Darkness in Todtnauberg

Abstract

Well, mein Alte, my Herr Professor Martin Heidegger, magician of Messkirch, we are nearing the end of our conversation, and, in view of the ‘turn’, the Kehre, our conversation took when I introduced Aletheia, you will not, I am sure, be sorry about this. Notwithstanding your repeated protestations that you did not mean to use the expression ‘idle talk’ in a ‘disparaging sense’ (e.g. BT 157), you did also describe it as ‘the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter’ (BT 158) and this would certainly be true of the kind of ‘gossip’ I forced us to indulge earlier, in the glade. In the end,

it is the business of philosophy to protect the power of the most elemental words in which Da-sein expresses itself from being flattened by a common understanding to the point of unintelligibility, which in its turn functions as a source for illusory problems. (BT 202)

Believe me, Herr Professor, on this you and I are of one mind. Whatever our differences (and what profoundly different cultures we come from, what utterly different lives we have led), perhaps, on this, one of the deepest things in each of us (if Da-sein is allowed depths), we are utterly convergent.