At the Existentialist Café (28 page)

The younger man says to the older, ‘
As we were marching to our workplace this morning, out of the rustling of the expansive forest I was suddenly overcome by something healing.’ What is this healing thing, he wonders? The older man says it may be something ‘inexhaustible’ that comes from that expanse. Their conversation
continues, sounding very much like two Heideggers talking to one another:

YOUNGER MAN:
You probably mean that the capacious, which prevails in the expanse, brings us to something freeing.

OLDER MAN:
I do not only mean the capaciousness in the expanse, but also that this expanse leads us out and forth.

YOUNGER MAN:
The capaciousness of the forests swings out into a concealed distance, but at the same time swings back to us again, without ending with us.

They go on trying to define the healing power, and to undersand how it might free them from what the older man describes as the ‘devastation that covers our native soil and its helplessly perplexed humans’.

‘Devastation’ (
Verwüstung
) becomes the key word of their conversation. It turns out that they are not only referring to recent events, but to a devastation that has been eating at the earth for centuries and turning everything into a ‘desert’ —
Wüste
, a word etymologically linked to
Verwüstung
. It has made its greatest gains in a certain workers’ paradise (clearly the Soviet Union), and in a coldly calculating, technologically advanced rival land where ‘
everything remains overseeable and arranged and accounted for so as to be useful’. This, of course, is the United States; like Sartre and other Europeans in this era, Heidegger found it natural to associate it with technology and mass production. At the end of the dialogue, the younger man says that, rather than trying futilely to ‘get over’ universal devastation on such a scale, the only thing to do is to
wait. So there they remain, a Germanic Vladimir and Estragon, waiting in their haggard landscape.

It is a typical Heideggerian document, filled with mutterings about capitalism, Communism and foreign lands that are up to no good — surely signs of what Hans Jonas called ‘a certain “Blood and Soil” point of view’. Yet it also contains images that are moving and beautiful. It can’t be read without thinking of the missing Heidegger sons, lost somewhere to the East. It speaks eloquently of the ruins of Germany, and of
the German state of mind amid those ruins: a mixture of post-traumatic distress, blankness, resentment, bitterness and cautious expectancy.

Having resumed his limbo life in Freiburg in the summer of 1945, Heidegger set off one November day on a clandestine drive to recover his hidden
manuscripts from the countryside near Messkirch and Lake Constance, or Bodensee. He was helped by the young French philosophy enthusiast Frédéric de Towarnicki, who had called at Heidegger’s house and made friends with him. German civilians were not yet permitted to travel without authorisation, so Towarnicki procured a driver and an official-looking piece of paper in case they were stopped. Heidegger installed himself in the back seat with an empty rucksack. They left in the middle of the night, amid storm clouds and lightning flashes.

The car had gone barely twenty kilometres when one of the headlights flickered and went out. They continued, despite the difficulty of seeing the road between black trees in the heavy rain. A French patrol loomed out of the darkness, with its tricolour flag; the travellers had to stop and explain themselves. The guard scrutinised their papers, pointed out that their rear lights were also broken, then waved them on. They advanced cautiously. Twice, Heidegger asked the driver to stop in front of a house in the middle of nowhere; both times he got out with his backpack, went in, and came out smiling with the bag loaded with documents.

The second headlight began to flicker too. Towarnicki tried to use his electric torch to light the way, but it was not very effective. Then the car swerved off the road and hit the embankment. Inspecting the damage, the driver announced that they had a puncture. They all got out while the driver tried to attach the spare wheel, which did not fit the car correctly. Heidegger looked on, interested — one of his favourite new philosophical topics was technology. He did not offer to help, but wagged his finger with a mischievous air and said,
‘Technik.’
He was clearly enjoying himself. Somehow the driver fixed the wheel and they moved onwards to their last stop, Bietingen.

By now it was morning, and Heidegger settled himself in to stay at the
house of his friends there. The long-suffering Towarnicki hitched back to Freiburg to arrange for a new car. He arrived to find Elfride glaring at him: what had he done with her husband? Still, the consensus was that he had done well by his friend: Heidegger later recalled the favour with gratitude, and gave Towarnicki an inscribed copy of his translation of the chorus from Sophocles’
Antigone
, with its passage on the strangeness of man. He wrote on it, ‘In memory of our expedition to Constance.’

Heidegger’s good cheer did not last long, as he now had to settle in for a long wait for judgement from the Denazification Committee and the university. Four years would pass before he was cleared to teach again, being finally declared a
Mitläufer
(‘fellow traveller’) in March 1949, after which he resumed teaching from 1950. The five years of uncertainty were difficult, and for the first year he also had the worry about his lost
sons. In early 1946, he had a complete psychological
breakdown, and in February was taken into the Haus Baden sanatorium in Badenweiler to recover. It must have looked for a while as though Heidegger was going the way of his heroes Hölderlin and Trakl. But, with treatment from psychiatrists who were already primed in his philosophical language and style of thought, he slowly improved. It helped when news came in March that the Heideggers’ two sons were alive in Russia. A much longer wait ensued before they came home. Hermann was released in 1947, having fallen ill, but Jörg, the elder son, was still away in 1949.

Heidegger left the sanatorium in spring 1946, and convalesced in the Todtnauberg hut. The journalist Stefan Schimanski, who saw him there in June 1946 and October 1947, described the silence and isolation, and noted that Heidegger greeted him wearing heavy skiing boots even though it was summer. He seemed to want nothing but to be left alone to write. At the time of Schimanski’s second visit, Heidegger had not been down to Freiburg for six months. ‘
His living conditions were primitive; his books were few, and his only relationship to the world was a stack of writing paper.’

Even before the war, Heidegger’s philosophising had changed, as he gave up writing about resoluteness, Being-towards-death, and other
bracing personal demands on Dasein, and shifted to writing of the need to be attentive and receptive, to wait and to open up — the themes that are woven through the prisoner-of-war dialogue. This change, known as Heidegger’s
Kehre
, or ‘turn’, was not an abrupt whirl-around as the word suggests, but a slow readjustment, like that of a man in a field who gradually becomes aware of the movement of the breeze in the wheat behind him, and turns to listen.

As he was turning, Heidegger paid increasing attention to language, to Hölderlin and the Greeks, and to the role of poetry in thought. He also reflected on historical developments and on the rise of what he called
Machenschaft
(machination) or
Technik
(technology): modern ways of behaving towards Being which he contrasted with older traditions. By ‘machination’ he meant the making-machine-like of all things: the attitude that characterises factory automation, environmental exploitation, modern management and war. With this attitude, we brazenly challenge the earth to give up what we want from it, instead of patiently whittling or cajoling things forth as peasant smallholders or craftsmen do. We bully things into yielding up their goods. The most brutal example is in modern mining, where a piece of land is forced to surrender its coal or oil. Moreover, we rarely use what we take at once, but instead convert it to a form of abstract energy to be held in reserve in a generator or storehouse. In the 1940s and 1950s, even matter itself would be challenged in this way, as atomic technology produced energy to be held in reserve in power plants.

One might point out that a peasant who tills the land also challenges it to put forth grain, and then stores that grain. But Heidegger considered this activity quite different. As he argued in a lecture-essay first drafted in the late 1940s, ‘
The Question Concerning Technology’, a farmer ‘
places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase’. Or rather, this is what farmers did until modern agricultural machinery came panting and chuffing along, promising ever greater productivity. In modern challenging-forth of this kind, nature’s energy is not sown, tended and harvested; it is unlocked and transformed, then stored in some different form before being
distributed. Heidegger uses military images: ‘
Everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.’

It is a monstrous reversal — and for Heidegger humanity
has
become monstrous. Man is the terrible one:
deinos
in Greek (the word also featuring in the etymology of ‘dinosaur’, or ‘terrible lizard’). This was the word that Sophocles had used when he wrote his chorus about the strange or uncanny quality unique to man.

This process even threatens the basic structure of intentionality: the way the mind reaches out to things as its objects. When something is placed ‘on call’ or in ‘standing-reserve’, says Heidegger, it loses its
ability to be a proper object. It is no longer distinguished from us and cannot stand up to us. Phenomenology itself is thus threatened by modern humanity’s challenging, devastating way of occupying the earth. This could lead to the ultimate disaster. If we are left alone
‘in the midst of objectlessness’, then we ourselves will lose our structure — we too will be swallowed up into a ‘standing-reserve’ mode of being. We will devour even ourselves. Heidegger cites the term
‘human resources’ as evidence of this danger.

For Heidegger, the threat of technology goes beyond the practical fears of the post-war years: machines running out of control, atom bombs exploding, radiation leaks, epidemics, chemical contamination. Instead, it is an ontological threat against reality, and against human being itself. We fear disaster, but the disaster may already be under way. There is hope, however. Heidegger reaches for his Hölderlin:

But where danger is, grows

The saving power also.

If we pay proper attention to technology, or rather to what technology reveals about us and our Being, we can gain insight into the truth of human
‘belongingness’. From this point, we may find a way forward — which, Heidegger being Heidegger, turns out to mean going backwards into the origin of history, to find a long-forgotten source of renewal in the past.

He continued to work on this material for years. Most of the above thoughts came together in the full version of his ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, which he delivered as a lecture in Munich in 1953, to an audience including the atomic physicist Werner
Heisenberg — a man who certainly knew about the challenging-forth of material energies.

At the same time, Heidegger continued to rework other writings begun in the 1930s, some of which offered a more positive vision of humanity’s role on the earth. One was ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which appeared in a revised form in his
Holzwege
(
Off the Beaten Track
) in 1950. There he drew on a notion borrowed from the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart:
Gelassenheit
, which can be translated as ‘releasement’ or ‘letting-be’.

Letting-be became one of the most important concepts in the later Heidegger, denoting a hands-off way of attending to things. It sounds straightforward. ‘
What seems easier’, asks Heidegger, ‘than to let a being be just the being that it is?’ Yet it is not easy at all, because it is not just a matter of turning indifferently away and letting the world get on with its business. We must turn
towards
things, but in such a way that we don’t ‘challenge’ them. Instead, we allow each being to ‘rest upon itself in its very own being’.

This is what modern technology does not do, but some human activities do have this character, and foremost among them is art. Heidegger writes of art as a form of poetry, which he considers the supreme human activity, but he uses the word ‘poetry’ in a broad sense to mean much more than arranging words into verses. He traces it to its Greek root in
poiēsis
— making or crafting — and he cites Hölderlin again, saying, ‘
poetically, man dwells on this earth’. Poetry is a way of being.

Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (
Unverborgenheit
), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term
alētheia
, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than the mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long
before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.

Enabling things to un-hide themselves is what humans do: it is our distinctive contribution. We are a
‘clearing’, a
Lichtung
, a sort of open, bright forest glade into which beings can shyly step forward like a deer from the trees. Or perhaps one should visualise beings entering the clearing to dance, like a bowerbird in a prepared patch in the undergrowth. It would be simplistic to identify the clearing with human consciousness, but this is more or less the idea. We help things to emerge into the light by being conscious of them, and we are conscious of them
poetically
, which means that we pay respectful attention and allow them to show themselves as they are, rather than bending them to our will.