Saturday, June 21, 2014

for Its Arriving



Heidegger to a student, 1950:
"The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of its inexhaustible nature.”
from: “A Letter to a Young Student, 18 June, 1950,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 182
By the way, his response isn't excluding there being the divine beyond regioning of Europe; rather, he addresses what's appropriate to the student's letter of 1950.