In this essay, which was originally given as a lecture — Was ist das — die Philosophie? — in Normandy in August 1955, Heidegger attempts to explain how an approach to philosophy can be made. Can it be approached in the same way as historiography or biology?
Heidegger would say ‘no’. His belief is that, before a start can be made in the radical analysis of human existence, which he sees as the responsibility of philosophy, the road has to be cleared of the objections of philosophical tradition, science, logic and common sense. As the moderns have forgotten the truths that the great thinkers such as Heraclitus and Aristotle discovered and as they have also lost the ability to penetrate to the real origins of those truths, the recovery of the hard-won, primary, uncorrupted insights of man into metaphysical reality is only possible through a ‘destructive’ analysis of the traditional philosophies.
By this recovery of the hidden source, Heidegger aims to revive the genuine philosophizing which, notwithstanding appearances, has vanished from the Western world because of autonomous science’s serious disputing of the position of philosophy itself.
Martin Heidegger (1899-1976) was born at Messkirch in Baden, Germany. From 1923 for six years he was Professor of Philosophy at Marburg University; then in 1939 he succeeded his mentor, Edmund Husserl, as Rector of Freiburg University, a post he held until his retirement in 1945.
Simon Gros 
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