Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche pronounces the principle of reason a “supreme metaphysical delusion” which, in its failing, turns thinking into art and poetry, and into their experience of the tragic.5
Heidegger traces the principle of reason through the history of Western thought and decides that a single formulation determines its present place (Ort). This “discussion” (Erörterung) enables him to carry his thinking beyond the metaphysical tradition. Doesn’t this put one in mind of the rhetorical tradition, in which remembrance orients itself by exemplary places (topoi)?6 These topoi are akin to outbreaks of historicism while being committed to history. The Romance scholar Ernst Robert Curtius (though admittedly in connection with medieval Latin literature) speaks of the topoi of researching a place (Toposforschung).7 In his book Mimesis, Erich Auerbach presents a version of Western literature and calls it a “topology.”8 Instead of working through the biographies of poets and the history of schools and tendencies, he looks for the guiding relations in short, exemplary texts. In this fashion he could show the way to a particular sort of existential realism. Auerbach thereby indicates the manner in which the understanding of literature expresses itself in terms of guiding words (Leitworte) which can be taken up lexically from relevant texts. For example he speaks of “the court and the city” (La cour et la ville) as the audience for the French classics.9
Might we not regard Heidegger’s topology of Being as researching a place, one which takes as its topoi the conceptual ground of Being’s place (Ort)?10 Not incidentally the so-called conceptual history was established after the Second World War. Fixed in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical Dictionary of Philosophy),11 it made an innocent attachment to their language impossible for philosophers and imposed a linguistic and historical consciousness on thinking. Martin Heidegger himself objected to this attempt to confine his later thought within the dominant methods of the period. Thus, on December 12, 1958, Heidegger wrote me, “I use the term ‘topology’ quite literally: the speaking of place; that is, thinking the truth (the disclosure of the self-concealed [das Entbergen des Sichverbergens]) of being [des Seyns]. In using this term I was not aware of the historical connotations that you have suggested.”
As was his practice at the time, Heidegger inscribes the word Seyn with a crosswise strikethrough, to indicate thinking the “fourfold” (Geviert).12 Indeed he understood the “topology of being” as searching out a new place for being. Yet it is not just his intentions and self-understanding that are of interest; we must also attend to what he actually did. In his schedule of lectures at Marburg (1923-28) he deals explicitly with rhetoric. Heidegger took up Plato’s struggle against sophistry; Plato’s polemic, however, no longer accepts the close attachment of rhetoric to words. Contrary to Plato, Aristotle always classified rhetoric and its topics
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie. Oder: Griechenthum und Pessimismus. Neue Ausgabe mit dem Versuch einer Selbstkritik (1886), Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe sec. 3, vol. 1 (Berlin: Gruyter, 1972).
6. [Topos is “place” or “position” in Greek. “Topology” is the branch of mathematics which studies “positions on geometric configurations unaltered by elastic deformation.” The metaphorical use of “topology” here suggests the search for those properties of Being unchanged by historical or other interpretation. Note that the appearance of “place” (Ort) in the German word for “discussion” (Erörterung) cannot be rendered in English. See footnote 46. —Trans.]
7. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948); European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953).
8. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Francke 1946); Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
9. Erich Auerbach, Vier Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Französischen Bildung (Bern: Francke, 1951).
10. For details see my essay “Dichtungstheorie und Toposforschung,” Jahrbuch für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 5 (1960): 104–201, as well as my Toposforschung, ed. Max L. Bäumer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 22–136. Further, cf. Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, 3rd revised edition (Pfullingen: Neske, 1990), 284f, 431, 438; Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1989), 227–242.
11. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel: Schwabe, 1971 ff.).
12. [Heidegger introduced the “fourfold” (earth, sky, mortal, and gods) in essays on Thought and Poetry (Denken und Dichten), written between 1941 and 1947. —Trans.]