Country Path Conversations

Martin Heidegger, Bret W. Davis

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780253004390
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

The philosopher's meditations on nature, technology, and evil, written in the final years of WWII, presented in "clear and highly readable translation" ( Philosophy in Review ). First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger's Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, World War II, and the nature of evil. Heidegger also delves into the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger's two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, this lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger's wartime and postwar thinking.

1.

A Triadic Conversation on a
Country Path between a Scientist,
a Scholar, and a Guide

SCHOLAR: This past autumn we met for the first time on this country path. That meeting was a splendid coincidence, for I owe a precious inspiration to it: an old Greek word occurred to me, which since then has seemed to me to be a very appropriate name for what we are seeking.

SCIENTIST: Our meeting was indeed splendid, but it was no coincidence. What we so name is always just the gap that still remains in our chain of explanations. So long as we have not ascertained the explanatory causes, we like to plug up the hole that remains with the name “coincidence.” Yet the cause of our encounter, which has in the meantime been repeated so fruitfully, lies close at hand. Each of us wished to free himself from his daily work by means of a distraction.

SCHOLAR: The similarity of our occupations also quickly brought us to the thematic object of our conversation at that time. We spoke about cognition.

SCIENTIST: Our discussions did, however, get easily lost in generalities that were difficult to grasp. It often seemed to me as if we were just talking about mere words. All the same, the conversation offered a distraction, which diverted me from the laborious experiments that I had begun at the time with the aim of investigating cosmic radiation.

SCHOLAR: It is true that the definitions of cognition, which we talked through in connection with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, were indeed grasped quite “generally.” Is there anything that cannot be brought under the headings “intuition” [Anschauung] and “thinking” [Denken]—which, according to Kant, are what make up cognition?¹ Hence the physicist among us demanded—rightly so, from his standpoint—an experimental investigation [4] of the processes which accompany the human activities of intuition and thought. As for me, it was then that the previously mentioned inspiration came to me, which obviously pointed me in a different direction in accordance with my historiological occupation. On that autumn evening I also already felt the first breath of winter, that season which is to me always more favorable than the others for burying myself in the business of my work.

GUIDE: The coolness of the past autumn is still present to me.

SCIENTIST: Then, if you don’t mind my saying so, you have evidently retained little from our conversation.

SCHOLAR: Indeed you barely took part in it; presumably because during the day you devote yourself all too ardently to the occupation of philosophy, and seek only a distraction by walking on this country path.

GUIDE: In the coolness of the autumn day, the fire of summer finishes in cheerful serenity.

SCIENTIST: This feeling for nature appears to be quite refreshing for you. You get enthusiastic and seek in such moods a counterweight to the abstractions of philosophy.

GUIDE: The cheerful serenity of the autumn coolness, which harbors the summer within itself, drifts about this country path every year with its gathering play.

SCIENTIST: Then on our walk, if I may say so, you allowed yourself rather to be gathered by the autumnal atmosphere of this path into a pensiveness which can be recommended only on occasion.

SCHOLAR: You were thus not distracted enough to follow our conversation.

GUIDE: Perhaps. [5]

SCHOLAR: By this do you want us to understand that in our conversation the thematic object [Gegenstand] of our discussion, the essence of cognition, was constantly slipping away from us?

SCIENTIST: That was hardly possible. We unwaveringly kept our eye trained on cognition with regard to its decisive fundamental trait. I mean that which fuels and rules our cognitive behavior.

GUIDE: And that is?

SCIENTIST: Its character of work and achievement.

SCHOLAR: Accordingly, our inquiry also directed itself straightaway to thinking, as that component of cognition which, with Kant, we may speak of as the “active” component. In contrast to thinking, intuition is allotted only a preparatory role in the process of cognition.

SCIENTIST: This order of rank between intuition and thinking shows itself with optimal clarity in modern natural science. The intuitive element has here vanished except for a small remainder.

GUIDE: You are presumably saying here more than you think.

SCIENTIST: I always only say what I think; I mean namely that within modern physics, which is considered to be the model for all the natural sciences, theoretical physics lays the foundation of all research. It creates the mathematical projection of nature. Only then, within its purview, can experiments be thought up and constructed.

GUIDE: But what about the arrangement and construction of experiments, the putting in place of all the necessary apparatuses? Do you want to assign these matters of “experiment,” which do not belong to theoretical physics, exclusively to the intuition side of cognition in physics? [6]

SCIENTIST: One could of course hardly do that. I would rather count the matters you introduced as belonging to the “technological” side of physics.

SCHOLAR: If we may speak of “sides” here, then a considerable quantum of thought-activity does indisputably lie in the “technological” aspect of experiments.

SCIENTIST: Indeed technology in general is a particular kind of thinking, namely, that thinking which is devoted to the practical application of theoretical natural science for the purpose of controlling and exploiting nature. Hence, we physicists also say that technology is nothing other than applied physics.

GUIDE: But what if physics, even as a pure investigation of nature, already uses technology in experiments? Just think for example of the machine that splits the atom!

SCHOLAR: Then would physics, and with it the whole of modern natural science, be nothing other than applied technology?

GUIDE: It is splendid that you yourself pronounced such a thing.

SCHOLAR: How so?

GUIDE: Said by me, it would have surely sounded like one of those at times unavoidable inversions of common views, inversions that are often received with suspicion.

SCIENTIST: And rightly so. For within the purview of rigorous research work—which everyone with sound common sense can follow in the main, that is, with regard to its fundamental bearing—it often seems as if the wisdom of thinkers were to consist in taking what sound common sense thinks and straightaway deliberately standing it on its head. [7]

SCHOLAR: This is how it seems to me as well. Moreover, this impression is confirmed by the testimony of thinkers themselves. After all Hegel says, ...