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Source and trace

The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker recounted a walk in the Black Forest with Martin Heidegger. The pair came to a halt on a thick patch of damp moss. Weizsäcker pointed out that the path had come to an end. The philosopher looked at him “craftily” and explained: “It is a Holzweg, it leads to the sources [er führt zu den Quellen]. Of course I didn’t put that in the book.”1 Heidegger could not put it in the book entitled Holzwege (1950) because the two metaphors, Holzweg and Quelle, are incompatible. In a brief foreword Heidegger had explained the book’s title. The Holzwege are “forest paths” that seem to lead nowhere. They are cut into the forest on an ad hoc basis by woodcutters to permit them to transport wood out of the forest. When you follow such a path you do not know where you are heading. Your inquiry is not guided by the idea of a goal. To walk the Holzweg is to accept a condition of discontinuity. You have abandoned the known and you cannot say what lies ahead. The saturated ground noticed by Weizsäcker disturbs the metaphor of the Holzweg because it suggests that the woodcutter’s decision was not arbitrary, but rather guided by knowledge of the location of hidden springs. The damp patch, a trace of a source, explains the abrupt cessation of the path, which until then had seemed mysterious. The real nature of the Black Forest Holzweg exceeds Heidegger’s metaphor. The forest introduces the alternative metaphor, unwanted by Heidegger, of the source as a destination. The wet ground at the end of the path relocates the metaphor of the Holzweg, and the philosophical project it shapes, within a description of culture as a perpetual falling away from authenticity that can only be reversed by a return to the source. Culture, according to this account which Heidegger wished to distance himself from, is the result of an imperfect handing down of messages and symbols from the past to the present, an ongoing accumulating and forgetting. In this version of things, understanding, including the inquiry into being itself, is at the mercy of the transmission. The one who is dissatisfied with this dependency on the course of discourse is invited to correct transmitted culture by returning to the source.2 The source corrects transmission because it delivers a first and most trustworthy message. The source is a rising (surgere) or springing up of subterranean waters. The source or spring brings hidden waters to the light of day. The source is the threshold between an unknown