Heidegger links the phy– of physis to the pha– of phainesthai (a coming to light) in order to think the ‘first’ beginning of philosophy, to open up aletheia, the element that allowed the Greeks to think without revealing itself to them as the origin of their thinking. Is this not to yield to the temptation of an etymology, a kind of philology which would somehow supplant the demands of philosophy? A demand which is maintained, in Heidegger, when philosophy itself is supposed to safeguard the null ground, das Nichtige grund?
Authority of etymology: the privilege of words and roots of words, a journey upstream to the secret roots to which words are filiated. A dream of a ‘natural’ element of thinking – a secret law which binds our thinking. The sense that in the ‘root’ of a word would lie its proper meaning, and that language itself is the play of such dried up roots which have forgotten their original enrootedness in a natural language. The sense of an ancient day which would have bequeathed to us everything we can or should think: the ‘first’ beginning in accordance with which we, ‘Europe’, the ‘West’ were destined. Of the day from which was first sent those great words according to whose presence the vitality of language can be measured. Of a becoming of language bound to an origin but also to a certain notion of history, of destiny, and to the inner homogeneity of an eschatology.
Beginning and end are linked. History as a kind of regress. The first beginning – the pre-Socratics is bound to our condition at the end of this history. Language is a straying that strays along one parth. Remember, too, Heidegger dreams also of the ‘other’ beginning – of what he calls the Ereignis.
Objection: how else can one construct a genealogy of those concepts which are closest and most commanding (think of Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the words good and bad)? How else might we understand what we are given to think? Besides, etymology, philology, is only one weapon in the philosopher’s armoury.
Counter-objection: the sanctification of language is a great risk – too great as long as one does not retain a kind of scepticism towards language. Scepticism towards the idea of origin as original presence. Scepticism as it would maintain, instead, the immemorial that is at play within language. What does this mean? Renounce the power of words, of a saying whose trace can only be discovered through etymology. Powerless words: no longer confirming the unity of a synthetic language. Strange diachrony that would allow the word to happen in two times – on the one hand, the word of history, whose origin one might trace, which lends itself to philology, to etymology, and on the other, the word which falls outside history, whose origin cannot be traced to an originary presence (even an originary relation between presence and absence, detectable only after the fact, as in Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks). To what, then, can one trace it? Scepticism: a distrust in the language which one is nevertheless obliged to trust: limitless suspicion of those who would build the house of being on the shifting sands of language.
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