures of solicitude, respect, and love that permit the welcome, recognition, and respect of that Other.
The purpose is not here to negate or erase the distance that Levinas wanted to emphasize so vigorously in relation to Heideggerian thought. The aim is rather to rethink this distance in terms of a certain proximity: “So far and yet so near,” Zarader pertinently writes.54 Such a strained and intense relation could not be understood, and still less examined, in purely external or “topological” terms.
Henceforth, how is it possible to rethink this distance in question without excluding the proximity implied by the shared concern for a phenomenology of the originary? If this question obviously exceeds the limit of this work, it is at least possible and desirable to indicate the direction in which one should turn to attempt to answer it. The stumbling block between Levinas and Heidegger is indeed the question of the Neutral: the ethical concern in Heidegger, remaining that of a relatively indeterminate open dwelling, neither forbids nor prescribes; it involves the neutrality of conditions of possibility of a sojourn on this earth; in this sense, it remains within a phenomenology that singularizes neither the face of the neighbor nor that of God. It is precisely this indetermination that Levinas intended to challenge: his phenomenology is from the outset uprooted (or diverted) by the transcendence with respect to any sojourn, and by the return of a human singularity that is paradoxically reaffirmed in the alterity of the Other. But this very alterity remains, if not neutral, at least purified by the level of abstraction required by the phenomenological approach. Did Levinas succeed in overcoming this indetermination? His distance from positivity is not the only thing that associates him, in spite of himself, with Heidegger. It is above all the way in which the Other dispossesses the Same, from the outset, that makes Levinas’s ethics an originary ethics, breaking with the Kantian or Hegelian mediations. Heidegger’s refusal to classify the empirical under the sphere of “values” is appropriated in Levinas’s effort to avoid the abstraction of the ought-to-be, and by short-circuiting it through a phenomenology of radical Difference.
Although one should not spare Heidegger’s thought from a critical examination of its “limitations” in terms of ethics, this examination should also recognize that an originary ethical concern is in no way absent in Heidegger’s work,55 including in Being and Time: one can even assert that the 1933 involvement—far from indicating an ethical indifference—in fact betrays the dangers of a heroic ethics of “resolute decision” that is insufficiently attuned to the specific exigencies of ethico-political rationality.56 As a consequence of the quest for a radical authenticity, this indetermination can be found, relatively speaking, not only in Levinas, but still more clearly perhaps in Wittgenstein (specifically concerning Heidegger): “I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language.”57
Should we be surprised to find that this ethical concern, which affects, destabilizes, and disarticulates the limits of language, is also present in Derrida’s later work? This is an “observation” that challenges the usual classifications, but that must be made, precisely because it concerns texts in which the approach to sexual difference, to the other’s corporeity, and to the listening to the friend’s voice is undertaken thanks to a close though critical reading of Heidegger. Without excluding other writings (in particular concerning the relations between the gratuity of the gift and the meaning of time58), it would be necessary to follow all the intricate analyses developed under the heading of Geschlecht (sex, race, family, generation, filiation, species, genre).59 To challenge Heidegger with the question of difference (or the play of differentiations) that he reveals and conceals, implicitly or explicitly, is obviously an attempt to counter him. However, the question is raised patiently, with an exceptional attention to the slightest nuances of some crucial texts. Thus, since 1983,60 Derrida questioned Heidegger’s silence61 on sexuality. While suspecting the violence of the “neutralization”62 of Dasein, he locates its origin in a transcendental dispersion that characterizes the status of flesh and of corporeity in Being and Time. At once a general structure and a mode of expropriation (or of the “fall”), this dispersion suggests a “sexual difference that would still not be sexual duality,” a difference that has not yet been set under a genre. This analysis may seem ambiguous, but it turns out to be more subtle than the harsh critique that would claim that Heidegger ignored sexuality.
This kind of deconstruction of the privilege of presence and of its theoretico-metaphysical worldview is pursued further in “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand”63 in a similarly precise, but also more theatrical and more critical, manner. This deconstruction was indeed more theatrical from the very beginning of the text, first given as a lecture in Chicago: “We are therefore going to speak of Heidegger. We are also going to speak of monstrosity.”64 This deconstruction was more critical as well, since the privilege given by Heidegger to the hand, to the handy or craft work, and to the gestures that mark a radical difference (or an “absolute oppositional limit”)65 between man and animality is understood as a logocentrism and a phonocentrism66 designed to gather metaphysics (and Christianity) into a unique figure, without being able to detach itself from it (even with respect to Trakl) except in the strange form of a “repetition.”67 The critique was almost polemical, if one notes the severity of the judgments concerning Heidegger’s approach, which was successively characterized as “dogmatic”68 and hesitant,69 following an argumentation that “takes some particularly laborious and at times very simplistic forms.”70 Henceforth, the reading of this text does not lead to a clear conclusion, and one remains perplexed, if not torn, between excessively detailed analyses (which elevate the Heideggerian text to the status of a classical reference par excellence) and harsh judgments, the scope of which range between two different kinds of risks (to compromise the entire project by discrediting the gravity of Heidegger’s thought; to mitigate the admiration by camouflaging it by rhetorical casualness). As for the theatrics of “monstrosity,” it rests—upon further examination—on a very narrow philological ground: while depending on the (indeed suggestive) “virtue”71 of the translation of ein Zeichen by the Old French une monstre (in the context of Hölderlin’s Mnemosyne),72 it then seems to introduce and validate the translation of ein Zeichen by un monstre,73 which is a mistake, at least if this translation is now considered as final and self-evident.74 Nevertheless, mixing doxography and dramatization, Derrida pursued his questioning on the generic unity of humanity by following in Heidegger’s footsteps: both with and, indissociably, against him.
From (Heidegger’s) hand to (his) ear: the work of deconstruction continued further.75 The extreme challenge consisted in listening to Heidegger until one paid micrological (and “otological”)76 attention to some key occurrences in which four themes were intertwined: the listening to the voice of a friend, the understanding of the philosophical tradition as erotological tension par excellence, the consonance of being as gathering, the transformation of truth into sacrifice under the authority of Heraclitus and Hölderlin. One can understand this incredible effort only if we bring to view both the final confession of the “intention” (“I thought I had to hear Heidegger”)77 and the initial epigraph of “hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it.”78 If one pays attention to the ambition of a text that is almost as “unreadable” as the Chicago conference was “inaudible,”79 one can presume that Derrida thus betrayed (in the strongest and most ambiguous sense) his most intimate and passionate philosophical friendship for the one who remained his master [and “overseer” (contremaître)],80 and whom he constantly sensed or felt near him, right against him, watching him.81
Whether exemplary or excessively singular, this listening to Heidegger defies any account: moreover, it leaves the ethical question in suspense, despite its attention to the other as friend-enemy, and its overly elliptical approval of the overdetermination of “Heidegger’s sacrifice” (projected on Hölderlin’s). What sacrifice? In what sense? Although Derrida does not answer these questions, one cannot deny that he went to the limits of ethics and language—philosophical paths on which Wittgenstein and Levinas had ventured before him. Has this surprising encounter (or strange proximity) been sufficiently considered, apart from the quarrels of schools or clans? If these rapprochements (and above all the thematic dialogue with Levinas) invite reflections, one can reasonably hope (or more cautiously presume) that the research to come will not limit itself to superficially opposing Levinas (or Wittgenstein) to Heidegger, but will integrate the radicality that they shared, all the while questioning the articulations to be found in the new conditions (mainly socio-technological) in which ethical concern must be inscribed. It cannot be denied that this attention to linguistic and practical articulations was the dominant axis of the hermeneutical philosophy championed in France by Paul Ricoeur.
To address the full dimension of the—mostly methodological—debate concerning the relation that Paul Ricoeur, the French master of hermeneutical thought, maintained with Heidegger’s thought, a guiding thread can be found in one of Ricoeur’s books on the relationship between text and practice:
From Heidegger onward, hermeneutics is wholly engaged in going back to the foundations, a movement that leads from the epistemological question concerning the conditions of possibility of the “human sciences” to the ontological structure of understanding. It may be asked, however, whether the return route from ontology to epistemology is possible. . . .
Ontological hermeneutics seems incapable, for structural reasons, of unfolding this problematic of return. . . .
The obsessive concern with radicality thus blocks the return route from general hermeneutics toward regional hermeneutics: toward philology, toward history, toward depth psychology, etc.82
This text not only bears on Heidegger’s case, but concerns the hermeneutical movement that it inaugurated and that Ricoeur characterized as a return to foundations, beginning from the epistemology of the “human sciences” and returning to the “ontological structure of understanding.” Characterizing Heideggerian hermeneutics,83 this text explicitly addresses the project and the structure of the hermeneutical path, and not praxis. But the question of method thus engaged has serious repercussions in the field that interests us. Finally, Ricoeur defends a position that would serve, after undergoing some modification, as a working hypothesis: the “constant preoccupation with radicality” prevents Heidegger from “making his way back”—not only from general hermeneutics to regional hermeneutics, but from the conditions of praxis (and of the deconstruction of the very concept) toward its effective (practical, ethical, and even political) implementations.
Let us follow an order that allows logic to correspond to chronology, beginning from Heidegger and his concern for the fundamental, and then addressing Ricoeur and his treatment of praxis. In a third and final stage, we will make a connection between the two positions, followed by some critical remarks.
When one returns to the impact produced between 1927 and 1930 in the philosophical world by Being and Time, one might be tempted to understand the existential analytic of Dasein as a “destruction” of an excessively abstract phenomenology (that is to say of Husserl’s “theoreticism”) in favor of a more concrete and practical approach. Dasein is no longer the Cartesian subject discovering the infinite riches of its own substance and contemplating the extended substance outside it: it is “thrown”; it is a being-in-the-world. One has to understand Dasein originally not in relation to what it thinks of itself with respect to itself alone, but beginning from its environment, from the referential and signifying systems surrounding it,84 that is to say, from its involvement [Bewandtnis] toward things.85
Let us take the example of the hammer. It is first “available as a tool” (zuhanden als Zeug).86 It is on the basis of “a circumspect explanation” (aus der umsichtigen Auslegung) that we give sense to that tool, in the set of references of our concern [Sorge] as beings-in-the-world.
The logico-theoretical structure of the proposition and its meaningful “content” are referred back to an originary existential-practical structure. In that case, it would therefore not be at all absurd to claim that the early Heidegger’s ontology would aim to be fundamental in that it prioritizes practical concern over the theoretical gaze, or at least that it subordinates the latter to the former. It is in this sense that existential ontology was understood by students and interpreters, some of whom were as remarkable as Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt.
However, Being and Time was never presented as a “practical philosophy” (neither in the Kantian sense, nor in a more general one) and the word praxis is itself difficult to find in the book. It does not appear in Hildegard Feick’s index,87 which, one has to admit, is not perfect. Nonetheless, one can find the expression das praktische Verhalten (“practical behavior”) at the end of paragraph 12.88
What we have to remember, of course, is the confirmation of the originary character of “being-in” for theory and even more so for any theory of knowledge. Should the existential analytic be conceived of as a thought of praxis and for the sake of praxis? In the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger warned against any strategies of reversal: an anti-metaphysical proposition remains metaphysical; and, similarly, as regards Platonism or Hegelianism (and its Marxian revision), Heidegger gave several warnings: one does not really surpass a basic philosophical position by purely and simply “reversing” it.
Does this Heideggerian mistrust (or caution) result from a kind of supererogatory style or from some devious ulterior motive (to avoid being thought of or “reduced” to Marxist or Marxian positions)? Would it not have been more honest to admit that the intention was to provide a foundation for thinking of practice (and of praxis) leading to a new approach to decision: Entschlossenheit?
It could have been clearer, but the price of this simplification would have been the betrayal of the cutting edge of a thought that was finding itself in Being and Time and that was developed subsequently more fully.
When Heidegger critiques the reduction of “practical behavior” to the “non theoretical” (or to the a-theoretical), this should not be misunderstood: it is not to the exclusive benefit of praxis; it is in view of a more radical and fundamental departure from the very horizon of the theory/practice dyad. It is in this more radical and more fundamental direction that the very well-known pages (but perhaps not generally read carefully enough) of the “Letter on Humanism” lead us:89
We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough. We view action only as causing an effect. The actuality of the effect is valued according to its utility. But the essence of action is accomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness—producere . . .90
When citing French expressions of Sartrean origin, such as l’engagement dans l’action, Heidegger does so to oppose it:
Thinking is not merely l’engagement dans l’action for and by beings, in the sense of whatever is actually present in our current situation. Thinking is l’engagement by and for the truth of being. [Das Denken ist nicht nur l’engagement dans l’action für und durch das Seiende im Sinne des Wirklichen der gegenwärtigen Situation. Das Denken ist l’engagement durch und für die Wahrheit des Seins.] (PA, 240)
What does this mean? It means that the truth of being is substituted for action or praxis. But what can l’engagement “by and for the truth of being” mean?
It is here that we find, as it were, in real time, “this constant preoccupation with radicality” that Ricoeur was talking about. Clearly, just as the theoretical gaze in Being and Time was held to be “derivative,” practical engagement is now considered to be insufficiently originary.
Matters become somewhat clearer when one makes the effort to read carefully through the argumentation developed by Heidegger two pages after the beginning of the “Letter on Humanism,” particularly with respect to technē, praxis, and poiesis.
Trying to justify his reference to being, Heidegger states that “the history of being is never past but stands ever before; it sustains and defines every condition et situation humaine” [die Geschichte des Seins trägt und bestimmt jede condition et situation humaine].91 It is therefore not only being in an abstract sense that is made to pertain to praxis in order to think it more radically, but it is being in its history. The word history is at least as important here as the word being. One has to consider both of them. Heidegger suggests that thinking should not be reduced to causing an effect [das Bewirken einer Wirkung]: “thinking accomplishes (vollbringt) the relation of being to the essence of the human being.”92 Vollbringen: “to accomplish” or “bring about” is the feature that characterizes thought, but also acting (Handeln): “the essence of acting is das Vollbringen.” In this sense, thought is originary acting.
Now, to begin to understand what is thus at stake and to experience it, one has—Heidegger clarifies—to free oneself (frei machen) from a “technical interpretation of thought.”
We thought we had understood that Heidegger wanted to free “practical comportment” from the theoretical gaze. However, he now contends that “for this reason thinking, when taken for itself, is not ‘practical.’”93 When we turn toward theory, Heidegger refers us back to practice! When we turn toward practice, he sends us back toward theory! Practice is more originary, but theory preserves the “autonomy” of thought. Theory and practice condition each other. How are we to exit this circle? By questioning the “technical interpretation” that predetermines this horizon. And how does one accomplish this? By no longer approaching thinking itself as poiesis, but as accomplishment, Vollbringen.
It is this very opposition between theory and practice that the Heideggerian radicalism means to overcome, which is confirmed by the rest of the “Letter on Humanism” concerning practical life and ethics. Does thinking remain theoretical? To this question Heidegger responds: “The answer is that such thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass (ereignet sich) before this distinction.”94
It is time to come to a conclusion: on the one hand, the situation has been clarified, while on the other hand, it has become more complex.
It has been clarified in the sense that the refusal to favor practice over theory, and Heidegger’s “reservations” with respect to any practical philosophy, can now be easily understood. The very difference between theory and practice is what needs to be rethought. The deconstruction of the one cannot be achieved without the dismantling of the other. Such is the radical exigency of returning to the foundations of metaphysical thought, which conditions any genuine renewal of thought.
It has, however, become more complex in the sense that Heidegger cannot honestly claim to have overcome the difference between theory and practice; he carried out his return to the foundations thanks to a reinterpretation of temporality (it is the freeing of the origin that frees up the possible). Yet, this opening of the possible entails a new experience: the overcoming of metaphysics is no more accomplished than the access to a new ethos, to a new “dwelling.” The task of thought is to prepare a response to the “turn in being itself.” This is indeed a task, an apprenticeship.
One knows the ethical and political consequences of this approach only too well. However subtle and enlightening it may be, the Heideggerian reinterpretation of the distinction between theory and practice runs a great risk of leaving the philosopher disarmed in the face of the exacerbated contradictions of his or her being-in-the-world in an epoch that is increasingly technological and prone to power struggles. The haughty figure of the later Heidegger, a solitary thinker disillusioned by his ideological and political engagements, certainly corresponds to the originary call of a more essential thought; but does this radical return to foundations not displace the expectation toward a future that is always withdrawn, avoiding actual praxis? Is that not a one-way ticket, and, in any case, without viable return, or without catastrophic consequences?
This question is worth being posed to the thought that itself claims to be the most questioning. This is precisely what Ricoeur has done, quite appropriately and pertinently, without yielding—for the most part—to reactive polemics, and also by taking into account the virtues of Heidegger’s hermeneutic thought.95 How is it possible to rethink praxis and its priority on a new basis, while integrating the lessons and the possible limits of the Heideggerian experience? Is that possible, even if it is very difficult? Let us recall briefly what Paul Ricoeur has attempted in this matter.
From the outset, Olivier Mongin96 characterizes Ricoeur’s philosophy as an “ontology of action.” Indeed, Ricoeur himself characterized the unity of his thought in the same way, while also criticizing the Heideggerian theme of the “end of metaphysics”: “My question is: what is human action? While asking myself this question, I find in Aristotle—but also in Spinoza with the idea of conatus, in Hobbes with his philosophy of passions, and in Schelling with his philosophy of powers—enough resources to re-engender metaphysics. Consequently, the latter does not appear to me as being accomplished, I would rather say it seems to me to be still unexplored.”97
A whole dimension of this critique targets the Heideggerian interpretation of the history of metaphysics as a history of being and as “onto-theology”; there are a series of very meaningful disagreements with Heidegger’s thought, as well as with Derrida’s, and the undertaking of a deconstruction of the “metaphysics of presence.”98 Let us concentrate on the positive side: the priority given to human action, a question that arises prior to and beyond reflexive philosophy, but also—in the case of Ricoeur—in its midst, if it is the case that being is conceived as action.99
It arises prior, in virtue of the primum vivere. Ricoeur is well aware of this urgency of immediate praxis. It arises beyond it, for Ricoeur remains faithful to the philosophical ideal of a practical wisdom. It arises at the very core of the act of philosophizing, since Ricoeur defends the necessity of a reflexive core that must provide the thought discovering the resources of its freedom its principles of action and justification.
Is that to say that philosophy is practical through and through? It is, as we saw, an “ontology of action” whose aim is “the good life” in the Aristotelian sense, and for which being itself can be discovered and defined as acting.
One could add that Ricoeur always attested to this philosophy and applied it to his own life in a systematic way. The advantage of drawing a parallel between the philosophical and practical projects of Heidegger and Ricoeur is to reveal a contrast from the outset between the two philosophers (without risking a value judgment): there is continuity in Ricoeur and a growing concern for coherence; the metaphor of a coming and going is completely valid here: not only is Ricoeur faithful to the basic inspiration of personalism, but he was constantly involved in testifying to this inspiration and reflecting in order to draw lessons from his involvements, including from his failures.
As for Heidegger, on the contrary, the involvement of 1933—although it had been in the making for some time, as Farias and above all Ott have shown—was quite a shock (including for his closest disciples: Arendt, Gadamer, etc.); moreover, after his resignation from the rectorate, and even though Heidegger never really “renounced” his engagement, he withdrew from any political activity and even attempted to become the very incarnation of the thinker in his hut or in Freiburg. The consequence is that the involvement of 1933 remains something of an enigma, and Heidegger, far from shedding light on it, only reinforced it through unsatisfactory and partial explanations (e.g., his interview in the Spiegel published after his death).
Thus, one can find a stark contrast between two styles of philosophical life (which at the same time stand for two different type of relation to praxis). Now, precisely, what interests us most is not only the contrast between two styles; further, the risk of becoming lost in psychologism or moralism will be prevented so long as we can go back to the source of the opposition: a very profound dissension with respect to the heart of the matter.
Ricoeur’s reservations bear less on Heidegger’s radicality as such than on its stakes: being100 as presence. Heidegger’s radicality is that of a decisive return to the conditions of presence.
Ricoeur clarified his disagreement at the end of Oneself as Another when he questions the relation between “selfhood and ontology” and constantly referred to Aristotle: “My reticence is on a single, but essential point. Must one make presence the fundamental nexus between oneself and being-in-the-world? . . . By placing the main emphasis on the ‘always already’ and on the impossibility of getting away from the tie of presence—in short, on facticity-does one not diminish the dimension of energeia and of dunamis by virtue of which human acting and suffering are rooted in being?”101
This is to express, with considerable caution—and in the context of a discussion of Aristotle—a fundamental difference that I will now try to clarify before drawing some negative but mostly positive consequences.
A few words first on Aristotle: while Heidegger grants much importance to the overdetermination of being in Aristotle, Ricoeur reverts to a more classical interpretation by posing the equation: being = energeia (or act) and by giving a major role to the dunamis-energeia couple. The polysemy of being will be articulated not on account of being as such, or of being as presence, but of being as acting. The central idea is that of an “analogical unity of acting.”102
The negative consequences of this position are twofold. Phenomenologically, Ricoeur seeks to diminish the importance of Heidegger’s analyses of facticity, anxiety, and “fallenness” (the entire “passive” dimension of the existential analytic). As far as hermeneutics is concerned, he rejects the entire Heideggerian understanding of the Schritt Zurück, the step back and the distance intended to question and critique—for the sake of the ontological difference and of an ever more original thought—the forgetfulness of the truth of being brought about by metaphysics in its onto-theological structure, from Plato to Nietzsche.
Happily, this appropriation has very positive consequences: it allows for a philosophy of action, about which we must now provide details.
Acting is aporetic; and Ricoeur’s concern is to respect this aporetic nature, to assume it, and to confront it—which first took place through an analysis of the tragic nature of acting in Jaspers’s work and in a philosophy of finitude.
The immense field of acting cannot be reduced to a single principle. It is hierarchical and plural. To assign it an analogical unification is to locate it between homonymy and synonymy. Ricoeur does not want to diminish the complexity of acting: he only wants to do all that he can to preserve the coherence of meaning in a scattered world and in a society that is continually in conflict.
This philosophy of acting becomes remarkably systematic in the formulations of Oneself as Another and of Réflexion faite. With respect to the metaphysical perspective,103 Ricoeur recognizes a “both powerful and effective ground” where Aristotle’s energeia and Spinoza’s conatus are conjoined. With respect to phenomenology, Ricoeur identifies practical agencies or categories enabling him to structure praxis in order to provide a solid ethical view that seeks to be practical wisdom. There is circularity between the meta-function and the phenomenology of acting.
To show how the resources of the practical field unfold, Ricoeur distinguishes between four instances of praxis:
language—speaking
action—doing
narrative—telling
responsibility—submitting to imputation
The investigation can proceed—he explains—at a first level, in terms of ordinary language (who speaks? who acts? etc.), then at a “greater degree of abstraction”: speaking, doing, telling, imputing will be endowed with meaning and serve as an “analogon in various figures of acting.”104
Let us return to the four instances to verify how each of them plays the role of referential unity:
1. With respect to language and to speech, one finds a semantic structure of the sentences that refers to actions, an investigation into the different ways one recognizes oneself as author (of narratives) and accepts moral imputation.
2. With respect to action, the point of view adopted is the performative actualization of speech itself, of narrative and of responsibility.
3. With respect to narrative, one finds the emergence of a narrative identity, in language in action and in moral and/or juridical imputation.
4. Finally, with respect to this imputation, language becomes the designation of the speaker, action assumes the free origin of causality (I accept myself as the author of my acts and I suppose the other does the same); finally, I situate myself in a network of meaning and of “references.”
The priority of praxis in no way means, for Ricoeur, a complete rejection of theory; on the contrary, praxis is permeated by theory and conversely, since the mediations (speech and narrative) are symbolic.
The complexity of a philosophy that is both reflexive and hermeneutical in relation to praxis corresponds to the tragically aporetic nature of action. The conflict is always present. The “Hegelian temptation” of a total mediation is set aside, yet the concern for meaning and coherence is never abandoned. Ricoeur confronts the difficulties105 and engages the aporias, without claiming to resolve them completely. This is a philosophy of detour, a philosophy of the “long way,” of the “prolongations” (from metaphysics to morality), in contrast to the shortcuts, the short circuits, and ideological impatience.
All the features of this philosophy of action show that in contrast to Heidegger’s “obsessive concern for radicality,” Ricoeur has opted for another obsessive concern: the return to praxis, to a just praxis, in which the attestation of the self as an other can be discerned, a self opened to alterity as self, an attestation that for Ricoeur is the contrary of suspicion.
To Ricoeur’s credit, let us admit—to conclude—that he put his finger on a fundamental imbalance that afflicts Heidegger’s thought on this question of praxis: the return to foundations is always privileged over the practical implications and their exigencies. This is what Ricoeur calls the Heideggerian priority of the aletheiological attestation, that is, of truth and its essence. Consequently, despite his denials, Heidegger cannot overcome the theory/practice dyad; certainly he explores its limits and origins, but he cannot dispense with it without being himself reduced to a “theoreticism” that compensated for the very brutality of his engagement in 1933. As Jacques Taminiaux has shown,106 Heidegger is much more Platonic than he claims, in particular in his political error: this so-called philosopher-king enters a domain in which he thinks he is both founder and commander. Ricoeur was right not to follow him in this direction and, on the contrary, to have exercised a critical vigilance.
However, in relation to Heidegger, Ricoeur wavered between reservations107 (which would be emphasized and in time further explained) and a reappropriation that is at times overly forced, laborious, and even recognized as such (at the end of Oneself as Another, he reappropriates Heidegger’s notion of Care). This corresponds to a more profound interest in the early Heidegger rather than the later one.
Ricoeur himself coined the expression “the masters of suspicion” about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. One could characterize him as a “master of scrupulousness.” His concern for justice, his willingness to address the aporias in order to confront them, and his infinitely respectable hermeneutic efforts prevent or complicate the clear account that one would hope for—above all when it relates to such a complex figure as Heidegger.
One must go as far as recognizing that, through his vision of metaphysics and his conception of the status of reflection in the context of an ontology of action, Ricoeur is completely opposed to Heidegger’s injunctions or suggestions. He aims at reactivating the treasures of metaphysical thought, from Aristotle to Kant, from Spinoza to Schelling. This attitude is quite antithetical to that of the overcoming of metaphysics, and to the idea of an “end of metaphysics” (and perhaps even more to the deconstruction of metaphysics conceived as an end).
The pages Ricoeur devoted to this question in Réflexion faite108 are very illuminating. He calls the horizon common to the enormous undertaking of hierarchization and differentiation of the ontology of action, “the meta-function.” Hierarchization refers to the research of principles while differentiation refers to a strategy of a semantics of the plurality of the senses of being (the metacategories such as the Same and the Other).
The situation thus seems for the most part clarified. In relation to Heidegger, the ambiguities that remain in Ricoeur seem due to his scruples and his intellectual honesty. But this does not completely excuse his misunderstanding of some of the most original aspects of the later Heidegger, in particular the questioning of technology and of the meaning of our global civilization driven by the will to power.
Finally, it is quite significant that the terrain of the debate that both separates and unites Ricoeur and Heidegger is temporality and historicity. Heidegger’s masterpiece is Being and Time and Ricoeur’s major work is Time and Narrative. The latter study, centered on the problem of praxis, seems to have forgotten the temporal axis. In fact, it always was implicit: what diverts Heidegger from determinate aporias of practice is the search for an originary time and historicity; on the contrary, by postulating that human time is a “narrated time” and by linking such narratives to a semantics of actions, Ricoeur keeps oscillating between an originary temporality and a so-called inauthentic temporality, between phenomenological time and cosmological time. On this issue, I am closer to Ricoeur rather than to Heidegger, if it is true that there is no “pure time” and that temporality always implies (historical) sharing and measure, a measure that is to a large extent socialized, and thus has a relation to action.109 One would hope that the lessons of the Heideggerian deconstruction of time as constant presence would not be forgotten and that the most penetrating views of Being and Time on “ekstatic” temporality as horizon of our finitude should not be invalidated. This is what Françoise Dastur helps us understand: it is undoubtedly the most reliable explanation and interpretation yet written in French on the question.110
But there is, however, an area that seems to hold further difficulties, namely, the theological question, which we find to be, moreover, a central concern of our time.
Before widening the scope of our investigations, let us go back to Ricoeur’s position: he adopts the critique of onto-theology, but assumes the reappropriation of the metaphysical metacategories. On this point, the relation with Heidegger reaches a state of extreme tension and complexity: Ricoeur accepts the Heideggerian critique of the God of onto-theology, while impugning the historical scheme globally applied to metaphysics. He thus intends to “save,” without confusing them, the operation of the “meta-function” and the Christian God.
Perhaps Ricoeur should have emphasized his disagreements with Heidegger much earlier, by espousing the best works of onto-theology more decisively (one thinks of Schelling for example), but one cannot, in any case, accuse him of incoherence or weakness on that point. What is certain is that his intent to do justice to the ontological, existential, and even historical concerns of the Master of Freiburg increasingly prevented him from marking his opposition to an overly encompassing and reductive conception of metaphysics and his profound reservations concerning Heidegger’s “paganism.” However, Ricoeur did not engage in an explicitly theological debate with Heidegger’s thought. One easily guesses the reason why: since the Heideggerian approach to the sacred did not fascinate or attract him, he had no reason to seek theological inspiration in a thinker who ignored the Bible and proclaimed with Nietzsche the death of God or the Entgötterung—the flight of the gods—while remaining deaf to the possible revival of the Christian message.
However, there was (especially among Catholics) a deep interest in the Heideggerian renewal of the question of the relation between philosophical thought and faith. We have found obvious evidence of this in the rich volume published in 1980, Heidegger et la question de Dieu [Heidegger and the question of God]. It seems to us that since this publication,111 the attitude of the Catholic philosophers interested in Heidegger has changed noticeably in the direction of a more critical perspective. In what sense? In order to respond to this question, we can refer to the dense and lucid article devoted to Heidegger by Jean-Yves Lacoste in the dictionary he edited.112
After having recalled in detail the biographical information that testified to both Heidegger’s deep Catholic roots and his subsequent decisive separation from the church, and finally to his ambiguous dialogue with theologians (an ambivalence ultimately revealed by his partially Catholic funeral), Lacoste noted the “utterly de-theologized” character of the philosophical analytic of the human being.113 Is theology as positive a science (distinct from philosophy) as chemistry? From the lecture “Phenomenology and theology” (1927–28) to the Zurich seminar held in 1951,114 Heidegger hammers out a warning directed toward both the theologians and the philosophers: God and being have to be radically distinguished; the attempts of “Christian philosophy” are “square circles.” His advice was heeded: both Levinas and Marion intended to think God outside of any onto-theology. Yet, as Lacoste added, “the assignment of a task does not mean it will be carried out.” Despite the clarity of his warnings, Heidegger could not prevent his texts devoted to language from lending themselves to a theological reading and thoughts welcoming the “event of speech” from being inspired by his reading of the poets. Better: Heidegger himself, apart from any faith or positive allegiance, did not forbid himself from speaking of the divine. In the “Letter on Humanism” (but already in the Beiträge), the thought of being presumes a new approach to the sacred. A kind of “theiology” is thus established, which Lacoste describes as “supremely a-theological.” Hence the following question, posed with rigor but without hostility: “Would ‘Heidegger’s theological secret’ be the quest for a substitute for the Christian experience and for the Christian delineation of what can be thought?” The answer is certainly positive. It has the merit of a disillusioned frankness: “Theology has nothing to learn here, except what it is not, which is, incidentally, a very useful lesson.”
This is a lesson that merits reflection. In a sense, it remains Heideggerian, since the Christian theologian is referred back to him or herself, or rather to the specificity of the message that he or she has the calling to pursue. However, it is quite a negative message: without Kant being named, one cannot avoid thinking of the catharsis applied to the Protestantism of his time by the one whom the young Hölderlin hailed as the “Moses of our nation.” Heidegger was no less influential, relatively speaking. But this comparison has its limits: as Kant continued to be inspired by a purified Christian tradition, Heidegger turned his eyes toward the distant star of an anonymous sacred. And it is by acknowledging this unquestionable distance that Lacoste himself, as a theologian and Christian thinker, parted with Heidegger, although he remained attached to him as a phenomenologist.
There is therefore much “unsaid” in Lacoste’s remarkable article, not because what is essential is hidden in it, but rather due to the importance of a point that is clear if one resituates it in the context of the history of Heidegger’s reception by the French Catholic theologians.115 The illusion of a direct convergence or even of a constructive dialogue with Heideggerian thought has disappeared; even if the confrontation led to a “useful lesson,” it resulted in a separation.
One must take a step back in order to consider the path followed thus far. In the 1950s, attempts at dialogue or rapprochement, while remaining cautious in their formulations, did not exclude ulterior motives or expectations. One finds a testimony of this in an introductory text in a journal published by the Dominicans of the Saulchoir in 1959. While avoiding “hasty baptisms,” it is stressed that Heidegger’s thought should not be understood as an atheism and that it encounters in the “ontological difference” the same difficulty Thomas Aquinas encountered with the analogy of being. Hence this question, seemingly sincere and unquestionably revealing: “Does it mean that the thinking of being such as Heidegger conceived of it is so foreign to us that we would be indifferent to it?”116
These attempts discreetly continued in the following decades, reaching a remarkable quality in 1980 in Heidegger et la question de Dieu. We already mentioned117 how instructive this book is and continues to be for today’s reader because it avoids no difficulty and opens the debate, to the greatest extent possible, between the scrupulous interpreters of Heidegger’s thought (Beaufret and Fédier) and his opponents (Stanislas Breton, Levinas, Ricoeur). But one should complete this first approach by clarifying the intentions of Richard Kearney and Joseph O’Leary, the organizers of the conference that was at the origin of this publication, which was held at the Irish College, in Paris in June 1979. In the context of our “double belonging” to Judaism and Hellenism, while the crisis of rationalism and technological civilization worsened, the foreword noted a “strange coincidence” between Heidegger’s “liberating gestures” toward the metaphysical tradition and the aspirations of a religious thought “thirsting for a more originary truth”: thus “the hypothesis of a possible encounter” between them.118
One must also note, behind the main issue (the direct confrontation between Heidegger’s thought and Judeo-Christianity), a kind of new development in the debate, introducing a questioning concerning the validity of his approach concerning the sacred within the very horizon of thought of the second Heidegger and criticizing the Master for a concept of idolatry forged from his critique of onto-theology. This was indeed Jean-Luc Marion’s concern. With the title of “Double Idolatry” [“La double idolâtrie”],119 Marion followed in Heidegger’s footsteps when questioning any conceptual approach to God (but also its reverse: conceptual atheism), then—in his quest for the most divine God freed from any ontological determination—he suspected Heidegger himself of a more subtle idolatry, because of the conditions posed and intermingled that subordinate the approach to the most divine God to that of the truth of being: “Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought.”120 This passage from the “Letter on Humanism” became well-known because it gave readers so much to think about: should we identify in this an unacceptable “obstacle” placed in front of the access to the unique God of the Judeo-Christian revelation? “Here again . . . there functions another idolatry,”121 Marion asserts, arguing that the authenticity of the Existent (Dasein) becomes the condition for any approach to God. Addressing the “unthinkable” character of God, and in order to escape any idolatry, Marion, in the end, crosses out the very name of God with a cross of Saint Andrew—a gesture that refutes Heidegger while strangely imitating Heidegger’s crossing out of being.
Marion’s article is followed, in the same book, by a detailed refutation of it by Maria Villela-Petit. She refutes the usage of the concept of idolatry against Heidegger because the ethical meaning of idolatry in biblical hermeneutics was overlooked. The result is that idolatry is in some way taken out of context by Marion and above all in an illegitimate manner in relation to a thinker whose entire work was devoted to a scrupulously respectful approach to the sacred and the divine. The passage in question in the “Letter on Humanism” does not impose a series of unacceptable prerequisites to monotheism: “if there are any conditions at all, they are phenomenological ones and are conditions of an approach to the divine God.”122 Marion does not understand that Heidegger does not situate himself at the level of abstract preconditions opposed to Revelation, but instead approaches the Divine in a henceforth nonmetaphysical way. Similarly, the lecture on “the thing” has a phenomenological scope that does not necessarily privilege the mythical sacred at the expense of biblical revelation: the suggestive evocation of the rainbow as sign of Alliance, of the various aspects of the earth (exile, passage, and the place of the promise) and of the expectation of the chosen People and of God’s messengers (the angels), enables and allows a reading of “the thing” that opens on the Play of the Four in the Judaic world.123
“One would need to learn how to read differently than with the consternation of a hen that would come upon silverware.”124 For his part, Jean Beaufret neither tries to argue point by point against Marion nor to show the compatibility of Heidegger’s thought with Judeo-Christian tradition: he prefers sarcasm, by referring to the Greek sense of Chaos and to Meister Eckhart’s approach to the Divine.
In his response, Marion maintained that one should not minimize “the idolatrous violence of the text of the Letter,”125 and in order to defy the “exegetes” (Fédier included), he referred to a clarification made by Heidegger himself in 1953 in Hofgeismar: “The passage in the ‘Letter on Humanism’ speaks exclusively of the God of the poet, and not of the God of Revelation.”126
“So, eating crow, like fox outwitted by the chicken coop, shamed-faced, abject, ears all a-droop,” Marion also refers to Jean de la Fontaine’s bestiary to prevail over his opponents.127 Actually, it is the impartial reader who may very well find him or herself, if not ashamed, at least seriously perplexed. For, if Heidegger’s clarification finally satisfies Marion, should he then not have retracted his charge of idolatry? Why should one still refer to an “idolater” especially if it is not the case, since one recognizes that he was not referring to the God of the Revelation? Consequently, Marion’s suspicion no longer seems justified, as it becomes clear that Heidegger did not mean to submit God to the least ontological condition. On the contrary, his constant effort (and not only in his “Letter on Humanism”) consisted in freeing Christian faith from any philosophical “imperialism” and in respecting its specific requirements. Given this clarification, one can still expand the explanation: Heidegger was not personally inhabited by the Christian faith; François Fédier reported this honestly,128 without confusing this fact with the extent to which a believer or a nonbeliever could make sense of Heidegger’s approach to the sacred.
Let us return to Marion’s position to observe that it takes (whatever its pertinence) a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in his attitude toward Heidegger; Marion himself dated the end of his Heideggerianism at that time.129 In The Idol and Distance,130 a meditation on the death of God, interpreted as the death of the moral God, a constant convergence took place—with the theme of Difference—between the Heideggerian deconstruction of onto-theological metaphysics and the theological quest for a spirituality that would be respectful of the mystery of the Trinity. Heidegger was even audaciously read in a quasi-apologetic sense: the fourth dimension of On Time and Being, the givenness of time itself, was referred to a Giver, the Father; and the ultimate Heideggerian term, Ereignis, was understood as a “medium or analogon of the Trinitarian play.”131 The text on “double idolatry” marks a rupture that would be reconsidered and reconfirmed in 1982 in God without Being.132 This book maintains again and in a provocative way (in the eyes of the traditional theologians) the typically Heideggerian claim of a separation between theology and ontology, but it assumes and sharpens its suspicions toward a Heideggerian “idolatry” of the truth of being and of the immanence of the thing within the horizon of the world (without taking into account the criticism addressed to Heidegger for reducing God to a being133). This is a strange imbroglio: the author, as early as the first page, claims affinities with Heidegger’s philosophy as well as with Pascal’s,134 but he proposes “working love conceptually”135 in intentionally speculative terms that ignore Heidegger’s entire work on the deconstruction of the language of metaphysics.
Beyond these formulations and these very personal and historically situated difficulties, it would be helpful to wonder, in all serenity—the Heideggerian virtue par excellence!—what form the debate would take today. Even if it is not possible to give an account that satisfies everyone in such a delicate field, it seems that the related development of the research136 from Heidegger’s perspective as well as in the theological field proved Jean Greisch right, who, as early as 1980, sought to avoid any “strange encounters of the third kind between two discourses that are heterogeneous.”137 The double requirement of rigor that results from such an awareness is of course easier to formulate than to apply.
To what extent can a hermeneutical theology succeed in drawing some lessons from Heidegger without being caught in the opposite trap of an insufficiently critical Heideggerianism or of a new “Christian philosophy” seeking to use some Heideggerian inspirations as a means to ends that are more or less apologetic? The Dominican father Claude Geffré, aware of these risks, limited himself to strictly theological grounds, while benefiting from Heideggerian hermeneutic teachings principally drawn from a reading of Being and Time: the existential category of understanding (Verstehen) must be able to welcome the Word in its textual, linguistic inscription, and above all, in its historicity. As an initiator of the hermeneutic turn of theology in the French-speaking world, Geffré claimed to have been influenced more by Ricoeur than by Heidegger. He nevertheless accepted Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics (on the condition that it does not apply entirely to Saint Thomas). On this issue, he was preceded and initiated by a German priest, one of Heidegger’s personal friends, Bernhard Welte,138 whom he had invited to come to the monastery of the Saulchoir. Since that time, he found the reading of the later Heidegger beneficial for religious anthropology, to the extent that the critique of the disenchantment of the world and the approach of a “more divine God” enabled a more open approach to non-Western religious phenomena, and facilitated an approach devoid of any “logocentrism.” But what was at issue in this case was a change in the intellectual attitude, but in no way a direct integration of Heideggerian themes in Christian theology, since Heidegger himself rejected the confusion between the “passion of the cross” and philosophical wisdom. Was this tolerant overture of the Christian faith, understood in terms of nonconcealment rather than dogmatic imposition, widely shared in the Dominican order and in the Church? Claude Geffré’s answer is cautious: speaking in his own name, he testified to the existence of a strand of hermeneutic theology, which had been more successful in Germany than in France. In the Dominican order, he felt rather isolated: at the end of the century, what was more important was his silence with respect to Heidegger.139
Jean Greisch, professor at the Institut catholique de Paris, does not have a radically different position but seems even more concerned to separate his reading of Heidegger (of whom he is a translator and above all an authoritative interpreter) from his theological and religious engagements. He presents himself as “atypical” within the French intellectual landscape. A citizen of Luxembourg, he studied theology in Austria, and he was in no way influenced—unlike the French Heideggerians of his generation—by Beaufret, Birault, Wahl, and the other Parisian “smugglers” of Heideggerian thought. He was influenced by Karl Rahner’s approach to transcendentalism and studied Thomism with J. B. Lotz; later, his masters at the Institut catholique were Dominique Dubarle and Stanislas Breton, who were not at all Heideggerian. Today, while considering himself close to Ricoeur and above all interested like him by the early Heidegger, and in agreement with Ricoeur on the necessity to reactivate the “meta-function,” he wanted to get the idea of a metaphysics of Dasein “back on the agenda” and thought there were still some hermeneutical teachings to be drawn from the Beiträge (which he does not, however, read without trepidation).
Asked about the subtly negative conclusion given by Jean-Yves Lacoste in his article on Heidegger in his Dictionnaire, neither Marion, Greffé, nor Greisch140 disagreed with it entirely: a Christian could not find direct theological inspiration in Heidegger, whose orientation toward the “sacred” was quite unique and recognized as such. However—and far from being immaterial—each of them, in his own way, carefully tried to draw lessons from the catharsis141 imposed by a serious reading of Heidegger: a double return to the sources is necessary for both Christian thought and philosophy. At the end of a detailed work that stands as a genuine summation of the “case,” Philippe Capelle also approves the perspective of recognizing a “double irreducibility”: he quite rightly shows that the relation between philosophy and theology is to be conceived as a tension that runs throughout Heidegger’s work according to a threefold thematic (the relation of philosophy to New Testament theology, to onto-theology, and to the awaiting of “a more divine God”).142 The complexity of the entirety of the Heideggerian path in its relation to the theological question is also reconstituted and scrupulously analyzed in a comparable way143 by the Jesuit Father Emilio Brito in a sweeping narrative144 in which the fascination for the Heideggerian sense of the sacred and for the supra-conceptual mystery is balanced by a critique of the Heideggerian “weaknesses” (his ignoring of ethical imperatives and of the intersubjectivity of community, but above all his lack of openness toward the transcendence of the infinite and substantial being: God). Is neo-Thomist metaphysics capable of bringing its speculative resources to bear in order to respond to the Heideggerian quest for the “God to come”? Whatever the answer, it was no small victory, albeit posthumous, for the Master of Freiburg to have communicated his message and to have had such an impact on the Catholic thought from which he emerged.
Paradoxically, the differences between our three interlocutors seemed less clear to us in relation to theology than in relation to Heidegger’s interpretation of metaphysics. Whereas Marion appropriates the critique of onto-theology while practicing a conceptuality that may seem quite metaphysical in several respects, Geffré is more accepting of the Heideggerian destruction of onto-theology; Greisch, on the contrary, remains quite reserved with respect to the “overcoming of metaphysics,” which was sought by the later Heidegger: he would not deny his own ironic reflections from 1980, which bring us back to the Heideggerian conception of the history of philosophy as onto-theology: “Does the haste with which one seeks to absolve theological discourse from any complicity with a supposed onto-theo-logy (or even, in another context, from any suspicion of idolatry) not look like the furtive burial of a cadaver? ‘Onto-theo-logy—or how to get rid of it?’”145
For once, we must take note of a particular case: in the field of the history of philosophy, one generally recognizes that Heidegger has the qualities of a master thinker.146 The most meaningful tributes come from “ideological” opponents. For example, Levinas wrote: “I must underline still another crucial contribution of Heidegger’s thought: a new way of reading the history of philosophy”;147 and in the evening of his life, Althusser confessed to Fernanda Navarro that he found Heidegger “fascinating,” because he was “an extraordinary historian and interpreter of philosophy.”148 One could find many other similar testimonies, including from younger philosophers devoted to analytic philosophy: from the latter perspective, the tendency would be to grant Heidegger a minimal recognition on the historical ground in order to deny him practically any relevance (analytic philosophers have the tendency to consider that continental philosophy is limited to the “exclusive domain” of its own history).149
This quasi-consensus must nonetheless be examined with circumspection: it obviously harbors many disagreements concerning the very contents of the interpretations. To recognize Heidegger’s predilection for the history of metaphysics does not mean to approve his reading of the great philosophers, but rather to concede, in most cases, its “provocative” nature.150 The way the Heideggerian interpretations nourished—albeit indirectly—the studies in the history of philosophy in France was in fact unexpected and paradoxical. In his critique of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Jules Vuillemin contributed to the public’s awareness of the book.151 Similarly, Dufrenne,152 Wahl, Hyppolite,153 Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Birault—in their courses as well as in their publications—awakened the curiosity of the public to the Heideggerian readings of the pre-Socratics,154 of Descartes, Hegel,155 Husserl,156 or Nietzsche, but without for that matter providing an exhaustive or completely favorable account of it. Jean Beaufret’s publication, translation, and commentary on “Parmenides’s poem” is itself paradoxical, but in a different sense. If Beaufret’s enthusiasm for Heidegger is obvious, the work is also quite personal and inventive with respect to the Master’s thought. In particular, Beaufret’s interpretation of Kant, which allowed him to interpret the reevaluation of the “opinions” on the basis of the Kantian theory of transcendental imagination (itself reread in a Heideggerian way), is quite tenuous and anachronically “Heideggerian.”157
From this first reception to the emergence of a genuine school of historians of philosophy inspired by Heidegger, more than a quarter of a century had to pass, the equivalent of a generation. And in this respect, there is yet another paradox: this community of inspiration has been called the “Aubenque school,”158 although Aubenque revealed almost no Heideggerian influence in his thesis.159 Indeed, if it was taken into account and always with a great clarity, Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle was subjected to reservations and critiques: thus the apophantic should not be understood in the sense of un-concealment;160 one had to go beyond the alternative between the latter and adequation;161 Heidegger did not really see that the “fundamental” dimension in Aristotle was the theory of being as being;162 and entelechy was not to be understood as pure presence of what is present.163 Somewhat later, Aubenque completed his critical work in the light of new developments in Heideggerian thought: he emphasized the excessively unifying character of the understanding of the history of metaphysics on the basis of its onto-theological structure; according to him, one had to be equally attentive to the overcoming of ontology—which was announced at the end of Book 6 of the Republic—an overcoming that unfolded in neo-Platonism and more particularly in the Plotinian “henology.”164 It is no less true, as we have seen in the course of this work, that Pierre Aubenque recognized Heidegger’s exceptional philosophical stature and vigorously opposed any politically oriented “reductionism.” This is a new sign proving the fact that along with allegiances or fascinations there was room in France—more discreetly but no less decisively—for a kind of nonideological reception designed to combine interest or sympathy with a critical perspective.
Whether it is baptized “the Aubenque School” or by some other name, a hub emerged for research concerning the understanding of the unity of metaphysics on the basis of the “onto-theological constitution.” These studies mainly focused on Aristotle, Suarez, and Descartes, and questioned Heidegger’s theses through a return to textual sources. A historiographic approach became predominant, in particular under the direction of Jean-François Courtine, who, without taking a strictly “orthodox” position, and assuming what was at times a “desperately micrological” aporetics, recognized that his inquiries into the history of metaphysics owed much to the Heideggerian questions and provocations.165
Whereas in matters of the history of metaphysics, the first reception included a dominant axis of “defense and illustration” of the Heideggerian theses combined with the Nietzschean inspirations in Henri Birault,166 illustrated by the marvelously pedagogical talent of Jean Beaufret167 and defended (in an even more assertive way) by Gérard Granel in his two theses,168 the new generation intended to affirm the rights and interests of a less literal faithfulness and of more erudite and concrete approaches.
Regarding the concept of “world” in Aristotle, and on what it denotes or suggests, Rémi Brague stated that he was not proposing a “Heideggerian interpretation” and claimed to have important philological reservations concerning Heidegger’s reading of the pre-Socratics.169 His project, however, was explicitly inspired by the application of the Heideggerian concept of “being-in-the-world”—with a critical intent—to Aristotle’s texts. The question raised can be schematized as follows: is it not the case that the cosmological concept of world conceals its phenomenological dimension? Brague’s inquiry involves three perspectives—ontological, anthropological, cosmological—and manages to reveal the complex tensions in Aristotelian philosophical research with respect to an “un-thought core,” which concerns the relations between Dasein, facticity, and the world itself. While the project can be suspected of anachronism or illegitimate “hermeneutic violence,” its detailed and nuanced achievement also offers the occasion of rediscovering Aristotle with a new eye. When he adopts a Heideggerian style, Brague does not do so naïvely or without providing justifications at each step for the gaps between his interpretative hypotheses and his results. His use of the Heideggerian notion of “world” and his recourse to the notion of an “un-thought” does not result in a mimetic adoption of the Heideggerian method or style; on the contrary, his strategy is that of a scrupulous philologist. Hence, the surprising originality of this work, which manages to critically “rework” some Heideggerian intuitions: the onto-theological structure of metaphysics is thus translated within anthropology in the form of a structure called katholou-protological,170 and the Heideggerian “care” is said to be reminiscent of (and probably inherited from) the Aristotelian phrontizein.171 One will forgive the technical character of these points: it was necessary in order to show the degree of precision of Brague’s work.
Instead of a new reading of a great author, Jean-François Courtine chose to foreground a philosopher of lesser renown (in France): Francisco Suarez, a Spanish Jesuit of the second half of the sixteenth century.172 It is true that Courtine undertook, at the same time, to sketch out a sweeping narrative of medieval and premodern metaphysics while pursuing the guiding thread (obviously of Heideggerian inspiration) of an inquiry into the identity of metaphysics and of its onto-theological structure. The “Suarezian moment,” carefully put in perspective in the context of the horizon of the scholastic transposition of the Aristotelian project, corresponded to a systematic refoundation of metaphysics in terms of a new theory of the object in general, or “objectness” [objectité].173 An heir of Ockham by virtue of his quest for a unique term that would provide an account of the whole of beings, Suarez ontologized metaphysics by rendering its “object” the correlate of knowledge, “without any appearing.”174 Suarez’s metaphysics, already a quite modern undertaking in spite of its scholastic trappings, understands every being in terms of its “knowability,” but does not directly confront the Thomist theory of the analogy of being: this is a difficulty that Courtine analyzed in light of a very fine distinction between the “blind spot” of metaphysics (its onto-theological constitution formalized in the theory of the analogy of being) and its structuring or systematizing accomplished or realized “after the fact” (the distinction between ontology—general metaphysics—and special metaphysics).175 It is therefore a Heideggerian framework that allows one to truly understand this monumental work of erudition, a work that runs the risk of remaining a mystery for a reader deprived of the key that has been quite discretely inserted in the body of the text.176
The refinement of that same line of interpretation was also Jean-Luc Marion’s project, this time concerning Descartes. Marion first tested the fecundity of what he himself named later a “wild Heideggerian methodology”177 on the Rules for the Direction of Mind. What does that mean? That the very idea of a confrontation between the thematics of the Regulae and the Aristotelian categories178 springs from the Heideggerian notion of a transformation of the ontological “core” of metaphysics, without, for that matter, directly questioning the hypothesis of the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics. This broader project (this time explicitly referred to its Heideggerian source) was the one that Marion followed more systematically in his detailed analyses of the nuances of Descartes’s “metaphysical prism.”179 The difficulty in this respect comes not so much from the rare use of the term “metaphysics” by Descartes as it does from the very originality of the new sense of first philosophy: the novel conjunction of a “nothingness of ontology”180 with a “white theology.”181 Since neither beings nor God can be approached directly, it is only on the basis of thought (as cogitatio) that a first onto-theo-logical figure is constituted: beings as objects of thought refer to the thinking that thinks them and that thinks itself. Nevertheless, beings can be addressed more fundamentally still and more radically when treated as a cause: the Cartesian “dictate” of reason imposes the recourse to causality realized par excellence in God as causa sui. This second figure of onto-theo-logy does not cancel the previous one, but founds it in its turn, such that Cartesian onto-theo-logy, which, at first, was not apparent, is in fact “redoubled”182 The Heideggerian scheme (which Marion recognized is best found in its elementary form in Leibniz and Hegel) appears, in Descartes, as “an exceptional rendition of a more complex and eventually infinitely varied game,”183 so that—far from being refuted—it finds itself, on the contrary, to be de-multiplied, as it were.
These three examples (Brague, Courtine, and Marion) of the fecundity of Heidegger’s work in the field of the history of philosophy do not correspond simply by accident to the three “moments” (Aristotle, Suarez, Descartes) that Heidegger himself had not studied as systematically and carefully as he had done with Kant and Nietzsche. Their common interest does not principally consist, however, in filling in the “blanks” in the Heideggerian program; it lies above all in the erudite and critical questioning of stimulating theses, which always ran the risk of dogmatism. In this respect, one could object that these works only exploit Heidegger’s suggestions while “normalizing” them, since they have submitted themselves to the Caudine Forks of the scientific demands of academic recognition that had been, in one way or another, somewhat shaken by Heideggerian “boldness.” This judgment would remain too external, unaware of the very reason for the confrontations “on the ground.” Their methodological and critical purpose cannot be separated from their “transplantation” outside the original, properly Heideggerian, soil. One could almost say that this Heideggerian scheme was henceforth exploited in a “technical” way in the field of the history of philosophy. Thus adapted and applied, did it still involve essential thought in the sense the Master understood it? The question must, at least, be posed. Let us limit ourselves here to observing that even if it is vain to look for a complete consensus in a field of research that is still evolving, one cannot deny that the works that have been mentioned184 occupy a central and strategic position for any reinterpretation of the metaphysical tradition. Heidegger’s legacy can certainly be contested, here or elsewhere, but it has undoubtedly deeply transformed and enriched the French studies in the history of metaphysics.185
In what sense can the five inquiries that we have just conducted be said to have taken us to the crossroads? In no way exclusive from one another, they share many common points, and they do not refer to particular directions that would be exclusive from each other. Opening new paths for research, apart from the distraction of current events, they rather draw a topology that has very little to do with the early receptions of Heidegger’s thought. Whether it concerns the appropriation of the two great traditions of the Western world, or the quest for a primordial ethics, or the difficult dialogue between the thought of being and a hermeneutic of action, or even the debate concerning the meaning of the sacred or the divine, or the reinterpretation of metaphysics as onto-theology, the work undertaken entailed the constant shifting of borders between the fields under consideration, as well as between the Heideggerian texts and the canonical texts of the tradition. And this thorough work escapes the more narrow problematic of the “reception” so as to converge and flow in directions we cannot yet entirely foresee. Between exegesis, ethics, hermeneutics, theology, and the history of philosophy, the crossings and the possible connections are so numerous that Heideggerian themes will bear fruit anew.186