one of their earliest walks, Heidegger recoils in horror as he rattles off names with which Schöner has only the faintest familiarity. “Schlegel? Heine? Hölderlin?”
It is only when Schöner realizes he’s being, at least in part, had that he retaliates with equally exaggerated dismay: “Not know a black spruce from a red spruce? Norway from white?” This prompts a lengthy excursus from Heidegger on Goethe’s theory of colors. Schöner, accusing him of trying to change the subject, insists on bringing him back to the trees, offering up the same mnemonics he does to his students. After several misidentifications, Heidegger throws his arms up in despair, and Schöner drops it.
After they’ve gone for several of these jaunts, Heidegger gets him a copy of Schlegel’s Shakespeare. He explains that Schlegel was influenced by Herder in his translation, recognizing the playwright not merely as a great dramatist, tragedian, and shaper of characters but as a splendid wordsmith, whose puns and poetry and musicality are inextricable from the works’ greatness.
“In Schlegel’s rendering,” Heidegger says, “Shakespeare is almost German.”
Looking through it in the evening, Schöner sees that he has inscribed the volume: “To my tree climber, who lends me his forest spectacles.”
Schöner, in turn, gets him a tree-identification guide, which he inscribes: “May this be soon as dog-eared as Viburnum plicatum.” Though it is a plant he’s pointed out to the philosopher, Schöner worries that his inscription is too impersonal. Nevertheless, he cannot risk a joke such as “Great being-in-the-woods with you,” since Heidegger is highly sensitive about the accusations that he coins terms and phrases with flagrant disregard for clarity and logic.
As for Schöner, he feels certain that there is clarity in Heidegger’s thought. As they are walking, sometimes, he loses himself in Heidegger’s voice, as soothing as though they’ve been following the banks of a stream. There is always a sense of connectedness, of going somewhere, even if Schöner is lost mostly in the sounds of the words. He can distinguish the grammatical distinctions between Sosein (“Being-as-it-is”), Sein-bei (“Being-alongside”), and his namesake, Schon-sein-in (“Being-already-alongside”) but he cannot follow the conceptual distinctions that the philosopher is attempting. At times, Heidegger makes him feel a little like he doesn’t speak German at all. It is something that the scientists will often poke fun at the philosophers for, this lofty propensity for abstraction, which sometimes seems to be a peculiarly German affliction. But in Heidegger’s voice the words are infused with something that makes them as palpable as the furrows in bark.
Though the pair return continually to the joke of their respective intellectual blind spots, they also find themselves returning again and again to science. Heidegger vehemently maintains that philosophy is a science, and Schöner remains skeptical. Further, Heidegger says, science has become too fragmented—he rattles off the various divisions and disciplines in the university as if he is a judge pronouncing a lengthy sentence. “But,” he says, “it is not too late. All science needs to do, really, is to recover its essence.” He praises the Greeks, how in the true spirit of discovery they had no separate designations for chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, physics, and so were better able to apprehend nature as a whole. At first, Schöner is thrilled to learn of Heidegger’s enthusiasm for such work, for he has secretly lamented such divisions, the petty snobberies and snubbings that they invite. The mathematicians look down on the physicists, who can’t quite do the pure math. In turn, the chemists couldn’t cut it in physics, and the biologists, like himself, are at the bottom of the pecking order, dealing with spotted haunches and big leafy greens, even while the physicists are plying away at the atomic limit of matter. Schöner feels that he is viewed by many, in spite of Freiburg’s prestige, as a taxonomist, or, worse, a glorified gardener.
He is also delighted by Heidegger’s reverence for classical civilizations. At last he’s found an ally who will sympathize with his own insistence on instilling Latin terms in his students’ minds. Heidegger, though, never simply agrees or disagrees, and in this case he frowns.
“The Romans translated everything, but the essences were destroyed in the act. Unlike the Greeks, remember, the Romans were a brutal, materialistic people right down to the morpheme.”
Schöner is no match for him as a philologist, so he tries to swing the conversation back to the need for interdisciplinarity, where they will surely agree. “Anything else is sheer stupidity,” says Schöner. The trees grow in the soil. For that, we need to understand nitrogen compounds. To understand these, we must understand nitrogen atoms, right down to physics. Labels impede scientific work. Worse, they impede progress.” He practically sings the last word.
Heidegger seems more amenable as he speaks, but in the end he continues to hem and haw. “Progress. A word to be infinitely suspicious of,” he says. “Science needs to get back to its roots, its origins. In its essence, science has no divisions. But the essence of science has little to do with its practical forms.”
“I’m afraid,” admits Schöner, “that maybe I don’t understand what you mean by the ‘essence.’”
“You’re not alone, then,” says Heidegger.
On many occasions, they loop around to a spot they’ve been that morning, and Heidegger will ask, “Were we here earlier?”
“We were.”
In these cases, Schöner is so sure that the other is thinking, “As with our conversations,” he doesn’t bother remarking it himself.
In late November, crunching through fresh-fallen snow, they come upon a veritable army of towering pines. Heidegger asks, “How old are these?”
Schöner looks over them, tightly bound with crisscrossing bands of branches at chest height and upward, a stand of the type that gives the Black Forest its name. “Probably a couple of hundred years.” Together, they search for a downed tree that will reveal its rings.
After they confirm that the trees are at least 250 years old, Heidegger gazes up, marveling at their lattice formation. “They live so much longer than us. For that, and lacking consciousness of their mortality, they call our attention to our own.”
As winter comes through, they ski, and Heidegger is a daredevil, even though he claims he did not start skiing until he was an adult. The philosopher teases him for taking turns too wide, especially on precipitous slopes, and Schöner wonders if this is how his students feel when he antagonizes them for being reluctant to climb. At some point, several minutes behind, he hears Heidegger’s scalding laughter from below, echoing off the walls of a canyon. As he skis downhill toward the sound, for a moment he feels a sudden urge to run Heidegger down. Instead, as he pulls into a stop, he tears off his skis and leaps into the lower branches of a beech tree and begins ascending, panting and calling down, “If I’m such a coward, you won’t start to look like a little mouse as I get higher and higher above you.” Heidegger stays on the ground, and his voice sounds faint as he calls up, “Schöner, you’re braver than I thought.”
By 1932, the university is beginning to feel the effects of political ferment, which are still just a ripple, not quite a shudder, throughout Germany. Freiburg may be far from Berlin and Munich, but the National Socialists have struck the universities, like the bark disease striking beeches, youngest first. Of course, soon nothing will be intact; for now, the Nazis are overrepresented in the schools but still a minority elsewhere.
Over time, Schöner has taken on greater responsibilities, sitting on various committees and administrative bodies, which all take away
