On Heidegger's Other Sins of Omission: His

Exclusion of Asian Thought from the Origins of

Occidental Metaphysics and His Denial of the
Possibility of Christian Philosophy

by Robert Bernasconi

1.

The most notorious ofHeidegger's omissions was his failure after the
Seeond World War to address National Soeialism in an appropriate way.
The relation of this personal fault to his thought has long been debated
under the title of Heidegger's "silenee." More reeently, some attention
has begun to be given to omissions from his aeeount of philosophy's
history. Although these may appear trivial by eomparison, Heidegger's
seleetive pieture of the history of Western philosophy does present a
philosophieal issue of broad signifieanee in the eontext of a growing
reeognition that the unquestioned insistenee on identifying philosophy
as Greek is both artifieial and oppressive. The present essay foeuses on
two ofHeidegger's exelusions. I shall examine his failure to look at what
preeedes Greek thought or eontributes to it from the "outside," and I
shall expose the way his resistanee to the idea of Christian philosophy
turned into an attempt to eonstruet aversion ofthe history ofphilosophy
that minimized Christianity's eontribution to philosophy.
These exelusions are not unique to Heidegger. From the end of the
eighteenth eentury, when the story of philosophy as a produet of Greeee
took hold, there has been little seholarly attention given to what the
Greek thinkers owed to other peoples. 1 This has changed reeently in

1See, for example, Martin Bemal, Black Athena, vol.· 1, (New Brunswiek:
Rutgers University Press, 1987), 215-17. I offer a provisional assessment of
Bemal's argument about how it came to be insisted at the end of the eighteenth
century that the beginning of philosophy was located in Greece in "Philosophy's

Copyright 1995, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. LXIX, No. 2

334 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

some quarters as a result of a renewed interest in the Greeks' own

testimony oftheir debt to the Egyptians. There have also been a number
of studies showing the importance of Indian and Near Eastem thought
for the so-called pre-Socratics. 2 That Greek science owed something to
the thinkers of what are now called Africa and Asia is impossible to deny
altogether, as are the stories of travel and cultural exchange, even if
their number and distance were subsequently exaggerated for effect. 3
Nevertheless, Heidegger did not give any more significance to this kind
of evidence than did Count Yorck, who was quoted in Being and Time
as saying,

We must keep wholly aloof from all such rubbish, for

instance, as how often Plato was in Magna Graecia or
Syracuse. On this nothing vital depends. 4

Leaving aside the possibility that Heidegger might have learned some-
thing valuable about the relation between philosophy and politics from
studying Plato's own experience in Syracuse, one has to admit that
Heidegger was following most of the scholars of his time when he refused
to explore the significance, both historical and symbolic, for the question
of the origin of philosophy of the Greeks' own stories about how their
sages travelled abroad, especially to Egypt, to learn wisdom. On the
question of the diminishment of Christian philosophy, Heidegger was
more isolated. Heidegger had begun the 1920s by presenting hirnself as
a "Christian theologian. n5 Subsequently, he showed a hostility to Chris-
tian philosophy that expressed itself both in his lectures and, appar-
ently, his relations with his academic colleagues. 6 John Caputo has
claimed that "From the 1930s on, Jews and Christians were shown the
door and replaced by a pantheon of 'pagan' 'gods,' pure Greeks, and
celebrated in an openly mythologizing thinking, which culminated in

Paradoxical Parochialism," Re{lections on the Work of Said: Cultural ldentity

and the Gravity of History, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, forthcoming).
2 See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1972), and M. L. West, Early Greek Philosophy and
the Orient, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
3 Heidegger himself commented on the tradition of the Egyptian origins of
mathematics at GA19 94 and 340, and GA22 40.
4 Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck v.
Wartenburg, 1877-1897, (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1923),61. Quoted SZ 400; BT
452. See also GA22 94.
5 "Drei Briefe Martin Heideggers an Karl Löwith," Zur philosophischen
Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 2, eds. Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler,
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), 29.
6 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, (Frankfurt:
Campus, 1988), 258-62.
 HEIDEGGER'S SINS OF OMISSION 335
the hope that one day one of them would come along and save us.,,7
Caputo is weIl aware that there were still references ·to the role of
Christianity in Western philosophy in the later Heidegger's texts: Eck-
hart and Angelus Silenus played a positive role in his thought; the
ontotheological tradition was identified as such; and so on. The point is
rather the place Heidegger accorded to it. Furthermore, Hebraic
thought, which was never prominent in Heidegger's accounts of the
history of philosophy, did virtually disappear from his works. 8 If one
reads, or rather misreads, Heidegger's account of this history of philoso-
phy as a narrative, it does not appear so very different from more
conventional accounts, notwithstanding the omissions. As I shall try to
show, if one focuses on what determines Heidegger's omissions, a radical
difference emerges between Heidegger's approach to the history of
philosophy and more standard versions.
There was a time when the only candidate for breaking the hegemony
of Western philosophy was so-called Oriental philosophy. Today when
many philosophy departments are broadening the historical and geo-
graphical parameters of what they accept as philosophy and include, for
example, African, African-American, and Chicano philosophy, there is
an urgent need to reexamine alternative ways of construing the identity
of philosophy. Even if the specific account Heidegger offered has little
to recommend it, his use of the past to open the future is highly relevant
to the current context. Simply to add new courses that expand the
syllabus without questioning the dominant picture and what sustains
it is inadequate at a straightforward philosophicallevel. It is similarly
wrongheaded to try to make good Heidegger's exclusions by trying to
graft additional material onto his account from elsewhere. 9
Nothing is simpler than to accuse philosophers of neglecting the
study of some important topic, as if they were all committed to total
coverage simply in virtue of being philosophers. Although Heidegger
was unusually weIl read in the history of Western philosophy, the list
of even conventionally recognized thinkers and areas omitted from his
account of the history of philosophy as the history of Being would be a
long one. Before the omission could be regarded as philosophically

7 John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1993), 169.
8 See Marlene Zarader, La dette impensee. Heidegger et l'heritage hebraique,
(Paris: Seuil, 1990). I am grateful to Jill Robbins for drawing this book to my
attention.
9 An example can be found in the way Joseph Kockelmans expanded Heidegger's
own brief history of aesthetics by drawing on conventional sourees. See
Heidegger on Art and Art Works, (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), xii and
10.
336 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

interesting, however, the burden would always be on the eritie to show

in eaeh ease that the exelusion was in some way symptomatie. For
example, did Spinoza fail to find a pIace in the history of Being simply
beeause his philosophy was an unimportant variation on Cartesianism
or beeause there was something in his thought that resisted a Heideg-
gerian reading?10 It is not the ease that allomissions ean be made good
by subsequent eommentators. Such efforts tend to assume that the
history of philosophy ean be added to indefinitely so long as the single
narrative that eonstitutes that history remains intaet. The narrative
approach to the history of philosophy took hold in part in an effort to
eombat the threat of relativism by enelosing the plurality of philosophies
within a unity. Although Heidegger was most insistent on thinking of
Western metaphysies as a unity, however, he did so with the very
different agenda of trying to open up future possibilities for thinking
that would transeend that unity. Heidegger attempted to go beyond the
historiologieal eoneeption ofthe history ofphilosophy as a single narra-
tive in an effort to uneover what exeeeded that narrative as its "un-
thought." Historiologieal omissions are an issue for Heidegger's history,
but it should be reeognized that this history was designed to diselose
what was systematieally omitted from philosophy itself beeause it was
unthinkable within the bounds of the tradition.
I will begin the seeond seetion of this paper by offering a few general
remarks about how Heidegger arrived at this eoneeption of his task. I
shall do so by sketehing a ehronologieal survey of Heidegger's various
treatments of the history of philosophy. This survey, whieh is far from
eomplete, is intended to establish the eontext for Heidegger's rejeetion
of the very idea of a Christian philosophy. In the third seetion I explore
how Heidegger's treatment of Greeee was in large measure determined
by his reading of Hölderlin. This provides the baekdrop for the fourth
seetion where I explore a parallel between Heidegger's exelusions of
Asian philosophy and of Christian philosophy. It is in'this seetion that
a eertain law of exelusion emerges that reveals the philosophieal moti-
vation of their effaeement from Heidegger's aeeount of the history of
philosophy in terms of the history of Being. Heidegger's exelusions
appear arbitrary only to those readers of Heidegger who are themselves
guilty of omitting a eore eomponent of his later thought. The later
Heidegger did not simply "forget" Egypt, still less Christianity. One
comes to this eonelusion only if one overlooks Heidegger's efforts to
distanee his philosophieal reading of the history of philosophy from

lOSee Jacques Derrida's remarks at the "Reading Heidegger" colloquium at the

University ofEssex in 1986. They are transcribed in Research in Phenomenology
17 (1987): 95-96.
 HEIDEGGER'S 8INS OF OMISSION 337

merely historiological issues. The history of Being, which is more than

a philosophical history ofphilosophy, does not aim at complete coverage
of everything past, which is in any case unattainable; its task is to open
the future by reinventing the history of philosophy. This is also what
underlies much of the effort expended today on expanding the bounds
of what is considered philosophy.

2.

The overcoming of metaphysics in Heidegger is, unlike the decon-

structive variation offered by Derrida, an attempt to initiate a relation
with the not-yet metaphysical that opens the no-Ionger metaphysical.
That is to say, Heidegger's account of previous thinking is always
directed by the question of the possibilities for future thinking. This was
already true for the Wiederholung and the destruction of the history of
ontology as announced in Being and Time. ll In 1927, in Being and Time,
Heidegger proposed a destructuring of the history of philosophy that
sought to recover the originary experiences of the tradition that had
become sedimented in concepts so firmly established that they had come
to be regarded as self-evident (8Z 21; BT 43). By 1935, with Introduction
to Metaphysics, Heidegger referred the thinking of the beginning of the
tradition to another beginning that, in turn, could only be thought in
relation to the first beginning (EM 29; IM 39). By the 1937-38 lecture
course, Basic Questions of Phenomenology, Heidegger identified future
thinking with thinking what the Greeks experienced as aletheia, but
which they nevertheless failed to think. as such (GA45 112-115; BQ
98-101). This way of presenting the issue emphasized the break between
another beginning and what immediately preceded it, a break that was
even more emphatically announced with the idea of the end of philoso-
phy as the end ofthe first beginning ofWestern thought (GA45124-125;
BQ 108-109). This in turn led to a further innovation when Heidegger
introduced the distinction between the beginning (Anfang) of thinking
and the start (Beginn) of philosophy. The effect of the distinction, for
example, in the 1942-43 lecture course Parmenides, was to accentuate
the tie between the thinking of the first and of another beginning by
marking what intervened as philosophy. The beginning of thinking took
place with Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus, whereas meta-
physics or philosophy, which started with Plato, extends to Nietzsehe.

See Robert Bernasconi, "Repetition and Tradition: Heidegger's Destructuring

11
of the Distinction Between Essence and Existence in Basic Problems of
Phenomenology," Reading Heidegger From the Start, eds. T. Kisiel and J. van
Buren, (Albany: State University ofNew York, 1994), 123-36.
338 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

It is within this context that Heidegger came to view metaphysics as a

unity which could be overcome in what he called "a more original
beginning" whereby "the beginning of the essential history of the West
is experienced more primordially (anfänglicher)" (GA54 113; P 77).
Heidegger's treatment of the history of philosophy is directed not 10
doing justice to philosophy, but rather 10 reopening the possibility for
thinking.
Although it is apparent from this brief survey that Heidegger shared
the view of almost all of his contemporaries in the academy that
philosophy began in Greece, the status he accorded this thesis was by
no means constant. There is no reason to doubt that in Being and Time
he simply inherited from the text books the dogma that philosophy - or
that part of "the on1ological tradition which has been decisive for us" (SZ
100; BT 133) - began in Greece. Furthermore, the need 10 identify a point
of origin seemed unimportant; Heidegger was willing 10 accept confir-
mation of his account of the on1ological foundations of Dasein whenever
he found it, including the fable that 10ld of cura (SZ 196-199; BT
241-244). By the time of Introduction to Metaphysics, however, Heideg-
ger's investment in the greatness of the beginning as a function of the
uniqueness of the Greeks was clear. Heidegger sought 10 defend the
early Greek thinkers from the charge of being "primitive," which he saw
as having serious consequences: "Thus the Greeks become essentially a
higher type of Hottentot, whom modern science has left far behind" (EM
12; IM 15). With this unfortunate turn of phrase, Heidegger sought 10
distance the Greeks from the rest of humanity and establish them as a
point of absolute beginning on the grounds that not to do so would
diminish them: "what is great can only begin great. Its beginning is in
fact the greatest thing of all" (EM 12; IM 15). Later in the same lecture
course, Heidegger criticized the humanistic interpretation ofthe chorus
on "man" from Antigone as a narrative of the development of man from
a savage hunter and Einbaumfahrer to the man of culture and the
builder of cities because it persisted with the opinion that history began
with the primitive and the backward, the helpless and the weak. "The
beginning is the strangest and mightiest (das Unheimlichste und Ge-
waltigste). What follows is not development, but levelling off as mere
spreading out; it is inability 10 retain the beginning" (EM 119; IM 155).
It is true that in the context of the relation between the first beginning
and another beginning Heidegger posed the question of whether the
alleged beginning ofthe West "really was its beginning" (GA45 115; BQ
101). Indeed, he seemed to suggest that there would be another begin-
ning only if thinking was in touch with the true fIrst beginning, and that
there would be no such future without it.

The beginning could be something which, furled in its great-

 HEIDEGGER'S SINS OF OMISSION 339

ness, reaches ahead into the future, and, accordingly, the

return to the beginning could be a leaping ahead, indeed a
genuine leaping ahead into the future, though to be sure only
under the condition that we really do begin with the begin-
ning. (GA45 110; BQ 97)

A closer reading, however, makes it apparent that the decision about

the beginning does not rely on historiological considerations (GA45 111;
BQ 97).
The issue Heidegger was addressing in this passage had nothing to
do with a possible reexamination of the scattered evidence that referred
the origins of Greek thought to Egypt and everything to do with arriving
at an interpretation of the Greeks that breaks through the Christian
appropriation of Greek thought. Heidegger repeatedly insisted that
Greek thought had been represented in terms of Christian concepts, so
that access to the Greeks had become virtually impossible.

Christianity, from early on, following the path ofJudaeo-Hel-

lenic teachings, has in its own way seized upon the philosophy
of Plato and has seen to it that from then until now the
Platonic philosophy, held out as the high point of Greek
philosophy, should appear in the light of Christian faith....
Not only does Greek philosophy appear in a Christian heologi-
cal interpretation, but even within philosophy it is presented
as the first stage ofChristian-occidental thinking. (GA54 139;
P 93-94)

This led Heidegger to develop his attack on the idea of Christian

philosophy into a rubric for reading the history of philosophy. According
to Heidegger, in the Middle Ages there was no philosophy, but only "a
preamble of reason on behalf of theology, as required by faith."

Aristotle was precisely therefore not understood in the Greek

way, that is, on the basis of the primordial thought and poetry
of Greek Dasein, but in a medieval fashion, that is, in an
Arabic-Jewish-Christian way. (GA45 221; BQ 185)

The attempts by Hegel and even Nietzsche "to restore the broken bond
with the Greeks" had failed because they had not been based on the
question of the essence of aletheia which alone would truly allow a
return to Greek thinking.
Heidegger's attacks on the possibility of a Christian philosophy
began in the 1920s with his insistence on the fundamentally atheistic
character of philosophy.12 They reached a crescendo in the following
decade. In 1935 Heidegger declared that "A 'Christian philosophy' is a
340 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

round square and a misunderstanding" (EM 6; IM 7). One year later, he

confirmed that "the feast of thinking never takes place in Christianity.
That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy" (NI 14; Ni 5). The
dissociation of faith from philosophy is widespread and does not rely on
any complex thesis about the history of philosophy. In Heidegger,
however, the era of Christian philosophy came to be construed as an
obstacle to the crucial task of recollecting the first beginning in its
originality, independent of all subsequent mediations. Heidegger's in-
sistence in the 1953 lecture What is Philosophy? on the Greek essence
of philosophy confirmed his rejection of Chinese and Indian philosophy
(see WD 136; WT 224). Nevertheless, when Heidegger explicated the
statement that philosophy is "Greek in its essence" and did so in terms
of the claim that "the West and Europe, and only these, are, in the
innermost course of their history, originally 'philosophieal,'" the conse-
quence that he chose to make explicit was that philosophy could not be
Christian.

However, the originally Greek nature of philosophy, in the

epoch of its modern-European sway, has been guided and
ruled by Christian conceptions. The dominance of these con-
ceptions was mediated by the Middle Ages. At the same time,
one cannot say that philosophy thereby became Christian,
that is, became a matter of belief in revelation and the
authority ofthe Church. (WdP 13; WP 31)

Heidegger's insistence on the Greek essence of philosophy was, there-

fore, directed not only, or even primarily, against the idea of Egyptian,
Indian, Chinese, African, or J udaic philosophy, but also against the idea
of Christian philosophy. That insistence cannot, therefore, be explained
by ignorance. What was at stake for Heidegger in this definition?

3.

Heidegger's commitment to the idea of a great beginning that could

not be explicated in terms of what preceded it gave him a philosophical
stake in the historiological orthodoxy that denied the philosophical debt
ofthe Greek thinkers to the Egyptians. Heidegger's commitment to the
idea of the unity of metaphysics, such that everything within it was
implicit at its start, gave him a philosophical stake in the idea that
Judaism and Judeo-Christianity were irrelevant to the task of thinking,

12See M. Heidegger, "Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu AristoteIes,"

Dilthey-Jahrbuch 6 (1989): 246.
 HEIDEGGER'S SINS OF OMISSION 341
not because they did not add anything, but because what they brought
to philosophy hindered access to the first beginning from which alone
another beginning could arise. Heidegger's rewriting of the history of
philosophy was concerned less with meeting accepted historical stand-
ards than with exploring how a no-Ionger metaphysical thinking might
arise in relation to the not-yet metaphysical thinking of the Greeks.
From the mid-1930s, when Heidegger introduced the idea of another
beginning, he focused on the early Greeks in order to open the possibili-
ties for future thinking and, until the end of the Second World War,
Heidegger explicitly looked to the Germans to inherit the future. 13
Heidegger did not offer any new arguments to support his reaffirma-
tion of the association between the Greeks and the Germans, which had
often been asserted since the time of German Romanticism. Nor is it
clear how one would set about proving that Greek and German are "the
most powerful and spiritual of all languages," although Heidegger
insisted upon it (EM 43; IM 57). Nevertheless, from 1935, for aperiod
of at least twenty-five years, Heidegger attempted to clarify the relation
of "another beginning" to the first beginning through an interpretation
of Hölderlin's account of the relation of the Germans to the Greeks.
Heidegger focused on Hölderlin's two letters to Böhlendorff, the first
from 4 December 1801 and the second from November 1802. On Heideg-
ger's interpretation, which is what concerns me here, the letters explain
that the Germans learn who they are, and appropriate what is their
own, through the Greeks as the people who are foreign to them and yet
with whom they have what might be called a special relationship.
Hölderlin wrote: "Yet what is familiar must be learned as weIl as what
is foreign. That is why the Greeks are so indispensable to us. ,,14 To learn
the free use of one's own calls for a confrontation with the foreign. 15
Heidegger's use ofHölderlin's letters to Böhlendorffto clarify his own
thought continued after the Second World War, even though Heidegger
ceased to address the Germans by name. Indeed in some ways the most
intriguing attempt by Heidegger to reconstruct the identities in terms
of which his thought of another beginning operates can be found in
"Hölderlins Erde und Himmel," a lecture delivered in 1959. The central

13There is an obvious tension between opening the future and naming it. I have
tried to throw some light on this aspect of Heidegger's thinking in '"I Will Tell
You Who You Are.' Heidegger on Greco-German Destiny and Amerikanismus,"
From Phenomenology to the Ethics ofDesire, ed. Babette E. Babich, (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, forthcoming).
14 Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke VI, hrsg. Friedrich Beissner, (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1952), 426.
16See further Susanne Ziegler, Heidegger, Hölderlin und die aletheia, (Berlin:
Duncker and Humblot, 1991).
342 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHlLOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

focus of the lecture was Hölderlin's poem "Griechenland," hut Heidegger

began by quoting in full the second of the letters to Böhlendorff. AI-
though all reference to the Germans disappeared from Heidegger's
interpretation, the same issues discussed with reference to the Germans
in the years when the National Socialists were in power were posed in
"Hölderlins Erde und Himmel" in terms of the West. l6 The context in
which Heidegger returned to the task of clarifying the meaning of
another beginning was the exposition of these lines from Hölderlin's
"Griechenland":

Zu Geringem auch kann kommen

Grosser Anfang.

Literally,

A great beginning can come

Also to the slight.

Asking "Where is the slight?" Heidegger referred it to Hölderlin's refer-

ence to a philosophical window. Heidegger, equating the philosophical
with Greece (EHD 171 and 161), came to the conclusion that "the slight"
to which a great beginning was coming was the West (EHD 176). Given
the way Heidegger construed the relation of another heginning to the
first beginning, if a great beginning is possibly coming to the West (das
Abendländische), what is coming is Greece as das Morgenländische
(EHD 176).
Nevertheless, Heidegger allowed the question ofwhat the West could
become to he interrupted by a recognition of what the West had be-
come-Europe. As Heidegger had said in What is Called Thinking?,
"Western [thinking] is for the moment submerged in European thinking"
(WD 110; WT 178). Europe was understood there and in "Hölderlins
Erde und Himmel" not geographically, but in terms of its technological
and industrial mastery of the whole earth (EHD 176). The pressing
question in "Hölderlins Erde und Himmel" is "What has Europe be-
come?" To answer it Heidegger turned to Paul Valery's essay, 'The Crisis
of the Spirit." This is a text that Derrida drew on both in Gf Spirit and

16Heidegger had already insisted in the "Letter on Humanism" that Hölderlin's

use of the word Heimat should be understood "not in an essential sense, not
patriotically or nationalistically, but in terms of the history of Being" (W 168;
BW 217). For my assessment of what Heidegger attempted in "Letter on
Humanism" with reference to his readings of Hölderlin, see "'Poet of Poets. Poet
of the Germans.' On the Dialogue Between Poetry and Thinking," in Heidegger
in Question, (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), 135-48.
 HEIDEGGER'S SINS OF OMISSION 343

The Other Heading, although not 10 juxtapose it with this diseussion in

"Hölderlins Erde und Himmel," but 10 refer it 10 the aeeount of the
German people as at the middle of the West, the middle of the middle
in Introduction to Metaphysics (EM 38; IM 50).17 Neither Heidegger nor
Derrida thought 10 eomment on the extraordinary presumption on
whieh Valery's essay is based: "Everything eame 10 Europe, and every-
thing eame from it. Or almost everything.,,18 Heidegger appealed to
Valery to offset his own aeeount ofEurope. Valery's 'The Crisis of Spirit"
posed the alternative between Europe as a small promontory of the
Asiatie eontinent and Europe as the brain of the whole teehnologieal and
industrial, planetary and interstellar order. Heidegger introdueed a
third possibility, that Europe might be "another dawn of world history"
(EHD 177). In his essay on Anaximander from the mid-1940s, Heidegger
had already explored this possibility when he addressed the future in
terms of the alternative of the night of most monstrous transformation
(ungeheuersten Veränderung) or another dawn (H 300-301; EGT 17).
Heidegger asked:

Will this land of evening (Abend-Land) overwhelm Oeeident

and Orient alike, transeending whatever is merely European
(das Europäische) to beeome the site of a eoming ineipient
destined history (die Ortschaft der kommenden anfänglicher
geschickten Geschichte)? (H 300; EGT 17. Trans. modified)

In "Hölderlins Erde und Himmel" there are some lines that explore this
possibility further.
Heidegger deseribed there how the great beginning is present to us
only in its eoming to the slight, whieh nevertheless ean no longer remain
in its Western individualization (Vereinzelung). Heidegger then offered
the following statement, eharaeteristie only in its obseurity: 'The slight
opens itself 10 the few other great beginnings whieh, in what is their
very own, belong in the self-same of the beginning of the in-finite

17Jacques Derrida, De l'esprit, (paris: Galilee, 1987), 97-101; trans. Geoffrey

Bennington and Rachel Bowlhy, Of Spirit, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 61-62 and 122-24. L'autre cap, (Paris: Minuit, 1991), espe 36-38;
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, The Other Heading,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 33-36.
18paul Valery, "La crise de l'esprit," Oeuvres I, ed. Jean Hytier, (Paris:
Gallimard, 1957), 995; trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews, 'The Crisis
oftheMind," HistoryandPolitics, Collected Works, vol.l0, (New York: Random
House, 1962), 31. Valery was quite explicit not only that the Greeks founded
geometry, hut also that the Egyptians did not, even though Smyrna and
Alexandria were included hy Valery in Europe. "La crise de l'esprit," 996-97;
trans. 'The Crisis of the Mind," 33.
344 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOsOPHICAL QUARTERLY

relation which sustains the earth" (EHD 177). It is tempting to try to

find in this unusual reference to a plurality of "other great beginnings"
the possibility that Heidegger envisaged a relation between the Euro-
peans and the Asians parallel to that he had already described between
the Greeks and the Germans. J. L. Mehta, one ofthe few commentators
to have addressed this passage, glosses Heidegger's denial that "this
new dawn ['the morning of another world history']" could remain "in its
Western isolation" in the following way:

The Upanishadic, mystical tradition of Indian religious and

philosophical thought, by going back to its own unspent
origins and opening itself out at the same time to the 'un-
thought' in that other great beginning in the West, can
perhaps contribute more substantially towards the prepara-
tion of a new dawn than has seemed possible so far. 19

Mehta is weIl aware, however, that the general thrust of Heidegger's

argument was that

The contemporary world situation is, in respect of its essen-

tial source, through and through European-Western-Greek,
and if it is to change, the resources for this must lie, and be
sought, in the untapped ahundance ofthis origin, ofthat great
heginning to which there cannot be any return hut which
preserves in itself the saving possibility that may yet in its
coming fulfill and heal the present. 20

The suggestion that Heidegger's enigmatic appeal to a "few other great

beginnings" referred to possibilities opened up by the dialogue between
East-Asian and Western thought seems to be excluded by other texts.
For example, in the mid-1950s, in the context of a discussion of "plane-
tary thinking," Heidegger noted the inability of either European lan-
guages or East-Asiatic languages to open up on their own an area of
possible dialogue between them (W 252; QB 107. Also US 93-94; OL 8).
There is a further problem that must be addressed by any attempt
to find in this essay on Hölderlin's "Das Griechenland" an exemplifica-
tion of the later Heidegger's commitment to "a more global perspec-
tive.,,21 It lies in Heidegger's insistence on Hölderlin's identification of

19J. L. Mehta, Martin Heidegger: The Wayand the Vision, (Honolulu: University
Press of Hawaii, 1976), 469.
20 Ibid.
21 The phrase is Fred Dallmayr's from The Other Heidegger, (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993), 167. In "Homecoming through Otherness" Dallmayr
 HEIDEGGER'S SINS OF OMISSION 345

das Morgenländische with Greece (EHD 157 and 176). This is not a term
Hölderlin used often, and the fact that Hölderlin conceived Greece as a
morning-Iand has been noticed by other commentators. 22 This is not the
same as saying, however, that the morning-Iand is Greece and the fact
that das Morgenländische would ordinarily mean the East, particularly
the Near East, and that Heidegger entirely effaced this in equating it
with Greece, raises the question of Heidegger's more general diminish-
ment of the role of Egypt and Asia in Hölderlin. 23

4.

In "Heidegger Reading Hölderlin" Warminski puts to Heidegger's

reading of Hölderlin the question "Why no Egyptians, then, why the
silence about (or the enforced muteness 00 the Orient?,,24 Warminski
reformulates the question in "Monstrous History" in the specific context
of an interpretation of Heidegger's lecture-course on Hölderlin's Der
Ister: "does he [Heidegger] remember that the Greeks also had 'their
own' language only in dialogue with a foreign language?,,25 The implica-
tion seems to be that Heidegger had not remembered because he failed
to read Hölderlin carefully enough. In fact, a few years prior to the
lecture course on Hölderlin's "Der Ister," Heidegger presented himself
as one of the few among his contemporaries who had not forgotten.
Furthermore, it was not simply an issue about the reading of Hölderlin.
If there was an effacement of Egypt or Asia in Heidegger, it was found
not only in his reading ofHölderlin, hut also in his reading ofphilosophy.
In "Wege zur Aussprache," a brief essay first published in 1937, Heideg-
ger wrote,

When we reflect on the possible greatness and the standards

set by Western 'culture' we immediately remerrlber the his-

addresses other relevant texts, particularly the essay on Trakl, that would need
to be taken into consideration for a fuller discussion of the issue.
22Richard Unger, Hölderlin's Major Poetry, (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1975), 185.
23 In a longer essay it would be necessary also to examine both the essay and
lecture course versions of Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin's "Andenken" to show
how Heidegger avoided a genuine confrontation with the Asiatic in spite of
Hölderlin's evocation of it. See EHD 85n and GA52 68. Note also Heidegger's
effacement of the East in his reading of "Der Rhein" when he takes up the East,
not as East, but as Seyn (GA39 204).
24Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 56.
26 Andrzej Warminski, "Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin," Yale
French Studies 77 (1990): 203.
346 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILoSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

10rieal world of early Greeee. And at the same time we as

easily forget that the Greeks did not beeome what they have
always been by being enelosed in their "spaee." ünly by virtue
of the most severe and yet ereative eonfrontation with what
was for them most foreign and most diffieult - the Asiatie -
did this people enter the brief period of their his10rieal
uniqueness and greatness. (GAI3 20-21)

Although the use of the phrase "most foreign and most diffieult" makes
it apparent that this statement was formulated with Hölderlin's letters
to Böhlendorff in mind, it seems at first sight 10 be areversal of
Hölderlin's statement that "the free use of one's own is the most
diffieult."26 Heidegger's explieation ofthis claim, however, set out most
elearly in the leetures on Hölderlin's Andenken, finally serves 10 eom-
plieate it.

To those not at home (Den Unheimischen) it remains unde-

eided what is foreign and what one's own. Neither the one nor
the other is found. For not only one's own but also the foreign
must be learnt. If, that is to say, the free use of one's own is
the most diffieult, then it lies therein that the eondition
(Beständnis) of the foreign also remains difficult and has its
own neeessity. (GA52 188)

This formed the basis for the interpretation offered the following semes-
ter in the leetures on "Der Ister," where the complex relation by which
that whieh for the Greeks is their own is foreign for the Germans, and
vice versa (GA53 154 and 169), was simplified into the formulation that
for the Germans the "beeoming at home of the own" takes place by a
passage or transition through the foreign (GA53 60).
Heidegger had already suggested in the 1934-351eeture course that
Heraelitus was "the name of an original power of Western-Germanic
historieal thinking in its eonfrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the
Asiatic" (GA39 134), thereby indicating with the label "Western-Ger-
manie" the relation that would determine his interpretation ofHölderlin
as weIl as of Heraclitus. In 1962, in Aufenthalte, Heidegger's personal
report on his first journey to Greece, he repeated the importanee of the
relation of Greece to Asia and he did so as part of his effort to highlight
the question of the West as the site of another beginning:

Confrontation with the Asiatic was a fruitful necessity for

26Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke VI, 426.

 HEIDEGGER'S SINS OF OMISSION 347
Greek Dasein. For us today in a completely different way and
to a far greater extent the fruitful necessity is the decision
about the destiny of Europe and of that which goes under the
name ofthe Western world. (A 16)

To reformulate Warminski's question in the light of these additional

texts, if the omission of Egypt and the Orient was not the result of a
lapse of memory, why did Heidegger omit this confrontation from his
account of the great beginning?
The best indication as to how to answer that question is provided by
Heidegger's discussion of Schelling's use of Christian concepts. Heideg-
ger claimed that it was not just the thought of the Middle Ages that was
dominated by Christianity, but all of German Idealism, especially Hegel
(SA 175; ST 145). In Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom, from 1936,
Heidegger again acknowledged what he most often appeared to ignore,
that

the great beginning of Western philosophy too did not come

out of nothing. Rather, it became great because it had to
overcome its greatest opposite, the mythical in general and
the Asiatic in particular, that is, it had to bring it to the
jointure (Gefüge) of a truth of Being, and was able to do this.
(SA 175; ST 146)

The context in which Heidegger reasserted the role of Asia in the

formation ofWestern philosophy, at a time when the distinction between
thinking and philosophy was not firmly set in his texts, was a discussion
of the place of Christianity in the history of philosophy. More specifi-
cally, the issue was the joint recognition both that Christian philosophy
served as an obstacle in the way of any attempt to retrieve the Greek
origin of philosophy and that the Christianization of philosophy could
not be overcome by edict, any more than one could "restore the broken
bond with the Greeks" (GA45, 221; BQ 185) by a mere leap.

In philosophy we can no more go back to Greek philosophy by

means of a leap than we can eliminate the advent of Christi-
anity into Western history and thus into philosophy by means
of a command. The only possibility is to transform history,
that is, truly to bring about the hidden necessity of history
into which neither knowledge nor deed reach, and transfor-
mation truly brought about is the essence of the creative. (SA
175; ST 145-146)

Heidegger did not suggest that one simply write off Christian philoso-
phy, either by engaging in polemic or by trying to ignore it. Both those
348 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHlLOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

options would have amounted 10 trying 10 eliminate it by command.

What was necessary was a rereading of the history of philosophy that
would creatively transform. that history.
The point that Heidegger made in drawing this somewhat enigmatic
connection between the Greeks' confrontation with the Asiatic, on the
one hand, and the need 10 look behind Schelling's Christianizing equa-
tion of evil with sin, on the other hand, revolved around the possibility
of a creative transformation of history. Heidegger rejected the idea that
one should s10p reading Schelling because of his reliance on Christian
concepts, and called instead for a reading that proceeded "with regard
to the essence and truth of Being (Seyn)" (SA 175-176; ST 146). His
suggestion was that a model for such a creative rereading of history
already existed in the way that Greek thought was generally treated as
an absolute beginning, even though it was formed in its confrontation
with Asiatic thought. Heidegger seems 10 have been more ready than
most of his contemporaries to acknowledge the importance for the
Greeks of their predecessors, but he was ready 10 do so only so long as
that was not the issue at hand. So far as his own account of philosophy
was concerned, he had a larger stake than anyone· in maintaining the
impression that the Greek thinkers constituted an absolute beginning,
because only then could the question ofthe relation ofthe first beginning
to another beginning, the relation ofthe Greeks to the coming Germans,
be posed with appropriate clarity. In other words, Heidegger's exclusion
of Asian thought from the origins of occidental metaphysics and his
denial of the possibility of Christian philosophy were not accidental, but
came to be regarded by him as conditions for another beginning of
thinking. Or, rather, they were conditions that would have to be fulfilled
if this "second" beginning was 10 be German in the way Heidegger
conceived it. To be more precise still, reading the history of thinking and
of philosophy in this way was not merely a precondition of another
beginning of thinking, it already belonged to the task of thinking.
Heidegger believed that to address the forgottenness of Being one has
to cultivate a certain forgetting of history, just as he recognized that it
might be necessary 10 continue to efface the Greeks' encounter with
what was foreign to them, an encounter that served as a condition of
possibility of a "first beginning," precisely so that the Greeks could serve
as the first beginning in relation 10 another beginning.
One could easily get the impression from the lecture courses of the
early 1940s that Heidegger did not apply to the Greeks the principle
that "A historical people is only in terms of the dialogue of its language
with alien languages" (GA53 80). He seems 10 have ignored this law at
the basis of history (GA53 61) and so treated the early Greek thinkers
as independent, self-sustaining and self-defining. Heidegger, however,
was far from unaware ofthe problem. Heidegger may not have been very
 HEIDEGGER'S 8INS OF OMISSION 349

precise about what he meant by Asia, but it is apparent that, for all the
statements about the Greeks as a beginning which renders the role of
Asia invisible, Heidegger did not simply forget Asia. In April 1936 in
Rome, Heidegger gave a lecture under the title "Europe and German
Philosophy." In this lecture, he proposed that the salvation of Europe
depended both on the preservation of European peoples in the face of
the Asiatic and the overcoming of the uprooting and fragmentation of
Europe (EDP 31). Heidegger emphasized that this overcoming, which
called for a transformation of human existence,. was possible only
through "a creative confrontation with the whole of earlier history - in
its essential forms and epochs." Most of the remainder of the essay was
concerned with recalling the beginning of philosophy in Greece, while
insisting that "every new beginning of philosophy is and can be only a
representation of the first" (EDP 34). It is clear that the exclusion of Asia
from Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin and of the history of philosophy
was anything but accidental. Those who do not want to read Heidegger
will find here another reason not to do so. That matters less than that
they should ask themselves why it is so often still assumed today that
only what is Western passes as philosophy. This is not the place to
examine how and when that presumption came to be formed. The point
here is only to emphasize, firstly, that Heidegger recognized why such
decisions are important for the future of a people, and, secondly, that he
showed one way in which a given history might be transformed. He did
so when he developed a story (Historie) about Western metaphysics
which he hoped would help bring about adecision on the part of
Germans to become the German people and thereby take possession of
their history (Geschichte). This is not the story we would want to tell
today. If it is true, nonetheless, that there will always be one story, or
another, or a multiplicity of stories, then current concerns about the
identity of philosophy provide a new reason for rereading Heidegger, as
he is one of the philosophers who has thought most deeply about this
question. 27

The University of Memphis

Memphis, Tennessee

1 am grateful to James Hanas ofThe University ofMemphis for comments on

27

earlier versions of this paper.

350 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Abbreviations of Works by Heidegger

A Aufenthalte. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 198~.

BQ Basic Questions of Philosophy. Translated by Richard Ro-
jcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994.
EDP "Europa und die deutsche Philosophie." In: Europa und die
Philosophie, ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993,
pp. 31-41.
EHD Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt. Kloster-
mann. Pages 1-143, zweite Auflage, 1951. Pages 152-193, vierte Auflage,
1971: page numbers of second edition in margin.
EM Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966.
H Holzwege. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972.
IM An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by R. Manheim.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
SA Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Frei-
heit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971.
ST Schelling's Treatise on the Essence ofHuman Freedom. Trans-
lated by Joan Stambaugh. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985.
SZ Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967.
W Wegmarken. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967.
WD Was heisst Denken? Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1954.
WelP Was ist das-die Philosophie? Pfullingen: Neske, 1956.
WL On the Way to Language. Translated by P. Hertz and J.
Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
WP What is Philosophy? Translated by William Kluback and Jean
T. Wilde. German/English Text. London: Vision Press, 1956.
WT What is Called Thinking? Translated by Fred D. Wieck and
J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.