Laureano Ralon interviews Michael Heim

HERE.

This is one of the best so far in Ralon’s series of interviews. Heim is filled with surprises here as elsewhere. I’ve never met him, but since we were both at Penn State at different times we had some overlapping acquaintances. The way he was described to me by someone who had known him was “very steeped in German academic training, but somehow also very free in his thinking.” Rigor combined with flexibility, in other words. And since then, he’s become rather prominent as a writer about issues such as virtual reality.

We did correspond a couple of times in the mid-1990’s. I wanted to thank him for his translation of Heidegger’s Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, which I read when I was 19. It was before I was reading the Heidegger volumes in German, and was therefore dependent on Heim’s translation. It was the first book that made me “get” Heidegger, and I must be one of the few people who were ever hooked on Heidegger thanks to that work in particular. I’d made about three tries at Being and Time and it did little for me. But somehow, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic really captivated me; after that, Being and Time was a breeze, a couple of months later.

There was a period of time during January/February 1988, my sophomore year, when I’d sneak away after dinner in the St. John’s dining hall. I’d go up into one of those empty rooms in McDowell Hall (pre-renovation, so it had really creaky floors), and would read that book alone for a few hours each night. I’d even put Heidegger’s diagrams on the board in chalk. Those were special times in my undergraduate years, and Michael Heim was with me then in a way, though he had no idea.

I once read a good essay about how every real education needs a “forbidden” author, one not sanctioned by those around you. For the person who wrote that essay it was Nietzsche, since he was educated in very conservative surroundings, and he spoke of cutting classes for a whole week to read Nietzsche. He later became a kind of cranky conservative historian, but an undeniably brilliant one.

In this respect, Heidegger was probably my “forbidden” author. Not that we weren’t allowed to read him, but at St. John’s there’s already a pile of stuff to read, and the point is that it’s all supposed to be shared in common. So, reading an author who only a few other students on campus were reading was a nice way to carve out the private intellectual universe that every young student needs. And your choice of a forbidden author could leave deep traces on your future path.