In 1950-1954, Foucault's Heideggerian "field of presence" was constituted, "on the upstream side", by the reception of Heidegger in the 1930s, the "Koyré-Corbin moment"; "on the downstream side", by his academic reception in the immediate post-war period, the "Hyppolite moment". Henry Corbin's first translation of Heidegger appeared in 1931 in Bifur, a Dadaist journal edited by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, with a preface by Alexandre Koyré. The title was Qu'est-ce que la métaphysique, a translation of Was ist metaphysik, Heidegger's opening lecture at the University of Freiburg (1929). Hence three questions:
- Who is Henry Corbin?
- Who spoke about Heidegger in Paris in 1931?
- Why Bifur ?
After a series of biographical indications on Corbin, we examined the year 1931 at the section des sciences religieuses of the École pratique des hautes études and found a mention of Heidegger in Étienne Gilson's lecture on "Duns Scotus' natural theology": "Duns Scotus constructed a metaphysics of essences from which Heidegger's phenomenology still believes it can draw inspiration". This was an opportunity to recall Heidegger's habilitation thesis (1915): Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. As Corbin was a pupil of Gilson and Koyré, we presented Koyré's teaching at the EPHE and underlined the role of Koyré and Kojève as introducers of German philosophy in France. Qu'est-ce que la métaphysique? was published in Bifur after being rejected by the NRF. Koyré's preface praises Heidegger's "demolition" and praises the "destructive power" of this "cathartic of Nothingness". The tone is very different in "L'évolution philosophique de Martin Heidegger", Koyré's 1946 rereading of Heidegger in Critique, Georges Bataille's new journal. This text, focusing on Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, sheds light on Foucault's supposed borrowings from Heidegger in the 1984 article published post mortem in tribute to Canguilhem. In it, Koyré uses the expression "history of truth", alludes to man's "end", focuses on the distinction between misguidance(Irre) and error(Irrtum), and recaptures the sense of Heidegger's evolution from the notion of wandering and the "reign of wandering". The crux of Koyré's critique is that, despite his assertions, Heidegger's Sein und Zeit is no more than an anthropology. To compensate for the failure of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger "turns to history", now understood as "the history of the constitution of the meaning of being". But this, according to Koyré, was another failure. The hour ended with an evocation of Foucault as a reader of Koyré: the review of La Révolution astronomique, Copernicus, Kepler, Borelli in the NRF (1961), and the revival of the notion of the history of truth.
