Abstract
The publication of the Black Notebooks has raised again the well-known querelle on “Heidegger and politics”, or more precisely “Heidegger and Nazism”, or even better “Heidegger and the Jews”. However, if we accurately read the Notebooks, we can notice that they do not add any new information to what we already knew about Heidegger’s controversial political relationship with Nazism. Rather, in the Notebooks, we can find Heidegger’s ontological disengagement from reality (after the delusion of his rectorship of 1933), which does not have a political character. Heidegger’s tone became increasingly apocalyptic, and the degeneration of power of the Reich was progressively becoming clearer to his eyes during the 30s. In Heidegger’s historical-ontological perspective, the Reich, which for him had to represent a counter-power to the European crisis, was transforming into a mere version of machination, another version of that technological operative enframing calculation which was metaphysically penetrating the “present”. Heidegger’s assessment condemns the entire aeon of the present time – the world, life, history and the humankind – to a pure abyss of a gnostic anathema. Within this anathema, there is no hope: the only one left is confided to the mystical knowledge of those few, chosen prophets able to foresee a new beginning for the Being to come. Hence, in the Black Notebooks, we assist to the crisis of the question concerning the meaning of Being as it was presented in Being and Time, in which Being was highly characterized by the concrete, historical and existential nature of its phenomenology. But in the Notebooks, we cannot find anything that can serve us as an authentic “custody” for Being.
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Notes
- 1.
F.-W. Von Hermann–F. Alfieri, Martin Heidegger, La verità sui Quaderni neri, Morcelliana, Brescia 2016, 17.
- 2.
Ivi, 34.
- 3.
Ivi, 47.
- 4.
“In Being and Time, Being is conceived of as a horizontal-transcendental disclosure, as clearing (Lichtung) or else as truth of Being – a truth more or less original, but not historical in its nature. Now, the same truth of Being is conceived from an ontological-historical perspective, as clearing of Being in its historical holding (Walten) of concealing or unconcealing- namely of its withdrawing”, ibidem.
- 5.
In Ponderings VIII [51], Heidegger refuses to be compared to Hans Heyse’s book (Idee und Existenz, 1935), warning us that his philosophy shall not be misunderstood as a “philosophy of existence” and “intellectual assets of National Socialism”. He notes that Hans Heyse’s “ink spilling is worth the mention only because it derives from a state of these modern times which has already lost the power of thoughtful meditation and has replaced it with mere inflated phraseology”. However, Heidegger avoids publicly expressing his opinion on the non-existence in re of a “National Socialist philosophy” (“philosophy (...) can also never be appraised “politically,” (...) A “National Socialist” philosophy is neither a “philosophy” nor a service to “National Socialism”— but instead simply runs behind it as burdensome pedantry (…) To say a philosophy is “National Socialist,” or is not so, means the same as to say a triangle is courageous, or is not so—and therefore is cowardly”, Ponderings V [61]). He gives us only a private note, since “one may at most establish one’s standpoint against this but must never throw oneself (sich wegwerfen) into a confrontation. Indeed, even that establishment can count only as the establishment of one’s own meditation and never serve as a public disavowal of it, for even such disavowal could be used only to provide the pursuit of “spiritual life” with “novelties” and to confirm this pursuit in its alleged indispensability”, Ponderings VIII [51]. In other words, standing against a “National Socialist” philosophy would have been, not only dangerous, but also an indirect claim of legitimacy in its philosophical and cultural claims. For an “anthology”, from the Black Notebooks, of Heidegger’ s private and philosophical distance from National Socialism and its culture, on the “secret” front of the “spiritual resistance”, see. F.-W. Von Hermann–F. Alfieri, Martin Heidegger, La verità sui Quaderni neri, 131-146.
- 6.
In March 1932, Heidegger confesses that his entire “previous literally output” (Being and Time, “What is Metaphysics?, Kantbook, and “On the Essence of Ground” I and II) has become alien to him (Ponderings II [49]). At the time, he was still hoping for the “end of the literary existence” (Ponderings III [10]), as solicited by the Fuhrer, and for a political-historical rooting of the “ontological renovatio” enacted by (his) “spiritual National Socialism”. This hope lasted for a brief time, and was translated just after Beiträge in 1938/1939, as the abandonment of history to its own self-destruction: “For a long time, I resisted the insight dawning on me from my asking the question of Being, the insight that technology and historiology are the same in a metaphysical sense. For I still believed historiology had struck deeper roots in history itself (cf. Being and Time, Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, GA2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), p. 518ff.). But there is no more avoiding this insight. The sameness of historiology and technology harbours the reason the human being, who pursues them and has finally granted them priority, has become intolerable to the gods and has been relegated to his distorted essence. This is now fully assisting beings to an exclusive ascendancy over the truth of Being”. Ponderings IX [63].
- 7.
As will be seen in Heidegger’s essays of the 50s, in which we assist to the renewal of Heidegger’s reflection on the essence of technology, Heidegger breaks the ontological darkness of the 30-40s, reconsiders Hölderlin’s poetry, and reconceives the meaning of the “double beginning” of the Greek philosophy. In particular, the “double beginning” of the Greek philosophy will explain, on the one hand, how Greek philosophy leads to the bimillennial tradition of metaphysics as an “oblivion of Being”, and on the other, how it still preserves, together with the poets, another possibility, the other beginning. This other beginning is the one toward which “thinking” (the denken conceived of as danken of the “ontological gift”, Gabe, of being in any case in the world) refers, even if within the necessary “metaphysical” destiny to be condemned to fall out of the light of Being into the false light of the rational-operative illumination of beings.
- 8.
As Heidegger warns us in his lecture of 1935 (in which he accuses Nietzsche of being “entangled” and confused about the concept of “value”, of having “never reached the genuine centre of philosophy”), in Introduction to Metaphysics, trans G. Fried and R. Polt, Yale University Press, New Heaven & London, 2000, 214. Heidegger himself did not maintain this prescription, losing it in the ontological darkness of Being in the Treatises and Notebooks the historical, ontological centre (the historical character of Dasein) of the question of Being – namely, of his own proper philosophy.
- 9.
On this trust to the “people”, while he was becoming rector, Heidegger states: Ponderings II [230]: “The people: the guarding and carrying out of the empowerment of being. The empowerment out of the fearfulness of thrownness, whose first essential individuation remains precisely the people—and their great individuals. The essence of these individuals to be grasped out of and in the individuation as people”. And ivi, [71]: “Only someone who is German can in an originarily new way poetize being and say Being”. in the name of the “excited” conviction [159] that: “The world is in reconstruction; mankind is awakening.”
- 10.
H. Arendt, K. Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969, ed. L. Kohler and H. Saner, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992,142. Letters of 29th September 1949.
- 11.
Ponderings and Intimations III [81]
- 12.
Ponderings and Intimations III [81] 81
- 13.
Ibidem
- 14.
F.-W. Von Hermann–F. Alfieri, Martin Heidegger, La verità sui Quaderni neri, 94.
- 15.
Ponderings V [62]
- 16.
M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1999, 47.
- 17.
Ivi, 37: “The self-mindfulness has left all “subjectivity” behind, including that which is most dangerously hidden in the cult of “personality” (…) Whether one understands personality as the unity of “spirit-soul-body” or whether one turns this mix upside down and then for example, puts the body first, this does not change anything in the dominating confusion of thinking that avoids every question. (…) and does one want to ground the ability to say I biologically? (…) Mindfulness as grounding selfhood occurs outside the doctrines just mentioned”.
- 18.
Ponderings X [59]: “The decision, however, is this: whether the human being of the West gives himself over to beings as objects, or whether he attains Being as abyss and from this attains the plight of a grounding of his essence out of the assignment to being. Because such did occur in a first beginning with the Greeks—because they ventured to determine themselves on the basis of being, then that brief and unique history had to be possible as long as this venture was risked. All “blood,” all “race,” all “ethnicity” (Volkstum) is otiose and a dead end if it does not already live within a venture of being and, as venturing, set itself free for the lightning flash which strikes it where its dullness must break asunder in order to grant a place for the truth of Being, within which place Being can first be set into a work of beings”. A passage of pivotal importance, as Alfieri rightfully highlights, “in which Heidegger denounces the impossibility to reach our own determination in terms of contingent factors such as the biological or ethnic-religious ones”. F.-W. Von Hermann–F. Alfieri, Martin Heidegger, La verità sui Quaderni neri, 157.
- 19.
Ponderings IX [84]: Seyn, the spelling – mocked by Arendt – that should indicate the Being that had never come to language before, before the call vom Ereignis of Professor Heidegger. A doubt regarding the incapability, which would include the Greeks’ language (the Presocratics of the inceptual saying), to name Being and its “night” and mystery, had already been raised in Ponderings VIII [3]: “But the night belongs to Being and is not merely an “image” of it, a sensibilizing of something nonsensuous (…)Yet this reference to the “night” allows only an approximate intimation of how much our language as language—not merely in its separate “expressivity”—is alienated from Being—must have become alien—because perhaps already the first—historically essential—words could not persist in the power of the Being which is to be said, and they consequently fled into beings [our italics]. This doubt involves the ability of the language of metaphysics to express the turn of thinking about Being, a turn from the meaning of the Being of Dasein to the flash of its truth, as thematised from Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. Or, in graphic terms, a turn from Sein to Seyn. This doubt will find its resolution only when Heidegger “conquers” the truth of Being – also for us – not only in “silence” but in a dialogue with the language of the “poets” and first inceptual “Greeks”. But all this occur only after the Black Notebooks.
- 20.
“They reside in masterful knowing, as what is truthful knowing. Whoever attains this knowing-awareness is useless and has no “value”; it does not count and cannot be directly taken as a condition for the current enterprise.” M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 278.
- 21.
See Ponderings XI [29]
- 22.
M. Heidegger, Contributions, 25
- 23.
See M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London, 1972.
- 24.
It is only possible to briefly recall that within Heidegger’s historical-ontological thinking, this kind of onto- (theo)-phany is what shows thinking its own aim, and the world of technology (in the historical-metaphysical terms of the onto-(ego)-logy unfolded), the last and first source of its salvation, while the danger grows.
- 25.
Heidegger offers us a lectio magistralis about our being-in-the-world also in the world of technology, by reading with Hölderlin (in “…Poetically Man Dwells…”) the “technological” daimon of the Being-in-the-world of Dasein (which risks, in an excess of hybris, to withdraw the world from us, while opening it) of the chorus of Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics.
- 26.
I suggest the reader to confront Heidegger’s “Anaximander’s saying” (in which, according to Heidegger, we find the knowledge of the “authentic” position of Dasein within Being of its being amidst-itself while being-not-itself, while courageously facing the truth of beings within Being in Anaximander’s saying and not within the “Christian” consolations for an economy of salvation) with Ponderings II [54] “I would give entire many-volumed “philosophies” for the single hard statement of Anaximander—even if only because this one statement compels us, i.e., compels us to examine whether and to what extent we summon up the power to understand or, in other words, to be at home in the questioning of being and therein to consent to being.”
- 27.
Ponderings and Intimations III [135]
- 28.
See Ponderings X [59]
- 29.
Ponderings XII [4]
- 30.
Ponderings X [30]
- 31.
Ponderings XII [1]
- 32.
Ponderings XII [9]: “right is then the power of the victor (…) the “right” of precisely this victor to his own “life.” But inasmuch as “one’s own life” has long been identified as that of self-reliant humanity (in the form of individuals, in the configuration of peoples and nations), this “highest” right to life becomes at the same time a “holy” right. This would apply not only terminologically, but also in the mode of thinking and valuing, the basic metaphysical position thereby proliferates (and so does its Christian deformation).
- 33.
Ponderings XI [44]
- 34.
Ponderings XIII [7]: ““Anthropomorphism.” – How are all the anthropologizing (Vermenschlichung) of beings and every anthropomorphizing (Vermenschung) of the human being to be overcome in a radical way? Only through the grounding of the human being in his most abyssal essence – i.e., in the stewardship of Being. Here the human being first attains the highest freedom toward himself—; here no redemption (Er-lösung) is needed, just as little as is its counterpart (Gegenspiel): flight into the “life” that merely has a lived experience of itself”.
- 35.
Ponderings XII [10]
- 36.
Ponderings IV [7]
- 37.
Ponderings and Intimations III [133]
- 38.
Ponderings XII [1]
- 39.
Ponderings XII [47]
- 40.
Ponderings VII [75]: “Even an occurrence such as the “world war” was not capable of anything, despite the “hells” into which humans were then drawn, despite the sacrifices and also the upswings, which were mostly accomplished in secret. The world war was not capable of anything, if we think out to the essential upheaval of humans; on the contrary, it became a preparatory school for basing the trappings of the self-instituting human being still more decisively, completely, and readily on the self-securing of his current essential state”; Ponderings XIV p.113: “Therefore, all imperialism is conjointly, i.e., in reciprocal increase and subsidence, pursued to a highest consummation of technology. The final chapter of this consummation will consist in the earth itself blowing up and the current humanity disappearing. That will not be a misfortune but, instead, the first purification of being from its most profound deformation on account of the supremacy of beings”; Ponderings XV p. 4: “The animal rationale, having arrived at its distorted essence, is now set into a topspin in a danse macabre.”
- 41.
Ponderings V [45]: “Will those stronger ones arrive, those who in advance thoughtfully master the mystery of Being itself in such a way that future humans may find their centre therein?”
- 42.
Ponderings VII [37]
- 43.
Ponderings XI [40]: “For one cannot “make” or even “will” solitude—solitude is most rare and is a necessity of being—insofar as being, in its abysses, bestows itself on the Dasein of the human being. Therefore what “one” can “make” is at most a preparation of knowing that only a transformation of being as such, i.e., an overcoming of the age of the complete abandonment by being, will open up the possibility of solitary humans as ones who ground and essentially bear”.
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Mazzarella, E. (2021). Heidegger and the Black Notebooks. The Crisis of the Question of Being in the Black Notebooks. In: Di Martino, C. (eds) Heidegger and Contemporary Philosophy. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56566-4_13
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