Have you noticed, Martin? Can you make out the exquisite place the Master put us in? Being surges in the world because there is an entity whose being consists in asking itself about being. The entity is man and it is for man that the question of being (the fundamental question of philosophy) brings into the world. That there being, that is in peril, that lives under the danger that implicates its throwness amongst things, asks itself why are there things rather than nothing? This hands man (to us, Martin) a central spot, a dignity that philosophy had been refusing to give us for decades. Do you recall Kant's starry night? Remember Kant marveling at the moral law within him and for the starry night above him? Recall now, Hegel's answer. Deceptive, the master from Jena said that he cared little for stars, those "grains of firmament". That it was possible that the Earth was only rubble that merely orbited around the sun. But there was in it, here, on earth, something worth much more than rubble and even more than a thousand plots. There was a metaphysical being, the man, who asked himself about the sense of the universe. Heidegger launched us on that pride. The being there was the there of being. Dasein was the site of the ontological question; the place of the question of being.

Heidegger knew how to put that pride in us. Early on we understood that Dasein, in its origins, with the pre-Socratics, had expressed itself in Greek. Now it did so in German. German was the language of philosophy, and Dasein was German. Neither for the Master nor for us was it difficult to make the next step. If the individual Dasein of existential ontology spoke in German, and was German, How could Germany not be the space of communal Dasein? How could Germany not be the place of being and the incarnation of its destiny?

From here on, this letter, that expresses my tragedy and the tragedy of the great German nation, is be written in German, the language of the absolute.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:56 AM