Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger

I have put up a page here on Bergson in German translation as "Einführung in die Metaphysik".  There are striking parallels of that German version of Bergson to Heidegger's own text of the same name.

You might not see this if you do not have Heidegger in the original to compare to that translation from the Eugen Diederich Verlag, Jena 1909.

Husserl was of course very much aware of Bergson on time and time was an early topic for Heidegger as an assistant to Husserl.  And then there is all of Heidegger's work on Aristotle as relates to motion, space and other related topics especially just before 1927 in his effort to secure the chair at Freiburg.

It is so striking to think that Heidegger saw himself as overcoming the dominant French philosopher - a Jew - and then to consider the sad fate of Bergson in occupied France in 1941.  Heidegger, through Jean Beaufret and others, would triumph in spite of - or even because of - the misappropriations of Heidegger's thinking and his very thoughts by the crypto-Hegelian and Cartesian J-P Sartre.  A territory reclaimed. A Bereich dominated (but a Beriech was to remain in the air ...)

It will be a happy irony if renewed interest in Schopenhauer is accompanied by renewed interest in Aristotle and Bergson: the texts of all three should be laid out on your desk when making sense of Heidegger's peculiarities as the Fuehrer - the oddities of what is Gestell - in the Heideggerian Einfuehrung and its particular Bestimmung from which Derrida says Heidegger was never to distance himself.

I will post a reconstruction at aule-browser.com (the text I have is in Fraktur) once I have a text and tie it to the Heidegger text using the Curl web content language for text from http://www.curl.com/

Derrida quoting Heidegger

In the paragraph of the Einführung in der Metaphysik which follows upon his treatment of heliocentrism, Heidegger makes one of his little puns: "nur der überkluge Witz" - he means of course the Spirit of the Enlightenment - reduced to a clever joke.

The problem in quoting from Heidegger is demonstrated in the Derrida text: two views are required - one with the mere text and another with the text adumbrated.

I will post the Derrida quotation over at aule-browser.com with 2 variants using the Curl web content language.

An alternative presentation of the 1953 Tübingen Max Niemeyer Verlag edition would begin with a quote from the first line of what we deem to be Aristotle's "post-physics"

πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.

Aristotle does not say "cleverness" or "obscurity" or "oracular" or "prophetic" or "dythrambic" but

τοῦ εἰδέναι

Pan + anthropoi -- not Das Volk and their "guide" -- and Eidos -- and then our very nature: physei and then a word with which Heidegger could never be comfortable in the open: oregon