Four Seminars

Translators’ Foreword

Translators’ Foreword I. Situations The Four Seminars of 1966, 1968, 1969, and 1973 grant us insight into Heidegger’s thinking at the end of his career and towards the end of his life. In many regards they are the culmination of his work and the last intensive philosophical engagements of his life. These seminars present us with a Heidegger who has left fundamental ontology far behind, who has traversed the expanse of Seynsgeschichtliche Denken, be-ing-historical thinking, who has thought with the Greeks and has attempted to do so in a way that is “more Greek than the Greeks” (see below, 39), a Heidegger who has likewise struggled long and hard with the twin mountains of Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and the relation between them, a Heidegger on the way to language and still thinking the question concerning technology; in short, the Four Seminars present us with Heidegger at full stride towards the end of his long path. The circumstances surrounding these seminars are treated at length in the German translator ’s afterword following the text,1 but a few opening remarks are in order. At the end of his life-work, Heidegger remains what he was at its beginning, a German thinker, viewing himself in intimate relation to a long line of German thinkers from the history of philosophy, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl to name only the brightest stars in the constellation. For this reason, these late engagements with France and French thought are all the more appealing to our intellectual circumspection . Here the thinker of the German homeland, German poetry, and German word origins, has placed himself on the foreign soil of France—foreign, to be sure, but nonetheless a “neighbor-people.”2 It is no accident that the ¤rst topic addressed in these seminars, in the 1966 Le Thor seminar, is that of Heraclitus’ xunín and the belongingtogether of contraries. Throughout the seminars one is surprised to ¤nd a Heidegger who is continually reaching out to his French audience, citing texts like Descartes’ Discourse or Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations by their French titles, engaging in conversation with the poet René Char, passing references to French poets and painters like Mallarmé and Braque, not to mention Cézanne, drawing examples from the landscape around him, and considering the place of the French language for a thinking of being and its givenness. Yet this francophile Heidegger is certainly not the only Heidegger present. To be sure, Heidegger does not cite Descartes in any laudatory fashion . Descartes remains, as he was in the 1937 “Wege zur Aussprache,” another name for the mathematical conception of nature and the phi- viii Translators’ Foreword losophy of representational subjectivism. And when Heidegger treats of the French language, it is to say that “il y a,” as a translation of the German “es gibt,” is still “too ontic.” A further complication in Heidegger’s regard for France arises when we consider a post card that he wrote in the midst of the seminars (September 10, 1966) to Imma von Bodmershof .3 The face of the postcard shows the church of Notre-Dame du Lac in Le Thor (Vaucluse); its back reads: Dear and respected friend, From a beautiful residence in Provence, in the vicinity of Petrarch and Cézanne, where Greece still speaks, I greet you heartily. Yours, Martin Heidegger The French landscape is admirable not for its own merits, one could say, but for its transmission of the Greek voice. Indeed, in seeming con¤rmation of this, a poem Heidegger wrote for René Char concludes by asking whether Provence is not the bridge between Parmenides and Hölderlin .4 And yet, would this not precisely mean that France and what is French surely do maintain a connection with the Greek? That if Greece can speak in France and if Greek is the language of philosophy, then French too could be a philosophical language? Certainly today there is no question as to the answer to this question, but is it not Heidegger who is held to maintain that philosophy can only speak in German or Greek? These Four Seminars open the possibility for a different view of the Heidegger-France relation.5 As such, they constitute a crucial document for a Heideggerian understanding of homeland and national identity —they not only develop central ideas for such a thought, they enact that thought itself. As to the texts, a few words should here be said. The single volume German edition of Vier Seminare...