Subject: Re: Lichtung
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 10:04:46 -0800


Rene,

I have greatly enjoyed our conversation. It's the best I've had on this list
by far. To tell you the truth I was almost ready to think it was impossible
to have a real stimulating conversation on this list that would get beyond
the making of general pronouncements. More or less we are reading the same
Heidegger. While writing to you many new insights on Heidegger have appeared
to me. Vague inklings have gain greater force and shown themselves more
clearly. This notion of possibly reading Heidegger as 'mending' or bringing
together the splitting that occurs in the distinction essentia and
existentia is a recent example of  these vague insights that I stumble upon
and work out further with you.  In Lecture Thirteen of GA10 Heidegger has
this question and it is the leading question of all the lectures: "But how
is it that ratio in the ancient sense could bifurcate in a manner such that
it speaks with the double sense of "ground" as well as of "Reason"? How this
could happen must have become clear to those who really have an ear out. A
few references to this "how" are still needed, for we are speaking of a
bifurcation of ratio into ratio as "Reason" and ratio as "grounds." To talk
of this bifurcation should make it understandable that both words, "Reason"
and "ground" -- and all that they say -- are divergent, but nevertheless are
held in one and the same root and stalk, which is why even in their
divergence  -- and precisely in this divergence -- they converge. The Old
High German word for a bifurcated bough, a bifurcated tree trunk and the
entire tree that has grown in this shape is Zwiesel. We often find such a
growth under old, towering pines in the upper Black Forest. How is ratio a
forked growth?"  The first lectures (one to six) deal with this question as
that of that "first tonality". Lecure Seven is the transition into the
"second tonality" that thinks the principle of reason as an "utterance of
being."  The question of a forked growth becomes, continuing with Lecture
Thirteen, "To what extent "are" being and ratio the same? To what extent do
grounds and Reason (ratio) on the one side, and being one the other belong
together?"  The rest of the lecure goes on to hearing this second tonality
in a 'Greek way...'. It becomes clear that it is an inaugural question of a
primordial origin of our philosophy in the presocratics, particularly
Heraclitus fragment 128 I think,  that says physis loves to hide and others
like it. The en-hearing in a leap of the utterance of being is just the same
as listening to an inaugural address, an inceptual directive...


thanks.

happy holidays and kind regards,
Gulio



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