Country Path Conversations

Translator’s Foreword

Translator’s Foreword The present volume is based on a set of manuscripts which Heidegger wrote in 1944–1945, but which he did not publish during his lifetime apart from an excerpt from the first conversation (discussed below). Heidegger did make plans, however, for this trilogy of “conversations” to be published in his collected works—or rather, as his motto for the collection has it, in his “ways, not works” (Wege, nicht Werke)—and these intentions were fulfilled when Feldweg-Gespräche (1944/45) was first published, posthumously, as volume 77 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe .1 Country Path Conversations is a translation of that volume. Many of the basic contours of Heidegger’s later thought were first sketched out in the voluminous collections of private meditations that make up Contributions to Philosophy and its sequel volumes, which were composed during the years leading up to Country Path Conversations, that is, between 1936 and 1944.2 These important texts are presently receiving the close scholarly attention they deserve. Yet because of the exceedingly monological character of those meditations, they are often notoriously difficult to decipher. To be sure, the unfamiliarity and difficulty of their thoughts must be understood at least in part as essential to the originary and enigmatic character of the matter itself. Heidegger indeed 1. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995; 2nd edition, 2005. For details on the manuscript remains and the editorial process behind volume 77 of the Gesamtausgabe (hereafter abbreviated as GA, followed by volume number), see the editor’s afterword at the back of this volume. 2. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–38) (GA 65); Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). A new translation of Contributions, by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu, is in preparation for Indiana University Press. Also see Besinnung (1938/39) (GA 66), translated as Mindfulness by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006); Metaphysik und Nihilismus (GA 67); Die Geschichte des Seyns (GA 69); Über den Anfang (1941) (GA 70); and the forthcoming volumes Das Ereignis (1941/42) (GA 71) and Die Stege des Anfangs (1944) (GA 72). vii viii Translator’s Foreword never writes for “public consumption,” and in Contributions he even goes so far as to claim: “Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”3 Common sense is all too quick to condemn as unintelligible what it cannot immediately understand on its own terms, and all too quick to neutralize and trivialize what it can. Nevertheless, while in those private manuscripts Heidegger also writes to be someday read and understood , at least by “the few and the rare,” even the most careful reading of many of the esoteric meditations in those volumes can sometimes leave one with the sense of having eavesdropped on a solitary thinker’s struggle to make sense of his own emerging and evolving thoughts, rather than having been addressed by a writer endeavoring to invite others onto his path of thinking. By contrast, Country Path Conversations was written precisely at a point when Heidegger had rounded the bend of the major turns in his thought-path, and it can be read as a fresh attempt to more openly convey—or rather, to more dialogically or conversationally unfold—the way of thinking he had found.4 Heidegger in fact prefers the word Gespräch (conversation) to Dialog (dialogue), apparently because, while the latter might be (mis)understood as a subsequent speaking that takes place between two subjects about something predetermined, the former can be understood as an originary gathering (Ge-) of language (Sprache) which first determines who is speaking and what is spoken about (see pp. 36–37).5 Insofar as it is especially through conversation that “what is spoken of may of itself bring itself to language for us and thus bring itself near” (p. 47), the literary form of Country Path Conversations would be vital to the furthering of Heidegger’s path of thinking, and not simply a heuristic device used to communicate thoughts which had already been worked out privately. In any case, while no less profound in content than his volumes of solitary meditations from the previous decade, and while at times as deeply enigmatic (indeed, abiding with what is essentially enigmatic is 3. GA 65, p. 435; Contributions, p. 307. 4. These “imaginary conversations” can also be contrasted with the significant interpretive works from this period, such as the lecture courses and essays on Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, H...