[I]t is, I think, quite misleading to describe Heidegger as an "Aristotelian." Heidegger's Aristotle is a radically Heideggerianized Aristotle. And yet he ultimately seeks to go behind even HIM, to find the primordial origins of the West that precede Socrates, the pre-Socratics, and even (one presumes) Homer. Yes, things went badly wrong with Descartes, but this error was prepared by Christian theological errors, which were prepared for by Aristotle's and Plato's, and Parmenides' error before them. All of them flinched in the face of Being; only Heidegger himself (and maybe Hoelderlin) could withstand the violent emergence of truth, which set the West out on its "first beginning" and might, if he and we are up to it, prepare the way for "another beginning."

[T]his, too, is a mistaken, even caricatured reading of Heidegger. It is a common caricature, to be sure, but I think it is one nevertheless. Heidegger sees each thinker, including the bogeyman Descartes, as taking up again the question of being?and as doing so faithfully and fully. But we have to do what they did. We cannot be satisfied merely to repeat what they did, for to do so is not to take up the question of being. It is not to do what they did.

The other beginning occurs over and over again in the history of philosophy. As a result, I think it is too simple to say that for Heidegger “we can’t learn anything from it [the history of philosophy] in a positive sense.” If “in a positive sense” meant “taking what another has posited and repeating it,” that would be right. But the history of philosophy gives us any number of thinkers with whom we can engage in order to think the “same” thing they thought. Because they give us the material for thinking, they give us a great deal that is positive. There are a number of places to see that this is what Heidegger is doing. Perhaps one of the best is The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. But one can also see it in the essays on the Greeks, the books on Aristotle and Kant, the book on Leibniz, that on Hegel, . . . . In each of them we find him reading thinkers in ways that no disciple would countenance, but in ways that are remarkably true to the direction of the philosopher’s thought, ways that use the thinking of a predecessor as a ground from which to draw fresh insights.

¶ 10:57 PM