FOREWORD In appearance, Professor Heidegger is short and slight his
hair is thick and jet black with occasional white streaks. When he
emerged from the small skiing hut, high up in the mountains, to greet
me, he was dressed in the costume of a Swabian peasant, a dress he
often also used to wear when he was Rector of Freiburg University.
His heavy, squarish sluing boots it was summer emphasised still more
strongly his relationship to the soil. He was born in 1889, in
Messkirch and his brother still farms in the region. Martin
Heidegger, too, has never left it. When Hitler called him to Berlin
in 1935, he rejected the offer. The world had to come to him, to
Freiburg. There he lives, with Hellingraths edition of Halderlins
works. This closeness to Holderlin is no accident but an essential
key to an understanding of Heideggers own philosophy. For Holderlin
came from the same physical region, he faced the same spiritual
problems, and he experienced more lucidly and bitterly the ultimate
meaning of not than any other person who could give expression to it
in song. The parallel with Heidegger is close, indeed, if thought is
substituted for song. On both occasions when I met Professor
Heidegger, in June, 1946, and in October, 1947, I had to drive for an
hour to the small town of Todtnau in the Black Forest Mountains, then
to climb still further until the road became a path and all human
habitation scattered and invisible There on top of a mountain, with
the valley deep down below, with nothing but space and wilderness all
around, in that small skiing hut, I spoke to the phxlosopher. He had
not been to Freiburg for six months when I saw him for the second
time. His living conditions were primitive his books were few, and
his only relationship to the world was a stack of writing paper. His
whole life revolved within those white sheets and it seemed to me
that he wanted nothlng else but to be left in peace to cover those
white sheets with his writmg. The atmosphere of silence all around
provided a faithful setting for Heideggers philosophy. I could not
help comparing it with the atmosphere I had encountered in the house
of Professor Berdyaev near Paris and that of Professor Jaspers in
Heidelberg. In every case, the external world faithfully reflected
the world of the mind. In Berdyaevs case it was the spirit of
communion in Jasperss that of spiritual engagement. But in Heideggers
case it was the spirit of overwhelming solitude. With the four essays
in this book, which Professor Heidegger gave me, this much-discussed
philosopher now appears for the first time before the
English-speaking world. As Professor Heidegger pointed out to me, the
four essays are complementary and have an organic unity...
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