These same questions should lead, by way of the Gespräch between the thinker and the poet, the Gespräch that always supposes some sort of friendship, toward two types of texts: on the one hand, those addressed to Hölderlin (“Wo aber sind die Freunde?,” in Andenken), on the other, those addressed to Trakl, to the figures of “the friend who follows the stranger,” of the brother and sister, precisely around this motif of the Geschlecht.

We should also reread, from this perspective, the 1943—44 course on Heraclitus on the interpretation of philia in the name philosophy (philia tou sophou) or of philein in the Heraclitean saying (“Der Spruch Heraklits: phusis kruptesthai philei”). Here Heidegger interprets philia as favor (Gunst), a benevolent protection or happiness for (Gönnen, Gewähren). “In der physis waltet die Gunst” (132). “In physis benevolence reigns—that which accords or is in agreement, like the favorableness of a favor.” Or again “Wir verstehen das philein als die Gunsi und das Gönnen”: “We understand philein as favor or solicitude.” Philia is here the essential and reciprocal or alternating (wechselweise) relationship between the raising, opening, or becoming-open (Aufgehen) and the decline (Untergehen) or self-dissimulation (Sichverbergen) of physis. Physis as philia is accord granted, this solicitude for revelation and self-dissimulation, this self-accord of the Aufgahen and the Untergehen. It has a relationship to itself which is at once generous and jealous, if one can say this, which means that it loves to hide. One of Heidegger's concerns is to avoid anachronism in this understanding of philia and philein. This anachronistic deafness would above all consist of anthropologizing, psychologizing, subjectivizing philein. Heidegger appears to hold a modern, or at any rate post- Christian, metaphysics of subjectivity responsible for this. I find it difficult to follow him in this epochal scansion, especially when he excludes Aristotle from this anthropologization of philia or of philein. It would be one thing to call the subject-object point of view anachronistic, another to say that the anthropological, or even the psychological point of view was foreign to Aristotle. It is true that for Heidegger what in modernity is called anthropology or psychology would be entirely dependent on a metaphysics of subjectivity, on an interpretation of man as subject. It is this that allows him to say, in the same passage, that Christianity constitutes the preparatory stage of an education in the passions, and even of a psychology: “For the Greeks, there is no psychology. Aristotle’s treatise Peri Psykhès has nothing to do with 'psychology.’ In the completion of metaphysics, metaphysics becomes ‘psychology,’ in other words psychology and anthropology are the last words of metaphysics. Psychology and technics go hand in hand. (Im Griechentum gibt es keine Psychologie. Die Abhandlung des Aristoteles Peri Psykhès hat mit “Psycholgie” nichts zu tun. In der Vollendung der Metaphysik wird die Metaphysik zur “Psychologie”, d.h. die Psycholoie und die Anthropologie ist das letzte Wort der Metaphysik. Psychologie und Technik gehören zusammen wie rechts und links)".

Whatever one might say about this epochal distribution and the problems it poses. one has to conclude, at any rate, that when Heidegger evokes the friend or friendship, he does so in a space which is no longer or not yet that of the person, the subject, the anthropos of anthropology, or the psychè of psychology.

When Heidegger, in the rather late text on Was ist das—die Philosophie? (1956), attempts to return to an experience of speech or of language (Sprache) originary enough to precede, in some way, questioning itself (das Fragen): when he recalls that this questioning, namely the very movement of research, knowledge, philosophy, presupposes a certain acquiescence, an accord granted to Sprache and engaged in it, he perhaps rediscovers this region of accord or of philein which has not yet become philosophia, a questioning tension, the eroticization of a Streben, a jealous, nostalgic, mournful, or curious contraction of Eros.

¶ 6:31 AM