Ponderings VII-XI: Black Notebooks, 1938-1939

by Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz (Translator)

Overview

Through these broad and sprawling notebooks, Heidegger offers fascinating opinions on Holderlin, Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein, Pascal, and many others. The importance of the Black Notebooks transcends Heidegger's relationship with National Socialism. These personal notebooks contain reflections on technology, art, Christianity, the history of philosophy, and Heidegger's attempt to move beyond that history into another beginning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253025036
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	02/06/2017
Series:	Studies in Continental Thought
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	366
File size:	651 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Richard Rojcewicz is Scholar-in-Residence  in the Philosophy Department at Duquesne University and translator of several works by Heidegger, including the previous volume of the Black Notebooks, Ponderings II–VI, The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, The Event, and (with Daniela Vallega-Neu) Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Rojcewicz is author of The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger.

Heidegger’s contribution to the growth and development of National Socialism was immense. In this small anthology, Dr. Runes endeavors to point to the utter confusion Heidegger created by drawing, for political and social application of his own existentialism and metaphysics, upon the decadent and repulsive brutalization of Hitlerism.

Martin Heidegger was a philosopher most known for his contributions to German phenomenological and existential thought. Heidegger was born in rural Messkirch in 1889 to Catholic parents. While studying philosophy and mathematics at Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Heidegger became the assistant for the philosopher Edmund Husserl. Influenced by Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Heidegger wrote extensively on the quality of Being, including his Opus Being and Time. He served as professor of philosophy at Albert-Ludwig University and taught there during the war. In 1933, Heidegger joined the National Socialist German Worker’s (or Nazi) Party and expressed his support for Hitler in several articles and speeches. After the war, his support for the Nazi party came under attack, and he was tried as a sympathizer. He was able to return to Albert Ludwig University, however, and taught there until he retired. Heidegger continued to lecture until his death in 1973. 

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Ponderings VIIâ"XI

Black Notebooks 1938â"1939

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By Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2014 Vittorio Klosterman GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02471-8

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CHAPTER 1

Ponderings VII

The essence of the Germans:

That they may be chained to the struggle over their essence, for only inasmuch as they take up this struggle are they the people they alone can be.

Suitable for this struggle is only that which, with unwavering confidence in its essential pride, is able to suffer the highest question-worthiness of what is most question-worthy (beyng).

One who encounters the distorted essence only negatively will also not ever be equal to the essence.

(Cf. p. 84.)

Nothing is in vain — least of all nothingness itself; for in it beyng delivers itself to its most unique uniqueness.

Like an errancy, beyng is riven through beings.

Those who have arrived too early must not depart too late.

Anyone who thinks ahead to future decisions must create a plight — and must know that.

To be German: to project the most intrinsic burden of the history of the West and to bear that burden on one's shoulders. (Cf. p. 81.)

1

Rare in history are those thrusts (p. 19) which, although unrecognizable by their own era, permeate all beings and come to be in another spatiotemporal field of another beyng. It is still more rare for these thrusts to be recognized; the recognition consists in clearing the way for the trajectory of these projections and making ready those who project. Historiology almost always snatches up, i.e., parries, the projections.

Because historiology as a "science" arises out of a determinate form of Western history — out of the modern essence of history — historiology is therefore not a mere inconsequential superstructure taking cognizance of history by history — but instead is one of the essential paths on which history is "made." This historical role of historiology is still not recognized, let alone grasped in its bearing for the decisive phase of modernity. Why does history employ the triviality of historiological science in order to achieve such an effectuation as must be presumed in the parrying of those thrusts? Does the history (of beings) indeed consist in the parrying of such thrusts of beyng?

Is it essential to the thrusts that within them that which thrusts, in 2 thrusting and projecting, should conceal itself in self-refusal? Do we first surmise on this basis something of the history of beyng, whereby the essence of this history may be called the negative force of the hesitation of what is concealed and undecided of the appropriation into the decision?

2

The history (of beings) as the parrying of the thrusts of beyng. Such a parrying is "culture," which not accidentally deteriorates into the gigantic form of the organization of lived experience. "Schmeling lives [erlebt, "has a lived experience of"] the world" — if only this were a mere inconsequential journalistic cliché, if only the journalistic cliché were not the most real reality and by no means simply a fleeting turn of phrase.

And if only those who play at being indignant over this did not take part in the same game.

For "culture" as an organization of lived experience is the reason that these, apparently combating one another, are of the exact same essence: cultural politics, cultural concern, Christian cultural assimilation.

The third — is the most dangerous. Here everything is processed and united, and yet what is creative — the uprightness of venturing the exposure to the projective domain of the thrusts — is radically I denied. But this denial is very well concealed, and this concealment is justified as a measured assimilation most comprehensively. The doom of the West is that which assumes the insidious semblance of saving it from "downgoing": cultural Christianity — of course, this "saves" it from "downgoing" by making such "downgoing" impossible in denying it the necessary presupposition: the greatness of historical beyng out of venturing the truth of beyng.

3

The apologetic undertakings of cultural Christianity, long ago (since Irenaeus) entrenched in the West, constitute a preliminary form of modern historiology. The latter must not at all be associated with Thucydides, but rather with Augustine and the civitas dei ["city of God"], which then finally gives rise to the most Christian modern realm of the highest cultural values and which once again confirms what it merely wants to "revalue." Therefore, cultural Christianity — because historiology derives from it — can also make use of historiology and do so with a special virtuosity. This Christian way of "rewriting" history necessarily sets a precedent followed in modernity, the 4 more modern modernity becomes. I (As already Karl Marx rewrote and turned upside down the Christian Hegel and Hegel's historiology — which both Marx and Hegel call "historical philosophy.")

4

Because the Catholic Church as "Catholicism" worked out the grandest Christianizing of modernity since Trent, now everything wanting to have a modern future must necessarily become "Catholic." This happens most effectively when a "conversion" to the Church is not necessary but at the same time the struggle against the Church remains possible, a struggle which, according to the modern decisionlessness in all things, naturally cannot once more be against the "Church" but is only against curialism (operated out of Rome) in "politics."

5

There was once a German thinking which surpassed by far the concept of the state that grasps the state as an apparatus of offices and authorities; and this despite the modern essence of such thinking, whereby it will not in the end avoid this concept of the state.

Is the "apparatus" character — the institutionalization of an institution — overcome or even only reduced I if another institution is placed beside the first, or must then not both sides unite into a still more decisive form of an "institution" and let the apparatus character come to count as what it basically is, the metaphysical essence of modernity? Is an institution sublated in its functional character or first fully confirmed and reinforced, if its bearers have taken on as their essential ontological form that of the operative instituter and organizer? (The executors merely constitute a determinate extreme form of these and are not at all "barbarians" we should romantically feel indignant about. —)

6

There are still childish romantics who gush over "empire" ["Reich"] and even over the "imperial" university, in the sense of Stephan {sic} George's idea of "empire." Whence the anxiety, of those who are supposedly free of anxiety, in face of the empire as the gigantic devices of the party apparatus and the state apparatus in their unity? Can the metaphysical essence of modernity and thus of the proximate future generate a more powerful unity than the apparatus of the unity of apparatuses? One who here perceives mere alienation and yearns to go back to a past — such as that of the Middle Ages — which never was I is for- 6 getting that indeed in the gigantism of this ap-paratus (in German: equipped-for [Zu-rustung]) the gigantic possibilities of "lived experience" are opened up and no lived experience is to be denied anyone, and he is forgetting that, in this equipping-for, "culture" is first secured and equipped as the organizing of lived experience. Therefore, even the constant professing of culture is not a "catchphrase," and the doorman at a movie theater has a perfect right to see himself as a "bearer of culture."

One does not know what one wants if on the basis of concern for culture one believes one must persuade oneself into an opposition to "National Socialism."

To be sure, the space of this concern and the number of those who fill it are growing more steadily and faster than the responsible ones could foresee — despite all the indications of it. And this space is already roofed over and guarded by Christian cultural activity, which is of course deceived if it intends to renew Christianity thereby —. Yet this intention is perhaps only a mask — one wants mastery in cultural activity — not in "politics."

What if Christian cultural activity were then only the dark side (passing itself off as the bright side) of that which I Bolshevism pursues as the destruction of culture — the dark side of the process by which modernity arranges for its own consummation and struggles to equip itself for it?

Thus the most proximate decision is only this: which of the gigantic equippings of the modern world-picture will be instituted as the victorious one.

The fronts and the forms of this struggle over the decision are not yet established. We must not consider the struggle simply as a future incident by calculating in advance in a historiological way. Instead, we need to know, through ever greater meditation, the essence of modernity in the whole of its historical course, assuming the Germans are still open to the carrying out of a decision through which, in the consummation of modernity, the plight of a transition is awakened. Then those must be ready to whom the plight of history is not a woe, nor a joy, but a thrust of beyng itself.

7

The future thinker must know the distorted essence of beyng. Therefore, he can never become a denier, but also never an affirmer, of "beings" and a fortiori never what common thinking would deduce from this I neither-nor: a doubter. Then is all that is left to him the cleverness of the dialectician, who can let all "sides" of beings count at once and at the same time eliminate them, bringing everything into balance in the absolute (wherein he knows himself — more surely than even Descartes — to be well sublated) and not merely into the oppositionality of the representational subject-object relation?

In the transition to the other questioning, however, "dialectics" must be abandoned; for "dialectics" belongs entirely to modern thought and is a calculative mode of representation transferred back into philosophy out of science and thus by necessity formed unconditionally. It is no accident that for its own assurance dialectics has taken refuge in the Christianizing of the world-picture.

(The unconditionality and certainty of the subjectum [Subjektum] already belong together for Descartes — cf. Meditationes II and III — although he did not yet attain, on the basis of the essence of subjectivity, the purely modern systematization of this connection. The same connection is displayed in what is essential to German Idealism, for which anthropological ontology is at the same time ontotheology. And this connection gains a new configuration in the essence of all I "worldview.")

The future thinker must be able to scorn, right from the start and in a decisive way, precisely this refuge and this escape that comes from balancing, because he experiences the errancy of beyng, and such errancy is essentially richer and "more in being" than any correctness of any lived experience of beings. Whoever even only for moments and short periods can, in paving his own way, traverse the errant paths of beyng effectuates concomitantly the transposition of modern humans into that which is refused them, yet without thereby sublating the self-refusal into a possession.

Nevertheless, almost every word of beyng is delivered over to reinterpretation in metaphysics, and the attempt to indicate the essence of beyng through "finitude" has attained exactly the opposite, insofar as this attempt, with the help of a very crude and facile dialectics, was acquainted with the fact that indeed the finite always presupposes and co-poses something infinite — whereby what might be attained is already half accomplished: the proof of the existence of "God," i.e., of the Christian cultural God of the "Christian worldview."—

8

To the "artist"— thus today someone who somewhere restrains himself and "works" only through indiscernible and long I indirection — how foreign must be everything that is covered by the activity of the now empty crafts and by the use of the customary forms of production and exhibition, that procures for itself a sham validity, and that by "struggle" gains for itself a historiological framework in "happenings."

9

How often does the scholar justify to himself what he himself at times surmises, namely, the goallessness and groundlessness of his occupation, justify it by taking comfort in the thought that what he produces will some day for someone somewhere be a "building block" — for which edifice? The scientist is "better" positioned in this regard, and he can already more decisively separate his activity from the rest of "life" and especially from "psychic lived experience." The methodicalness of research gives "existence as a scientist" a justification and indeed even claims to be an affirmation of life, since research does make humanity "at home" in beings. And in that way then a "joyfulness" penetrates science and its administrative institution — the university — and indeed has already reached such a superficiality of self-interpretation that people are not reluctant to see here, in this newly secured pleasurableness I of "otherwise" undisturbed research, the fulfillment of what Nietzsche called "joyful science." But perhaps scientists would be uneasy about their marvelous state if they had to experience something of that "joyfulness."

10

The mere creating and bringing into play of an apparent productivity is without truth, unless we know what basically has precedence over history. For example, where is the ground for the fact that our essential poets and thinkers remain so ineffective and must at once seem inferior in relation to the emptiest mediocrity of pen pushing, provided the latter is currently relevant? Can we even speak of an inferiority where no struggle or distinction is at issue, but where mere forgetting maintains the upper hand instead? The constantly unfettered mania for novelty, the ever greater impotence of recollection, the predominance of the mediocre, the increasing facility in the production of the now ordinary "cultural assets," the revaluation of the traditional "cultural assets" into mere pieces of the exhibition of cultural-political organizations — all these are already consequences of a deeper process, | one making Germans into secret enemies of their own concealed essence. They are already so the moment they withdraw from meditation. If other peoples renounce questioning and save only their past, then that does not contravene their basic attitude, since they are not tasked with questioning. But what if the inherited defect of the Germans to gaze at what is foreign were overcome in what is nearest and current, what if we develop our own taste, etc., for which nevertheless we merely copy others in what is most essential, most unique, and most our own and set everything and the first thing on "politics"? All peoples lose ever easier what is most proper to them as this is more uniquely their own and is incomparable and can be grasped and configured solely in never-wavering self-meditation.

And wherein lies that which alone makes us, the Germans, into a people? Legendarily, the "people of poets and thinkers." But "poets and thinkers" are only the precursors of those creative persons who will once in the history of the West place beings into the decision of beyng again and thus allow the flight or advent of the god to become the | event through which that history first becomes history: the struggle for and the downgoing of the essential occurrence of beyng.

There is no universal operative "principle" by which every people is a people; instead, every people is raised to the structure of its essence through its history and its essential position toward and in history, through its "principle." And the "principle" of the Germans is the struggle over their most proper essence. Only for that reason is the struggle over their "substance" a necessity. But the saving (and securing) of the substance is neither itself already the struggle over the essence, nor can this struggle, as something supervenient and later, be left for the time the "substance" has supposedly been ensured; for the "substance" "is" what it is only if it is borne and determined by the essence, i.e., with regard to the Germans, by the struggle over their essence. For us to kindle the flames of this struggle, what suffices is neither opposition against what is to the West nor opposition against the Asiatic East, especially since we remain, even in relation to the latter, in the undecidedness dominant in everything essential. It would be a half-measure, more disastrous than any I other undecidedness, for us to renounce the Western democratic-liberal spirit and yet persevere in the essence of modernity, instead of now already and now precisely outgrowing modernity in an essential volition, and despite the necessities of modernity, bringing it to its end. The principle of the Germans is so originarily a struggle — as the struggle over their essence — that this struggle must arise purely out of their proper power of decision and cannot even be based on mere oppositions to others, let alone dissolve into such oppositions.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Ponderings VIIâ"XI by Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz. Copyright © 2014 Vittorio Klosterman GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction
Ponderings VII
Ponderings VIII
Ponderings IX
Ponderings X
Ponderings XI
Editor's Afterword