Heidegger

PN: Henry Corbin, you were the first to translate Heidegger in France and
then the first to introduce Iranian Islamic philosophy. How can these two
tasks be reconciled as properly belonging to one and the same person,
especially given that Martin Heidegger claims the West as his homeland. His
philosophy is typically German, and one might imagine a certain disparity
between the business of translating Heidegger and that of translating
Suhravardî.

H.C.: I have often been asked that question, and I’ve sometimes noticed,
with amusement, a certain astonishment overtake my interlocutors upon
discovering that the translator of Heidegger and the man who has introduced
Iranian Islamic philosophy to the West are one and the same. And then they
ask themselves, how has he passed from the one to the other? I tried to
tell you a while back, in an interview we had shortly after Heidegger’s
death, that this astonishment is the symptom of a type of
compartmentalizing, of an a-priori labeling of our disciplines. We tell
ourselves: there are the Germanists and there are the Orientalists. Among
the Orientalists there are the Islamists and there are the Iranianists, etc.
But how could one go from Germanism to Iranianism? If those who asked
this question had only a little idea of what the philosopher is, and of the
philosophical Quest, if they would imagine for a moment that linguistic
incidents are no more for a philosopher than signs along the way, and that
they announce little more than topographical variants of secondary
importance, then perhaps they would be less astonished.
 http://www.amiscorbin.com/textes/anglais…

Posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 3:30 am
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