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4 HEIDEGGER’S FALL WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J. “Lethe is Schwarzwald black, not Buchenwald black.” With this succinct remark, a widely-respected philosopher (and good friend of many years) John Caputo, crystallizes his reaction1 to an attempt I had made2 to discuss the tragic debacle of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism in terms of Heidegger’s own conception of the negativity of truth: aletheia. Thereby hangs a tale. The symposium that occasioned my proposal was entitled “Heidegger and Politics,” and I have taken as a springboard for the essay an earlier reflection of John Sallis, commenting on Heidegger’s then recentlypublished Beiträge zur Philosphie (Vom Ereignis): “What if Truth were monstrous? . . . What if there were within the very essence of truth something essentially other than truth, a divergence from nature within nature, true monstrosity?”3 Seizing on the theme of negativity of truth as suggested by Sallis, I stressed the concealment (lethe) quality that remains interior to the process of non-concealment (aletheia) as Heidegger conceives truth, focusing particularly on a secondary modality of that negativity (after “mystery ”), namely “errancy” (Irre): Errancy is the primordial counter-essence to the primordial essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every opposite to essential truth. . . . Every mode of comportment has its mode of erring. Error extends from the most ordinary wasting of time, making a mistake, and miscalculating, to going astray and venturing too far in one’s essential attitudes and decisions. The errancy in which any given segment of historical humanity must proceed for its course to be errant is essentially connected with the openness of Dasein. By leading him astray, errancy dominates man through and through.4 73 I tried to argue that Heidegger’s philosophical experience (the Being-question , eventually Being as aletheia) did not lead to his capitulation to Nazism but did not prevent it either. It may be that he himself became victim of the errancy of which he wrote. Truth that tolerated this would be monstrous indeed. To situate this thesis in a literary context, I wove it into the story line of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,5 where I suggested that Kurtz symbolized the victim of this darkness that Heidegger calls “errancy.” Caputo would have none of it. Lethe, the concealing of concealment that distorts truth and seduces a human being into forgetting its concealment , may indeed lie at the heart of aletheia, but for Caputo that is not where Kurtz’s problem lay. The darkness was not in Kurt’s head (“his intelligence was perfectly clear,” says Marlow) but in his heart, in the hardness that had over taken it. This, then, was not a matter of truth, whether as concealment or unconcealment, but of something “otherwise than truth.” “It had to do with faces, with his utter nullification of the face of the other.” Hence, for Kurtz “there was no Other, no Law of the Other.” He was a simple murderer, with all the in-vunerability, in-sensitivity, im-passivity that this implies vis-à-vis the “niggers” that he “decapitated.” “The darkness of lethe is not old enough, not ancient and anarchical enough, to envelop murder.” “Lethe belongs to the economy of shining temples and emergent physis, . . . of the silent fall of snowflakes outside the cabin and tinkling cowbells . . . “But this is “Schwarzwald black.” “Buchenwald black” is the black of murder ; its interdiction derives from an “immemorial past” whose signification signifies over and beyond the manifestation of being, that is otherwise than being—lethe and all. This criticism that Caputo makes of my position is trenchant and compelling . It demands a response, whether by way of defense or of withdrawl. I shall indeed attempt to defend it, if only as a form of discernment in order to decide whether or not to abandon it completely. Clearly Caputo is condensing into a few pages here the fundamental thesis of his full length critique of Heidegger as articulated in the imposing work of recent vintage, Demythologizing Heidegger (1993). There he argues that Heidegger’s original posing of the Being-question (“what is the meaning of Being in its differentiation from beings, “ i.e., question about the ontological difference”) as formulated in Sein und Zeit (1927) was sabotaged in the 1930s by what Caputo calls a “mythologizing” of Being under the aegis of Greek thought that allowed Heidegger’s seduction into the orbit of National Socialism . Accordingly, multiple turnings notwithstanding, Heidegger never recovered from this fall. Caputo’s...

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