Heidegger: His Life & His Philosophy

“My beginning is Titanic & it ends in concepts” (19), Heidegger wrote to Elfride very early on, in 1916. With Elfride acting as a vase or a receptacle in this domain, too, the letters are the reflection of the theater of thought, with conceptual characters appearing in the order they were created, at a rhythm that matched that of his courses, lectures, and philosophical works. In 1930, for example, his verdict on Berlin, a place of “sheer groundlessness” (die absolute Bodenlosigkeit dieses Ortes) and yet “no real abyss for philosophy” (kein wirklicher Abgrund für die Philosophie), transmutes everyday life into the language of Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reasons), which was being written in 1929. Hence the real difficulty of translation, since the transmuted novelty is reintegrated into and reproduced in the everyday language, replete with abbreviations and dialect, from which it was extracted—there is even something like a complicity of idiolects between the “My D. S.” (“Dear little soul,” 220) and the instances of Gestell (“framing,” 1952, 228), Ge-Stell (1956, 257), and Ereignis (“essential event,” 186). This is heavy artillery—clearly too heavy when every Ur- is translated as “originary” and the perfectly simple Dasein as “being-there,” since it “must” contrast with Existenz, Ek-sistenz, Sein, Hiersein (“being here,” 231), Für-uns-Sein (“being-for-ourselves,” 30), Wesen (“essence,” 185), and Seyn (“Beying,” 163).1

In a sense, it is only ever a question of language. Everything, for Heidegger, is staked on it, as is shown by his experiencing the rectorship as a feeling of “being drained,” which made him fear a long barren period and feel the need for a “new language” (1934, 144). He repeats this over and over: “Increasingly clearly I feel the need for simple saying; but this is difficult; for our language only applies to what has been up to now [das Bischerige]” (1945, 182). It was a matter of striking the right balance between banality and bombast in the writing; using everything available—Hölderlin, Parmenides and Heraclitus, Humboldt—to create; even “camouflaging” the pervasive presence of language (“But the title [The Principle of Reason]…is chosen as a camouflage so the theme of ‘language’ doesn’t create an immediate sensation” [1955, 249]). Günter Grass in Dog Years and Adorno with The Jargon of Authenticity could not have been more on target, as Heidegger’s terse mention of a plot against him reveals (1964, 290).2

So, when all is said and done, what is to be thought about the philosophical import of these letters?

The problem hardly arises if you are a Nietzschean, which, incidentally, means that you prefer disorder to order in philosophy. For anyone who is convinced, like Nietzsche, that a philosophy is ultimately a life story, the portrait Heidegger drew of himself for his wife in letter after letter, even if it was also, like any portrait, a pose and a lie, can still be clearly interpreted as an unintended illumination of his thought processes. The move from the Little to the Great, like Plato’s move from the structures of the soul to those of the City, was easy. It is indeed as a reflection of the German Catholic provinces and a mountain cabin that the originary, the home, the welcome, or the place must be imagined. It is indeed as a reflection of Elfride that the latent saintliness of the other, the rather obtuse connection between the people and the work, the virtue of forgiveness, stubborn endurance, and even the resolute decision never to give up must be imagined. It is indeed the scheming of colleagues, the hassles with publishers and lecturers, and the newspaper attacks on him that present us with a world divorced from Being by the domination of technology and the power of the worthless “they.” It is as a female student that the Dionysian appeal of nature appears and in the guise of downhill skiing in the fresh snow that, for one moment, the degradation of what must be allowed to come forth disappears. It is also in the guise of a professor seized by rectoral debauchery that the redeeming function of the Führer appears.3 And, conversely, we can clearly see in the horny rector, in the mountain walker’s boastfulness, in the suspicious lover of every passing skirt, in the schemer of academic committees, in the husband whose infidelities were intertwined with his fidelity, and in the sedentary provincial something that absolutely exceeds their outward appearance and binds them intimately and forcefully to a new kind of thinking; something, deposited by Heidegger in the crates of his papers and the reprints of his books, that affects us not only because of the sublimation of their latent existential material but also because of the wholly new intimation they afford of the fact that, in our seemingly fast-paced but at the same time stagnant and pernicious world, this philosopher, through the very torsion to which he subjected language, was able to express certainty that the means for salvation existed, right where he was, with his pettiness, lack of courage, stubborn will to survive, and ordinary distractions. Yes, right there, were the means, which he’d discovered: a serene way of living more essential than all his vicissitudes, which he was able to change, as Mallarmé did the console table of a small Parisian living room,⁴ into the rarest star.