[Verbergung] of that which is not yet manifest. Anxious to clarify again what he meant by epoch or by destinal sending [Geschick], Heidegger then characterized the Grundstimmung of his own thought by the two following words: Offenheit (“openness”) and Gelassenheit (“releasement”). The first is openness to the dialogue with history, in the sense that was clarified earlier; the second seems to be its direct complement: thinking the “mutation of the forgetting of difference.”
Formulating his thanks to the hostess, Madame Heurgon, to Kostas Axelos for his translations, and to Gabriel Marcel for leading the debates [Gesprächführer], Heidegger asked the audience to excuse him for having possibly “shocked” them when he recalled his peasant origins. One final gesture is worth noting; beyond the participants, it was addressed to the French language; Heidegger dwelled on two French words that seemed to him laden with meaning: the verb penser (where one should hear peser [to weigh]) as well), and the substantive regard (which refers not only to vision but also to zurückbewahren, the guarding that preserves and restores). About this word, Heidegger even said that it is “marvelous” and does not exist in German. He was so often reproached for exclusively privileging the German language that this exceptional homage to the French language is worth mentioning. Finally, it was a quotation from Braque with which the Master concluded the conference: “Penser et raisonner font deux” [To think and to reason are two different things].94
Even if it is difficult and risky to try to make a definitive statement about those days, one has to recognize that the occasion was exceptional and that Heidegger’s “performance” was not insignificant: he came down from his pedestal, or from his hut, to dialogue in a very civil manner with some of his most distinguished French peers (this was a renewed recognition for Heidegger, the importance of which escaped no one in the European philosophical world) and, in this unexpected undertaking and with the efficient help of Axelos and Beaufret, he succeeded in imposing his method of reading and working. This achievement (due in large part to the devotion and skill of Jean Beaufret) was all the more remarkable since it occurred only ten years after the defeat of Germany, the destitution of Heidegger and the “denazification” process to which he was subjected. However, as we saw, there were also quite a few objections. They mainly concerned the particularities of Heidegger’s language, the difficulty of translating it and making it understood in French, its inability to be universalized, his silence with respect to biblical sources and even with respect to his political involvement of 1933.95 Jean Beaufret evoked these debates a few years later: a polemical text, admittedly, but so striking that I cannot resist the temptation to quote it: “Are you not in philosophy, Gabriel Marcel asked, a sworn enemy of universality? Don’t you skip over Jaweh? Ricoeur said. And Lucien Goldmann, more unexpectedly: what happened in 1930, which you would like the naïve to believe was principally the date of the first divulgation of your question concerning the