Prolegomena to a Dialogue with the Greek Thinkers

If modern science finds its foundations in the thought of the ancient Greeks, has it thereby managed to resolve the question of the real as that which is, as stated at the dawn of philosophy? By way of an initial answer, Heidegger puts forward a thesis deployed at length in his 1953 Munich lecture “Science and Reflection” (Wissenschaft und Besinnung): science is not the same thing as the essence of science. This implies that one cannot hope to approach what governs all science so long as one merely represents and practices science. One must therefore question what constitutes the essence of modern science through a dialogue with the Greek thinkers—a dialogue that has still not taken place!

Heidegger places two terms in balance here—”science” and “meditation/reflection”—and in doing so elaborates an elaboration which, while passing through modern science in its limitation, comes to realization in what Heidegger calls “meditation” (Besinnung). Seeking to show the situation from which the essence of science arises, he initiates a journey toward “that which is worthy of questioning” with a view to an elaborating meditation of the real always in becoming. Starting from this text, I propose to highlight what Heidegger left unsaid, so as to bring it into dialogue with the thinkers of psychoanalysis—the psychoanalytic thinking of Lacan and of Christian Fierens.

Heidegger starts from a surprising idea: what was spoken poetically at the dawn of Greek antiquity is still present today, “so present that its being, still closed to itself, is ready on all sides to welcome us and comes upon us precisely where we least expect it, namely in the reign of modern technology, which is completely foreign to antiquity and yet holds its essential origin within it.” […]