This essay by Jean Beaufret centers on a visit by Heidegger and René Char to Beaufret's garden in Ménilmontant, Paris, in 1955.

Conversation Under the Chesnut Tree

Under the branches of a chestnut tree in Ménilmontant, a philosopher and a poet discuss what they know and what they are. As they speak, Martin Heidegger and René Char are learning the language of their dialogue. Paris is on vacation. The year is 1955. “During my time in France,” Heidegger had written, “I would be pleased to make the acquaintance of George Braque and René Char.”

Impromptu meetings are always chancy. But here, at the beginning of a summer’s night,

The bread and the wine gleam
On the table in pure light.

Despite the differences of experience and language that separate the two men, a meeting of the minds has taken place. The result is a dialogue between poetry and philosophy.

Thought, in its innermost depth, is dialogue. Thought seeks, through dialogue, to situate itself: from the very beginning, thinkers have sought a space for themselves. All of Aristotle is a dialogue with Plato. Hegelian dialogue is an attempt to open itself up to the totality of language. But language is not just the language of thought. Before the noetic thought of the thinker reverberated the poetic thought of the poet. Homer’s language touched the essence of things before Heraclitus. It created a place, situated a world, the Greek world, in which philosophy would be born. Long before philosophy would be born. Long before philosophy, it opened up the space within which, as Hesiod put it, “the gods confronted man.” But why does language serve for thought as well as for poetry? From what does this intrinsic duality derive? “What blossoms forth delights in pulling back.” With these words Heraclitus tells us that the question most remain unanswered. At best we can try to relate to the duality in language.

To relate to the duality in language is to enter the dimension of dialogue. Dialogue never seeks to reduce the other, as haughty philosophy does in its claim to complete its other reductions by elaborating an aesthetic that would ultimately reduce poetry to a theme of philosophical explanation. Dialogue, by contrast, seeks to let the other be. “This is truly the first time,” Char said of Heidegger, “that a man of this sort did not try to explain to me what I am and what I do.” Heidegger listens more than he explains. From this listening to the point of silence comes the possibility of relating without responding, without offering a response that that as already transformed what is to be thought about into a problem, that is, in offering a response that that as already transformed what is to be thought about into a problem, that is, in Leibniz’s terms, into a proposition, part of which “is left blank . . . as when we are asked to find a mirror that will focus all that sun’s rays on a single point.” The poet is such a mirror, of course, but he is never to be “found.” Because the poet can not be grasped, he represents a danger for thought, but perhaps a salutary danger.

Three dangers threaten thought.

The miraculous and therefore salutary danger is the proximity of the poet, the closeness of his song.

The pernicious danger, which confesses everything, is philosophizing.

In such terms did Heidegger speak to himself “when the wind suddenly shifted, causing the beams of the cabin to groan, and the weather began to turn sour.”*

P. 158-159

Continued.  ¶ 12:42 PM