Correspondances – Between Baudelaire and Heidegger

Heidegger’s philosophy is a theory of correspondence. This claim is jarring. For was it not one of his projects, precisely, to criticize the correspondence theory of truth?¹ The exchange of letters in my title is meant to invoke the French word — the title of what is perhaps Baudelaire’s most famous sonnet — and thereby set up a relay between the notion of correspondence (from adaequatio to Entsprechen) in Heidegger and the mysticism of correspondances from Swedenborg to Baudelaire and beyond.² But despite the resonance of Denken und Dichten, is it not specious to place Heidegger’s “philosophy” (by which I mean here what is named in his lecture, “Was ist das – die Philosophie?”³) in such proximity, in such an affinity, with Baudelaire’s metaphysical poetics, or poetical metaphysics? In putting these terms together, I am crossing a line – among other things, the one between German and French. Heidegger crossed this line in 1955 when he delivered his lecture, “Was ist das – die Philosophie?” in Cerisy-La-Salle.⁴ In this text, Heidegger performs an interesting self-translation at key moments, retaining in the German text the French words in parentheses, thus not leaving them to the whims of a translator. He explicitly and emphatically translates the term Entsprechen as correspondance, thus inscribing himself in the vocabularies of both the concept of truth as correspondence and the mysticism of poetic correspondances. Despite the practices of bracketing or separating prefixes, the resonance of correspondence continues to be heard throughout Heidegger’s refashioning of the term as Entsprechen. While a study of the poetic network of correspondances is not possible here, I would like to consider the itinerary of correspondence in Heidegger from the critique of truth as adequation to the infralinguistic relation to Being in his later texts.

1. The Critique of Truth as Correspondence

The theme of Heidegger’s critique is consistently the conception of truth as correspondence, as adaequatio intellectus et rei, the adequacy of the mind to the thing, or what will later come to be formulated as the correspondence of word to thing or a proposition to a state of affairs.⁵ Instead, as is well known, Heidegger puts forth the notion of truth as aletheia, Unverborgenheit, verbergen/entbergen, a process of movement of concealing and revealing. Truth as aletheia is a “Grundzug” of being itself, not a characteristic of propositions. There are several things at stake in Heidegger’s critique of the concept of truth as adequation that are clearly outlined already in Sein und Zeit. First, adequation implies that truth is a proposition, a position Heidegger denies. Secondly, it is important that the relation of adequation or assimilation is a relationship of representation. The shift of meaning of “truth” to “correctness” follows the installation of representation that, in turn, sets up a separation and an opposition between subjectivity and objectivity. “Richtigkeit” suggests a relation of measurement and calculability that the framework of representation sets up.

Heidegger argues consistently that the locus of truth is not the proposition. Instead, it lies in the relationship or comportment (Verhalten) towards being through which the world or Seiendes is disclosed. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger shows that the relationship between Da-sein and Seiendes as truth is prior to and in fact grounds or makes possible the notion of truth as adequation or correspondence. Erschlossenheit and Unverborgenheit make homoiosis – adequation or assimilation – possible. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger argues that truth as correspondence is a deficient mode of truth as “discoveredness” (Entdecktheit). This is defined specifically as a relation of representation. Given his critique of representation and his obvious rejection of the notion of truth as adequation, it would seem that Heidegger has done with the term correspondence altogether. As he writes in Sein und Zeit, the traditional concept of truth has been “ausgeschaltet”.⁶ But it reappears as an “other” correspondence in the terms Entsprechung and Entsprechen, especially as they occur in his 1955 lecture, “Was ist das – die Philosophie?” This lecture was given at Cerisy on the occasion of Heidegger’s first visit to France. Entsprechen is meant...