Heidegger In Greece

My training as a psychotherapist was first grounded in the existential thought of European philosophers, mostly in Martin Heidegger prime work “Being and Time”.  Although many years have gone by since then, Heidegger still delights me, even in short and less impressive texts.  

In my last trip to Buenos Ayres, I found a little book (55 pages!) in the corner of a shelf in one of those incredible bookstores which I can only see over there: a manuscript edition that Heidegger wrote while his first (maybe only?) trip to Greece. The title is “ESTANCIAS”** (I think that the best translation from this Spanish word is staying, stopping, dwelling?). I’ve just finished reading it and I feel myself involved by a nostalgic mood (in a good sense: that which brings up a warm feeling in relation to something that has already gone) of the text. Not only because Heidegger’s trip happened in 1962, but also because he constantly inserts beautiful  Hölderlin’s verses and  quotes strophes in which echoes the poet’s passion for the Greece of the Gods and of the beauty.

  

But where the thrones, the temples, and where the vases,

Where, full of nectar, the chant for the satisfaction of the Gods?

Where, where they brighten up, the oracles that go so far?

Delphos sleeps, and where resounds the great destiny?

(Bread and wine, 4^th strophe, free trans.)

And also:

“Dear Islands, eyes of the enchanted world” (Tears, 2^nd strophe)

The “booklet” is a narrative of his journey to some of the Greek islands with a little stop in Athens. It describes landscapes, the villages’ poverty, the ruins of the temples, the omnipresence of tourists taking pictures everywhere, “pouring their memory in the technically elaborated image, renouncing without realizing to the feast of thinking”. (p. 53)

Heidegger traveled all over the Greek islands by boat, along with other Germans companions, remaining always with the question: what’s more proper, more truthful, of the Greek existence and of its world? He will only give us the answer when he arrives at Delos. And the answer is: aletheia; “the openness that offers itself to itself, that reaches, delimitates and free everything, which in all presence and absence offers arrival and moment, departure and need”. (p.44)

Of course Heidegger couldn’t fail to mention Heraclitus and Parmenides, those Greeks that had so much inspired him throughout his trajectory as the most dense and original thinker of the 20^th century.

It was in Delos that the journey to Greece converted to an “estancia”, he tell us. Once more, he realizes how much we withdrew from the Greek estancia, distinct from the technological world that prevailed in modern Europe. Heidegger writes in his “travel diary”: “We, human beings of nowadays, seem to be expelled from such home lost in the chains of the calculative planning (p.44)

To follow his journey was an enchanting experience: his often melancholic reflections, his love for the Greek origins of thinking, his passion for truth as the unfolding and concealment of everything that is: aletheia. At the same time I re-discovered his profound involvement with Hölderlin‘s poetry and all the melancholy the poet reveals for the lost of the sacred, of the Greek world and its joyful, ironic Gods full of sensuality and wisdom.