Reading Heidegger's <I>Black Notebooks 1931--1941
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Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 0 Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 edited by Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Syntax and Times New Roman by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-03401-2 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas I The ReADiNG Of HeiDeGGer’s BLACK NOTEbOOkS 1 On the Philosophical Reading of Heidegger: Situating the Black Notebooks 3 Jeff Malpas 2 Heidegger’s Notebooks: A Smoking Gun? 23 Fred Dallmayr 3 Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 29 Steven Crowell 4 The King Is Dead: Martin Heidegger after the Black Notebooks 45 Gregory Fried 5 Heidegger’s Black Night: The Nachlass and Its Wirkungsgeschichte 59 Babette Babich II The BLACK NOTEbOOkS AND Other WOrkS 6 The Role of Martin Heidegger’s Notebooks within the Context of His Oeuvre 89 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann 7 The Critique and Rethinking of Being and Time in the First Black Notebooks 95 Jean Grondin 8 The Existence of the Black Notebooks in the Background 109 Laurence Paul Hemming vi Contents 9 The Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s Writings on the Event (1936–1942) 127 Daniela Vallega-Neu III MetAphYSicS, ANti-SemitiSm, AND ChriStiANitY 10 “Heidegger” and the Jews 145 Michael Fagenblat 11 Heidegger and the Shoah 169 Peter Trawny 12 Heidegger’s Metaphysical Anti-Semitism 181 Donatella Di Cesare 13 Metaphysics, Christianity, and the “Death of God” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941) 195 Holger Zaborowski IV PhilOSOphY, POliticS, AND TechNOlOGY 14 Nostalgia, Spite, and the Truth of Being 207 Karsten Harries 15 On Relevant Events, Then and Now 223 Tracy B. Strong 16 Heidegger and National Socialism: Great Hopes, Despair, and Resilience 239 Thomas Rohkrämer 17 Philosophy, Science, and Politics in the Black Notebooks 253 Andrew Bowie 18 Thinking the Oblivion of Thinking: The Unfolding of Machenschaft and Rechnung in the Time of the Black Notebooks 269 Nancy A. Weston 19 The Black Notebooks in Their Historical and Political Context 289 Ingo Farin Bibliography 323 Contributors 340 Index 344 Acknowledgments 000a Acknowledgments Acknowledgments Brought together relatively quickly in direct response to the controversy that emerged with the publication of the first volumes of Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) in 2014, this has been a demanding volume to organize and produce. We are extremely grateful to all of our authors not only for agreeing to participate, but also for accommodating themselves so well to the tight schedule the project required. At the MIT Press, we would like to thank Philip Laughlin for seeing the worth of the volume and giv- ing such strong support to its publication, and Judith Feldmann and Elizabeth Judd for their work in preparing the typescript for publication (thanks all the more deserved given the complexity of the material and the range of authors). We also would like to thank Adrian Staples for proofreading the volume and putting together the index. In addition, Ingo Farin would like to thank the Deutsche Literaturarchiv at Marbach for permission to see and read Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte in the original. Finally, we are also grateful to the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory for allowing Gregory Fried and Michael Fagenblat to make use of previously published material from those journals in their contributions here. Introduction 000b Introduction Introduction Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas The first series of Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks, spanning the years from 1931 to 1941, were released in three volumes (94, 95, and 96) of the Gesamtausgabe in the spring of 2014.1 These three book volumes contain the transcripts of fourteen individual volumes of notebooks, numbered II–XV by Heidegger himself. The first volume of the notebooks is missing and may have been destroyed by him. Heidegger gave titles to the individual notebooks, using the simple title Überlegungen or Considerations for the notebooks from the third to the fifteenth, the more cumbersome title Winke X und Überlegungen II und Anweisungen, or Hints X and Considerations II and Instructions, for the second notebook, and Überlegungen und Winke III, or Considerations and Hints III, for the third notebook. Heidegger continued the practice of writing notebooks after 1941, and so there are many more extant notebooks than just those that make up the Überlegungen. It is believed that he wrote thirty-four or thirty-six notebooks in all, of which the last were composed in the early 1970s. All of the additional notebooks are currently held (as are the original notebooks that make up the Überlegungen) in the Heidegger Archives at the Deutsche Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany, and all are scheduled for publication in forthcoming volumes of the Gesamtausgabe in the near future. The first of these, containing the notebooks Anmerkun- gen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948), has already appeared, in March 2015, as volume 97 in the Gesamtausgabe.2 This volume also contains an individual notebook that was found only after the publication of the first three volumes in 2014. It has become customary to refer to these notebooks in general as the Black Notebooks after the black oilcloth booklets into which Heidegger originally transcribed his thoughts. But while this generic title has some practical advantages, it must not be forgotten that Hei- degger put great care into distinguishing them from one another—something reflected in his practice of titling each notebook individually. Moreover, because the Black Notebooks encompass some thirty-four notebooks written over a period of forty years, it is prudent to refer to individual notebooks or sets of notebooks whenever possible. For this reason, we refer to the first of the now published sets of notebooks, those that span the years 1931 to 1941 (the years that appear in the title of this volume), by using the title Heidegger chose for them—Überlegungen or Considerations—while we use the common name Black x Introduction Notebooks only when talking about the entire collection of extant notebooks. Although not all of our authors consistently follow this practice, the fact that, for the most part, the only published volumes available at the time they were writing, and the volumes that have provoked the initial controversy surrounding the Black Notebooks, were the Überlegungen means that most references to the Notebooks in the contributions here can be taken as being to the Überlegungen unless otherwise noted. The publication of the Überlegungen, and the material the volumes contain, has pro- voked an enormous controversy that extends well beyond the confines of academic phi- losophy. That Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party during the early 1930s is well known. However, the Notebooks not only provide further evidence of the extent of that enthusiasm, as well as demonstrating Heidegger’s increasing estrange- ment from National Socialism (however one interprets this) after 1934, but they contain a number of anti-Semitic passages. Moreover, those passages come almost entirely from the later volumes of the Überlegungen, at a time when Heidegger had become deeply criti- cal of Nazism, a point that itself raises questions about the relation between Heidegger’s Nazism and his anti-Semitism. Since Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, and a thinker who continues to be a major influence on contemporary thought, the material the Notebooks contain has led to much controversy over their relevance to our understanding and assessment of Heidegger’s philosophy. The editor of the Notebooks, Peter Trawny, has argued that the Notebooks show anti-Semitism as contaminating Hei- degger’s philosophical thought.3 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann’s attempt to disarm Trawny’s criticism has drawn the ire of Jean-Luc Nancy, who reaffirms the charge that there is a “systematic” connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his anti-Semi- tism.4 Richard Wolin writes that “what has now become indubitably clear is that racial prejudice against non-Germanic peoples—the English, the Russians, the French, the Americans, and, especially, the Jews—lies at the very center of Heidegger’s philosophical project,” and Wolin goes on to claim that, on the basis of what is given in the Notebooks, “any discussion of Heidegger’s legacy that downplays or diminishes the extent of his political folly stands guilty, by extension, of perpetuating the philosophical betrayal initi- ated by the Master himself.”5 Although there have been controversies over Heidegger’s political beliefs and commitments in the past, the publication of the Notebooks has thus taken matters to a new level. Some have claimed that they put Heidegger beyond the pale so far as contemporary philosophy is concerned, and that there can no longer be any pos- sibility of treating Heidegger as a serious and worthwhile thinker. Somewhat less dramati- cally, but perhaps no less radically, Thomas Sheehan has said that the controversy over the Notebooks should be seen as an opportunity to “rethink, from scratch, what [Heidegger’s] work was about.”6 François Fédier, in contrast, has defended the Black Notebooks, arguing that understood properly they will not distract but will contribute to the significance of Heidegger’s overall work.7 Introduction xi The discussion that has swirled around the Notebooks so far has been further compli- cated by several other developments.