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Here it is said that Heidegger viewed German and Greek as the only languages in which doing philosophy is possible at all.
The article references several sources [I won't list them to save space] I don't have any access to. If someone has these sources, please provide the argument from Heidegger supporting the claim.
For those who know a lot about Heidegger's thought, any educated guesses about what the argument (arguments?) might have been would be greatly appreciated.
First, I want to mention an important rule (which of course has caveats), but the accuracy with which a philosopher writes about the history of philosophy is in general inversely proportional to their own fame (and infamy).
There's several different dimensions on which we can trace Heidegger's beliefs about Greek and German being the only languages for philosophy.
It's worth mentioning that Heidegger was a Nazi and based on writings that we've found one who was pretty committed to at least some of their theses. But I don't think this means his preference for Germany and Greece arose because he was a Nazi. Instead, I think the more likely case is that he joined up with the Nazis because he already thought for his own reasons that German language / culture was superior. While joining the Nazis provided him with near instantaneous benefits (being a rector, etc), the relationship between him and a lot of what they thought seems to be a matter of debate (I'm not saying here he's not a Nazi nor that his views deserve a pass -- just that we can't attribute every nazi view to Heidegger -- even if we can say he deserves guilt and blame for being in their party and the atrocities it committed).
So then the question would be why does Heidegger believe philosophy can only be done in Greek and German? (or perhaps why do I think the causal arrow for Heidegger goes Germany is great → join Nazis and not the other way around).
Part of it is that Heidegger's view on the history of philosophy goes something like this (caveat lector - this is a gross oversimplification):
Greeks discovered Being and interacted with it sparking great philosophy, especially pre-Socratics. Romans and Christianity got confused and obsessed with "beings," losing sight of Being. Germany recovers the philosophy of Being especially when not caught up in the myths perpetrated by Christianity. The hints as to how/where Being has been hiding are hidden in plain sight in the German language.
We can see him trying to do this starting all the way back in Being and Time where he works on the etymology of certain German words to accomplish his argument (His followers think he's doing great etymology; his detractors disagree). See the SEP entry here
Where does this idea come from?
Many German thinkers thought Greek and German had a special link -- "inner relationship of the German language with the language of the Greeks and with their thought”. (Quotations from Only a God can Save Us 113 [quoted from SEP linked above].)
I don't think it greatly influenced Heidegger, but Hegel also thought philosophy started with the Greeks and that the Romans interrupted with codification and other things. It's quite possible this was a common thought taught in German classical education.
Heidegger thought the Romance languages where under the sway of metaphysics and didn't have the ability to break free to primordial being. Ergo, he thinks they're not going to be useful for getting to Being.
all of that to say, Heidegger both before and while a Nazi thought German could unlock the grip of metaphysics and get us to the real nature of the world when it looked at Being. He also thought the Greeks had captured that at some point too -- though they eventually lost it when they started doing metaphysics.
Here I found a photocopy of the "Spiegel"("Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten", Der Spiegel, Nr23/1976,p3,p5,pp193-219). and here I found a translation (I don't know about its quality).
HEIDEGGER: Ich denke an die besondere innere Verwandtschaft der deutschen Sprache mit der Sprache der Griechen und deren Denken. Das besätigen mir heute immer wieder die Franzosen. Wenn sie zu denken anfangen, sprechen sie deutsch; sie versichern, sie kämen in ihrer Sprache nicht durch. [(Der Spiegel, Nr23/1976, p 217)]
Here is the translation from the link above:
HEIDEGGER: I am thinking of the special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This has been confirmed to me again and again today by the French. When they begin to think they speak German. They insist that they could not get through with their own language.
You can see:
“Das Wort ‘Philosophie’ spricht jetzt griechisch.” This means, literally, that the word itself, if we hear it rightly, speaks Greek.
See page 60:
But it is not with the German roots that we must start; it is with Greek etymology, for “along with German, the Greek language is (in regard to its possibilities for thought) at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of all languages.”
For Greek, the source is Heidegger's lecture Was ist das - die Philosophie (1955); see page 45.
It is the 'pure-ness' of the language that makes Greek and German better for philosophy than, e.g., English.
As you read Heidegger in German or translated in a language close enough to keep all or most of the word-play intact (e.g., Dutch), you'll see the way he builds up his insights. This word comes from this and that, in this and that way it means such and such, but in this and that sentence it means something else, so how is that possible; what is the common root, what is the basic meaning that underlies both differing specific meanings; how is the derivation or development of this to be explained; etc. This technique doesn't make for his strongest arguments; but it provides him the basic elements with which he builds his thinking. If you accept his thinking in the larger picture, you can't get around his way of using etymolog; you'll have to become creative yourself in playing this game.
English is a mixed-up language. The core feeling of it is Germanic, but it has an insane amount of loan-words from Latin. If you take any German or Dutch stem-word from which a long list of derived words can be made, and you translate that into English, you'll see that only the one stem-word in English is still of Germanic origin; the rest are all very different loanwords. Result: the underlying basic meaning cannot be traced easily. Result of which is English words will function like 'stickers': this means that, because we said so, just learn it by heart. German and Dutch words mean something because the words themselves say so. Basically, as an English speaker, you'll need to speak both Latin and German to understand your own language.
Example: here is a list of Dutch words derived from from 'spreken' (to speak). All derivations still show traces of 'spreken', 'spraak', 'gesprek'. In English only 'to speak' remains; the rest are Latin words, and not even from the same Latin word:
Spreken - speak
Aanspreken - address/ appeal
Afspreken - agree/ make an appointment
Bespreken - discuss
Gesprek- talk, conversation
(...) Inspreken - record/ leave a message/ encourage
Tegenspreken - contradict
Uitspreken - pronounce
Verspreken - make slip of tongue
Vanzelfsprekend - evidently, obviously, naturally, taken for granted
Vrijspreken - absolve, acquit
As for Heidegger's aversion to Romans and Latin (which is a pretty pure language by itself), this lies somewhere else, mostly. Also, it has to do with the fact that when the Romans translated into Latin (same argument as with English) they romanized everything, also the meaning of words.
But the way in which Heidegger places the Romans in his history of being is another argument. He really reserves a special place for them, as one of the historical high-points/deep-points of nihilism, only to be surpassed by Nietzsche and the technological age (the make-ability of beings coming to the foreground of understanding the world, and a subsequent ending of philosophizing as development of new Original metaphysical basic positions). To argue with this, one must find another way of engaging with Roman culture (e.g., their art; Heidegger focuses more on their politics and their (lack of) philosophy), because, in Heidegger's own terms, you cannot get around this role they played without changing the development of his history of being both backward and forward.
It is easy to get offended by Heidegger's views on language (and on some other topics too of course), and I thought about this question for a long time. There are basically two answers, one historical and one philosophical:
a. Philosophically, Heidegger thought that philosophy has been going downhill since Socrates. It's not that simple, because some philosophers like Aristotle, some scholastics like Duns Scotus and Husserl were on the right path, but the general trend in philosophy has been that of decline, and a covering-up of truth. Analytic philosophy, cognitive science, behaviourist are all schools of thought based on the wrong understating of being.
Pre-socratics understood being correctly (as phenomena revealing themselves and being uncovered in 'alethea'), and one of the reasons why they succeeded was because of the Greek language. This language is rich enough to grasp being. Latin, on the other hand, did not. Romans gave us concepts of truth as certainty and truth as verifiable facts, both of which were wrong. Modern English is a lot worse than Latin was in this respect.
b. Historically, Heidegger thought that philosophy is over. The epic history of philosophy started with Greece and ended with Germany. Alpha and Omega. Germany is like Greece, but at the opposite end of history. Old age and infancy resemble each other.
