My first question would concern your personal itinerary, your philosophical beginnings.
When did I first read Heidegger? In philosophy class in high school? In khâgne? From Jean Beaufret? In fact, my first encounter with Heidegger was during a celebration at UNESCO in April 1964. I was there; I was not even in my senior year in high school, but was in the year before; I had read Kierkegaard or something like that. I understood nothing; I listened and that was very good; I attended this improbable thing: the session where Beaufret read a homage to Kierkegaard, a text by Heidegger that did not contain a single word about Kierkegaard (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”). I understood nothing at all. I left telling myself: there are things that I absolutely do not understand. I did not know Beaufret, and for me Heidegger was a name in Jean Wahl’s Introduction to Existentialism, which I had flipped through without understanding anything.
In hypokhâgne, I never heard about Heidegger. I read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on my own, and then I read Spinoza: that, I understood. Khâgne was the great adventure, with Beaufret. What was very surprising was that he never spoke of Heidegger. He gave excellent courses, which were very rigorous. I learned many things, but he did not refer to Heidegger and taught no classes on him. I read a little Heidegger for the exam, Letter on Humanism or What Is Metaphysics. Basically, I had almost no exposure to Heidegger.
It was only at the École that I realized two things. First, I understood that the entire history of philosophy that I had learned had been based on Heidegger’s interpretation. Without knowing it, I had imbibed a Heideggerian understanding of the history of metaphysics, far more than I had ever realized, through Beaufret’s courses: I had confirmation of this when they were subsequently published. Then, I told myself it would be necessary to learn German; I did so, and then I read Sein und Zeit for the first time in its entirety. But that was after Beaufret.
In a sense, I did not speak about Heidegger very often with Beaufret. I went several times to see him at passage Stendhal during my second year of khâgne and during my first years at the École. It was great there. But later, when he moved to rue du Temple, I felt, without really knowing why, that the atmosphere changed: there was a Praetorian guard around him, and I felt excluded, even before passing the Agrégation. I did not make an issue of it. In spite of everything, I must say that “l’Ontologie grise,” for example, was an essay that responded to a question that Beaufret posed often in khâgne: that of the relation between Aristotle and Descartes, and how an object differs from the entity; and also a question that I have asked myself long since: how could Cartesian science be “true” without attaining reality? In order to clarify this problem, it is necessary to accept the idea that one can directly compare, without hermeneutic precaution, Aristotle’s texts and Descartes’s texts. I had thus acquired a somewhat unorthodox but extraordinarily efficacious Heideggerian methodology. This really was a specific approach, and it was Beaufret who taught it to me: one had to read Aristotle, and to compare, as if there was nothing to it, Aristotle to Descartes’s Regulae—and voila! And thus I proceeded in this way. Why did Alquié accept such a project, such a method? Because Alquié, also in his own way, had an idiosyncratic approach to Descartes, the Descartes who spoke of a mute being and of a theory of the object without being. Thus he was quite content for me to contrast the object to the entity, when I contrasted Descartes to Aristotle. I thus was able to dedicate “l’Ontologie grise” to both Beaufret and Alquié without either of them being troubled by this, far from it. But that still did not depend on Sein und Zeit. When I began to become interested in the history of philosophy, just while reading Heidegger, it was often Heidegger’s conception of the history of philosophy that influenced me. In a sense—it is paradoxical to say that—I was not interested in Heidegger in and for himself until 1980, after I finished Sur la théologie blanche.
Wasn’t The Idol and Distance before that?
Yes, The Idol and Distance was in 1977, so it was well before that. But at that point I had another guiding thread in my work. The first question in The Idol and Distance concerned, from a theological point of view, the death of God. And in that way again I reconsidered a point of Heidegger’s history of philosophy: the God of Nietzsche is the God of Metaphysics and is the figure of the moral God after Kant, etc. Certainly, I was engaging Nietzsche, but this problematic still pertained to a history of philosophy and of metaphysics influenced by Heidegger. In fact, Heidegger played only a speculative, nonhistorical role at the end of The Idol and Distance, because I wanted to highlight the distance, the ontological difference and différance. It was only then that I worked on the enigmatic character of the ontological difference. After that I did not work on it. Even at that moment, in my mind, the discussion was centered not on Heidegger, but on the death of God. It was a short time later, when I was asked to explain the idolatry of metaphysics, the representation of God in relation to the theology of idolatry, that I specifically engaged Heidegger’s decision. But finally, why did being itself become a determination of God, including within a certain part of Christian theology? I then imprudently went further into this engagement. And then I examined more attentively the case of the “‘non’ metaphysical God.” A sentence struck me, which is found in Die Technik und die Kehre, page 45: “God, if he is, is a being.” Right there, such questions! First the obvious, banal question, which is in fact secondary, “Does God exist?” It presupposes another question, or rather, a response prior to the question: “Must God be?” And that was too unbearable for me—as if God had any obligation, and above all the obligation to be! Hence a double refusal: of the death of God and above all that God had to be! At that moment I moved from a book against Aquinas to a book against Heidegger.
Was that God without Being?
Yes, in the 1980s. Now I am able to speak about it a bit more. I met Maurice Clavel the last year of his life. He read Heidegger at the same time that he was writing his last, little known and remarkable book, titled Critique de Kant. At that moment, we focused on Heidegger by comparing our works in progress. He did not find me sufficiently anti-Heideggerian, but I realized later that I became at that moment consciously anti-Heideggerian, if this expression means anything. Very curiously, this was also the time when Alain Renaut changed dramatically.
Wasn’t there also a polemic with Jean Beaufret shortly before his death?
Yes. It was even included at the end of God without Being. I had written an article for Heidegger et la question de Dieu, a fine volume inspired by a conference organized by Kearney and O’Leary, which was to some extent a sort of commentary on the Idol and Distance. They had a conference at the Irish College in Paris, which I had not been able to attend, but for which I had given a text to which Beaufret, who had attended, had responded in a polemical manner. And I responded to Beaufret, a response that can be found in the appendix to God without Being. From that point on it was clearer than ever: I was no longer a Heideggerian, at least in the sense of Beaufret or Fédier.
The most curious thing was that, at the same time, my work on Descartes caused the historians of philosophy to see me as a Heideggerian. Jean-Marie Beyssade repeated (and he was only echoing the fama) that I had an obviously excessive Heidegger’s interpretation of Descartes. In fact, I was anything but Heideggerian, but it is true that I remained faithful to the interrogation of the history of metaphysics. Nonetheless, by 1982, I had become officially a non-Heideggerian according to Beaufret’s students; and that’s the way things remained since.
In 1984, I arrived in Poitiers, and I resumed my work. First, I did a course on Husserl, and then, although I am not sure when, I threw myself, for the next two years, into teaching a course on the entirety of Sein und Zeit. I did something similar at the École with Didier Franck. When I went to Nanterre in 1988, I did a course on Sein und Zeit right away, doing a commentary on the entire text. I did the same when I arrived at the Sorbonne in 1995. On several occasions, I chose—truly with great joy—to provide commentaries on Sein und Zeit, sparing no detail for the students. This was just about the time when you invited me to participate in a volume on Sein und Zeit at Nice, and when there was also the issue of the Martineau translation, around which there was a productive discussion. I also published Jean Greisch’s book, following this simple idea that Sein und Zeit is a classical text that must be treated as a classical text.
Greisch’s book was published later.
Of course. But I mean to say that all of that issued from the same tactic, which was very simple, and which challenged Jean Beaufret’s opinion that the university would not tolerate anyone speaking about Heidegger. As soon as I became a university professor, I therefore gave courses on Heidegger as one would for instance on Parmenides, and that was the beginning of disagreements. I have in fact worked on Heidegger from the moment that I no longer felt that I was one of the “Heideggerians.”
The other moment that was determinative was the publication of Le Prisme métaphysique, in which I wanted to test the validity of the notion of “onto-theological constitution.” In fact, this took place in several stages: after my thesis, in 1982, the French Society of Philosophy had invited me to give the usual traditional lecture and I had chosen as a topic, “On Descartes’ Onto-theo-logy.” It was a beautiful lecture, in my view, a “metaphysical fable” for others, but I revisited it as chapter 1 of the Prisme . . . I received comments and objections on the lecture, and the book, which I strongly believe in, emerged from my response to all of them.
At the same time, Courtine was working to finish his book on Suarez. I had the idea, with respect to the methodological use of the history of metaphysics by Heidegger, that the onto-theo-logical constitution could take a flexible form, as a real hermeneutics, on the express condition that one articulate it more historiographically, and that one adapt it to each author. I believed that I was right, and others have since followed me by posing the same question: can one make use of it, and under what conditions, for specific authors (Bulnois on Duns Scotus, Carraud on the principle of reason, Bardout on Malebranche)? Frankly, I would say yes. The question remains, however: during what period? With respect to Descartes, at least, the model functions well. The proof is that if one tries to apply the model to some Cartesians, one sees clearly that the methodology works. But we still have to examine the cases of Spinoza and occasionalism. The more interesting problem would be to see how it applies to Kant, because in his case the principle of reason is no longer operative, or at least it is replaced by the “supreme principle of synthetic judgment,” i.e., transcendental apperception. Then, is it not precisely the complete appropriation of the status of the onto-theo-logical constitution in the process of cogitatio? It is hard to say; it remains to be established and examined. We decided to organize a conference at the Sorbonne in 2004, on Kant and Descartes, to reconsider, among others, all these questions.
The problem of the status of onto-theo-logy is henceforth posed historically. For my part, I have rediscovered, by reading medieval thinkers, the validity as well as the limits of this model. Traditionally, the exceptions to onto-theo-logy are Greek theologies (Plotinus, etc., studied by Aubenque and Hadot). Personally, I have never been very convinced by the argument: to pass from being to the One remains a metaphysical gesture, by the mere conversion of the transcendentals. A failed escape!
But what is the sense of Aubenque’s or of Hadot’s objections? Do they suggest that onto-theo-logy is overcome, because Plotinus was a hyper-metaphysician or because he was no longer a metaphysician?
Yes, this remains quite unclear. I think the case of neo-Platonism has not been sufficiently explored. Jean-Marc Narbonne, among others, is working on it. I myself had been intrigued, when rereading Anselm, since it is clear that his celebrated argument has no metaphysical, ontological, or onto-theo-logical functions. In the context of my discussions and my belated reconciliation with the contemporary neo-Thomists, I have seen the great difficulty of speaking of an onto-theo-logy in the case of Aquinas. On numerous points, warning signs are clearly visible. On the contrary, as soon as one addresses Duns Scotus, things are in place thanks to the clear evidence of the primacy of the concept of being and of the noetic univocity.
I published an article on these matters in the Revue thomiste in 1995. Regarding Aquinas, there are many places in his work where onto-theo-logy is resisted. First, formally, God is not inscribed in the metaphysical domain, because it is first necessary to prove that the Christian God enters into metaphysics—which is false, at least literally, for Aquinas. Next, in Aquinas’s work, there is the fact that there is absolute equivocity between what being means for creatures and what being means for God, whose esse remains so unknown that one is unable to speak of it (Gilson). And the analogical relations remain so detached that they reinforce the ontological unknowability of God, far from tempering the fact (as does the work of the neo-Thomists, including Suarez above all) that there is an impossibility, an obstacle. Finally, one notes the quite strange relation between God and causality; the causa sui is always challenged for numerous reasons; very quickly, the problem of the incompatibility of causality in God is posed as such. Some tell me that it does not prove everything: I agree, of course, but textually, one can nevertheless identify very easily some positions that, retrospectively, prevent any onto-theo-logical interpretation. There is therefore currently a decisive question in the history of philosophy (posed at some point by Alain de Libera): if there is an onto-theo-logy, if this concept has a precise meaning (nonideological, and patently clear), where and when does it operate? What depends on it and what remains completely foreign to it? This is a hypothesis that Heidegger has, incidentally, perfectly admitted: this hypothesis did not apply to thinkers like Kierkegaard or others. What cannot be refuted cannot be proved: let’s be somewhat Popperian in the history of metaphysics. Likewise for the too famous “metaphysics of presence.”
There is then a nondogmatic, heuristic, hermeneutic manner of using Heidegger, which permits one to see into the history of metaphysics much more clearly. So that suddenly the opposite of metaphysics becomes interesting if one can specify it. Philosophical work has much to gain. In fact, those who take a frank approach to this question turn out to be better authors than others, because the latter are reductive and do not see anything else, or persist in another vision of metaphysics that is overly narrow. I find that Heidegger’s schema is the most interesting because it offers a principle of organization and of interpretation that is very open and at the same time quite efficacious, which avoids what many historians of philosophy do since Plato—and which consists in saying: everything is historical in philosophy, except one philosopher. This is a very metaphysical way of occluding the question of metaphysics. Who is part of it? Who is not part of it, etc.? Incidentally, this sheds an entirely new light, for example, either on medieval philosophy, which appears to be at its limit, or on authors who until then were not situated within metaphysics, and who now return to it with a vengeance. For example, at one point, Descartes was completely banished from metaphysics; there were entire periods about which one would love for there to be an inquiry, for example, into Hobbes, Spinoza, the French Enlightenment, Comte, etc.
One finds that also among contemporaries. What is the status of metaphysics for those who critique it the most? In general, can one respond to them at least somewhat negatively?
Absolutely. Now that we know the Vienna school better, and thus the birthplace of analytic philosophy, one sees better the immensity of the metaphysical assumptions that were admitted, without these assumptions being recognized as metaphysical. The ambivalence of Husserl or Bergson is similar.
I have remained methodologically Heideggerian, then, but especially in relation to the history of philosophy, because it is the most enlightening and fruitful method, which not only does not prevent scholarly studies, but makes the work interesting.
On this point, do you have the impression that France is an exception? What is your experience in the United States?
Today, the history of philosophy is completely internationalized. It is not the case that the French are in their corner with their supposed French problems; the Italians, the Dutch, and the Americans work in the same way. When someone says something in France, and when it is published, it is read, approved, and reviewed by the Italians, Americans, etc. When Le Prisme métaphysique (so indigestible and so overly coded!) was published, it was immediately translated into Italian and English. This proves that these kinds of things are transmittable across borders. The reciprocal is true (Gregory, Garber, Frankfurt, Larmore, etc.).
Now we can discuss the phenomenological renewal with which your work Being Given is concerned. In that case, isn’t it a bit more complicated?
The first thing to say—this holds true for me as well as for others—is that the renewal of phenomenology in France in the 1980s was related not to Heidegger but to Husserl. Franck reopened Husserl’s very question: a good period of the work of the Centre de Poitiers (that of Phénoménologie et Métaphysique) addressed Logical Investigations. Phenomenology, in fact, was renewed by a return to Husserl, which continued with good scholars (English, Benoist, Bernet, etc.). In my case, Husserl played the essential role, because I went back to write on Heidegger in terms of his relation to Husserl, the Husserl of the Logical Investigations. For me, the debate with Heidegger was revived, and profoundly modified, by questions like “What is intentionality?” “What is reduction?” The question of givenness emerged only when I studied the Logical Investigations (the article, The Breakthrough and the Broadening1), where I rejected Heidegger’s and Derrida’s interpretations, by maintaining that the question was not at all that of the primacy of intuition, but that the great discovery was the luminosity of givenness, whether the givenness of intuition, of signification, or that of intentionality. Incidentally, I was enlightened on this point by Franck’s book, which showed in Chair et corps, that Gegebenheit dominates the distinction made in Ideas I, §40, between two regions supposed to be distinguished by a fundamental difference: consciousness and reality. I returned to Heidegger through the discussion of this point. On that basis, inspired by Husserl, I posed questions to Heidegger, through an exegesis of the occurrences of Es Gibt, which is impossible to avoid, since it is so massively present in his text. I am genuinely persuaded that what happened with this return to Husserl allowed France to avoid this kind of evanescent phenomenology devolving into a history of phenomenology that one sees elsewhere. Because these simple questions were raised anew: What is reduction? What is intentionality? Is there subjectivity or not, etc.?
We will rediscover the theological question through a return from phenomenology to the metaphysical question.
I observe that today there are many ways to do metaphysics. Either one keeps the word and uses it in a Kantian way: this is what Husserl has done, and others after him—it is difficult but one can certainly do so. Or, one still keeps the word, while rejecting its ontological word in order to replace it with another one, for example, ethics (Levinas) or some other word. Or else, to cross out the word and the ontological stakes to discover another stakes, which is what Derrida attempted. There is above all the Heideggerian path: to speak of the question of being it is necessary to overcome metaphysics. These are clear strategies with respect to metaphysics. None of them suit me.
You omitted the destinal unity, the interpretation of metaphysics as technology.
Yes. Metaphysics as technology, indeed this is one possible path. The fact that I did not mention it proves that I am not Heideggerian, since this is a Heideggerian motif through and through.
My current position is that philosophy is perfectly open. Open by virtue of the crisis of the term “metaphysics” itself. This not a strong position; it is a provisional position.
Isn’t one of Heidegger’s virtues that he reopened the question of metaphysics as such, as a question? This has happened several times in history; for example, Hegel did not say Metaphysik but Wissenschaft: the word “metaphysics” only reappeared to be rethought.
But that happened already with Descartes, from the moment that he defined metaphysics no longer as a thinking of beings as beings, but as a thinking about knowledge, as the order and principle of knowledge. That moment also reopened a metaphysics. When Descartes undertook that shift, he prefigured Kant: it is the same definition. Also, between Kant and Descartes, Baumgarten could say that he enacted these same formulations.
Perhaps we could return to theology through Lacoste’s opinion of Heidegger in his article in the Dictionnaire Critique de théologie. He says in substance that it is necessary to construct a properly Christian theology without Heidegger. Isn’t this a paradoxical manner of agreeing with Heidegger after all, since it is he who led us to this gesture?
But, curiously, he did not abide by that project: in the end, he did effectuate this departure, since he established that any thinking of God, even Christian, depends on beings. Thus he himself has not maintained this project. This is the reason I parted from him. For me, Heidegger operates absolutely and entirely only in two domains: the history of philosophy and the analytic of Dasein. That is already a substantial work. Then, there is the question whether one can entrust the destruction of the history of ontology to being itself, if the truth of being suffices for the abandonment of metaphysics itself. Heidegger himself refused to isolate a nonmetaphysical “truth”; he eventually admitted it somewhat bluntly. The problem remains open, and I do not see at all what Christian theology can gain from it. At any rate, it has tried many times to work with Heidegger and that has been, fortunately, a lamentable failure.
Are you thinking of particular priests?
Yes. There was Lotz, Rahner, and so many others. In the final analysis, this is still a neo-Thomist reflex, according to which being leads to God. I have never taken that path, and frankly I think that a Christian theology cannot do it: its only relation to phenomenology must remain formal. It must be able to describe formally, in all of their possibilities, in the mode of the phenomena of phenomenology, the phenomena of the Revelation. That is the only thing that they have in common. It must be said: after all, let us try to see whether what the biblical Revelation presents as manifestations are indeed phenomena. And let us try to describe them, to let them give their meaning.
Is it a hypothesis you are raising?
It is a question that I raise. If phenomenology is capable of constituting all that is visible (and of giving it meaning), it must be capable of letting that constitute itself.
This is all the more interesting since, as metaphysics is going toward its end, it has defined itself, very clearly, through certain of its shortcomings, through its very incapacity, its refusal or its denial to speak of a certain number of phenomena like the Revelation. This began with Hobbes’s, Spinoza’s, and Hume’s denials of miracles. Next came Kant’s and Fichte’s critique of any revelation. Schelling and Hegel tried, each in his own way, to transgress or recuperate this prohibition. But they did not succeed, because clearly, they only ended up with a mythological philosophy. Their undertaking possessed a certain greatness, but what was most important was missing. In modern theology, one can see very well that, each time, one falls into a trap (Bultmann, as an example), it is because the theologian cannot describe a certain number of phenomena that nonetheless are constitutive of a Revelation, but that one cannot accept according to the positivist frame of mind. This is the decisive point. Metaphysics has clearly said that it cannot and does not want to give thought to the Revealed—this is not its domain and is not within its competence. If phenomenology really claims to go farther than metaphysics, it should be able to say something about it, or at least provide some tools of description or (nondescription). These seem to me to be the nonclassical and nonobjective phenomenological situations.
You have used the expression “end of metaphysics.” Would you thus accept that metaphysics is coming to its end?
Yes, I accept it for the purposes of a historian of philosophy. When Heidegger said, quite early, that one should no longer speak the language of metaphysics, he was thinking no doubt of what the reading of Husserl had shown. There is a perfect remark by Granel in the preface of his translation of The Krisis: what is striking in Husserl’s work is that what he had to describe was incommensurate with Kant’s properly metaphysical lexicon, in which he remained trapped. And all the philosophers, Bergson, Levinas, Wittgenstein, etc., tried not to speak of “metaphysics.” In my view, the great weakness of analytic philosophers is their overwhelmingly metaphysical language. And because of this, an extraordinary imprecision occurs: when they say “being,” “cause,” “reality,” or “truth,” what can they have in mind? Even and especially when they are innovative they preserve Aristotle’s language or rather the fourteenth-century Aristotelians’. What Heidegger teaches us precisely is to be historical and to know how to recognize historicity so as to not be naïve. It is when one does not want to be historical, that one is actually so.
Finally, aren’t you in agreement with Lacoste’s statement?
First, I do not think that, as such, Heidegger can be integrated into a theological project. I do not see how one can do it. Besides, no philosopher has done so.
Jean Greisch spoke to me of “the weakness of the last God.”
For me, reading of the Beiträge raises nothing but doubts concerning “the last God.” It is obviously not a question of God.
Perhaps you have suggestions concerning perspectives on Heidegger en France?
The question I ask myself now is how long it will take for a serious reading of Heidegger after 1934 to take place. There are two readings of Heidegger that have already been done, two phases of Heidegger that have been established: from Husserl’s influence to the analytic of Dasein; then there was the reading of the history of metaphysics as onto-theo-logy. Now, the question remains of what there is of the best of Heidegger’s work that came after, during the period that began with the Letter on Humanism and the Bremen Lectures. How long will it take for them to be genuinely read?
Can one speak of the end of the French exception? I mean the end of the reception that has been so distinctive since 1930. Isn’t that page in the process of being turned in favor of a much more “globalized” approach?
I almost would say the contrary. When I went to Chicago the first time, ten years ago, people did not really read Husserl or Heidegger. They knew Bergson, Gilson, or Merleau-Ponty much better. And today I observe the many translations of Heidegger, and the proliferation of translations of Husserl. And in the United States there is work on French phenomenology: the reason for that—our modesty will suffer—is a historical fact: the ’70s were Heidegger, the ’80s were Derrida, the ’90s were Levinas, and the debates that took place with these translations. In fact, it is true because I have seen it with my own eyes: the waves of translations. And the debates now are also translated. I believe that there has been a renewal, which is already in the process of being integrated into the history of phenomenology as such. I spoke about it with Vattimo. I was also struck by what is taking place in Germany, for example, in the case of French phenomenology: Waldenfelds, Casper, Kühn, and others have noted that there was a new debate in France. Thus one of the reasons why the history of philosophy makes progress is its dissemination, i.e., the fact that the information and the methods of work are the same all over the world. One proceeds in the same way in phenomenology, whereas before this there was no accumulation. In France, this strange thing happened that was constant accumulation for the last fifty years of very different scholars who were connected nonetheless: Paul Ricoeur, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Michel Henry, Derrida, and the young ones: that makes quite a collection. There is no equivalent anywhere. There is a critical mass that the Americans follow with rapidity and avidity, with the awareness that one must go through it. I think that we are not at the end of the exception.
When I speak of the end of the French exception, I meant it in another sense: not the fact that we would cease being interesting, but that “Heidegger in France” will perhaps no longer have the unique status that it once had. Is it not now already somewhat passé?
In France, it played an anchoring role. When Heidegger came on the scene after the war, there were two dominant things: Marxism (with the ensuing for and against) and structuralism. Marxism was a pole of resistance to the structuralist wave until the ’70s. It was these two opposing poles that made Heidegger seem overdetermined, with a function I would call ideological, indeed quasi-religious. I believe it is in the process of disappearing since the credibility of Marxism has declined and that we saw that Heidegger was nonetheless beyond that. And as a human being, he fell short of it.
If you are correct, it would correspond to a work that is more academic and more scientific. On that basis, with respect to the onto-theo-logical schema, couldn’t the richness of what Heidegger inspired be more easily understood and shared?
More easily, because in the history of philosophy there are those who, in the name of the onto-theo-logical, were interested in Heidegger, because they could not avoid him, although they were not in their approach or in their language Heideggerians. For example, in your own case, you wrote your thesis, which was not a thesis on Heidegger, but the manner in which you approached Hegel was nonetheless typically Heideggerian. Now Heidegger is no longer an object of passion. This is what has changed since Granel and Birault.
Birault is a separate case. In the end, I speak about him very little in my book. Now, his place has been shown to be limited. Hasn’t Jean Beaufret himself played a role that is somewhat less important than one believed?
I believe that Beaufret was much more important that Birault and even more brilliant for our generation. He really taught us how to read the texts. He put things in their context. When I arrived at the Sorbonne and even at the École, I saw, felt, and realized his absence very strongly.
Was he as successful with respect to translations?
Curiously, I think that when Beaufret’s students from khâgne and the École Normale became professors, when, in a certain way, the door was finally open, he no longer influenced them. His vision was put into question. At that moment, for all those who had a different vision, the massive legitimization of Vezin and Fédier had a negative effect. One no longer adhered to Beaufret’s approach that held that one did not need to write a thesis or enter a university.
Beaufret has an enormous responsibility for the death of a certain reception of Heidegger. In the end, it seemed to me that he did not want Sein und Zeit to be translated. And indeed, the official translation closed the door to the text.
A final point: shouldn’t we also address the excessively negative reactions to Heidegger, in particular from certain analytic “colleagues”? The fact is that theses on Heidegger alone are often not approved.
Unfortunately, they are often of a poor quality. In any case, I do not advise people to write theses on Heidegger. Not because it is a taboo subject, but because it is too difficult. It is first necessary to translate the works very carefully, to go through the work of the history of philosophy. Then it is necessary to work seriously through Husserl. And then we can discuss things. The good authors write books on Heidegger only later on.