These two treatises were grouped together by Martin Heidegger for a separate Hegel-volume for the Gesamtausgabe. The two treatises belong together both in terms of the time of their composition and in terms of their content. Although the texts are at times fragmentary and some passages in either text contain addresses to an audience, which indicates that they were composed for an oral presentation, Heidegger explicitly assigned them as treatises to the third division of the Gesamtausgabe.
The treatise on “Negativity” from 1938/39 consists of notes strung together in pieces that allow for a continuous reconstruction. The drafts are worked out to different degrees and in different ways. They range from detailed parts in which the rhythm of the speaker can still be discerned, to “glances” with a clearly numbered outline of thoughts, to “sketches of thought,” as I would like to call them, that is, they are brief unfoldings of a concept or simply different approaches of the inquiry and what are at times tentative answers. As such, these notes offer formidable insight into the workshop of Heidegger’s way of thinking, questioning, and elucidating.
The treatise that seeks to elucidate the “Introduction” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit from 1942 offers a different picture. What we have here is a continuous text that divides the sixteen paragraphs of Hegel’s “Introduction” into five parts and that—after a preliminary consideration—interprets these paragraphs in a way that follows the text for the most part. Only the final part, titled “Absolute metaphysics,” was not worked out. Instead it consists of drafts of thoughts of the kind described above.
Although the fact that the texts were composed for an oral presentation cannot be missed, it remains unclear at least for the text on “Negativity” what the occasion for the composition was and for what audience Heidegger undertook it. In fact it is unclear whether the text was ever presented in this form at all. The documents detailing Heidegger’s seminars (course catalogues, Heidegger’s own lists, seminar registers) give no indication. In the winter semester of 1938–39 Heidegger did not teach a graduate seminar but only a beginner’s seminar on a text by Nietzsche.
The notes on “Negativity” may have been presented to a small circle of colleagues, the so-called philosophical Kränzchen.[39] Evidently the audience that Heidegger addresses here is one that was to a degree familiar with Hegel’s philosophy and that occupied themselves with Hegel’s Logic.
Perhaps a presentation before this circle of colleagues was also the occasion for the “Elucidation of the ‘Introduction’ of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.” We find some evidence for this in Off the Beaten Track, which Heidegger himself published in 1950. This work also contains an elucidation of the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, titled “Hegel’s Concept of Experience.” However, this elucidation has a completely different style. In the “List of Sources” Heidegger writes, “The contents of the essay were thoroughly discussed in a more didactic form in seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Books IV and IX) 1942–3, and during the same period presented in two lectures before a smaller audience” (GA 5, p.375).[40]
Both manuscripts, like many others too, were transcribed by Fritz Heidegger. In the winter of 1941–42 Heidegger undertook the transcription of “Negativity,” presumably for the purposes mentioned above. He also added handwritten supplements. They are for the most part abbreviated references. They have been supplemented with bibliographical information and are printed here in the footnotes. Due to what seems to have been an accident, three full pages of the manuscript of the “Elucidation of the ‘Introduction’ of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” were put in the supplements, which had the effect that Fritz Heidegger did not transcribe them as was the case with the other supplements. The pages in question are the chapter “The Experience [Erfahrung] of Consciousness,” which fits well at the end of part three and in all likelihood was written for it.
For the publication both manuscripts were carefully read, or deciphered, and compared to the transcriptions as far as these were available. Omissions were supplemented, reading errors were corrected, and later additions were incorporated as footnotes.
The structure is indicated in both manuscripts. The individual paragraphs in each of the five parts of “Negativity” were numbered consecutively. In the odd case where subheadings were missing they were added (in the form of a keyword that matches the content of the paragraph). The same was done for the supplements.
Following Contributions to Philosophy (GA65), the publication of this book marks the publication of a second volume from the third division. In contrast to the lectures of the second division, where in accordance with the wish of the author small imperfections of the oral presentation had to be compensated for the sake of a carefully constructed text, the texts of the third division follow the handwritten original copy more closely. For the many sketches of thought this means that every underlining and every quotation mark was preserved even if this leads to doubled emphases. The abundance of underlining and quotation marks is characteristic of the author’s style of work.
Most of the citations come from Heidegger himself. The necessary bibliographical additions are based on the copies used by Heidegger from his own library and from the Philosophical Seminar of the University of Freiburg. In a few cases quotations were completed.
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I would like to cordially thank Dr. Hermann Heidegger, Prof. Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm v. Herrmann, and Dr. Hartmut Tietjen for always having been kind and willing to help with questions of deciphering, problems of organization, and the search for sources, as well as for their critical review. I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Klaus Jacobi and cand. phil. Mark Michalski for their help with the citations of quotations that were hard to locate.
Stuttgart, June 1993.
Ingrid Schüßler