The Place Where The Two Seas Meet

Each time I've read and re-read Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" over the past thirty years or so, I've taken from it both insights and confusions.

It was not until I read it again, closely, in June of 2014 on the Turkish Mediterranean, that I began to understand it whole.

I still required months of Nietzschean rumination of the text before I finally relaxed my suspicions about the author's sincerity and began to take him at his word when he said, in effect, "I don't really know the way to the clearing, but I am following a hunch. If you accompany me, we may reach our destination--but, then again, we may not. I think it's this way..."

What prevented me from gaining a full appreciation of Heidegger's genius was always my sneaking suspicion that he was being less than candid with his reader: that he had an agenda up his sleeve and was only pretending to wander about the dark wood, poking here and there with his walking stick, questioning, inquiring...A clever ruse designed to catch the unwary in his crypto-metaphysical system.

I thought, "What do you take me for? I'm not falling for that!" And repeatedly left his side.

But if one recognizes in Heidegger a genuinely Socratic figure--an "historical" Socrates, without a hidden Platonic agenda, then his frustrating and maddening peregrinations are just that. He remains a difficult read, but not a fundamentally dishonest one.

After four decades of journeying with Heidegger, I have concluded that he was not a con-man but a ken-man: where "to ken," from the Old Norse, is Rortian redescription as a way of "knowing."