Approaching Heidegger’s History of Being Through the Black Notebooks

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the importance of the Black Notebooks (GA 94-99) beyond their contribution to Heidegger’s political biography. While attention has up to now focused almost exclusively on other matters, the Black Notebooks offer new perspectives on Heidegger’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, and beyond. The essay argues, that any reading of Heidegger’s later work that tries to ignore the question for the History of Being, as it moves from a consideration of the Meaning of Being to the History of Being, is doomed to misunderstand the whole of Heidegger’s thought. Therefore, if one wants to mobilize Heidegger’s thinking as a response to the great questions of our age, which this essay identifies as those of Global Warming, Globalisation, Nihilism and the Nightmare of the Manipulated Human Being, then one needs to force the question of history as the central problem underlying any future potentiality of Heidegger's philosophical impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Heidegger
• Black Notebooks
• History of Being
• globalization
• global warming
• Nihilism

Notes

1 Trawny 74.

2 Merleau-Ponty 122. As this is a rather central passage of this work, I am going to quote it here in full:

Si ce genre de pensée prend en charge l’homme et l’histoire, et si, feignant d’ignorer ce que nous en savons par contact et par position, elle entreprend de les construire à partir de quelques indices abstraits, … , puisque l’homme devient vraiment le manipulandum qu’il pense être, on entre dans un régime de culture où il n’y a plus ni vrai ni faux touchant l’homme et l’histoire, dans un sommeil ou un cauchemar dont rien ne saurait le réveiller.

3 Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV, 176f, my translation.

4 Heidegger, “Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger” 652–83.

5 Precisely because it is quite evident that Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzungen with Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Hegel, etc. have never been intended to be mere interpretations of philosophical doctrine, but were always an attempt of allowing us to take a step back towards a proper Wahr-nehmung, that is, perception of our experience, this shift is quite significant, especially in terms of understanding Heidegger’s hermeneutics. In other words, the critique of Nietzsche of the late 1930s and early 1940s is always and essentially a critique of the present. In this respect, the Auseinandersetzungen with these authors is, at the same time, the Aueinandersetzung with metaphysics, as it is to be found in the Contributions, Mindfulness, The History of Beyng, etc.

6 The initial reception of the Black Notebooks has been essentially informed by their editor, Peter Trawny, who coined the term “Being-Historical anti-Semitism”, or, slightly less awkward, “Seinsgeschichtlicher Anti-Semitismus”. See: Mitchell and Trawny. For the Blut und Boden ideology, see the most extreme, if unphilosophical response to Heidegger’s work by Emmanuel Faye, for example: Heidegger, L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie. See also the rather violent critique of this interpretation of the Black Notebooks by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, in: Herrmann and Alfieri, Martin Heidegger – Die Wahrheit über die Schwarzen Hefte.

7 This might sound strange in English, while the German refers to the Anbauen, i.e. to grow, to cultivate and the bestellen des Landes, i.e. to crop, to cultivate.

8 Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 89, my translation.

9 Figal 285.

10 Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V, 310: “Die Philosophie aber muß sich hüten, erbaulich seyn zu wollen” (my translation).

11 See Figal 285.

12 This remark, “Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht”, attributed to Heidegger in a story told by Hans-Georg Gadamer, might, therefore, only arise from hearsay, but has nonetheless a revelatory power with respect to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. See also: Haase, “Dike and iustitia, or: Between Heidegger and Nietzsche”.

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Overbeck, 2nd of July 1885, in: “Briefe”, KSB 610 7/63, 1885; “My life now consists of the desire that all things may be different from how I understand them; and that someone will make my ‘truths’ unbelievable”, my translation.

14 Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, KSA 11/565, my translation.

15 Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister”, 65.

16 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 22; KSA 2/40; “Our sensations of space and time are false, for tested consistently they lead to logical contradictions”. One needs to listen carefully here: Nietzsche speaks of our “sensations”, our “Empfindungen” of space and time, not about our ideas or conceptions of them.

17 See the quotation from Eye and Mind above, as it claims that the way in which we interpret our existence threatens to become the truth of our existence.

18 This is again a theme following from the idea of history in Nietzsche. See, especially, the “illumination of the Eternal Recurrence”, in KSA 9/494: “The new heavyweight: the Eternal Return of the Same. The infinite importance of our knowledge, our errors, of our habits and ways of life for all that comes.” My translation.

19 See Heidegger, Brief an Medard Boss, 29. Dezember 1967, in: Zollikoner Seminare, 352. And yet, we need to be careful to interpret this in the sense of an, essential trait of the human being, which would be strange in the context of Heidegger’s reflections. Rather, as he says in: Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 18: “Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into a mere standing-reserve”.

20 GA 97/308, my translation; “vielleicht auch hält das Ereignis mitten in der Jähe seiner Kehre an sich, so daß alles in die Machenschaft erstarrt und diese Starre sich als das Leben ausgibt”.

21 Anmerkungen VI-IX, GA 98/42.

22 Richardson XXII.

23 Cf. Bataille 12.

24 Vallega-Neu 83f.

25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, KSA 4/189, “Gedanken, die mit Taubenfüssen kommen, lenken die Welt”. And maybe it is for the same reason that we feel much more comfortable with, for example, Merleau-Ponty, even though he follows, as one can see in his defence of the Phenomenology of Perception as well as in Eye and Mind and the lecture courses on Nature, a similarly historical path, in that he positions the development of phenomenology within a historical framework, which, in the first text, answers to the historical fate of metaphysics and, in the second, more specifically, to the “nightmare from which there will be no awakening”, a nightmare essentially linked to the reification of the body.

26 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 272, “Both the contention that there are ‘eternal truths’ and the jumbling together of Dasein’s phenomenally grounded ‘ideality’ with an idealized absolute subject, belong to those residues of Christian theology within philosophical problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded”.

27 Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), (GA 94), 442.

28 See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 51.

29 This is often seen as the idea of the repetition of metaphysics with the aim of its destruction, as, for example, in the derivation of the idea of truth as adequatio intellectus et rei to the originary notion of truth as aletheia in Being and Time. While this is the step back into the originary experience of metaphysics, it does not accomplish the step back to the “things themselves”, already because, as Heidegger claims, the Greeks have not experienced truth in the fullness of aletheia. Equally, as has often been argued, there is not yet a full exposition of the phenomenon of “world” in Being and Time, which really does not come into its own before the Origin of the Work of Art; see “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”, in: Holzwege, 1–72; Engl. trans.: The Origin of the Work of Art, in: Poetry, Language, Thought.

30 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 4, “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological”.

31 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 38.