Did you know that Terrence Malick began as a translator of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, before he became a filmmaker? If you start to read Martin Heidegger, I think you will see the influence he has had on this most spiritual filmmaker — especially in the film The New World. The New World is, among many other things, an attempt to show an indigineous people becoming Westernized. One of the great tasks of Heidegger’s thinking is the deconstruction of Western philosophy, in order to expose Western thinking’s roots and to explore what was left unthought by Plato, Aristotle and even the initiators of Western thinking: Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaximander. What Heidegger, and Malick, find is a more poetic way of being.
Aside from filmmaking, my great passion is to work through Heidegger’s thinking, particularly his attempts to translate the thinking of the Greeks from the Greek language into the German. Below is an attempt, guided by my mentor and friend, Professor Jim Bradford, to translate Heidegger’s German into English. This is no small task, because the ‘ideas’ here are so new and difficult to think through, that even a word like “idea,” which is loaded with the meaning of the Platonic ideal, cannot truly translate Heidegger’s thinking.
In the following video, Jim leads a consortium of people from both sides of the Atlantic through a few sections from Heidegger’s “Basic Questions of Philosophy,” which is a lecture course corresponding to Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy.”