My Date with Heidegger: An Epistolary Saga

My Dear Heidegger,

I hate to say this, but people warned me about you.

They said you were difficult; they said you weren't worth the trouble—all those things that people tend to say about philosophers, especially ones they don’t like.

So I tried to prepare myself: I brewed an entire pot of coffee. I made myself a batch of scones (I’ve always thought that scones are the most academic of baked goods). I readied my pile of differently-colored highlighters. I even Googled your picture—incidentally, I wonder how you would have felt about Google?—and you don’t look like a difficult man. Just serious. Thoughtful.

But, as will come as no surprise, I’m not writing to you to talk about your face.

You see, Heidegger—can I call you H.? I’m going to call you H.—when I read philosophy, I always try to figure out why the ideas are being presented in the way that they are. Structure and content go hand in hand, right? And so I asked myself this question about you. Because you really weren’t satisfied with the job that language was doing, were you? I confess that I don’t speak a word of German, and I do wonder if I’d be coming to you with a different set of questions if I’d read things as you’d written them originally. But, alas…

I’m going to cut to the chase here. What is it with the re-definitions?  I’m as much a fan of the flexibility of language as the next person; I freely admit that sometimes I make up words, too. But I’ve never read anything written by anyone who liked gerunds as much as you. I read things like “Enframing is an ordaining of destining, as is every way of revealing” and the cynic in me just wants to clock out. But I didn’t want to do that to you…even though after a re-read, and another re-read, I’m not sure I understand. You know, H., you were a beautiful writer—not beautiful in the way that flower are beautiful, or even in the way that sonnets are beautiful, but more like the beauty of a well-preserved skeleton. It’s very precise, your language, and completely dependent on a series of interlocking parts—like a spine, like the twenty-seven bones in the human hand.

I’ve been wondering, H., how much you knew about programming. You see, what you did to examine the essence of technology feels an awful lot like what programmers do to get at the physical, or instrumental, if you will, side of technology. When the code doesn’t work, you rewrite it. When the proof is broken, you fix it. And so you do here. You were creating your own way to communicate, just like the originators of symbolic logic, or the creators of HTML. You take this very magpie approach—look to the Greeks, look to science, look to poetry (a nice touch, by the way)—and you build us up to this triumphant place, where all of a sudden we are not just dealing with technology, but something more:

…enframing propriates for its part in the granting that lets man endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus the rising of the saving power appears.

            The irresistibility of ordering and the restraint of the saving power draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. But precisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side of their nearness.

            When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.

            The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the essential unfolding of truth propriates (338).

You—like so many others—are bringing it back to Truth. The question concerning technology, you write, is the question that holds the essential notion of Truth. And how is it that you and so many other of the early builders and makers and thinkers all zeroed in on this idea of technology as a vehicle for truth, or a way into the concept of truth, when so many of us now are just really into Angry Birds and cat GIFS? Which bus did we get on? Which constellation are we looking at? In the balance between ordering and restraint, I have to imagine that you’d be putting us squarely in the former territory—but what does that do to us going forward?

I’m trying, H., I really am, to make sense of this, but I’m just not there yet. 

If you want to send along any cosmic hints, from the afterlife, well—you know where to find me.

Best wishes,

L.