153
Evening Conversation [234–235]

getting down to business with the given facts, remaking what is present at hand, and moving forward what has existed heretofore?

Older Man: In other words, that factual sense of reality which they claim lets the human first stand with both feet squarely on the ground.

Younger Man: That sense which drives peoples to secure a place for themselves on the earth, a place on which they can stand fast and create close to the facts in order to be effective and validated. And yet, nonetheless, this necessary matter [Nötiges] of theirs can never be without the unnecessary [das Unnötige].

Older Man: Such that the necessity of the unnecessary [die Notwendigkeit des Unnötigen] would remain to be thought.

Younger Man: Do we not think this in waiting? Is not waiting into the coming such thinking—perhaps even the authentic thinking? According to my unmistakable feeling, the healing that befell us rests not in that it freed us personally from an inner need [Not], but rather in that it transplanted us into the knowledge that we, as those who wait, are now to begin to turn and enter [einzukehren] the still-withheld essence of our vanquished people. [235]

Older Man: You mean that by becoming those who wait, we first become German?

Younger Man: Not only is this what I mean—since early this morning, it is what I know. Yet we will not become German so long as we plan to find “the German” by means of analyzing our supposed “nature.” Entangled in such intentions we merely chase after what is national, which, after all, as the word says, insists on what is naturally given.13

Older Man: Why do you speak so severely against the national?

Younger Man: After what we have said about the event of devastation, it has become unnecessary to still inveigh against the national.

Older Man: I don’t quite understand this.

Younger Man: The idea [Idee] of the nation is that representation [Vorstellung] in whose circle-of-vision a people bases itself on itself as a foundation given from somewhere, and makes itself into a subject. And to this subject everything then appears as what is objective, which means that everything appears only in the light of its subjectivity.


13. The words “nation” and “native” can be traced back to the Latin nasci, meaning “be born.” The derived noun natio “literally meant ‘that which has been born,’ a ‘breed,’ but was soon used by extension for a ‘species’ or ‘race,’ and then by further narrowing down for a ‘race of people, nation’” (Ayato, Dictionary of Word Origins, p. 361). Heidegger’s critique here is obviously aimed at the racist nationalism of Hitler’s National Socialism.—Tr.


Country Path Conversations (GA 77) by Martin Heidegger