form taken by Habermas* reflections on Heidegger: ‘Since 1945 the issue of Heidegger’s fascism has been raised in diverse quarters. It is essentially the rectoral address of 1933. when Heidegger celebrated the "upheaval in Germany’s existence”, which has been at the heart of the debate. Any criticism which stops there, however, remains schematic. What is much more interesting, on the other hand, is to discover how the author of Being and Time (the most important philosophical event since Hegel’s Phenomenology), how such a great thinker could stoop to such an obviously elementary mode of thought, which any lucid analysis can discern in the unstylized pathos of this call for Lhe self-assertion of German universities.’35 It is clearly not enough to guard against the ‘elevated’ quality of ‘Martin Heidegger's linguistic posture as a writer’36 in order to break with the concern for the ‘elevation’ of discourse, that sense of philosophical dignity which is fundamentally expressed in the philosopher’s relation to language.
The ‘elevated’ style is not merely a contingent property of philosophical discourse. It is the means by which a discourse declares itself to be authorized, invested, by virtue of its very conformity, with the authority of a body of people especially mandated to exercise a kind of conceptual magistrature (predominantly logical or moral depending on the authors and the eras). It also ensures that certain things which have no place in the appropriate discourse, or which cannot find the spokespersons capable of putting them in the correct form, are not said, whereas others are said and understood which would otherwise be unsayable and unacceptable. In ordinary speech as in learned discourse, styles are hierarchical and hierarchizing; an ‘elevated’ language is appropriate for a ‘top-level thinker’, which is what made the ‘unstylized pathos* of Heidegger’s 1933 address seem so inappropriate in the eyes of all those who have a sense of philosophical dignity, namely, a sense of their dignity as philosophers: the same people who acclaimed the philosophically stylized pathos of Being and Time as a philosophical event.
It is through the ‘elevated* style of a discourse that its status in the hierarchy of discourses and the respect due to its status are invoked. A phrase such as, ‘The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell,’37 is not treated in the same way as a statement in ordinary language, such as, ‘the housing crisis is worsening,’ or even a proposition in technical language, such as, ‘In the Hauxvogteiplutz, the business district of Berlin, the price of land per square metre was 115 Marks in 1865, 344 Marks in 1880 and 990 Marks in 19K5.‘M As a discourse with its own form, philosophical discourse dictates the
conditions of its perception.”1 The imposition of form which keeps the lay person at a respectful distance protects the text from ‘trivialization’ (as Heidegger calls it), by reserving it for an internal reading, in both senses: that of a reading confined within the limits of the text itself, and concomitantly, that of a reading reserved for the closed group of professional readers who accept as self-evident an ‘internalist’ definition of reading. Wc have only to observe social custom to see that the philosophical text is defined as one which can only be read (in fact) by ‘philosophers', i.e. by readers who are ready to recognize and grant recognition to a philosophical discourse, and to read it as it demands to be read: ‘philosophically’, in accordance with a pure and purely philosophical intention, excluding all reference to anything other than the discourse itself, which, being its own foundation, admits of nothing outside of itself.
