For his summer semester course in the fateful year of 1943 H. chose Heraclitus and ‘the inception of occidental thinking’. The next summer he returned to it again, now focusing on the question of logos. The two lecture courses served as the raw material for his two essays on Heraclitus, ‘Aletheia’ and ‘Logos’, included in the 1954 collection Vorträge und Aufsätze. In 1979 they were published together as Volume 55 of the German Gesamtausgabe. This material, now available in English translation, constitutes an idiosyncratic and wide-ranging effort on H.’s part not only to make sense of the Heraclitean fragments, but of the origin, legacy and future of the Western philosophical inheritance as such.
Sixteen years earlier H. had propelled himself to fame with the publication of Sein und Zeit. The book secured his position as Professor of Philosophy in Freiburg, succeeding H.J. Rickert and E. Husserl. In 1933 he assumed the role of rector for Freiburg University. It was a position that he occupied for less than a year, but that would forever connect him to the National Socialist dictatorship, as one of the most high-profile intellectuals to initially support its aspirations. The twelve-year period of its rule was for H. a period of extraordinary intellectual activity, resulting in a series of groundbreaking courses on ancient philosophy, notably Aristotle, on German idealism, Nietzsche, and the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. The collected works comprise no less than 20 volumes of lecture series only from this period. To this is added another 10 volumes of independent works written during the same time and published posthumously, among them the 500-page Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) and his so-called Black notebooks.
During this dramatic historical period H. sought to forge a new philosophical agenda and orientation-map, a so-called ‘being-historical thinking’ (seinsgeschichtliches Denken). It delineates a new beginning for Western intellectual culture, beyond the rule of technology, will to power and subjectivism, in favour of a culture of contemplative post-metaphysical reflexive thinking or ‘mindfulness’ (Besinnung). At the outset of this experimentation he was animated by a nationalist-political agenda, where Germany and the German people are credited with a particular responsibility, a third way between a capitalist America and a communist Russia. But as his disillusionment grows, and with the changing fortunes of the war effort, the mood of his thinking also changes. While the two courses contain a few misplaced outbursts of nationalist sentiment, ultimately Heraclitus is mobilised in an appeal for a new culture of phronetic, reflective thinking, released from the constraints of a modern culture of technological mastery.
From early on H. had established himself as a skilled and innovative reader of the ancient sources, both Latin and Greek. His early lectures on Aristotle, Plato and Augustine were groundbreaking hermeneutic exercises, which energised a generation of young scholars, such as Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Paul Natorp was so impressed by a 30-page excerpt of H.’s existential-phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle that it secured his first professorship in Marburg in 1923. His lectures on the basic concepts of ancient philosophy from 1926 display a first interest in the earliest sources of Greek philosophy, and a lecture course from 1932 focuses on Anaximander and Parmenides. But it is only with the 1943–44 courses that he explicitly takes on Heraclitus.
The first course, on the ‘inception’ (Anfang) of Western thinking, takes aim at what was always considered to be the central topic of the earliest philosophers, that is, nature (phusis). An overall thrust of these lectures is to dismantle the conventional narrative according to which they offer a primitive natural philosophy in an Aristotelian sense. In H.’s view, already Aristotle's reception of their work, and thus the bulk of the doxographic tradition, is flawed, all the way up to the modern metaphysical-religious and psychological receptions, from Nietzsche to J. Burnet and B. Snell. We misrepresent the experience and concept of phusis when we look at it through the spectacles of modern science. In order to retrieve a presumably more ‘inceptual’ or original sense, we should see it instead through an experience of how things come to presence, in a dual process of appearance and concealment, as ‘emerging’ and ‘submerging’ (pp. 89, 123). In order to reach into this experience, H. spends much effort on fragment DK16, that (in A. Laks and G. Most's translation [2016]) asks the question: ‘How could one possibly escape the notice of what never sets’. Laks and Most list it as number 83 under the heading ‘Cosmic Fire’. But for H. its genuine meaning lies beyond its ‘cosmological’ implications, pointing instead to the enigma of manifestation as such and thus of truth as appearing and coming-forth.
The second course takes aim at the relation to modern logic and linguistics. The Heraclitean logos – the key term of his thinking (p. 207) – should not be interpreted through the lens of what in Plato and Aristotle and the ensuing tradition is understood by ‘logic’. Instead H. activates earlier senses of the term that signal the acts of ‘gathering’ and ‘harvesting’, an activity that brings together and unifies (p. 199). When language is steeped in logic as a science of the logos, it leads to an illusion of technological mastery and control. Instead H. seeks to convey an understanding of a more originary logic as the thinking of thinking (pp. 153, 268), that could lead to an awareness of how we are already located within its opening and truth in a homolegein. A guiding theme is taken from fragment DK50 (L&M: D46): ‘after you have listened not to me but to the account (logos), it is wise to recognize (homolegein) that all things are one’.
At the heart of these sometimes strained, rash and presumptuous interpretative exercises there is a hermeneutic model that animates H.’s entire effort. We tend, he thinks, to read and understand the past through the viewpoint of the present and inversely to see the present as the logical outcome of the past. Instead we should turn our gaze around and cease to believe that we can master these inceptual moments through our ordinary methods of historical research. The inception does not ultimately lie behind us, but before us, as something yet to think and respond to. For H., the fragments are not historical material, but a demand from a future that challenges the way modern thinking understands nature, language and truth.
His exposition culminates in a reading of fragment DK112 (L&M: D114): ‘To be moderate: the greatest virtue. Wisdom: to speak the truth and to act in conformity with the nature, understanding it’. H.’s ‘translation’ into German (here in English translation!) is worth citing, since it brings out how his commentary is also an exercise in often cumbersome poetic transcriptions: ‘Reflective thinking is the nobility, because knowing is to gather the unconcealed (from out of the concealment into the unconcealment) in the manner of bringing forth into the set-forth and set-up in view of emerging (and all this nevertheless) within the drawing-out drawing-in relation toward the originary forgathering’ (p. 279).
These lectures are at times tedious and repetitive. Philologically they are inconclusive to say the least. H. pays no attention to manuscript versions and textual uncertainties nor to the context of the original citations. He engages other scholars only marginally, and mostly in the form of sweeping critiques (condemning ‘conventional’ thinking while professing ‘essential’ thinking). Still these texts stand out as a fascinating attempt to mobilise the earliest sources of Western intellectual culture in the service of a critical rehearsal of where this theoretical adventure has taken the human species in a time of competition for global technological-scientific mastery. From Heraclitus H. elicits a very different tone: a tone of restraint, of lived finitude and of contemplation in the face of what is.
