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German Translator’s Afterword to Vier Seminare
- Indiana University Press
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German Translator’s Afterword I. In the 1937 essay “Wege zur Aussprache,” Heidegger referred to France for the ¤rst time as the “neighbor people,” with whom a “meditation to be achieved through productive reciprocal conversation”126 would be historically necessary. This was explained through a reference to Leibniz , whose thinking was “constantly conducted in a confrontation with Descartes.”127 The “foundational and predetermining character of mathematical thinking in the principal sense” is indebted to the thinking of Descartes, i.e., to the “beginning of modern French philosophy,” and from out of this grew the concept of nature for mathematical physics . Indeed, Heidegger sees the “meditation opened with respect to the essence of nature”—opened “predominantly through” Descartes and Leibniz—as “so little closed that it must be taken up once again on the basis of a more original posing of the question.”128 The question to be more originally posed is the one that Heidegger’s own thinking sought to articulate, the clari¤cation of which is the main concern of the Four Seminars as a whole, even if in 1966 this occurred for the most part indirectly . The statement following the previous citation makes clear what Heidegger already saw in 1937 as the task for thinking in France and Germany: “Only in this way do we also gain the preconditions for conceiving the metaphysical essence of technology, and thereby first achieve a conception of technology as a form for the installation of beings in one of their possible con¤gurations.”129 Even if it is only Descartes who is treated in the Four Seminars and not Leibniz’s confrontation with him, nevertheless the recurrent thoughts on the age of modern technology along with the questions of the French participants concerning the essence of technology and the possibilities for the technological world all appear today as a peculiar echo of the citation from 1937. The early look to France also converges with the work recorded in these seminar protocols with French philosophers , poets, and scholars, in that the question concerning technology, though further elaborated and more pressingly formulated in the Seminars , remains underway and is not to be regarded as “closed.” The organization of the seminars themselves was such a manner of being underway. Heidegger explicitly related them to the condition where thoughtful meditation ¤nds itself confronted by the essence of language that is required for the performance of action within the dominance of the technological world (see above, 51). In short, this is an essential part—though not the whole—of what these seminars meant for Heidegger. 86 German Translator’s Afterword [140–142] In that same year of 1937, as the ¤rst French translations of his writings were already appearing, Heidegger received an invitation to France from the International Descartes Congress and the Société française de philosophie, with which, for various reasons, he did not follow through.130 In “Wege zur Aussprache,” he had delimited “genuine philosophical self-understanding” from the “exchange of results in the sciences” which, “as is plain to see, must incessantly strive for a ‘technologizing’ and ‘organization’ (cf., for instance, the type and role of international congresses) in order to follow their long established path to its end. . . .”131 Consequently, even though Heidegger certainly did not think congresses and similarly organized meetings to be the proper form for the necessary “reciprocal conversation of the creative ones in a neighborly encounter”—rather, 1937 called for a “writing which roots itself in such open discussions [Aussprache]”132—at that time, work groups like the Four Seminars were obviously not yet in view. After the Second World War it was Jean Beaufret who did the most to motivate Heidegger’s conversation with French thought. How this happened cannot be considered here in detail, especially since numerous other French intellectuals confronted Heidegger’s thinking or attempted to take their start from him. It is to be recalled that already in his ¤rst letter to Jean Beaufret, a letter sent prior to the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger had at that time made an early announcement of the seminars at hand—on November, 23, 1945, as the circumstances of the time would not allow for envisioning a meeting. As a supplement to the remarks on seminar work that are contained in the protocols, the following passage from a letter may be cited: “Fruitful thinking requires not only writing and reading, but also the sunousÖa of conversation and the work of learning-teaching. . . .”133 In the beginning, such...