Destructionis destructio. Heidegger, Foucault and medieval thought (3)

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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.

The second hour was devoted to the "Hyppolite moment". After recalling that the notion of the "historical transcendental" was a "Hyppolite" marker in Foucault's thought, we traced a few aspects of the thought of Foucault's own master. In the early 1950s, Heidegger was very present in France. Jean Hyppolite, philosophically "struck by lightning" by reading the Lettre sur l'humanisme, took over from Jean Wahl as introducer of the "second" Heidegger in Paris, alongside Jean Beaufret, with the support of a young PhD student, Henri Birault, author of an article entitled "Existence and Truth after Heidegger", published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, from January-March 1951. In 1951, Jean Wahl gave a series of lectures on Heidegger at the Sorbonne, in which he used the word "post-modern", perhaps for the first time. Between 1951-52 and 1953-54, Hyppolite himself gave three lectures on Heidegger, including a commentary on "The Essence of Truth" and a lecture entitled "Ontologie et anthropologie ou rapports entre la finitude et l'ontologie". Unlike Koyré, Hyppolite praises the discovery of the "historicity of being" in Sein und Zeit and the "new problematic of being": "being as being-true", "non-voicing", the source of the distinction between being as essence and as existence. Similarly, Hyppolite valorizes the critique of "philosophical anthropology" in Être et temps, and re-examines the Kantian question from "What is man?" to "What is Being?", Hyppolite operates both a Heideggerianization of Hegel and a Hegelianization of Heidegger. To support this observation, we turned our attention to Logique et existence (1952), "one of the great books of our time" according to Foucault in 1969. Hyppolite's fundamental question: "how does being express itself in man?" is formulated in the Aristotelian-Hegelian style of the "second Heidegger". For Hyppolite, "veiling and wandering are the very character of being". There is a perfect continuity in Heidegger's thought: the progressive elucidation of the initial anthropological or rather phenomenological question: "What are we, we who can discover or miss being?" is the project of Heidegger's meditation from Sein und Zeit to Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, a text "that could perhaps be more rigorously called : On the Essence of Error ". Having established this point, we turned to Hyppolite's reading of §10 of Sein und Zeit: "the apophantic function of discourse", and identified his fundamental thesis: "True-being [...] is not primarily a property of the judgment or the proposition, but depends on the tearing away of the being spoken of from its veiling". For Hyppolite, the link established by Heidegger between history and oblivion is crucial: "Metaphysics has a history which is the history of the progressive oblivion of its own foundation". Hyppolite's remarks are crucial to our investigation. Foucault's starting point is the same as Heidegger's and Hyppolite's when speaking of Heidegger: the apophantic. The decisive point is Foucault's distinction between apophantic and sophistical operations. According to Foucault, the opposition of these two operations determines "the way in which the regime of knowledge has been constituted in the West". After recalling Foucault's guiding question in the first lecture at the Collège de France, namely "how could the relations of domination at play in sophistical discussions be repressed and eliminated to 'give rise to an apophantic discourse that claims to order itself to being in the mode of truth'?", we showed that Foucault's opposition to Heidegger on the status of the apophantic led back to the Middle Ages and the question of the essence of truth. This in turn leads to the question of certainty, which leads from the Middle Ages to Descartes, and back from Descartes to Aristotle.