You consider yourself to be atypical: what do you mean by that?
Coming from the “wilds” of Luxemburg, and having completed training in theology before “converting” to philosophy, I consider that I am totally atypical, in the sense that I was not influenced by any tradition or by any French schools of thought. My relationship to Heidegger preexisted my encounter with the “French Heideggerian School” represented by Jean Beaufret, Henri Birault, and many others. Of course, I had read their works, but all this was in addition to a relation to Heidegger that had already been established. More significantly, I do not think that my approach to the Heideggerian texts was influenced by any particular school of interpretation. In a way, I have educated myself. I recognize, however, in retrospect, that my first encounter, which was quite indirect, my Herkunft, so to speak, with Heidegger’s questioning, was connected to my studies in fundamental theology in 1964–65 in Innsbruck, in the shadow of Karl Rahner, if I dare say. The fact that my relationship with Heidegger involved the hermeneutic question from the very beginning was due to my work with Heinrich Schlier, who was himself a student of Bultmann, who had been my mentor in New Testament exegesis. All my later work in philosophy evolved from this initial debt.
I pursued my studies in philosophy in Paris, under the supervision of three professors who each influenced me in their own way. At the department of philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris, there was the memorable personality of the dean, Dominique Dubarle. He was above all interested in establishing the foundation of a “theological ontology,” closer to Aquinas and Hegel than to Husserl and Heidegger. I should also mention the presence of Stanislas Breton, who was intellectually stimulating as he was humanely supportive, and under whose supervision I actually began to work on the notion of Ereignis in light of the Platonic and neo-Platonic notion of exaiphnes. For a long time, Breton’s Du Principe guided my first foray into what the same author called the contemporary “space of the metaphysical thinkable.” Breton also supervised all my academic writings until the end of my thesis, which I chose to title, somewhat mischievously, La Parole heureuse, to be in contrast with the text La Parole malheureuse that Jacques Bouveresse had just devoted to Wittgenstein. In addition, I was influenced by Paul Ricoeur, whose seminars I attended at the C.N.R.S from 1972, and where I gave my first lecture on the status of metaphor in Heidegger. I was also, of course, fascinated by Jean Beaufret, whom I met in the context of the discussions at Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which were moderated by Odette Laffoucrière. However, I cannot say that he influenced me in a direct way.
Even if I consider myself a kind of Heideggerian “autodidact,” I want to tell you about a twofold debt that probably makes me suspect in the eyes of some. On the one hand, my theological interests—which were very strong at the beginning, although now somewhat less so—aligned me with a particular theological school, that of the “transcendental” theology of Karl Rahner. If any tradition of reading Heidegger has influenced me more than others, in a way, without my being aware of it, it was his work: Hörer des Wortes.1 Without this theological provenance, my book La Parole heureuse would not have seen the light of day. But this does not mean that it would be a simple transcription of crypto-theological themes into philosophical language!
Could you clarify the spirit of that tradition in relation to Heidegger?
With respect to metaphysics, I am indebted to the transcendentalism of Joseph Maréchal and his Germanic followers: Jean-Baptiste Lotz and Emmerich Coreth. I attended the latter’s course on metaphysics in Innsbruck. The figure of Heidegger that I could vaguely discern through this metaphysics, which was rooted in the experience of a radical, transcendental questioning, was that of a “metaphysician,” especially a metaphysician of the metaphysics of Dasein. It was the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, of course, but read more as drawing the lineaments of a metaphysics of Dasein than as undertaking an existential analytic whose phenomenological presuppositions were more or less kept silent.
In this respect, I realize more and more that my approach to Heidegger and, perhaps, even to contemporary philosophy resembles the movement of a crab walking backward. In 1968, already knowing that I was going to pursue my academic studies in France, I set myself to working seriously on Gadamer’s Truth and Method. I was reading this book while undergoing professional training in the Villeroy & Boch ceramic factory in Luxembourg. As my incompetence as a craftsperson became increasingly clear, I educated myself in the problems of a philosophical hermeneutics. It was beginning from the Gadamerian source that I progressively ventured into the Heideggerian domain. For a long time I avoided exploring the phenomenological and Husserlian “back country” of Heidegger’s thought.
This is one of the reasons that explains why, at the moment, I am much more taken by the early Heidegger, and in particular the one of the first teachings in Freiburg. One should realize that this early Heidegger has not really been addressed in France, where the debates relating to the “onto-theological” constitution of metaphysics, the critique of the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction, etc., still occupy center stage. I too knew a time when “my Heidegger” was mainly the one of the “Letter on Humanism,” which remains undoubtedly an important text. In spite of this, I nonetheless concentrate now much more on Heidegger’s phenomenological beginnings. This is why in my book, L’Arbre de vie et l’arbre du savoir (The tree of life and the tree of knowledge), I devoted myself to the task of outlining a complete interpretation of the first course in Freiburg in which Heidegger set forth the basis of what he called at that time the “hermeneutics of factical life.” I would like to continue this reconstruction that is meant to be genealogical and systematic at the same time, in a style similar to the one I used in my commentary on Sein und Zeit, through an inquiry on the notion of a “metaphysics of Dasein” during the time after Sein und Zeit, from 1928 to 1934. In the end, it is the early Heidegger that fascinates me the most.
The reasons for my interest in the “early” Heidegger are quite complex. I feel close to Theodore Kisiel, while not being as good a “detective” as he is, since I am less focused on original sources, which demand extensive research in the archives. But, just as Kisiel and a new school of scholars, I am sensitive to a genealogical approach to Heidegger’s texts. I do not think, like Ricoeur and Levinas, that one should limit oneself to Sein und Zeit, although I do not mean to deprive this groundbreaking work of its greatness. What I do disagree with strongly is the extravagantly theological reading that gives the impression that all the paths of Heideggerian thought should lead not to Rome, obviously, but to the Thor seminar. It is not by accident that the latest editions of Pöggeler’s book, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, contain an appendix where the Heideggerian “paths of thought” appear as a plurale tantum.
Isn’t there another reason, namely the personal interest of the young Heidegger in the Thomist tradition and Augustine’s and Luther’s religious thinking?
Surely, and this is also what I am interested in, of course. But unlike the orientation of Kisiel’s research, which is principally genealogical, I would like to address Heidegger’s early courses, not so much because of their “archaeological” interest, but because they are relevant to the present debate on the status of phenomenology and to the metamorphoses of contemporary, and in particular French, phenomenology. I am taking something of a risk by supposing that the hermeneutical importance of factical life for the first Heidegger was not purely genealogical and historical.
I have an unpublished article in my papers entitled, “Reading Heidegger with the Third Generation.” It is a lecture that I presented at several places, first at the University of Lausanne, and then at the University of Memphis in the United States. In distinguishing three generations of readers of Heidegger, it is probable that I am stating the obvious. However, during my studies in philosophy, the main reading and the text of reference had become the “Letter on Humanism,” whereas for a first generation, it was Sein und Zeit, a Sein und Zeit read in a more or less existentialist manner, that is to say, through the eyes of Karl Jaspers or Kierkegaard, if you will. The third generation of readers, whose work began to appear in the middle of the 1970s, was that of a phenomenological reinterpretation for which Sein und Zeit, inseparable from the Marburg courses, became again the primary text. Perhaps we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth generation, which is no longer mine: namely, the young thinkers who were brought up in the Levinas school before they came to Heidegger. It was in 1996, during the Conference at Cerisy-la-Salle devoted to Michel Henry, which I co-directed with Alain David, that I had the impression of discovering this new generation. It would be a nice subject for study and reflection to examine the “conflicts of intellectual generations,” linked to the disparity of their respective “hermeneutical situations” in light of the concepts of “forerunners,” “contemporaries,” and “followers,” inherited from Mannheim and Schütz.
All this does not prevent me from being interested in Heidegger after the “turn,” the one of the Beiträge, of Besinnung and other texts still to be published. I will confess, however, that I read those texts with quite mixed feelings, almost as if I had to deal with kind of a tremendum fascinosum. The fascination I feel is great but often accompanied by an uneasy feeling; I have expressed it, among other places in my reviews of the Feldweg-Gespräche. The way the dialogue between two German prisoners in a Russian prison camp ignores the question of moral responsibility and addresses only the wickedness of being deeply disturbed me and continues to do so to this very day.
Your commentary on Being and Time is something completely new in France in relation to the previous receptions and is more similar to what has been done abroad.
What can I say, I am not French, even if I often regret it! This is the problem: I have been living in France for more than thirty years, and it would be very difficult for me to leave this marvelous country, if I ever had to. This does not prevent me from feeling that, in Parisian circles, I am only an add-on that has not been trained à la française, with all the intensity and grandeur this expression connotes. In the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, in my native haunts, we do not have anything like the École Normale Supérieure of the rue d’Ulm with its great intellectual traditions and its petty feuds. The fact that I teach in an institution that belongs to a network of Catholic universities, but that, because of a strange state restriction, is not allowed to call itself a “university,” increases my feeling of being a rare bird, who, for this very reason, can feel free to think whatever he wants, without any obligation to the academic authorities.
Do you feel exactly the same as Ricoeur, that is, increasingly resistant to the second Heidegger?
No, not quite. What I agree with is that the “meta” function has not yet exhausted all its possibilities. We have not finished yet with metaphysics, not only because it does not want to die, but because it still provides resource for thought. I maintain a relationship, even if problematic, with metaphysics, precisely because of Heidegger. I do not consider myself as a “post-metaphysician,” or a “post-modernist,” two expressions that do not necessarily designate the same thing. Would I dare say that some ways of speaking of the “post-metaphysical” era, or of the “closure” of metaphysics, really irritate me, because one is not even capable of saying what exactly is “ended,” finished, and why. If there is a lesson to be learned from Heidegger, it is the great patience we need to approach this kind of questioning.
It is also this interrogation that preoccupies me at the moment: to reinvent, to re-elaborate the meaning of the “meta” function. It is also in this sense that I part with the later Heidegger. Before returning to “the other beginning of thought,” I would like, insofar as it is possible, to revisit the very idea of a metaphysics of Dasein, which Heidegger tried to deepen, in the wake of the fundamental ontology undertaken with Sein und Zeit. In my book, Le Cogito herméneutique, published by Éditions Vrin—the second volume of a trilogy dedicated to the idea of a hermeneutical phenomenology—I tried to propose a few hypotheses about the “meta function.” I had first thought of writing a book on Ricoeur that would have been entitled Le Cogito blessé (The Wounded Cogito). In the process, the book has increasingly begun to resemble my own “cogito blessé”! I give more details on Ricoeur’s contribution to hermeneutical phenomenology in my work: Paul Ricœur: l’itinérance du sens, which appeared with Éditions Jerôme Millon in the series Krisis.2
Ricœur was not interested in a genealogical rereading of Sein und Zeit, for the simple reason that Heidegger’s courses during his phenomenological period have been accessible for only fifteen years or so. Moreover, he had reservations about Heidegger’s views dealing with the onto-theological constitution of Western metaphysics.
My own wager is that, provided one makes the effort to restore all the links of the genesis of Heidegger’s thought, one would be able to discern some possibilities that would be otherwise obscured by an overly teleological reading of his itinerary.
Further, I think it would be worth it, even if it would be a painful and time-consuming work of exegesis, to carefully examine each motif of the Beiträge, that is to say, the different phases of its reception of Nietzsche, etc.
In the end, what interests me most is the analytic of Dasein and its possible developments, even if for many philosophers it would not make it through the caudine forks of the analytic philosophy of language.
This implies, thus, that while not rejecting the whole of the Heideggerian conception of the history of being, you would remain relatively cautious?
Yes, I remain quite cautious. Let us take for example the theme of the “last God,” or of the “ultimate God,” to which I have devoted several studies. The last one bears the deliberately provocative title of “The Poverty of the ‘Last God.’” This title, directly inspired by an expression from Besinnung, can be understood in two different ways. The first one is Heidegger’s own understanding: the truth of being that was addressed by the later Heidegger must be approached in terms of not plenitude and overabundance, but poverty and deprivation, which has direct consequences for the post-metaphysical representation of the divine. But the way I use the expression—poverty of the last God—is meant to be provocative. What keeps troubling me is this: how does the last God intervene in the thinking of Ereignis that is supposed to free us once and for all from the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics? Is this a “philosophical theology” in disguise? What is the philosophical status of the discourse on the “last God”? Are we closer to Schelling or to Nietzsche? Pushing this point to its limit: are we are dealing with a new kind of “theosophy”? In that case, we would not be dissimilar to Franz von Baader! I certainly know that the simple attempt to pose such questions makes many who are more orthodox Heideggerians than I am react strongly. But, you see, these are the questions that I try to address, as well as possible. The important questions for me are not the elective affinities with Schelling, Nietzsche, or Hölderlin, but rather the philosophical stakes of some of the themes that Heidegger developed in his Beiträge and the related pieces of work.
One point that I share closely with Ricoeur is that I too have some difficulties in accepting the sometimes critical or offhand judgments that Heidegger, in the Beiträge, addresses to Judeo-Christianity. To say that this is only a certain “worldview,” and therefore an ideology that one can compare with Nazism or Communism, is a bit too superficial, a bit too facile! To my mind, the entire question of the conflictual relationship that the later Heidegger maintained with the Judeo-Christian tradition deserves to be examined further.
Perhaps we could move on to discuss Heidegger in terms of theology since a whole debate has been engaged, in France, between the theologians and Heidegger’s thought. Do you think that there is any misunderstanding between them?
This is a difficult question insofar as I myself have theological training: I have been trained by theologians who were themselves influenced by Heidegger. So you can see how I am caught up in a “hermeneutic circle” that concerns me personally. As I have already indicated, I was influenced by a very specific theological tradition, namely, Maréchal’s transcendentalism and its interpretation by metaphysicians such as Emmerich Coreth and theologians such as Karl Rahner. Their approach is not same as that of a Thomist or a strict neo-Thomist. This is what Rahner’s thesis, on the metaphysics of knowledge in Thomas Aquinas, and published as Geist im Welt, shows. The relationship my friend Claude Geffré had with Heidegger—he has been strongly influenced by the Thomist tradition (not having myself been brought up in Thomism, our problematics are not exactly the same)—is different. The theologians have very good reasons to take Heidegger seriously, and that pleases me, as I am pleased that they formulate their questions and objections from the perspective of intellectus fidei. Let the Heideggerians and philosophers decide whether their questions are relevant or not! What I personally regret is the paucity of strong theological reactions. Of course the temptation is that the theologians would content themselves with merely “recycling” Heideggerian themes, in which case they would confirm the caricature that Alain conjures of theology: “a philosophy without distance.”
I would like to share something with you: in 1973, at the time when I was writing my pre-doctoral thesis on Herméneutique et grammatologie, which Ricoeur published a short time later, Stanislas Breton advised me to send the text to Derrida and to contact him. I went to see Derrida in his office on rue d’Ulm. Anticipating a difficult time, I was completely thrown off by the question Derrida asked me ex abrupto: “Could you tell me under what conditions it is still possible to practice theology today?” I left the question unanswered and would be even less able to answer to it today! But this is precisely why I wish that the theologians who think they have an answer would become involved in the debate, instead of withdrawing, or simply using Heidegger’s ideas. I prefer a theologian who dares to address critical questions to philosophers, however untimely, just as Karl Barth questioned a theologian who took refuge in pastoral or ecclesiastical strategies. But one could also wonder whether the French academic community is ready to listen to the voice of theologians who think critically, instead of considering them as pariahs.
Since I have been working on Heidegger, I have tried to undertake a “philological” reading, that is to say, to pay attention to the detail of the text, avoiding extrapolations and excessive generalizations. This is one of the reasons I have labored like Sisyphus to write reviews on all the volumes of the Gesamtausgabe in the columns of the Revues des sciences philosophiques et théologiques. One of the fruits of this time-consuming and patient reading is that it allows one to unmask certain argumentative strategies. It is as if, in relation to some questions, Heidegger always chose the same approach. The words may change but not the method. Take, for instance, the question of the status of eternity that I tried to analyze in an article published in English. What strikes me is that, at first, Heidegger always begins by saying that, of course, the metaphysical concept of eternity inherited from Boethius, the sempernitas or the Nunc stans, is absolutely unacceptable and that, then, eternity should be conceived on the basis of time and not the other way round. Does it mean that in a thinking of the finitude of being, there is no more room for the thought of eternity? Of course not! Second, Heidegger claims the necessity to rethink the idea of eternity in the horizon of the finitude of Ereignis, but one has the impression that he makes a promise he does not keep. It seems to me that he adopts a similar strategy in his relations with theologians. Herkunft bleibt stets Zukunft: “Provenance always remains futural.” As much as the development of the Gesamtausgabe enables us to understand its theological provenance, the future he promises to theology remains undetermined.
How far can we trust Heidegger’s self-interpretation? Even if it is an intrinsic dimension of the work (as I have shown, concerning Sein und Zeit, in the last chapter of Ontologie et Temporalité), I allow myself the right of a critical distance, instead of letting myself be blindly guided or influenced by his self-interpretation. This critical distance is relevant for the relationship to theology, as well as for other questions (for example, the retrospective judgment that Heidegger directs at his first hermeneutic works in his “‘A Dialogue on Language—Between a Japanese and an Inquirer’” in On the Way to Language).
What would your reaction be concerning Jean-Yves Lacoste’s opinion, at the end of his article “Heidegger,” in the Dictionnaire critique de théologie?
Lacoste is not wrong to remind theologians who would succumb all too quickly to Heidegger’s seduction (to tell the truth, they are quite rare nowadays) that the “assignment of a task does not mean it will be accomplished.” But the question is: what concept of theology underlies the provocative declaration that “theology has nothing to learn here, except to learn what it is not, which would be, by the way, a very useful lesson”! Just imagine if one would say the same of the relationship between Aquinas and Aristotle! Obviously this comment involves a specific concept of theology; I would like somebody to tell me how this concept is elaborated. A Barthian would probably applaud—enthusiastically—Lacoste’s comment that “man does not have the right to be near God simply by virtue of being born.” Is that a sufficient reason to compare the Heideggerian hermeneutic of facticity to a “phenomenology of pagan experience,” or to transform the Heideggerian Sprachereignis into a secularized redoubling of the theological concept of the “word of God”? Before answering, the theologian, just as the philosopher, has to allow him- or herself a very long time to understand the question. This takes us back to the question: What is the status of theology and how is it defined? How does the Catholic theologian respond to the charge of a “positivism of the Revelation” raised against Karl Barth’s dialectic theology? At least in the way it is addressed at the university, theology is a rational discourse like any other with an epistemology and must be able to critically ground its own conditions of possibility.
A good example of a “positive” rather than a servile relationship with Heidegger would be a theology that aims at being as resolutely theological as that of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Von Balthasar nevertheless felt the need to graft an entire metaphysics onto his vast baroque undertaking, i.e., his three-part theological system—theological Aesthetics, divine and then Theo-logical Theatrics. The second volume of Balthasar’s theological Aesthetics, where he proposes his own theological reading of the basic texts of metaphysics, ends with a theological version of the ontological difference. However theological it may be, it presupposes a particular reading of Heidegger. In the work of a theologian as close to Lacoste’s heart as Balthasar, there is not only a defiant attitude toward Heidegger, inviting the theologians to manage by themselves, with the haughty assertion that we are capable of doing as well and even better without him. Balthasar, just as Rahner, was obliged to work on Heidegger at a given moment of his trajectory on the way to accomplishing his theological work. So things may be even more complex. In my view, Lacoste’s defiance is only an overreaction against the “apologetic” excesses that some theologians have made of certain Heideggerian themes.
I am not fond of apologetics, and this is why I am wary of the concept of “Christian philosophy,” or of the way this highly problematic expression is used. As regards this subject, I can understand Heidegger’s position on Christian philosophy. Heidegger seems to have had two “pet peeves” that were probably inseparable: Christian philosophy and the analogy of being. His rejection of the analogy of being was directed toward Father Erich Przywara, a very famous Jesuit at that time, the intellectual mentor of Balthasar and Rahner (it is possible that he might have been Heidegger’s music teacher during Heidegger’s brief stay at the Jesuit novitiate of Feldkirch). I devoted a study to this fascinating character that I expect to take up again in the philosophy of religion that I am currently finishing entitled, Le Buisson ardent et les Lumières de la raison.3 Claiming that with Karl Barth’s commentary on the Roman Epistle, the “protestant vision of the world” had found its adequate metaphysical expression as dialectic theology, Przywara was proud to show that the analogy of being was the perfect metaphysical expression of the “catholic vision of the world”; an expression that he then called: “the fundamental form of Catholicism.” The analogy of being becomes then the touchstone of any worldview, of a metaphysics that is inseparable from a theology. This explains why Karl Barth writes, in the preface of the Dogmatique, in 1927, that the analogy of being is an invention of the Antichrist and the only serious intellectual reason not to become Catholic! This is, of course, the expected response of God’s Word to the shepherd of being. Przywara was an extremely important intellectual figure who acted as a foil to Heidegger. Consequently Heidegger’s very negative sentences concerning the analogy of being in the course of 1932 (in 1932, Przywara published the Analogy of Being: one can then imagine that the students informed Heidegger, and asked him to take a position, which he did without fail, in no uncertain terms).
In all of this debate, one cannot forget the background of the Catholic theological tradition, namely the fact that the First Vatican Council established the possibility of knowing God through the light of natural reason as a truth of faith. It is in this sense that it presupposes a positive relationship between theology and philosophy. The question is, how a theology that accepts the Heideggerian thesis of the end of metaphysics, which seems to some extent similar to a Barthian intransigency, can manage such a burdensome legacy. If it is true that, undeniably, Lacoste’s conception of theology is similar to that of Balthasar, Balthasar would probably not express it in the same way. The question of the relationship between theology and Heideggerian thought is and remains a complex story that could not be reduced to a simple rejection.
Does the fact that Heidegger’s thought, in the United States, was better received in the Catholic schools than in the Protestant or analytic circles mean that there are connections above and beyond the historiographic aspect between Heidegger’s work and the theological tradition?
This is also quite a complex question. I do not know whether the different faiths matter and to what extent. It seems to me that today, the divisions between the different intellectual traditions play a more important role. I went to a conference that took place in October 1999 at Villanova University on the theme “Religion and Post-modernism.” It began with a lecture by Derrida on the theme of forgiveness. In this philosophy conference, there was a strong presence of theologians, representing different faiths, Jewish, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, etc. What struck me most was the very strong presence of Heidegger in the debates, but a presence strongly influenced by the Derridean or Levinasian readings of Heidegger. I was one of the few contributors to directly address Heidegger’s text, focusing on the theme of ipseity that I was trying to juxtapose to the Augustinian name of God, which is precisely not Causa sui but Idipsum, a very strange nomination that fascinates me deeply. As Villanova University was founded by the Augustinians, I wanted to honor this Augustinian heritage by addressing the reasons that led Augustine to elaborate that strange neologism, which, although it belongs to “onto-theo-logy,” does not correspond to Heidegger’s canonical definition in any way.
I do not think that one can still say that the Catholic universities steer the diffusion of Heidegger’s thought. It is now already much more diffuse, in the Anglo-American world at least. We should not overlook the fact that there are hardly any departments of theology left these days since nearly all the divinity schools have been converted into departments of religious studies. At the most, if one still pursues theology in the United States, it would be likely in a department of philosophy, since there remain only three or four divinity schools where one can study theology. These institutional problems, and the division of knowledge they imply, entail considerable philosophical stakes that merit reflection.
At the Institut Catholique de Paris, are there many students reading Heidegger, or are there fewer students these days who are interested?
This is a difficult question for me to answer since I am a part of it. Since my classes partly bear on Heidegger, of course my students work on him. In any case, I do not have the impression of a generalized hostility, nor do I have the feeling that Heidegger has been rejected by the theologians. This might be so, but I do not have the impression that it is the case here. In the department of philosophy and theology at the Institut Catholique de Paris, the hostile reactions do not come from “analytic philosophers” either because, in the kind of student body we have, the students are more sensitive to “continental” thought than to analytic thought.
If there are negative reactions of any kind, they rather come from some neo-Thomist circles, which vehemently call for a return to Thomism. There is today a “neo-neo-Thomism” taught in other institutions, often bound to very precise ideological orientations. There is, among some young Catholics, sort of an aspiration to a neo-Thomist lost paradise. The problem is that this is a neo-Thomism that is more or less the “unhappy consciousness” of the great Thomism of the past—Ziehen der Linien der Sehnsucht ins Leere hinaus, as the romantic nostalgia evoked in the Phenomenology of Spirit! This is the aspiration of an idealized Thomism that avoids a confrontation with the texts. What I try to show my students is how Heidegger, precisely insofar as he is our contemporary, can supply us with vital access to the great texts of the tradition, which apparently otherwise no longer speak to us. Heidegger can be an excellent révélateur of the significance of a text. I obviously do not use Heidegger to enhance the work of Aquinas, nor as a foil to Aquinas or to Meister Eckhart, whom I address in my class on metaphysics and ontology.
I would like to ask a question about the Gesamtausgabe, that is to say, about the problem of translation.
It is hard for me to speak of it, as I have just finished the translation of volume 60, The Phenomenology of Religious Life. I gave the manuscript to François Fédier in March. It goes without saying that I am still willing to revisit my translation, but I am not ready to compromise on the terminological choices I have deemed appropriate.
Is someone holding things up?
Perhaps . . .4
I now have a question to ask you on the problem of ethics, and on the hidden biblical sources.
Actually, it is rather Levinas who plays the role of “Father of the Church”! The debate is always about the question of continuity between Heidegger and Levinas. With this question, each time, I find myself before a kind of chiasm: on the one hand, I have the impression that there are two absolutely contradictory discourses, while on the other hand, I see a hidden proximity that could even, in Levinas’s case, be emphasized by showing how some of Heidegger’s existentials are appropriated, without being acknowledged, and with an added ethical component. The hostage, seen in a different way, could be understood as Geworfenheit, which is rather troubling. Something I do not accept in Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is his general assertions that we are dealing with a philosophy of power. Heideggerian “care,” after all, is not an existential version of Spinoza’s conatus essendi! One can say whatever one wants about Heidegger’s political wanderings, but, as for his thought, it is certainly not a philosophy of power; it is rather even a philosophy of powerlessness. The texts I am working on at the moment on the metaphysics of Dasein speak of a Preisgegebenheit [surrender] of an Ohnmächtigkeit des Daseins [Dasein’s powerlessness], etc., and there is an entire vocabulary, on the contrary, on powerlessness. Levinas pretends not to be aware of it, which is all the more surprising since it was one of Heidegger’s classes that he himself attended. This is the topic of the contribution that I have presented at the symposium on “Levinas et la phénoménologie” subsequently published by Jean-Luc Marion. I asked myself a perplexing question: we know that Levinas attended only one of Heidegger’s lecture courses, Einleitung in die Philosophie, in 1928—his first lecture course as Husserl’s successor. It was an introduction to the metaphysics of Dasein, and thus it was a kind of systematic commentary on the lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” I speculated about the following question: What was it that the young student Levinas understood of it at that time? What did he retain? It was precisely in this course that Heidegger strongly insisted on the Ohnmächtigkeit [Dasein’s powerlessness], the Preisgegebenheit [surrender] constitutive of Dasein’s being-in-the-world.
In Heidegger, all these terms are more ontological than ethical, in the later Levinas’s sense. Rather than opposing them frontally, one should reflect on their common starting points.