enowning
Saturday, April 21, 2012
 
Frédéric de Towarnicki's Visite à Martin Heidegger.
In the late sixties, with my friend Jean-Michel Palmier, I easily found the house of Heidegger in Zähringen on the outskirts of Freiburg where I had found myself at the end of World War II in what was then the French occupation zone. Near the entrance, the old clock chimed answering the bells of a church in the distance, in the Black Forest, as it had before. The sun already chiseled shadows into the hot garden. I myself saw again, in uniform, a visitor without a schedule, recalling courses that I had only half understood.

I had not seen Heidegger for a decade. He seemed relaxed and was about to celebrate his eightieth birthday. He immediately asked for news of our French friends. The controversy aroused by his illusions in 1933 did not appear to have seriously impaired his health, or slowed his work. Of that period, he said to explain his silence: "However one looks at it, it turned into an error.” And he let go, with time, the task of locating its meaning and limits.

His books had not left me. The features of the world of technology that install themselves around us look a little more each day like those he had sketched so often. While philosophy was divided into technical disciplines, his philosophical path continued with an unprecedented interrogation far from our Western civilization; which tended to make of the world and man a target and an object.
Pp. 15-6
From Martin Heidegger : Souvenirs et Chroniques.
Translated by yours truly.

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