This is a translation of volume 96 of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (“Complete Works”). The German original appeared posthumously in 2014.
The volume is the third in the series publishing Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks.” These are small (ca. 5 × 7 in.) notebooks with black covers to which the thinker confided sundry ideas and observations over the course of more than forty years, from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. The notebooks are being published in chronological order, and the four herein correspond to the years 1939–1941. In all, thirty-three of the thirty-four black notebooks are extant and will fill up nine volumes of the Gesamtausgabe.
Heidegger gave a title to each of the notebooks and referred to them collectively as the “black notebooks.” The first fifteen are all “Ponderings.” Their publication began in volume 94 with “Ponderings II” (“Ponderings I” is the lost notebook). Volume 95 included the second five “Ponderings,” VII–XI. The present volume with its four notebooks concludes the publication of the extant “Ponderings.”
As can be imagined regarding any notes to self, these journal entries often lack polished diction and at times are even cryptic. Nevertheless, the style and vocabulary are mostly formal, not to say stilted, and are seldom colloquial. This translation is meant to convey to an English-speaking audience the same effect the original would have on a German one, the degree of formality varying pari passu with Heidegger’s own. A prominent peculiarity of the style I was unable to render in full, however, is the extensive use of dashes. Heidegger often employs dashes not merely for parenthetical remarks but for any change in the direction of thought. Sometimes dashes separate subjects and predicates, and some dashes even occur at the end of paragraphs. Due to differences in English and German syntax, I could not include all the dashes without making for needless confusion and could not place them all at the exact points that would correspond to the original sentence. This admission is of course not meant to imply I did capture the varied styles of the notebooks in all other respects.
The pagination of the notebooks themselves is reproduced here in the outer margins. All of Heidegger’s cross-references are to these marginal numbers. The running heads indicate the pagination of the Gesamtausgabe edition. I have inserted myself into the text only to alert the reader to the original German where I thought it might be helpful (for example, as indicating a play on words I could not carry over into English) and to translate any Latin or Greek expressions Heidegger leaves untranslated. I have used brackets ([]) for these interpolations and have reserved braces ({}) for insertions by the editor. All the footnotes in the book stem either from me, and these few are marked as such, or from the editor and are then placed within braces.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for a critique of an earlier version of this translation.
Richard Rojcewicz