Translated by Pete Ferreira
115
But where are these forces intact? and how to recall and gather them? After having interpreted the λόγος and ratio as prehistory of technology and having therefore waived them, Heidegger tries to find these forces intact in the combination of thought with the experience of poetry, namely in that experiment of thinking poetically in which he sees the alternative to calculative thinking and the thinking representative of technology.
Choosing – for the best reasons – this attitude, Heidegger rightly drew focused attention on the problem of the one-dimensional development of λόγος, which in modern times is understood and reduced more and more to the sense of axiomatization, of calculation and of instrumentality; but this choice represents at the same time, plainly put, a renouncing of the achievements of Western rationalism that cannot but appear problematic. If only because – to paraphrase Heraclitus – the λόγος is exactly what men have in common and which enables them to establish a common world (fr. 2), while those who sleep or dream have their own world (fr. 89).
For this, while acknowledging the depth and clarity of Heidegger's analysis, one should question its abandonment of the Greek tradition of philosophy and of ἐπιστήμη; for this we should investigate the deepest motivations of his search of their 'other'. Allow me to nominate here at least two of these assumptions, which seem to me to be relevant to this investigation.
First, I think we should call into question the Heideggerian conviction that the essence of the modern technology completes the original motivation of philosophy and Greek ἐπιστήμη. Here one should ask if the development of the λόγος, which animates the Greek philosophy, in the modern sense of calculating, axiomatic, and instrumental reasoning, really represents its complete realization, or not instead a reductive and unilateral development.
The second assumption, resulting from the Heideggerian thematization of the connection between being and time, seems to me to consist in the overcoming of the traditional thesis according to which the λόγος stands above time. If for Greek thought the λόγος represents the Archimedean pivot on its foundation, freeing itself from the dross of temporality, man is able to rise above the particularities and the perspectivalness of his knowing, and achieving the universal and the ideal, for Heidegger instead – what contaminates the Hegelian thesis temporal kernel of truth with the Nietzschean affirmation of the perspectivalness of knowledge – it is no longer λόγος which stands above time, but it is time that always conditions the epochal forms and manifestations of the λόγος.