Shortly after the publication, on October 3, 1801, Schelling wrote to Fichte: “Just recently, a book came out from a truly superior mind. . . .”38
After having circumscribed the exterior, we now need to “leap into the matter itself.” On this point, Heidegger begins with a citation from Hegel: “a torn sock is better than a mended one . . . ”39 and asks, why is that so? A moment of hesitation follows, for the auditors know another version of that same sentence. Heidegger explains that the sentence just cited was “corrected” by the printer into the one we know. Let us return to Hegel’s citation and ask how he could have written this. For it is plain that it is the contrary that seems the case. From a strictly formal point of view, one can say that common sense is reversed, stood on its head.
In order to understand, Heidegger says, one must see phenomenologically. He thus invites us to the first exercise of phenomenological “kindergarten.” To tear apart [zer-reissen] means: to tear into two parts, to separate: to make two out of one. If a sock is torn, then the sock is no longer present-at-hand—but note: precisely not as a sock. In fact, when I have it on my foot, I see the “intact” sock precisely not as a sock. On the contrary, if it is torn, then THE sock appears with more force through the “sock torn into pieces.”
In other words, what is lacking in the torn sock is the UNITY of the sock. However, this lack is paradoxically the most positive, for this Unity in being-torn is present [gegenwärtig] as a lost unity. This is the point of departure from which to access Hegel’s text, but not without Heidegger insisting that the “analysis” undertaken be reenacted (“realized” in Cézanne’s sense), and not simply presented conceptually.
Page 12, l. 6 ff./89: “Dichotomy [Entzweiung],” underlined by Hegel, “is the source of the need for philosophy.” In order to stress that Hegel starts from the dichotomy, as what is originally experienceable and experienced, this is brought into relation with the sentence from p. 13, l. 30 ff./90: “Opposites such as spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and understanding, freedom and necessity, etc., used to be important; and in more limited spheres . . . ” until the passage concerning the radical opposition of “absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity.”40
This sentence states negatively that all the attempts to suppress the “tearing” [Zerrissenheit] must be abandoned—insofar as the “tearing” is what basically remains and must so remain. Why? Answer: as we saw above, it is only in the tearing that the Unity, as absent, can appear. “In the tearing,” Heidegger says, “there always reigns unity or a necessary conjoining, that is, a living unity.”
With this central idea of a “living unity,” one can now read the sentence on page 14, l. 9/91, which, according to Heidegger, governs everything: “When the power of conjoining. . . .” This sentence is a