Four Seminars

German Editor’s Afterword to Collected Edition, Volume 15

German Editor’s Afterword to Collected Edition, Volume 15 On the Four Seminars Heidegger gave the above mentioned manuscript of the Parmenides elucidation, including the preliminary remark “The Provenance of Thinking,” to his brother Fritz on his eightieth birthday, “in memory of the years of mutual work.” Since these texts belong together they are both presented here, though Heidegger did not deliver “The Provenance of Thinking” in the last session of the 1973 seminar. In conversation , Heidegger had considered placing the Parmenides elucidation at the place where it is recounted in the protocol. Since the preliminary remark cannot be inserted along with this text without falsifying the course of the seminar, the appendix now provides an acquaintance with the text as a whole, a text intended not solely for that seminar session . Further, the text was presented in the seminar with “elucidations . . . accompanying the reading,” which are entered into the protocol. For this reason as well, the text of the protocol remains unaltered. In comparing the two, along with repetitions, one ¤nds conclusions drawn from the elucidations. On August 30, 1968, Heidegger delivered the self-made abridgment —“A torn sock is better than a mended one”—as an early note of Hegel’s that was familiar to him for years. He had used that very passage in the lecture course What Is Called Thinking? and during its printing either he or an editorial assistant had replaced it with the original text as presented by Rosenkranz.154 In Le Thor, François Vezin recalled this formulation of Hegel’s text, which Heidegger explained at the time as a “correction” by the “printer.” If no misunderstanding arose here in the bilingually held session, it would be obvious that the printer’s acting proofreader, in French prote, was meant. Otto Pöggeler imparted in 1978 that “printer” could refer back to an erroneous recollection of a conversation in the Hegel Archive about the printing history of Hegel’s “Wastebook,”155 which took place in the early summer of 1964 as Heidegger visited the archive. I see no other explanation. Heidegger cites Hegel’s wording in Off the Beaten Track;156 so Heidegger would have retained “Hegel’s” version more than once. Heidegger’s formulation probably appealed to him due to the pleasure he took in the raw imagery of Hegel’s words, even carrying it too far. It should provide us with an indication of his intensive engagement with Hegel’s language. We should not explain away Heidegger’s own coinage as simply false—we would instead, perhaps, offer the reproach that Hegel makes to his contemporary “would-be philosophers,” that they are “letter-bound men.”157 Hegel’s thought—the fact that what is torn and Afterword to Collected Edition, Volume 15 [443–444] 99 thus “open to admit the absolute,”158 is “better” than the “mended consciousness ” of everyday self-satisfaction—is retained in Heidegger’s formulation . It changes nothing that the 1968 citation is, in the ¤rst place, only for an “exercise in phenomenological kindergarten.” Both times, in 1952 and in 1968, delivered without the additional phrase, the passage says the same as Hegel’s note with the additional phrase, even if it does not agree with it literally. In 1952, Heidegger was prompted by a number of those listening to move from the “tear of consciousness” to the self-satis¤ed “mended consciousness,” a fact mentioned in the notes of the editor, since it was not entered into the printed protocol. Twice the audience laughed over the “torn sock” saying. At ¤rst Heidegger answered pedantically, “I do not know why you are laughing. You must learn to endure the scope of a sentence such as the one I have cited.” Wishing to continue and repeating the saying, but once again being met with laughter, Heidegger reacted in angered disappointment: “Perhaps you all live with a mended consciousness.”—Heidegger’s coining ¤rst becomes false if the additional phrase is appended, and only insofar as the “tear” would then be denied to self-consciousness. This page intentionally left blank ...