b) The releasement into the meaning and content
As much as possible, we must release ourselves into the whole, as alien as that whole might seem at first. But we have indeed somewhere preserved the remainder of a kinship and line of descent. The task is to unfold this remainder into its original fullness. (Understanding of Being.)
The meaning and content of the work as well as the spirit of Parmenides accessible only if we conjure up that spirit. This conjuring necessarily among our means of interpretation. Lay people, among whom I also count a certain class of “so-called scientific philologist,” see therein at once only a modernization. They see the contemporary means along with what is contemporary in that which is achieved thereby and to which it leads. What thereby comes closer to us they do not see, because they do not want to see it, and that because at bottom these old issue are insignificant to them. As if the issues were there only so that a science of them can be developed, or as if books were written only so that reviewers might not be put out of business.6
c) Attitude toward my own interpretations
It has now become fashionable to refute my interpretation of earlier philosophers by saying, “That is Heidegger, but not Hegel,” or “Heidegger, but not Kant,” etc. Certainly. But does it follow ipso facto that the interpretation is false? That cannot at all be decided “ipso facto,” especially not as long as one believes that there would be an interpretation true in itself and binding on everyone at all times.—The truth of one interpretation versus many others depends primarily on the level the interpretation occupies in its questioning and in its claim to understanding. If just any concepts and propositions are taken over from an arbitrarily adopted philosophical theory, namely, Heidegger’s, and the interpretation is measured up to these, then all my interpretations are in fact false. What is decisive, however, is not this but precisely the necessity and originality of the guiding questioning under which the interpretation stands. The so-called “correct” interpretations are not attributable to x or y, but to “no one”—they are also on no one’s authority.
Instead of this, the usual procedure is the reverse: with great diligence one detects “falsehoods,” and at the conclusion or beginning one remarks that there is neither place nor occasion to become involved in Heidegger’s own philosophy and that that would lead too far. But this amounts to shirking the essential and pursuing a purely formal quibbling under the semblance of scientific exactness. This by
6. Sil.! [sic] Here insert a “personal remark” called for in accord with the issue. Attempt at a new interpretation of Parmenides.