Gabriel Marcel opened the session of September 1st with a long presentation. He first expressed his surprise at having heard from Heidegger himself that there was no Heideggerian philosophy. While admitting and even approving of the absence of a system, he nonetheless maintained that Heidegger’s thought is a philosophy, if only for the fact that it is immediately recognizable and that it possesses that “unique quality” that allows it to be identified, just as one distinguishes Brahms’s style from Debussy’s. The question of the translation of the key words of Heidegger’s vocabulary was then posed. Thus zum-Tode-sein (“being-toward-death”) is stumm (“mute”) for a French ear; in French, être can be plural (one can speak of “un être,” or “des êtres”), which makes the difference between être and étant (being and beings) difficult to grasp. While admitting his agreement with the Heideggerian understanding of truth as unveiling and clearing (Lichtung), Marcel asked whether Heidegger could defend his absence of reference to any philosophy of values and his silence on the great Catholic tradition from Saint Augustine to Pascal. For him, as an ultimate recourse, the last word belongs “not to the wise, but to the saint.” As if echoing this intervention, Ricoeur insisted on this point, but more precisely asked whether it was possible to exclude the Hebraic tradition from philosophy. Of course, one should not have the prophets philosophize as was attempted during the nineteenth century; but the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was an event that had a deep significance and that one should reflect on. How can Heidegger help us in thinking these “two greatnesses” of Denken and prophecy, in order to rethink the difference between the philosophical path and that of divine calling?
To Gabriel Marcel, Heidegger responded that the assertion that there is no Heideggerian philosophy is rather a sign of humility [Demut] before the very question of philosophy as metaphysics. It would have been better to ask: “How can you characterize philosophy as metaphysics if your own thought is an overcoming of metaphysics?” Strictly speaking, it was from the perspective of a meditation on the temporal character of the being of beings that the overcoming of metaphysics was attempted, at least as a gesture, as early as Sein und Zeit. With respect to the question of universality, Heidegger limited himself to a purely historical clarification (the Greeks did not have the universal conception that classical philosophy attributed to them) that was immediately contested by Marcel (beyond the flat universalism of the Enlightenment, one has to be open to a genuine universality, as offered by great art). Heidegger replied that an authentic universality is never guaranteed in advance: to understand requires the productive translation of what is to be thought. To Paul Ricoeur,87 Heidegger responded briefly and cautiously that he could not follow him in a direct confrontation between Hebrew and Greek (having forgotten the little Hebrew he had learned during his studies in theology), but above all that it was necessary to consider the