Aqui temos de estar atentos, bem como de exercer o nosso discernimento. Porque quando um filósofo começa a misturar o que aparentemente se opõe à verdade, isto é, a mentira, com a verdade, a perverter uma na outra, então o sofista não está longe. Será possível que Heidegger seja o sofista da modernidade? Quem poderia negar que esta questão é sugerida precisamente pela publicação das Schwarze Hefte? Heidegger liberta nelas a sua ira. Surge um pensador que lança os seus raios sobre tudo o que não resiste à pureza do olhar filosófico. Para Heidegger, quem der ouvidos a qualquer pretensão que não seja a de “pensamento e poesia” está perdido. Neste sentido, a sua retórica é, por vezes, muito estranha. Mas, em última análise, não se trata de sofismas. Os problemas não residem na antiga querela entre filósofos e sofistas.
É apenas o pensamento (e a poesia) que dá sentido ao mundo e à história. Só onde o pensamento levanta a “questão do sentido do ser” é que ele pode, como a forma mais pura de “Da-sein”, tecer os fios de sentido pertencentes ao mundo e à história numa narrativa poética que se inspira no drama da tragédia. Nem a política, nem a ciência, nem a religião e, por fim, nem mesmo a arte podem pretender ter um papel fundamental nesta narrativa — até porque são incapazes de a desenrolar. O pensamento abandona a filosofia e começa — sem se tornar poesia — a poetizar o drama.
O que emerge nesse drama é uma topografia em que o verdadeiro e o falso formam juntos o possível, o atual e o necessário. Mas isso ainda diz muito pouco: “A verdade, na sua essência, é uma não-verdade.” O hífen entre “não” e “verdade” deixa transparecer aquilo que, antes de mais, caracteriza o acontecimento apropriativo da verdade na sua totalidade: onde algo se mostra como verdadeiro, “algo” se oculta que — porque o seu significado não é conhecido — desvia o pensamento. Devo notar que a dissimulação pertence a este mostrar. Mas quem é que repara na ocultação?
Assim, a topologia da relação entre “errância” e “desobstrução” situa-se naquilo que Heidegger elucida, num número tremendo de passagens, como “des-encobrimento (Unverborgenheit)”. “Des-encobrimento” é a tradução mais ou menos literal da palavra grega ἀλήθεια. Heidegger consultou os enunciados mais antigos sobre a verdade (em Heráclito, Parmênides, Píndaro), entendendo os posteriores (já em Platão) como derivados. O fato de o primeiro caminho para a verdade conduzir aos “gregos” é já um aspecto dessa narrativa da tragédia que Heidegger tenta transferir para o mundo e sua história.
The significance of the publication of the Überlegungen [“Considerations”], of the so-called Schwarze Hefte [“Black Notebooks”], as Heidegger himself referred to them, is still open. Yet they have shown more clearly than everything published previously by him that what he writes in 1961 at the beginning of his Nietzsche about the latter – namely, that “the name of the thinker stands as the title for the matter of his thinking” – holds also for Heidegger himself: “The matter, the point in question, is itself a confrontation.” Heidegger – the name stands for the matter of this thinker, a matter which was always already held to be objectionable, but now with the publication of the Überlegungen has become an unavoidable point in question – an unavoidable point in question for anyone who would like to encounter Heidegger’s thinking.
Heidegger has no philosophy, no doctrine, that could become the model for an academic school. He once said that himself: “I have no label for my philosophy – and not indeed because I do not have my own philosophy.” The assumption that there is a Heideggerian philosophy presupposes that it is a fabricated product, that it can appear as an object, in the form of a book or a collected edition (Gesamtausgabe). Yet he gave the right indication with the motto of his Gesamtausgabe: “Paths – not works.” The thinker’s writings are open attempts. Even the most finished products like Being and Time remained incomplete.
This can be seen in his biography as well. When Being and Time appeared, Heidegger was 38 years old. Nietzsche reached this age having already worked on the first part of Zarathustra. At 38, Schelling’s time of publications was already behind him. The thought that in Heidegger’s philosophy it was a matter of “paths – not works” is no contrivance, but a fitting self-interpretation. One can learn from Heidegger that philosophy is a philosophizing, always rather a questioning than an answering.
The paths that Heidegger’s thinking took are obscure. Ernst Jünger, who was not especially interested in philosophy, once characterized the “forest” as “Heidegger’s home”: “There he is at home – on untrodden ways, on timber tracks.” The paths of thinking led to what is uncertain, into the wild, even into danger. When, in his lecture “On the Essence of Truth” – that turning point in philosophy at the beginning of the 1930s – he explains how “errancy” also belongs to the appropriative event of truth, he hit upon the character of his thinking best of all.
To be “at home” “on untrodden ways” – it is probable that Jünger intentionally brought closely together what is incongruous. Did Heidegger in his thinking want to be at home in the unfamiliar? Assuming this were so: could one explain on the basis of this that it almost irredeemably ended up not only on “timber tracks (Holzwege),” but was at times also led astray (auf Abwege)? Did not this thinking also move in domains in which there was hardly anything left to think? In which Heidegger in his way ventured to say what need not have been said? Is there a limit to what is to be said, to what ought to be said?
The limit, which must be asked about after the publication of the Überlegungen, is not that of the unsayable. Heidegger was familiar with this limit. He thought about it with words that are unique in the twentieth century. Yet it is not a matter of this limit. It is a matter rather of the limit that “separates (scheidet)” good from evil; “separating into good and evil,” which belongs to the “difference (Unterschied)” and the “decision (Entscheidung).” Should, indeed can, thinking ignore this limit? Should thinking conduct itself with neutrality regarding this limit, acknowledge evil because it belongs to being? Is not Nietzsche the master of all those who have ventured it and continue to do so? Was he Heidegger’s master?
Jünger might be right to emphasize the friction between the home and the untrodden in Heidegger’s thinking. Here the catastrophe begins, which the thinker recognized in, indeed as, modernity. And was it not especially he, he who occasionally depicted the home so unsentimentally that something threatening also or precisely in its provincial character was revealed – was it not he who was able to experience the alienations of the twentieth century? It seems obvious that this could be explained dialectically. Yet we have in the meantime come to learn that the whole is more complex. We not only have seen that and how the “planet” stood “in flames” and “the essence of the human” was “out of joint.” We also see how thinking is convulsed in its joints and complies with this convulsion.
Thought traverses “the errancy-fugue of the clearing.” “Errancy-fugue,” a sonorous word, a singular discovery, without allusion. “Errancy,” the place or, better, placelessness of error, a landscape of placelessness, an a-topography, which appears as a “fugue” or “conjuncture” (Fuge). The “conjuncture” is for Heidegger what conjoins, what enables a conjoined structure. He thus once spoke of the “errancy-conjoined clearing.” “Clearing” is the primary word for truth, for the appropriative event of truth – because truth happens, eventuates. That means, however, that a “conjuncture” of “errancy” – a straying of thinking into that placeless landscape – quite simply builds the “clearing,” the eventuating truth, to say it inelegantly. How is that possible?
The formulation “errancy-fugue of the clearing” – we know this from Heidegger – emphasizes the genitive in both senses. It is not that “errancy” brings forth the “clearing” in a one-sided manner. How could the “clearing” emerge from “errancy”? Rather “errancy” stems from the “clearing” as it structures (fügt) the latter. The “clearing” is the place in which something like placelessness can first be understood or – only now am I touching on Heidegger – in which placelessness, the loss of place, the significance of place lights up, so that it becomes thinkable that “errancy” belongs to the “clearing.”
“ ‘Errancy-Fugue’: Heidegger’s An-archy” – I would not have written this essay if I had not thought that here, in this “errancy-fugue,” the controversy surrounding the name of Heidegger was gathered, the controversy that is connected to the name of Heidegger and the controversy in the name of Heidegger that we will have to clarify philosophically. For, if “errancy” structures the “clearing,” because the “clearing” needs “errancy,” then Heidegger’s erring, then his aberrations, are a moment of philosophy.
Here we need to pay attention, as well as to exercise our judgment. For when a philosopher begins to mix what is apparently opposed to truth, i.e., untruth, with truth, to pervert the one into the other, then the sophist is not far away. Is it possible that Heidegger is the sophist of modernity? Who would wish to deny that this question is suggested precisely by the publication of the Schwarze Hefte? Heidegger unleashes his wrath in them. A thinker appears who hurls his thunderbolts upon everything that cannot withstand the purity of the philosophical gaze. For Heidegger, whoever hearkens to any claim other than those of “thinking and poetry” is lost. In this regard, his rhetoric sometimes cuts capers. Yet ultimately this is not sophistical. The problems do not lie in the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and sophists.
It is solely thinking (and poetry) that provides the world and history with meaning. Only where thinking raises the “question of the meaning of being” can it, as the purest form of “Da-sein,” weave the strands of meaning belonging to the world and history into a poetic narrative that takes its lead from the drama of tragedy. Not politics, not science, not religion and lastly not even art can claim to have a key role in this narrative – not least because they are incapable of unfolding it. Thinking abandons philosophy and begins – without becoming poetry – to poetize the drama.
What emerges in such a drama is a topography in which the true and the untrue together form the possible, the actual, and the necessary. Yet that still says too little: “Truth, in its essence, is un-truth.” The hyphen between “un” and “truth” lets emerge what first of all characterizes the appropriative event of truth in its entirety: where something shows itself as true, “something” conceals itself that – because its significance is not known – leads thought astray. I must note that concealment belongs to this showing. Yet who notices concealment?
Thus the topology of the relation between “errancy” and “clearing” is located in what Heidegger elucidates in a tremendous number of passages as “unconcealment (Unverborgenheit).” “Unconcealment” is the more or less literal translation of the Greek word ἀλήθεια. Heidegger consulted the earliest utterances on truth (in Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pindar), understanding later ones (already in Plato) as derivative. That the first path to truth leads to “the” Greeks, is already an aspect of that narrative of tragedy that Heidegger attempts to transfer to the world and its history.