海德格尔致阿伦特的三封书信[英译]

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt

February 10, 1925:

After the First Kiss:

Dear Miss Arendt!

I cannot wait, but must come to you and speak to your heart this evening.

Everything must be simple, clear and pure between us. Then alone will we be worthy of a real meeting or encounter. That you are my pupil and I your teacher- that is merely the occasion for what happened to us.

I will never be able to possess you, but you will henceforth belong in my life, and my life will grow with yours.

We never really know what we can become for others through our being. However we can perceive to what extent our presence operates in a destructive and inhibiting fashion.

What path your young life will take is hidden. We must submit to that. And my fidelity to you must be devoted to helping you remain true to yourself..

That you have lost your “restlessness” shows that you have found your pure maidenly essence {Ihres maedchenreines Wesens}. And some day you will understand and be thankful (not to me) that the visit during my office hours was the decisive step back from exile in the terrifying loneliness of scholarly research, which only a man can endure- and even he only when he has also come into possession of the burden and the madness of creativity.

“Be joyful!” That has become my greeting for you.

And only if you possess joy will you become the woman that can give joy. And around whom all joy, shelter, peace, reverence and gratitude for life, exists.

And only in this fashion will you remain in the proper state of preparation to take possession of what the university can offer you. Herein lies authenticity and seriousness, not in that forced, scholarly activity which, for many of your sex, produces a busyness that one day falls part again and makes them helpless and untrue to themselves.

It is precisely when it is a matter of one’s own intellectual work, that the decisive thing is to protect one’s own original womanly essence.

That we are able to encounter each other we must cherish and protect as a gift in our innermost selves and not spoil its pure vitality through self-deceptions , i.e. we don’t want to deceive ourselves into imagining something like a soul-friendship- which can never occur between human beings.

I cannot and do not want to separate your faithful eyes, your lovely face from the pure trust, goodness and purity of your maidenly essence.

But thus the gift of our friendship becomes an obligation into which we want to grow and develop. And it is this obligation that allows me to beg for forgiveness that I forgot myself for a moment during our walk.

But at least one time I would like to thank you and through a kiss on your pure forehead take the purity of your being over into my work.

Be joyful, dear one,

M.H.

February 25, 1925

Dear Hannah!

Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately

We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret.

Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve- but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but incomprehensible” revelation of the “only there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life- this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.

If you had met me at the age of 13, or if it had been a decade from now- it is pointless to try and make sense of it. No, it occurred now, as your life quietly makes itself ready to change into the life of a woman—where you will absorb without loss the intuition, longing, blossoming, laughter of your maiden age and carry it into your life as the source of goodness, faith, beauty, the feminine always-giving.{Immer-nur-schenkens}.

And what can I contribute to this moment?

To take care that nothing breaks in you. That what in your past was painful and burdensome will purify itself , that the alien and artificial will be avoided.

The possibilities for feminine being in your environment are so completely different than the pupil in you believes and much more positive than you can imagine. Empty criticism will dissolve in your presence and exaggerated negation will retreat.

Masculine questioning will learn reverence in modest submission; one-sidedness will learn expansiveness in the original wholeness of feminine being.

Curiosity, chatter and the vanities of the academy cannot be extirpated, your nobility will only be able to give to free spiritual life the woman as she is.

When the new semester begins, May will be here, and the lilacs will flood over the old walls and the tree blossoms will drift in the hidden gardens—and you will walk in your fragrant summer dress through the ancient gate. Summer evenings will enter into your room and intone in your soul the serene happiness of our lives. Soon the flowers will awaken which your lovely hands will pick and the moss will awaken in the forest depths through which your blessed dreams move.

And shall I soon on my lonely mountain journey greet the mountains whose rocky peace you will some day encounter, in whose contours the permanent elements of your being are mirrored back to you. And I will seek out the mountain lake in order to look down from the steepest cliff into its calm depths.

Yours,

February 27, 1925

Dear Hannah!

The daemonic has struck me. The quiet praying of your dear hands and your shining forehead protect it through a feminine transfiguration.

Never before has something like this happened to me

In the rain storm on my way back you were already more wonderful and beautiful. I would have liked to wander through many nights with you.

As symbol of my gratitude please take this little book. Let it be an image of this semester.

Please, Hannah, grant me a few words. I can’t let you go like this. You will be absorbed by the busyness of your upcoming trip. But just a few words, just casually , not beautifully written. Just as you write. It only matters that you have written them.

Your,