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6 Toward the Future of Truth William J. Richardson Anyone who is not a native of Greece will have one or other standout memory of his or her ¤rst experience of that remarkable place that is Athens . For me, it was the ¤rst visit to Marathon. Propelled by a longtime adolescent fantasy as old as high school days, I took off alone one summer afternoon only to ¤nd this singular monument to the Marathon dead closed down tight as a drum—not a human being in sight, neither vendor, nor visitor, nor even a watchman to bribe. The funeral mound itself was barely visible through the padlocked iron gate shouldered by a ten-foothigh iron picket fence mounted with angry spikes. But I ¤nally found a spot where I could slither through a small opening between the end of fence and adjoining concrete wall. With deep breath, risky hope, and sixfoot leap, I was soon utterly alone with . . . the dead, and nothing to interrupt the silence but the chatter of the crickets. It was quite wonderful. I tried to recall the facts of the battle but details were hazy. By a brilliant deception, Miltiades caught the Persians by surprise before their cavalry had assembled and drove them back into the sea. Over 6,000 Persians died in the battle while the Greeks suffered only 192 casualties of their own. The remains of the fallen were disposed of in a mass cremation, followed by animal sacri¤ces and funeral banquet. Then the spot of cremation was covered by the immense mound of earth,which, somewhat eroded by the centuries, is what we still see today. The dead were venerated as heroes, their names carved somewhere in stone. It was easy to feel close to them, as if the almost 2,500 years that separated us had dissipated long enough to leave us together in a strange way with what happened there at the dawn of Greece’s Golden Age. Such is the power of the tradition of language and culture that binds us still, the sense of which Martin Heidegger has helped us to understand better, perhaps, than anyone else. Fast forward to our own day: to another funeral monument honoring dead from another war—the war that America waged in Vietnam almost forty years ago. This is not a huge mound of earth covering ground made holy by the blood of those who died there. It is rather a long black granite wall that lies like a huge scar in the green hillock of an urban park in Washington, D.C. Almost ¤ve hundred feet long, the wall consists of two wings set at an angle to each other, one stretching toward the Washington Monument, the other toward the Lincoln Memorial—both of them rich with traditional meaning for Americans. The only decoration on the wall is name after name of the fallen in Vietnam, listed in the grim democratization of death—not according to rank or age or years of service but simply in the order of their dying. There are similarities here to Marathon, of course, but one major difference: the cause for which the Athenians fought was clear and unambiguous. Not so for everyone who fought in Vietnam. The moral justi¤cation for ¤ghting there remains debatable even today. What is honored in the monument is the courage and ¤delity of those who gave their lives because the country asked it of them. Interesting, perhaps!—but what has it to do with Heidegger and the Greeks? I begin this way for two reasons: (1) apologetic; (2) propaedeutic. I say “apologetic” in the sense of offering an “apologia.” Some keep asking for an explanation of why my own interest appears to have shifted from Heidegger and philosophy to psychoanalysis and Freud-Lacan. When I returned home after ¤nishing studies in Europe in the early 1960s, I was plunged into the turmoil of the time: the assassinations, the Vietnam War, student protests, conscientious objection, and so on. One could talk the talk about the Being question, ontological difference, event of appropriation , and the like, but to walk the walk with the students it was necessary to make clear the relevance of all this to them as embodiments of Dasein. This led to a focus on Dasein as an indispensable component of Heidegger ’s experience of the reciprocity between human being and Being as such. I was especially sensitive to Heidegger’s insistence at the beginning of Being and Time...

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