WERNER MARX

Albert-Ludwigs-Universit~it Freiburg ira Breisgau

IN REMEMBRANCE OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Does a philosopher's path of philosophizing go with his death back into the
darkness or does thought itself have the strength to hold its own against the
power of darkness ?
A memorial to Martin Heidegger dare not be biographical, it must draw
attention to the great turmoil occasioned in thought by his work and point
out a few stages, "milestones," that characterize this thinking, which has
always understood itself as being "on the way." Heidegger has requested
that we attend only to the path of his thinking - - a thinking which for him
was never the preoccupation of an academic discipline, but came forth with
a claim to a transforming, history-grounding power, and for which it was
a matter of helping bring it to pass that mankind one day would find its
way to an other, "creative" domicile in this world.
The first great milestone of this thinking is Being and Time, published
in 1927. This work had a curious fate, characterizing the epoch : for a long
time people did not understand its question : how does the meaning of being
show itself ? They did not see its twofold task : first, to take the primary
category of substantiality, which since Greek philosophy has become deter-
minative for thinking, and the category of subjectivity stemming from the
thinking of recent times - - the thought tradition from Plato to Hegel - - and
think them through to their ground, and, transforming them, surpass them.
Secondly, however, with the aid of the phenomenological method founded
by Edmund Husserl but now understood in a fresh way, to determine anew
the essence of man in a way no longer oriented around the categories of
substantiality and subjectivity. In opposition to the conceptual styies of the
philosophy of reason and metaphysics of light, the facticity and finitude
of man were to be disclosed in a radical way. Meantime, all the basic deter-
minations of human being which Heidegger worked out in Being and Time
have become common coin in the thought of contemporary philosophy
throughout the world. They have extensively influenced literature, linguistics,
aesthetics, history, psychology and psychiatry, and even parts of the natural
sciences. The literature about Being and Time has grown beyond measure.
Next came the Freiburg inaugural address, "What is Metaphysics ?"
(1929.) For metaphysics as well as everyday and scientific thinking it
 "~VERNE R MARX

showed in a provocative way the "essencing power of the Nothing" (die

"wesende Macht des Nichts.") The essay "On the Essence of Truth",
written around 1930, likewise pointed out a dimension necessarily inacessible
to metaphysical thinking. This essay - - on ground prepared by Being and
Time - - is Heidegger's first attempt over against the tradition to present a
radically other account of truth - - truth as a clearing flawed by concealment
and dissimulation. For Heidegger this basic account remained right up to
his last works the "Ma~er of Thinking" (die "Sache des Denkens") (this
is the title of the last publication of 1962.) Already in the essay, "On the
Essence of Ground" (1929), which further develops the structure of "being-
in-the-world," Heidegger's thinking arrives at a point from which it had to
take another direction - - a change later described by Heidegger as "the
turning." In his published lectures of 1935 and then explicitly in the "Letter
on Humanism" (1946) the nature of this '~turning" becomes clear.
On the basis of the insight into the historicity of Dasein already won in
Being and Time, Heidegger's thinking, through continually renewed dia-
logue with the history of thought, determines its own place within that
history, its style of execution and its task. In light of the fact that Being
has manifested itself differently in the different epochs of the history of
thought, thinking must discharge its task so as to take account of the
"historicity of being," must "tear itself loose" from "metaphysics" as it has
for Heidegger come to shape the whole world of western humanity, and
attempt to think the experiences of the meaning of being of the early Greeks
which they laid down in their aphorisms and poetic works. All this occurs
not out of any theoretical interest in the history of philosophy, but solely for
the purpose of re-thinking this "first beginning" of our thought-history
projectively, through a transformation of what was then experienced and
thought, for an "other beginning," which is the "other beginning" of a
future humanity. Thus in numerous essays Heidegger has rethought and re-
determined the early Greek basic words physis, aletheia, logos in ways ap-
propriate to that "other beginning."
This "other beginning" is "experienced" in an other way in the poems of
H/51derlin. They are a further source of the fundamental accounts that are
to be thought out. The "purely poeticized" and that which shows itself in
a work of art point out the path to a completely different conception of the
essence of language and the essence of the world in which man, together
with his fetlowmen and things, could dwell in the presence of the godhead

4
 IN REMEMBRANCE OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER

in a more primordial way. At the end of his thought path Heidegger

projected, with the aid o,f all these basic accounts which he spelled out, an
image of an arrangement within which one day man could dwell in a
"poetic" way. Herein would lie the "saving" that Heidegger sees within the
dominion of technology (Technik) for the epoch in which metaphysics has
completed itself, in the historical moment in which the essence of man is
exposed to the greatest danger of being reduced merely to a component
part of an all-dominant technological system. To be sure, in projecting this
image he did not predict the time of such a radical transformation; but he
did indeed show it to us as a possibility lying in the essence of being and
of m a n .
By what criterion does one ascertain the greatness of a philosopher ? The
history of thought, the philosophia perennis, goes its way. Great is a thinking
that does not come to this history in terms of external flashes of insight but
rather penetrates it; that within this history gives answers to the traditional
questions, which, however new they are, remain integral parts of this course
of the history of thought. The thinking of Martin Heidegger was able to
accomplish just that.
Translated by
RICHARD S. GRABAU
Purdue University