Heidegger the Fox - Hannah Arendt
Heidegger says, with great pride: "People say that Heidegger is a fox." This is the true story of Heidegger
the fox: Once upon a time there was a fox who was so lacking in slyness that he not only kept getting
caught in traps but couldn't even tell the difference between a trap and a non-trap. This fox suffered from
another failing as well. There was something wrong with his fur, so that he was completely without natural
protection against the hardships of a fox's life. After he had spent his entire youth prowling around the
traps of people, and now that not one intact piece of fur, so to speak, was left on him, this fox decided to
withdraw from the fox world altogether and to set about making himself a burrow. In his shocking ignorance
of the difference between traps, he hit on an idea completely new and unheard of among foxes: He
built a trap as his burrow. He set himself inside it, passed it off as a normal burrow—not out of cunning, but
because he had always thought others' traps were their burrows—and then decided to become sly in his
own way and outfit for others the trap he had built himself and that suited only him. This again demonstrated
great ignorance about traps: No one would go into his trap, because he was sitting inside it himself.
This annoyed him. After all, everyone knows that, despite their slyness, all foxes occasionally get caught in
traps. Why should a fox trap—especially one built by a fox with more experience of traps than any other—not
be a match for the traps of human beings and hunters? Obviously because this trap did not reveal itself
clearly enough as the trap it was! And so it occurred to our fox to decorate his trap beautifully and to hang
up equivocal signs everywhere on it that quite clearly said: "Come here, everyone; this is a trap, the most
beautiful trap in the world." From this point on it was clear that no fox could stray into this trap by mistake.
Nevertheless, many came. For this trap was our fox's burrow, and if you wanted to visit him where he was
at home, you had to step into his trap. Everyone except our fox could, of course, step out of it again. It was
cut, literally, to his own measurement. But the fox who lived in the trap said proudly: "So many are visiting
me in my trap that I have become the best of all foxes." And there is some truth in that, too: Nobody knows
the nature of traps better than one who sits in a trap his whole life long.
|