Forest Paths

I've long held that much of Heidegger's popularity has to do with his mystifying use of language, a use that he draws from the best tradition of German poetry, but that, applied for the aims of positive philosophy, yields nothing more than genre confusion. This mystification is often overemphasized in translation. Thus, for example, Was heißt Denken?, which would be correctly translated as What Does 'Thinking' Mean?, is rendered by the tortured and overliteral What Is Called Thinking? The problem with this is that, in German, it is perfectly normal to use the verb heißen, 'to be called', where in English we would use the verb to mean. Heidegger was not saying something as precious or as extraordinary as the English title implies.

(*Update, May 5, 2011: A sharp reader has written to complain that I misrepresent the title, both in German and in English, of Heidegger's book, since in fact Heidegger did wish to draw attention to the significance of the verb heißen, and to this end ran through many of the ways that 'calling' might be of significance for a philosophical treatment of thinking. For this reason, what I should have said is not that there is nothing extraordinary about the verb heißen as Heidegger treats it, but only that the title of the book in the original German would not strike a German-speaker prima facie as strange, in the way that the English title strikes English-speakers.)

Efforts to make Heidegger more accessible, however, more domestic and approachable, have occasionally resulted in what looks like a sort of pulling back of the curtains on the Wizard of Oz, revealing a rather small man behind the booming voice. One of the more amusing moments of demystification came with the recent retranslation of the philosopher's Holzwege of 1950, a work that had previously been published in English with the title left in the original German, under the new, rather mundane name Off the Beaten Track . What had appeared as dark and impenetrable as the Black Forest at midnight now looked like a common trail-guide for avid hikers!

I was surprised recently to come across an entry for 'Holzweg' in the Grimm Brothers' alphabetical index of the key terms of German folk sayings. The Heidegger text suggests, whether Heidegger meant it to or not, a lone thinker, wandering the forest he calls home, deriving the depth of his thought from the wildness of his surroundings. In fact, however, from Konrad von Haslau in the 13th century through Martin Luther in the 16th, the figure of the Holzweg stood for errancy, for drifting from the true path, God's path. Thus von Haslau writes:

dar an sich manger verschriet, /der einen holzwec geriet: / der dünket in der beste; / dar nâch so vindt er ronen und este, / die von den boumen sint gerêret; / swelch tumber da niht wider kêret, / daz spriche ich wol in sînen hulden, / der muoz vil unrede dulden (verse 1033 ff).  

[Many went astray / in going down a Holzweg / they thought it was the best way / but then they found fallen trunks and boughs / that fell down from the trees / whoever is so foolish and does not turn around / this I say for his own good / that he must put up with the bad things said of him.]

In 1495, the preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg reiterates this connection between the Holzweg and the Irrweg, writing:

man findt under tausent nicht einen, der dem rechten weg nachtrachtet, sonder sie gehn all dem holzweg nach und eilen heftig bisz sie zu der hellen kommen.

[Of a thousand men, you will find not one who strives for the right way, but they all follow the Holzweg, and hasten onward until they end up in hell.]

The institute where I am currently in residence has its own woods, and the members go there, and are encouraged to go there, and to stroll and to think as they stroll. Today I went there, in the horrible heat that hung over the East Coast on June 1, 2011, the end-of-the-world heat, the Jurassic heat. I was there to photograph mushrooms (more on this soon), but I couldn't help but think, as I walked, about the expectation that these woods were there for thinking, that they were a sort of thinking-preserve. These were Holzwege I was walking along, and they were custom-made and preserved for the purpose of doing what we imagine Heidegger did in the Schwarzwald.

Naturally, also, I thought back to the earlier connotations recorded by the Brothers Grimm, who preserved for us a trace of a time when dark forests were exactly what was not recommended for the benefit of the human mind/soul (either because they were not conducive to thinking, or, which is more likely, because thinking itself was already quasi-heathenish). And then I though about the post-Heideggerian attempts to domesticate the dark forests, no longer either Satan's way of leading you astray, or the profound philosopher's natural element, but simply a bunch of 'nature trails', owned and conserved by well-meaning people with money, against the onslaught of housing developments, and to which you should come prepared with a supply of trail mix and a full can of Off.

It was hotter than hell, as I said, and the mosquitoes were buzzing around my ears and the ground was crawling with the sort of creatures that didn't even get names in Genesis. I found some fine fungus specimens, and I suppose that in some way the overall effect of the excursion was to cause me to think. In sum however I found it all rather unpleasant, and after all too short an errancy was happy to return, having made no great contribution either to mycology or to what is called 'thinking', to my air-conditioned apartment.

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Comments

[Corey McCall]

But surely Heidegger was aware of this connotation of Holzwege as Irrwege? I'd like to think that he was, as it might mitigate some of the less flattering characteristics of his prose. Arguing against this possibility, however, is that Heidegger is one of the least ironic of philosophers (odd, that, from someone who read so much Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and was clearly influenced by both).

[museincognito]

Try, try again! Perhap when conditions are not as mosquito-enticing i.e. cooler, less humid. Forests are, indeed, wonderful, infallible places to ponder in (and on).

Also, most certainly there is a correlation with the destruction of wooded, prehistoric "dark"lands, under the guise of so-called progress and enlightenment, and lack of thought. Great post, J.

[Supra Strapped NS]

Every dog has his day.