In-Between Origins and Futural Implications: Looking Back and Thinking Ahead With Heidegger
In the chapters making up this book we have tried to stay as close and true as possible to Heidegger’s philosophy as it takes shape after the Turn. At the same time, we have not wanted our readings to be a history of Heidegger’s thinking, nor have we wanted them to be strict retellings of his philosophy or potential explanations of what Heidegger might have intended us to think when reading his texts. We have tried to follow his advice to find the movement or rhythm of his texts and to let this movement or rhythm guide our writing. In this way, we hope that we have been able to develop some of the ideas that we have brought to the fore, from our engagement not only with Heidegger’s thinking but also with the work of the authors and thinkers whose texts we have read together with Heidegger.
However, we find it necessary to end our encounter with Heidegger by taking a step back and give our view of the fact that to approach Heidegger always comes with the responsibility to acknowledge and critically think through his Nazi involvement. This involvement cannot be forgotten. Having said that, we also acknowledge that his philosophy in itself still has value for thinking within all the subjects we approach in the book, that is, literature and poetry, education, and, of course, philosophy. This is also the reason why we begin the epilogue with an attempt to contextualize Heidegger’s philosophy, as well as our readings, within some of the interpretative traditions that have, in one way or another, related to Heidegger’s philosophy, before we address Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. We end the epilogue with a reflection on the paths of thinking he has opened up that form our readings and on what is arguably the most important word in Heidegger’s thinking after the Turn, namely, the word “Ereignis.”
Readings of Heidegger that move toward a renewed interpretation of literature and poetry must take into account that in the humanities, which includes studies in comparative literature, the fundamental concepts and interpretive frameworks adopted emerge primarily from critical theory, and so postmodernism and deconstruction play crucial roles in such forms of interpretation where both language and meaning are irreducible to the “myth of the given”; that is, they transcend both traditionalism and modernism. Fried (2001) argues that “Heidegger must be counted as one of the greatest influences on postmodernist thought” and, beyond, “one of its chief ‘founders’” (186). Elucidating this claim, Fried (2006) reasons that both “postmodernism and its attendant phenomenon of deconstruction” (157) owe debts to Heidegger’s “doctrinal” reading of Plato (“Plato’s Doctrine [Lerhe] of Truth”)—that is, Platonism—that grounds much of postmodern critique. For example, both Derrida (1981) and Irigaray (1985), each for their own purpose—deconstruction and psychoanalytic feminism, respectively—embrace a Heideggerian reading of Plato that traces the nihilistic decline of the West to Plato’s cave and the doctrine of the Forms (eidoi) or Ideas, which Heidegger identifies with the “first beginning” of philosophy. This is a view consistent with Thomson’s (2011) analysis of Heidegger and art: In the “Origin” Heidegger embraces a nonmodern or “postmodern” view of human comportment where he thinks in terms of a “postmodern responsiveness to the abundance of being,” which stands opposed to our “late-modern tendency toward the kind of technological making that imposes form on matter without paying heed to its intrinsic potentialities” (103). Although a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s relation to postmodernism and deconstruction is beyond the scope of these modest closing remarks, we do want to challenge the pervasive stereotype that Heidegger might be read in terms of either a conservative traditionalist or modernist in the strict sense of these terms. With that stated, our position is that although Heidegger’s thought does indeed contain elements traceable to the origin and development of both postmodernism and deconstruction, it is irreducible to either of these conceptual interpretive frameworks. In fact, Heidegger actually defies the types of labels that are often attributed to him, which include that of both “postmodernist” and “deconstructionist.”
As related to these thoughts regarding Heidegger, postmodernism, and deconstruction, we also note that Fried (2016) interprets Heidegger as a “radical historicist” (49). This is because for Heidegger, truth is not subjectively bound to the correspondence or agreement between thought/representation and an external objective reality. Rather, and this is pushed to the extreme during the Turn, truth “is the time-bound unfolding of how the world simply is meaningful to us as historical human beings, embedded in a given time, place and tradition” (49), and along with our reading, Fried concurs that the event of historical truth (Ereignis) is not wholly under our voluntaristic control, for the event of opening and founding a meaningful historical world (Ereignis) “happens to us” (49). Related to our talk of Heidegger and labels, here, too, we must tread with caution when approaching the term historicist in relation to Heidegger’s philosophy. This is because historicists, or cultural materialists, such as Dollimore and Sinfield (1985), adopt a form of historical-cultural critique that is unlike Heidegger’s view of “history,” for their aim is to question and criticize literary and cultural texts in a way that reveal that these texts are products relating directly to and emerging from economic and institutional modes of production, in terms that smack of causal determinacy. They then question how these sociopolitical factors exercise power in the construction and determinate control of subjects. Contrarily, Heidegger is clear that Dasein’s attuned historical (ontological) response (epoch grounding rejoinder) to the primordial address of Being is ultimately responsible for the various ways in which institutions arise in the first instance and are then mediated and structured through political and economic responses. Against historicism, for Heidegger, cultural-political responses are in essence indeterminate, because they are contingent upon a far more primordial phenomenon: the unique and original historical/epochal stance Dasein assumes in the temporal-historical moment of appropriation within the Being event (Ereignis).
To our concern regarding Heidegger’s relation to traditionalism and modernism, we recognize that Heidegger’s practice of philosophizing as Destruktion (Abbau), a practice that continues throughout the Turn, breaks up lines of thought that have become hardened as they filter through historical traditions. We find two crucial manifestations of Destruktion in Heidegger’s later thought in “The Age of the World Picture” written in 1938 and “The Question Concerning Technology” from 1955). Destruktion is not meant to break with the past but, rather, to put the past in question regarding its influence on the present while at once, in a liberatory fashion, revealing and freeing new and hitherto hidden and unforeseen possibilities for Dasein’s futural appropriation. This speaks against a traditionalist or staticist view but falls far short of the modernist or a secular humanist view, which is the belief that tradition can be overcome and that world mastery via human progress is an inevitable possibility through voluntarism empowered by the continued development of science and technology. It is not against the objective world that Dasein struggles in order to exercise its “subjective” control and establish its superiority, as in modernism. Rather, as we have shown, it is in and through participating in the phenomenon of Being’s unfolding as a giving or granting, in terms of Being’s essential unfolding as appropriation (das Seyn west als das Ereignis), that resolute Dasein’s historical Being-inthe-world first becomes as possibility. It is not the task of Dasein to master this world through determinate acts of will, as Heidegger makes clear in Contributions and the Hölderlin lectures of the 1930s, but instead, Dasein attempts to found and enact its historical destiny as it is given over to the event of Being. Perhaps nowhere else is this issue more powerfully elucidated by Heidegger (1993) than in the “Origin,” where, as we have already seen in Chapter 1 §2, through participation in the work of art, Dasein’s “vocation” is revealed in terms of its historical destiny. This occurs within the lighted space (die Lichtung) of the art work’s moment of truth-happening in the Riss, or context of the counter-striving activity of World and Earth, and this, for Heidegger, highlights Dasein’s historical role as a resolute and respectful co-participant in and “preserver” of the truth revealed by the work of art—truth that includes resolute Dasein but ultimately stands beyond the power of willful Dasein.1
It is possible to engage Heidegger’s philosophy in a legitimate and productive manner without focusing on any political implications. However, Zimmerman (1990) believes that since “Heidegger’s political orientation, especially his contempt for Enlightenment values, profoundly shaped his interpretation of Western history,” Heidegger “should also be read in light of those [political/historical] implications” (38).2 Zimmerman is careful to point out that—and we mentioned this above in relation to historicism or cultural materialism—readers must avoid reducing Heidegger’s thought to an “ideological reflex” of the reigning social-historical conditions; that is, interpreters would do well to resist the postmodern tendency to view all “ideas” as determined by political/social activity. At the time of this writing, the Black Notebooks (Ponderings) 1931–1941 (Schwarze Hefte) are available in English translation, and we believe that Heidegger scholarship should continue to acknowledge and grapple with the relationship between the philosopher and his politics, which includes working through new issues emerging from the recently published Notebooks. However, as Clark (2002) astutely recognizes, beyond merely an issue about Heidegger and National Socialism, it is also “necessarily about the nature of reading, interpretation, textual meaning, authorial responsibility and the readers’ responsibility” (134). Indeed, it is the case that even the most thoughtful commentators seeking to offer ethically responsible readings, tempering judgmental tendencies in favor of an openness to rereadings, will encounter great difficulties, for each individual reader, an issue of authorship to be sure, must “confront the issue anew, as his or her circumstances best allow” (138).
To “think” Heidegger and National Socialism involves exploring the relationship between philosophy and politics and, in addition, the potential link between philosopher and philosophy, which includes thinking on the value of philosophy in relation to its ability to provide answers to the questions it raises, especially in terms of philosophy’s so-called practical efficacy. However, as Gadamer (1992) observes, philosophical knowledge in the realm of praxis is often misconstrued by the “knowledge-oriented culture of modern times,” and what is unfortunately lost is the philosophical understanding that true practical knowledge (phronesis) “requires a special gift that does not rely on merely technically acquired information” (367). Here, Gadamer indicates, and quite rightly, that judgment plays an indispensable role in practical philosophy: This opens the possibility that our deliberation and choice, our practical comportment, will be guided in a desirable manner by good judgment. It also, unfortunately, holds the unfavorable potential for the exercise of bad judgment in the practical decisions we make, and with this in mind, we turn to the issues of Heidegger, politics, philosophy, and National Socialism.
On May 27, 1933 Heidegger delivered the Rectorial Address (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”) and became Führer of Freiburg University, its purported spiritual leader and guide. At that time, Heidegger was consumed with unbridled enthusiasm; he believed that National Socialism held the potential to renew and transform the spirit (Geist) and world of the German people, and the Black Notebooks testify to this. As Kisiel (2002) observes, for Heidegger, the “university’s educational task in the new Reich would be enormous, and in fact total in its revolutionary character and service to the state” (136). Despite this fact, we must avoid the fallacy of transferring Heidegger’s fanatical and ebullient reception of National Socialism as expressed in the Rectorial Address onto his entire philosophical corpus. Such a move is impudent because it is debatable whether the works prior to or after 1933, for example, Being and Time and the “Origin,” can legitimately be labeled “political philosophy.” However, it is possible to read the Rectorial Address as a testimony to Heidegger’s personal vision of the ineluctable relationship between his philosophy and politics. For in no uncertain terms, this manuscript is “political” and, beyond, brings together with politics, philosophical ontology, and education—in service of party and state—to inform the “practical” unfolding of the envisioned “other” historical beginning that the National Socialist movement might inspire.
As Schmidt (2001) observes, Heidegger placed “great faith in the power of knowledge to lead” and believed that the political leaders must be “educated by the philosopher,” and this erroneously indicated for Heidegger, in a manner reminiscent of Plato’s fateful miscalculation, that the “political will readily subordinate itself” to the superior and controlling “force of the philosophical” (233). In the inaugural address, Heidegger concretizes themes that are taking shape and evolving post-Being and Time, which are familiar to readers from Chapter 1 §1. It is possible to understand the historical-ontological core of National Socialism as envisioned by Heideg ger by attending to the “tragic” words that Aeschylus attaches to Prometheus: “Techne d’anangkes asthenestra makro” (knowledge is far less powerful than necessity). Heidegger (1998) claims this phrase expresses the “essence of knowledge” (31); however, the weighty historical-ontological significance that Heidegger attaches to these words radically transcends such a deceptively limited understanding focused on “knowledge.” We offer the following retranslation as related to the Turn and Heidegger’s developing view of history, destiny, and the question of the truth of Being: “Technicity-machination is far less essential (originary) than the necessity of Dasein’s dawning historical destiny,” and indeed, here, we must note, Heidegger is speaking in ominous terms of a collective historical destiny of a specific community (Gemeinschaft) that takes shape as an “ethnic and national community [Volksgemeinschaft]” (35).3
Ultimately, as indicated, Germany’s potential for a renewed beginning (Ursprung) is grounded in Wissenschaft, which is not to be understood in terms of scientific knowledge but, rather, in terms of philosophical thought that finds its grounding in and takes its guidance from the Seinsfrage. The connection we addressed earlier between philosophy and politics is made explicitly in the Rectorial Address in Heidegger’s analysis of original theoria in its relationship to praxis. For the Greeks, Heidegger (1998) tells us, theoria is not detached contemplation; instead, it is a mode of questioning that is the “highest mode of man’s energeia, of man’s ‘being at work’”; this is because the Greeks did not hope to “bring practice in line with theory, but the other way around; to understand theory as the supreme realization of genuine practice” (32). Philosophy, informed by the Seinsfrage, as “knowledge service,” grounds the Volk’s dedication to the other two forms of “practical” and “political” service: labor service and military service. Although Heidegger talks of the Volk submitting to the “power of the beginning” (31), of their spiritual and physical struggle to claim their history, this is not to indicate “resolute openness” (Entschlossenheit) or “releasement” (Gelassenheit) toward their approaching destiny; rather, there is the palpable presence of voluntarism in the Rectorial Address; Heidegger advocates the willful pursuit and appropriation of Germany’s new destiny, expressed in terms of the Volk’s appointed “task” or “vocation.” In 1933 Heidegger stresses the necessity of the “struggle” of the will, for all “capacities of will and thought, all strengths of the heart, and all capabilities of the body must be developed through struggle, must be intensified in struggle, and must remain preserved as struggle” (37). Returning to Aeschylus, it is the necessity (d’anangkes) of history standing over Germany that has “already decided this,” and it is the Volk’s task to burden this fateful responsibility and will its “historical-spiritual” mission (38).
Although Heidegger envisioned concrete practical implications for his ontological vision of National Socialism, there are many reasons to question the validity of his view, not the least of which is that despite Heidegger’s personal assessment of the functionality and indeed the supposed applicability of his philosophical ideas to the practical politics of National Socialism, in terms of his ontological “blueprint” for university and social-political reform, there is an undeniable abstract and even abstruse quality to many of the concepts Heidegger employs in the address, which actually speaks to the inapplicability of these concepts to the realm of praxis. On this point, Caputo (1999) argues that far from embracing Heidegger’s thought, the Nazi Party members “were baffled by the connection that Heidegger was making between the meaning of the [National Socialist] revolution and the question of Being” (53). Ultimately, as Crowell (2016) observes, after stepping down as rector in 1934, Heidegger recognized the failure of attempting to steer the movement in the direction of an ontological understanding of Being and destiny in light of the Grundfrage and realized that his “hopes for metapolitics were doomed by the imperatives of ontic politics” (35). Prior to considering the so-called failure of Heidegger in terms of the failure of philosophy itself, we briefly examine the role that Heidegger’s character played in this failure. We admit that this is also a complex issue, for although Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism is part of his biography, which includes, of course, his deeply held beliefs and stature of character, it is a difficult matter to ascertain whether and to what degree biography is relevant to Heidegger’s philosophy, or any philosophy for that matter.
The flaws in Heidegger’s character become evident if, in addition to examining his private correspondence and journaling in the Black Notebooks, we attend to the many questionable and unethical decisions rendered as acting Rector of Freiburg University. We should not be surprised, as Gadamer (1992) points out, that despite—and indeed perhaps because of—Heidegger’s superior philosophical powers that he was susceptible to a certain blindness that caused him to “lose himself to delusions” (368). Dallmayr (1992) also recognizes this tendency toward delusional thought and beliefs and argues that Heidegger’s grandiose persona, and we might say without risking hyperbole, megalomania, drove his outlandish “ambition to guide and lead Hitler (den Fuhrer Fuhren)” (289). To further this line of thought, Fried (2016) recognizes that Heidegger’s immense ego led him to the conclusion that National Socialism would “succeed only if the German Volk, the youth, the university, even the Nazi party itself,” understood what was at stake on “his terms” (51). Fried goes on to point out that in the Black Notebooks Heidegger reveals that he never actually saw himself as a failure, for he placed the blame for the failure of National Socialism on the weakness of the German Volk and flawed state of higher education structured by the views of scientism, vocationalism, and the technologizing of knowledge; indeed, for Heidegger, the entire “revolution itself had failed to shoulder the task set for them by history” (51). In addition to Heidegger’s egregious overestimation of his potential philosophical influence, it must be noted that Heidegger demonstrated a glaringly naïve understanding of politics, and this also contributed to Heidegger’s gross misunderstanding of philosophy’s authentic relationship to the political.
To further pursue an issue from earlier, Heidegger correctly recognizes that the Nazis failed to properly understand his lofty and dense ontological ideas, and in addition, as Caputo (1999) concludes, although they relied on his political devotion, they “did not have the slightest inclination to let either Heidegger personally or his thought be a guiding force for the new Reich” (67). We must understand that the Nazi’s understanding of the German revolution was in no way radical enough for Heidegger: The Nazis were concerned with Germany’s revolution representing a “new start” (Beginn) whereas Heidegger, as we have seen, demonstrates the far loftier and ontological concern for historical “origins” (Ursprung) and “beginnings” (Anfang) that transcend the hold of the metaphysics of presence, ushering in the “other” beginning. Caputo reasons that because of Heidegger’s dense philosophical conceptions, with tenuous connections to “practical” political practice, Nazi officials were actually correct to be skeptical of Heidegger’s talk of the “questionability of Being, the groundless abyss beneath whatever we call ground,” for when attempting to persuade the Nazis that a “revolution from the ground up required a questioning of the ground,” it was unclear to them whether or not this type of ontological probing could eventually, with disastrous consequences, be “turned against the grounds of the National Socialist revolution itself” (68).
Addressing the issue of philosophy’s relationship to social-political realities, Gadamer makes two crucial observations about that the so-called Heidegger problem as related to National Socialism: First, as we have touched on previously, the problem is grounded in the limitations of Heidegger the man, the mortal, the human-all-too-human thinker-and-philosopher. Second, the problem is also traceable to the inherent limitations, or we might say danger, at the heart of philosophy as conceived and practiced by Heideg ger. Reaffirming our claim, Gadamer (1992) argues that Heidegger fell prey to his own “secret wishes for happiness and the shimmering dream of fulfillment” through philosophy’s perceived power and that, even beyond Heidegger, all those practicing philosophy must be aware of the impending “danger of misjudging” themselves and of “clinging to illusions” (367). As stated, Heidegger, as an extremely gifted philosopher—often ranked alongside Wittgenstein as one of the two greatest philosophers of the 20th century—was perhaps more predisposed to fits of delusion than other lesser thinkers, for the superiority of his powers predisposed him to be led all too easily astray by his own genius. “Whoever envisions possibilities with great clarity,” observes Gadamer, “may also see what he wants to see—which may not actually exist at all,” and Gadamer claims that Heidegger after 1933 eventually recognized this but, unfortunately, “admitted it through his later silence” (368).
The failure of Heidegger in 1933, as related to Gadamer’s insights, might also be traced to the unique essence of philosophy itself. Consider that philosophy asks questions that the sciences fail to answer, so why is it, Gadamer asks, “should it be considered especially qualified to penetrate and solve daily problems” (366), such as our social-political interrelations with others, better than other modes of inquiry? It must be noted that the “freedom” to practice philosophy “presupposes the ability to ask questions, to see, possibilities, even when they may not be able to be realized” (367). Thus, philosophy searches and seeks but never truly finds or arrives at definitive answers; it is, as Heidegger would later recognize, far more adept at formulating questions than at arriving at answers to those questions. The most and perhaps best philosophy can offer is what Gadamer terms, burrowing from Jaspers, the “clarification of existence” by means of illuminating the “boundaries of knowledge,” all the while lacking the prescient and prophetic insight to “anticipate which practical goals will be manageable and realistic” (368). Although Gadamer does not elaborate this point, his reference to Jasper’s (1962) philosophy is meant to indicate the radical difference between “fundamental” or ontological insight of Existenz and “finite knowledge” of the world, which is related to propositional truth and scientific techniques “that can be applied and repeated at will” (17). This, according to Gadamer, is unfortunately what Heidegger in 1933 seemed to remain blind to with respect to his philosophy of Being. However, it is obvious that in the 1935 lecture course, Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger painstakingly details the limitations of philosophy and writes in considerable depth on this issue, offering a radical reassessment of the earlier views he held in 1933 regarding philosophy’s power and value to influence or control praxis in a way that echoes Gadamer: “Philosophy,” Heidegger (2000) claims, “can never directly supply the forces and create the mechanisms and opportunities that bring about a historical state of affairs” (11).4 Thus, in 1935 Heidegger indicates in no uncertain terms that we cannot do anything with philosophy; however, this is not the end of the story. For he goes on to pose the following thought-provoking query for our consideration: “Even if we can’t do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it” (13)? We might say, in line with Gadamer (1992), that as Heidegger moves deeper into the Turn, he becomes acutely aware of the “political incompetence of philosophy” (364).
Heidegger faced the denazification committee in 1945, and it is not an exaggeration to state that many of the French were more interested in arranging meetings for Heidegger with leading intellectuals than they were in learning the degree of his involvement with the politics of the Nazi Party and their crimes against humanity. As Safranski (1998) informs us, with the exception of Adolf Lampe, who “was outraged at the absence of any sense of guilt in Heidegger” (337), representing the one proverbial thorn in Heidegger’s side, opposing his rehabilitation and calling for Heidegger to admit of personal responsibility, the committee in August 1945 was overall congenial, arriving “at a very lenient judgment on Heidegger’s political behavior” (338). Heidegger’s fellow philosophers and former students were the hardest on him; for example, Lowith (1998) finds it impossible to divorce Heidegger’s politics from his “existential” philosophy, his abject failure from his pursuit of the question of Being—and so, to condemn Heidegger’s political affiliations is to at once condemn his philosophy in toto: For Heidegger’s questionable, and beyond, horrendous political decision cannot be grasped or judged “in isolation from the very principles of Heideggerian philosophy itself” (182). Ultimately, what they all demanded from Heidegger was his admission of guilt, expecting from him that which he never adequately provided, an explanation that served to fully justify his involvement with National Socialism and, beyond this, an apology for Auschwitz. They wanted, as Safranski (1998) observes, “a word that would finally clear Heidegger of being identified with Nazism” (428), and this “word” never came, not even in the posthumously published interview in Der Spiegel.5
Overall, our conclusions on these issues find kinship with Kockelmans (1984) and Young (1997): It is dubious to attempt to legitimately extract political theory from Heidegger’s greater overall philosophical corpus. Although a political agenda can certainly be read into and imposed upon Heidegger’s texts from the outside, there is neither a Nazi philosophy nor a “blueprint” for a political agenda that can be lifted with any sense of certainty—save for, perhaps, as presented earlier, the Rectorial Address of 1933—from major works such as Being and Time or the later writings of the Turn. However, despite this, it is necessary to take Heidegger to task on the issue of Nazism. We argue against the apologetics that Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism is wholly reducible to his political naiveté, which includes his gross overestimation of philosophy’s power to sway and influence the development of Germany’s “political” history. Heidegger’s students would perhaps agree with the following point, namely, that a naive complicity is complicity nonetheless.
So, we return to the thoughts that began this section: Is it fair to demand a consistency between the life lived and the life philosophized by the philosopher? We conclude by offering two possible responses, although there are certainly many more ways to approach this highly complex and controversial issue: Heidegger undoubtedly made some horrendously egregious moral decisions. It can be argued, in a manner reminiscent of Sartre, that in affirming the politics of Nazism, Heidegger was at once affirming every single atrocity committed in the name of Germany during World War II, leading to the Holocaust and Europe’s destruction. However, as Polt (2007; 1999) and others have cogently argued in an ethically appropriate manner, if we dismiss Heidegger’s work on the grounds of his politics and moral past, we must as well dismiss the work of all the other philosophers, and further, artists, and poets, among others, who have also behaved immorally. Although we find it unrealistic to demand that the philosopher’s life represent the embodiment of the work in its totality, there must be some relation between and subsequent responsibility for his thoughts and actions, that is, Heidegger’s “political” life, which represents his involvement with Nazism, and his “philosophical” life as the great philosopher of Being.
The main theme of this book has been Heidegger’s thinking after the Turn, and the guiding word (Leitwort) for Heidegger after 1936 is a word which plays a prominent role in our readings as well, namely, the, in truth, untranslatable word Ereignis. Sometimes it is translated as enownment, sometimes as the event of appropriation or the appropriative event. As is now perhaps evident from our previous chapters, there are other variants, to be sure, but in the Epilogue we keep the German word, for reasons not of convenience but because it comes closest to what is possible to say at the limit of metaphysics. Ereignis, furthermore, is also part of the title of the book that is Heidegger’s most systematic attempt to account for the new path his thinking was taking after 1936. The book we are thinking of is, of course, Contributions to Philosophy: From enowning (Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis). And we want to specifically reflect on a passage taken form Contributions, which we think ties in to our view of the history of Heidegger’s thinking, as well as on the personal history of Heidegger, and also on the traditions of scholarship on Heidegger. The passage in question runs as follows:
The burden of thinking in the other beginning is different: it is enthinking that which is enowned as enowning itself; it is to bring be-ing into the truth of its essential swaying. However, because be-ing becomes enowning in the other beginning, the echo of be-ing must also be history, must pass through history by an essential shock, and must know and at the same time be able to say the moment of this history.
(75–76)
Anders ist im anderen Anfang der Philosophie die Last des Denkens: das Er-denken dessen, was sich ereignet als das Ereignis selbst, das Seyn in die Wahrheit seiner Wesung bringen. Weil aber im anderen Anfang das Seyn Ereignis wird, muß auch der Anklang des Seyns Geschichte sein, die Geschichte in einer wesentlichen Erschütterung durchmachen und den Augenblick dieser Geschichte zugleich wissen und sagen können.
(GA 65, 108)
Within a path of thinking that belongs to the other beginning the “burden of thinking” (Last des Denkens) is different from a path of thinking within, what Heidegger calls, “machination” (Machenschaft), which we have already pointed out is a precursor to Heidegger’s notion of technology, or calculative thinking, in which everything can be counted, accounted for, and measured, and which leads to the “abandonment of being in the forgottenness of being” (75). The burden of thinking within the calculative order of thinking is the burden of measuring, judging, accounting for, critiquing, and counting—it consists in a doing through manipulating before any essential making is done; that is, it is unconcealing as enframing. A thinking as the burden of machination is never still and does not hear nor feel the rhythm of the movement of essential thinking. This kind of thinking carries with it the burden of history, of the past, of what has come before and is now presented before us, making us answerable and obliging us to respond. But, this response is always in the form of a judgment, often within an ethical order that follows certain predetermined ethical rules, which decides between right or wrong, good and evil, in short, an enframed ethics. This is the burden of thinking as Machenschaft.
The burden of thinking in the “other beginning” is a burden of responsibility, in which we are able to respond to the call of the truth of Being by listening to the movement of the instantly vanishing moment of Ereignis. This is not a manipulative making as Machenschaft but a letting be as Gelassenheit; it is being still and following the path of thinking opened by the rhythm of language. In this way, the unkown can be known and said though naming as poietic saying. The burden of thinking in the other beginning is not heavy, it is a burden because it requires essential responsibility, which means that it is not a responsibility that must answer to any law of Machenschaft but is obligated by the truth of Being as Ereignis. The burden of thinking as responsibility thus appropriates as that which comes to happen as Ereignis. Instead of judging, this responsibility lets things happen by letting be, by following the path of the movement that is a recollective questioning before any tradition or tribunal of taste or law. If we judge a person because of his or her acts we judge them within the “En-framing” of a set of nomological laws or ethical rules. This cannot be overcome and is necessary to secure that life is valued and cannot be violated, but it cannot be used to judge a person’s thinking, or an artist’s artwork, or a poet’s poems in the same way, according to the same enframing which is part of the rational order of technological thinking and which reduces thinking and art to a measurable use value that can be calculated and judged. Thus, before laying down the verdict on how Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism affects his philosophy and his thinking, or hermeneutically analyzing his philosophy according a certain -ism, we should take Heidegger’s (2002) own advice in Identity and Difference “to pay attention to the path of thought rather than to its content” (23). This is when essential change comes about in thinking, and it comes, if we take Heidegger at his word, as a call, in terms of a monumental historical responsibility, from out of the truth of Being as Ereignis.
1 On a related note, in light of what we have stated regarding interpretive approaches to Heidegger, our reading takes into account Babich’s (2015) recommendation for scholars approaching Heidegger, namely, that they should consciously resist the temptation to bandy about terms such as neo or new in connection with Heidegger. For this gives the erroneous impression that scholars have somehow mastered the “old” Heidegger and can now move “beyond” him in order to confront the so-called “new Heidegger” (See also Introduction §3 and Chapter 2, “Concluding Remarks: Preparing for the Heideggerian Readings”). Babich asserts, and rightly so, that we are still just beginning the attempt to know Heidegger and to think with him, because we are certainly not yet in a position to categorically think beyond him: “Once we begin to read an author we think we know, even when we think we know, perhaps especially when we do know the author, we find ourselves in the realm of the unexplored: finding nuances, sometimes whole ranges of riches missed the first time, contexts we failed to see and points we realize may be vanishing from our grasp even as we notice them for the very first time” (178).
2 The fervent debate surrounding Heidegger and National Socialism continues to rage in academic circles. To this point, in a recent issue of Philosophy Today, Sheehan (2015) confronts Faye (2012), whose reading of Heidegger and Nazism is skewed and unsympathetic. Sheehan meticulously catalogues Faye’s countless errors, exaggerations and, what appear to be, purposefully fraudulent readings of Heidegger’s key texts, which give the impression that Faye, in a vindictive manner, is determined to construct a case against Heidegger from the start. Faye owes a debt, as do all current commentators, to Farias’s (1989) Heidegger and Nazism, a book criticized by Dallmayr (1992) for being far too “polemical,” in that is reduces Heidegger to an “adversary, an enemy ‘who is wrong’ and ‘whose very existence constitutes a threat’” (282). Farias melts truths with half-truths, “insinuations and innuendoes—all presented with the same unquestioned authority” (283). However, there are other readings that are also questionable, either those engaging uncritically in apologetics or purposefully skirting the issue of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism altogether.
3 Although critical of National Socialism in writings after 1933, Heidegger remained silent about the Holocaust, the single most horrific event of the 20th century. We do not embrace the position that Heidegger did indeed break his silence in the 1949 Bremen lecture when comparing the death camps and production of corpses to the mechanized food industry, which callously relegates the Holocaust to a single historical event among many tainted by the attunement of das Ge-stell (see Introduction §1). Dallmayr (2016) suggests that the in the Black Notebooks Heidegger’s talk of “World Jewry” lives at a level that is “abstract” and highly speculative, which is “not adequately supported by concrete details” (24). After clarifying that any form of anti-Semitism is dangerous, Malpas (2016) makes the case, despite Heidegger’s mention of an ethnic revolution, that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is grounded in a “form of cultural anti-Semitism of a sort that was widespread in Germany and Europe before the Second World War” and not grounded in “natural difference” (6). Malpas recognizes that the issue is complex and that it demands not only a concern for Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, but in addition a concern for the issue Malpas refers to as the “pro-Semitic” elements of Heidegger’s thought. This concerns Heidegger’s immersion in and contribution to the traditions of “twentieth- and—twenty-first-century Jewish thinking” (9–10), which is crucial to both a deeper understanding of such thinkers as Arendt, Levinas, and Husserl, as well as Heidegger himself. Safranski (1998) demonstrates that there are undeniable strains of anti-Semitism expressed by Heidegger not only in personal letters and journal entries but also instantiated in his “official” duties as rector of Freiburg University. As Wolin (1998) observes, already in 1933, “the brutal characteristics, of totalitarian rule,” driven in part by an undeniable anti-Semitism, “were as plain as noonday” (17). And, as Fried (2016) makes explicit, as early as 1929, in “a letter of recommendation discovered in 1989” (46), Heidegger already warns of the dangers “Jewification [Verjudung]” poses to the spiritual life of Germany and its future rooted in the national ties to blood and the soil.
4 It must be noted that we are not claiming Heidegger espoused of view of philosophy antithetical to a “technologized” method only after 1933, for as Gonzalez (2009) rightly points out, in a “course from 1919/1920 entitled Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger characterizes philosophy as a ‘struggle for method,’” and what is distinct about philosophy in Heidegger’s view at this time is that the philosophical method resists “technologizing” (426). In this early lecture course Heidegger rails against the view that philosophy as a “mere instrument for producing results, to be discarded once the results are achieved, but rather itself contains and exhibits the truth philosophy seeks” (426); that is, the truth or essence of philosophy is inseparable from its method, and is not found in any results that reside beyond its continuous and renewed mode of questioning. Gonzalez links this view of philosophy in Heidegger with Socrates’s ever-persistent quest for truth; however, Gonzalez stops short of comparing Heidegger’s understanding of “method” in philosophy with the Socratic dialectic. Despite Heidegger’s claims in the Rectorial Address, it is clear that the “non-technologized” view of philosophy is already present to his thought prior to 1933 and reemerges, as we suggest, after 1933 when Heidegger renounces “official” party affiliation with National Socialism and moves deeper into the Turn. For example, in What Is Called Thinking? amid a rare discussion of Socrates as he might appear apart from Plato (Platonism), Heidegger (1968) describes Socrates’s philosophical thought and method of inquiry in terms that are reminiscent of Being-historical thinking from Contributions: “Socrates,” Heidegger declares, “did nothing else than place himself into [the] draft, [the] current [of Being] and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West” (182).
5 Indeed, the French poet Paul Celan, as recounted by Safranski (1998), was deeply conflicted in his feelings toward Heidegger the philosopher and man, for in the end, Celan became disenchanted after meeting and conversing with Heidegger on more than several occasions, which included a fateful visit to Todtnauberg and Heidegger’s Hutte. This is because Celan was perhaps urgently waiting for “a confession of guilt” or word from the heart, and was, along with many others, “disappointed that Heidegger did not make one” (423).
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