This volume 96 of Martin Heidegger’s Collected Works [Gesamtausgabe (GA)] comprises “Ponderings XII–XV,” four of what the thinker himself called the Black Notebooks [“Schwarze Hefte”]. The publication of the “Ponderings” is thus complete.
“Ponderings X,” in GA95, contains a remark on the character of these “ponderings” that unfold in fifteen notebooks. They are not a matter of “aphorisms” as “adages” but of “inconspicuous advance outposts—and rearguard positions—within the whole of an attempt at a still ineffable meditation toward the conquest of a way for the newly inceptual questioning which is called, in distinction from metaphysical thinking, the thinking of the history of beyng.”1 “Not decisive” is “what is represented and compiled into a representational edifice,” “but only how the questioning takes place and the fact that being is questioned at all.”
Heidegger also refers in a similar vein, in his “backward glance over the way,” to “especially notebooks II, IV, and V,” i.e., to the respective “Ponderings.” They are to capture “in part ever the basic dispositions of questioning and the directives into the extreme horizons of attempts at thinking.”2 The emphasis on the “basic dispositions of questioning” reinforces the indication that the “ponderings” are a matter of “attempts at thinking.”
Following this up, I have inserted as an exergue to the first published Black Notebooks a later remark (presumably from the early 1970s) to the effect that at issue in the “black notebooks” are not “notes for a planned system,” but rather “at their core” “attempts at simple designation.”3 It is striking that in all three characterizations of the Black Notebooks, the word “attempt” claims an essential significance.
As “inconspicuous advance outposts—and rearguard positions,” that is, as pre-ponderings and post-considerations in the basically polemical thinking of being, the Black Notebooks assume a form not yet seen in Heidegger’s many already published writings. If what is indeed “decisive” is “how the questioning takes place,” thus how the question of the “meaning of being” finds expression, then we are encountering in these notebooks a new writing “style,” a concept often mulled over in the “notes.”
Besides the published work of the 1920s, the courses, seminars, essays, lectures, and treatises on the history of being, we become acquainted in the Black Notebooks with a further way of expression on the part of Heidegger. The question of how all these various modes of speech cohere does perhaps belong to the most important tasks of a thinking which would seek to understand Heidegger’s thought as a whole.
The Black Notebooks present a form which in style and method is possibly unique not only for Heidegger but also for all of twentieth-century philosophy. Compared to generally known sorts of texts, it comes closest to an “idea diary.” Yet if this designation thrusts the writings that come under it mostly to the margin of the total work, the significance of the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger’s “way for inceptual questioning” will still need to be examined.
According to the literary executor, Hermann Heidegger, and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Heidegger’s private assistant between 1972 and 1976, the Black Notebooks were brought to the German Literature Archive in Marbach around the middle of the 1970s. On the occasion of the shipment, Heidegger stated that they were to be published only at the very end of the Complete Works. Until then, they were to be kept “doubly secret, so to speak” (von Herrmann). No one was to read them or look them over. The literary executor has decided against this directive, because delays in bringing out the still-unpublished volumes of the full project of letting Martin Heidegger’s thought appear in due form should not prevent the publication of the Black Notebooks at this time.
Why did the philosopher want to have the Black Notebooks published only as the last volumes of the Complete Works? The answer might very well be related to an already familiar stricture according to which the treatises concerned with the history of being were to be published only after all the lecture courses. For these courses, which intentionally do not speak about what is contained in the writings on the history of being, prepare for what these latter are saying in a language not accommodated to public lectures.
The Black Notebooks are thirty-four in number. Fourteen bear the title “Ponderings,” nine are called “Annotations,” two “Four Notebooks,” two “Vigilae,” one “Notturno,” two “Intimations,” and four are named “Provisional Remarks.” In addition, two further notebooks with the respective titles “Megiston” and “Basic Words” have come to light. Whether and how these belong to the Black Notebooks must still be clarified. Volumes 94 to 102 of the Complete Works will in the coming years make available the thirty-four manuscripts first mentioned above.
The writing of the notebooks spans a time frame of more than forty years. The first extant notebook, “Intimations x Ponderings (II) and Directives,” bears on its first page the date “October 1931.” “Provisional Remarks III” contains a reference to “Le Thor 1969,” so that the notebook “Provisional Remarks IV” must stem from the beginning of the 1970s. One notebook is missing, namely, “Intimations x Ponderings (I),” which must have been composed around 1930. Its whereabouts are uncertain.
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“Ponderings XII,” the first notebook in the present volume, stems from the late summer or fall of 1939, and “Ponderings XV,” the last one, stops at the end of 1941. Heidegger mentions, besides other historical events, the start of the war with the Soviet Union on “June 22, 1941”4 and the subsequent “war effort of the human sciences.”5
“Ponderings XIII” contains two passages that were incorporated into other writings. Pages 98–112 of this notebook were further elaborated in the “Draft for KOINON. On the History of Beyng” (GA69, pp. 199–214). And a thought on p. 116 was again taken up in the “Letter to Individual Soldiers” (GA90, p. 273).
In the “Ponderings” published herein, Heidegger continues his interpretation of the “machinational signs”6 found in the everyday occurrences of the National Socialistic German Reich as it drives on to war. Underlying this interpretation is the explicit intention to recognize in specific phenomena of the time the state of the “history of beyng.”7 Heidegger has obviously taken distance from National Socialism, which allows him even to refer with biting mockery to a sentence from a “Führer speech.”8
It is altogether evident that Heidegger intensely observes and contemplates even political events such as the visit of the Russian foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov9 to Hitler in Berlin in November, 1940. The thinking is involved in historical happenings. Heidegger sees indications everywhere of a decline in the history of being. “Europe,” he says toward the close of “Ponderings XV,” is the “actualization of the decline of the West.” There is “no longer the least inducement to take the field against the ‘pen-pusher’ Oswald Spengler.”10
Of course, Heidegger’s way of considering the “machinational signs” must not be understood as the taking of a political position. It is instead a matter of a stance toward events that is attentive to the history of being, and therein Heidegger occupies a special point of view. It is in this regard that he understands the ever greater unleashing of the war machine as the “consummation of technology,” whose “final chapter” will be “the earth itself blowing up” and the “current humanity” disappearing. Yet 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.”11 This notion of a “purification of being” seems to have led to consequences needing to be taken into consideration.
It must be pointed out at the start that Heidegger, more strongly than in the previous “Ponderings,” presents as this “deformation” everything found in the domains of “religion,” “culture,” and “science.” Even a presumably rather innocent science such as the “history of art” is in one place called the “most dreadful degeneration of the historiology which is in any case already thoroughly entangled in its distorted essence.”12 “Machination” dominates the world and all the regions therein.
Heidegger sees a further “sign” of “machination” in “Bolshevism,” which arises out of “Western-further westward, modern, rational metaphysics”13 and has nothing in common with “Russianism.” “Americanism” appears as the “pinnacle” of “nihilism.”14 Thus “Americanism,” “National Socialism,” and “Bolshevism” present the “machinational essence” of the metaphysics which is proceeding on to its end.
This seems to show itself also in the world-historical significance Heidegger ascribes to “Judaism” or “world-Judaism.” Thus he recognizes an “occasional increase in the power of Judaism,” whereby “Western metaphysics, especially in its modern evolution,” offered “the point of attachment for the expansion of an otherwise empty rationality and calculative capacity.”15 The National Socialists encounter this “increase in power” with measures noted by Heidegger. He says at one point that “with their emphatically calculative giftedness, the Jews have for the longest time been ‘living’ in accord with the principle of race, which is why they are also offering the most vehement resistance to its unrestricted application.”16
This interpretation of the role of “world-Judaism” reaches its peak after the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war, when it is brought up that this Judaism, “incited by the emigrants allowed out of Germany,” cannot be “held fast anywhere” and, “with all its developed power,” does not need to “participate anywhere in the activities of war, whereas all that remains to us is the sacrifice of the best blood of the best of our own people.”17
Such statements about “Judaism” show how much Heidegger was involved in his thought of a “purification of being.” He specifically wants to emphasize, precisely by underlining the words “of being,” that he contrasts his thinking with the National Socialistic phantasies of racial purification which relate in fact to “beings,” namely, “race.” Indeed at the same time Heidegger interprets “world-Judaism” as a phenomenon that, on the side of “beings” and their planning by way of “machination,” has exercised an essential influence on events.
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The “Ponderings” appearing in volumes 94 to 96 of the Collected Works comprise fourteen of the thirty-four (or possibly thirty-six) notebooks with black oilcloth covers. The pages are in an unusual format: 5¼ × 7½ inches. The originals reside in the Heidegger literary remains at the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar. I as editor had available copies bound in blue linen, with the titles printed on the spines.
The present volume 96 brings together the following texts:
“Ponderings XII,” 106 pages;
“Ponderings XIII,” 120 pages and one supplement;
“Ponderings XIV,” 125 pages;
“Ponderings XV,” 46 pages.
Added to these pages are indexes Heidegger provided at times for the notebooks. Only “Ponderings XV” has no index. The brevity of this notebook also suggests that the entries in it were interrupted.
The manuscripts are fully worked out. They display hardly any slips of the pen. There are no inserted sheets.
Detlev Heidegger prepared a typed transcription of “Ponderings XII–XIV,” as did Jutta Heidegger for “Ponderings XV.” Hermann Heidegger checked these typescripts.
I transcribed everything once again from the manuscripts, while constantly looking at the already prepared typescripts. Then I proofread the typescripts. Finally, the galleys and page proofs were checked both by me and by my collaborator and student, Sophia Heiden.
Heidegger numbered the individual entries in “Ponderings XII” and “XIII,” perhaps imitating his own treatises on the history of being, perhaps following the example of certain writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. This changes, however, beginning with “Ponderings XIV”; it and all further Black Notebooks no longer display such numbering.
Letters (“a,” “b,” “c”) with which Heidegger sometimes designated the first pages of a notebook, as well as the page numbers that begin thereafter, are here reproduced in the margin of the text. The vertical stroke in the middle of a line indicates a page break. A question mark within braces (“{?}”) flags an uncertain reading. All cross-references in the text are to notebook page numbers. All underlinings found in Heidegger’s own text have been changed to italics; underlinings in cited texts, which would be italicized on their own, have been printed in bold.
More than in other volumes of the Collected Works, certain of Heidegger’s remarks, especially ones referring to historical events, were supplied with an editorial explanation. Thereby the reader can see at which time Heidegger composed which of the “Ponderings.” Also with regard to persons and institutions, ones which might be unfamiliar to younger readers, I have attached concise clarifications. There could obviously be no completeness here, in an edition that is supposed to come “straight from the author’s hand.”
In some cases, though very sparingly, I brought Heidegger’s idiosyncratic spelling as well as his characteristic syntax into conformity with current rules. At the same time, I intentionally retained certain peculiarities, for instance that of occasionally capitalizing adjectives (e.g., “Propositional communication,”18 or “Transitional history”19) or writing Gebahren20 [for Gebaren, “behavior”]. Also, Heidegger’s notorious coinage of hyphenated words was not standardized but, instead, with a few exceptions, is reproduced just as it appears in the manuscripts.
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I thank Hermann Heidegger for the trust with which he conferred on me the task of editing the Black Notebooks. Thanks are due Jutta Heidegger for proofreading the present volume and for checking the page proofs. I thank Detlev Heidegger for making available the first typescript. I express my appreciation to Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann for many discussions in which various editorial issues were decided. Such gratitude is also owing to Arnulf Heidegger and to Vittorio E. Klostermann. Anastasia Urban, of the Klostermann publishing house, always offered me capable and friendly collaboration, for which I am grateful. I am indebted to Ulrich von Bülow of the German Literature Archive in Marbach for assistance with regard to questions concerning the availability of the manuscripts. Finally, Sophia Heiden deserves my gratitude for her careful proofreading.
Peter Trawny
Düsseldorf
Dec. 13, 2013
1. “Ponderings X,” p. a, in Ponderings VII–XI (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014). The page references correspond to the pagination of the original manuscripts, which is printed in the margins of the published volumes.
2. Heidegger, Besinnung, GA66 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997), p. 426.
3. Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, GA94 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), p. 1.
4. “Ponderings XIV,” p. 120.
5. “Ponderings XV,” p. 19.
6. “Ponderings XII,” p. 2.
7. Cf. ibid., 53 as well as “Ponderings XIII,” p. 55.
8. “Ponderings XIV,” p. 12.
9. Ibid., p. 47.
10. “Ponderings XV,” p. 38
11. “Ponderings XIV,” p. 113.
12. “Ponderings XV,” p. 21.
13. “Ponderings XII,” p. 69.
14. “Ponderings XIV,” p. 91.
15. “Ponderings XII,” p. 67.
16. Ibid., 82.
17. “Ponderings XV,” p. 17.
18. “Ponderings XI,I” p. 51.
19. “Ponderings XIII,” p. 21.
20. Ibid., 95.