You probably know that this text, soon after its appearance (1929), was the first that was translated into the language of your country. Almost simultaneously, a Japanese translation appeared in 1930, composed by a young, highly gifted Japanese student who took part in my seminars.
The reaction to the piece in Europe was: nihilism and enmity to ‘logic.’ In the far East, with the ‘nothing ’ properly understood, one found in it the word for being.
In the course of the years, by means of a “Postscript” and an “Introduction,” I attempted to clarify the text in regard to the return into the ground of metaphysics;143 for “What is Metaphysics?” already pushed the question towards another dimension. There is no metaphysics of metaphysics. But this other dimension, from which metaphysics as such receives what is proper to it, is not yet determined even today. It remains difficult enough to enter into this determination as a task of thinking.
Your translation, which you present without any apparatus, requires our French friends and myself first of all to think through the matter of the lecture anew. This matter is a question. It places the very one who is questioning, and thus the Da-sein of the human, into question. It is important to experience Da-sein in the sense that man himself is the “Da,” i.e., the openness of being for him, in that he undertakes to preserve this and, in preserving it, to unfold it (Cf. Being and Time, p. 132 f.).
The matter of the lecture is a question. The answer sought, for its part as well, has the character of a question. The text ends with this question, and thus testifies to the finitude of thinking—or should we instead say: to the finitude of being, in the self-withdrawing manifestation of which the Da-sein of the human stands?
It is important to find in thinking what is thought-worthy for thinking, to endure it, and to experience it as what abides.
When we friends once again saw each other in September 1966 at the home of our mutual friend René Char in Provence, you gave me a text with seven questions. The first read: Vous parlez, dans Gelassenheit, de la Puissance cachée dans la technique moderne. Qu’est-ce que cette Puissance, sur laquelle nous ne savons pas encore mettre de nom et qui ne procède pas de l’homme? Est-elle positive en son principe? Relève-t-elle de cette Contrée ouverte (Gegnet) où l’homme déploie librement son essence? 144
What you ask from the experience of modern technology’s dominance is the same as what my lecture asked from the situation of science at that time.
Since then the interlocking of modern technology and modern science has become more poignant and more urgent. Today it appears to me to be equally the case that a sufficiently grounded insight into the relation of the two has not yet been gained.
I would still like to have the privilege one day of answering your seven questions, which I have continually reconsidered. Admittedly, this can occur only in the form of a more clarified question concerning the determination of thinking.
If I were able to unfold this question in an adequate manner, then I would voice the right thanks for the gift of your translation.”145
143 TN: See Pathmarks, pp. 231–238 and 277–290.
144 The sentence which here expands the question in comparison with the text on p. 78, reads in translation: “Does it belong in that open region (Gegnet [citation from Gelassenheit]), in which the human freely unfolds his essence?”
145 In French translation as a prefatory note to Munier’s translation of “What is Metaphysics?” which appeared in Le Nouveau Commerce, Cahier 14 (Paris: José Corti, 1969), pp. 57–59.