Being and Time appeared in 1927. I dedicated a year to studying it.

Hegel's genius, when I read The Phenomenology of Spirit early on, had dazzled me.

Heidegger's genius blinded me.


I don't know if you will choose philosophy as your destiny. I don't know if you will give yourself to it. You are, still, very young and although I discover in your words, or in your concepts that are at times, in their more illuminated moments, assumed in them, the genius that would justify a calling to the knowing of all knowledge, that genius is erratic in you, elusive, it shows itself and hides. I ignore on the other hand, whether to whet your ambitions for a philosophical destiny. I had one and don't believe that I threw myself into the arms of joy. Would it be fair, nevertheless, to blame philosophy for the impiety of the times? Was it her or the roughness of history that led me to write this letter to you, these confessions without hope?

In any case, I cannot avoid burdening you with a mandate. Don't go abroad in this world without reading Being and Time. This mandate is based on one of mine and should not be transferable. I cannot avoid it. I'll try to tell you the origin of my mandate and the power it had for me. Power so strong, son, that it condemns me to the madness of demanding (or is a request from a father anything else?) that you read that book of arid writing, overflowing with neologisms and greatness that, necessarily, awakens the reader the truth of his own limits, the desperate vertigo of their own insufficiencies. Perhaps philosophy is that too. Perhaps Heidegger, his greatness, was that too: the certainty of never reaching it, the spectacle of an inaccessible mind, the pain of seeing the summit, the real possibility of its existence, and the agony of never reaching it, because only one could do it, and that was him. An industrialist of steel, a powerful man, aristocratic, who fed the war industries of the Reich, used to sit in the back seats of the auditorium in which the Master dictated his classes. Once I heard him say: "My God! I don't understand anything. But, this is philosophy!"

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 5:43 AM