Heidegger and the Jews

The Black Notebooks

Donatella Di Cesare

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509503834, 9781509503827
• eBook ISBN: 9781509503865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.

III
THE QUESTION OF BEING AND THE JEWISH QUESTION

And Heidegger? Did Heidegger hate the Jews?1

1 The Night of Being

The landscape in which the Jew appears in the pages of Heidegger’s writings is where the story of Being unfolds. The first volume of the Black Notebooks dates from the transitional years, from 1931 to 1938, during which Heidegger also wrote two other decisive works, the Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935 and Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), written between 1936 and 1938. The bitter delusion of Heidegger’s rectorate at the University of Freiburg was added to the interruption of Being and Time, published in 1927 as the first part of an admittedly incomplete work.

In his Letter on “Humanism,” which appeared in 1947, in the aftermath of World War II, it was Heidegger himself, as is well known, who suggested the idea of a Kehre, a “turn” or turning point in his reflections, moving away from the fundamental ontology of Being and Time, which was focused on being-in-the-world – on the idea of Being understood as an event.2 But this should not lead us to believe, as has at times happened, that this shift in the orientation of Heidegger’s thinking merely designated a circumstance in his life. The word Kehre has a philosophical weight that emerged in particular in Contributions to Philosophy. The turning point was not only the gesture of a thinker leaving behind one pathway in order to follow the successive one; nor was it solely the motion of thinking that, freeing itself from fixity, reverses, turns around, changes direction, to unfold into Being; much more, this turn was the way in which Being “gave itself.” Being itself was turning.3

In German, Kehre can indicate the narrow curve or hairpin turn in a mountain path, the turning point that marks a change in direction, and a change in altitude – that turning around which is, however, also a progression forward, toward the summit. In this mountainous passage, amid perilous crossroads, paths that are brusquely interrupted, roads that have yet to be dug, a new speculative universe unfolded for Heidegger. Rather than marking a before and an after, the turn marks the direction in which Heidegger’s meditations were deepening – the place of his philosophy.

The starting point for Being and Time is existence, or rather Dasein, the state of being human in its facticity. Among all the entities, Being is the only one capable of posing the question about existence. Heidegger’s path followed the projection of Being toward its possibilities, up to the ultimate possibility of no longer being – up to death. But the end of Being cannot be considered the fulfillment of philosophical inquiry, nor therefore the conclusion of the work, ended only by force, and therefore incomplete. Heidegger himself asked whether his orientation had only been unilateral, if that turn toward the authenticity of the being-toward-the-end had not attracted his attention to only “one of the ends,” leaving in the shadows the other term, the “beginning” – that is, birth.4

What about the beginning? The provenance of Being? The immemorial wellspring from which there emerges the facticity into which Being is thrown? It is the finiteness of Being that prompts us to reflect on the opening of the beginning; it is its historicity that requires the passage to the history of Being.

But what does the history of Being mean? It is neither a version of history nor – much less – the object of a historiography. Geschichte (history) refers to Geschehen (occurrence). The history of Being is the occurrence of Being, which continually unfolds in its historical shattering.

In Being and Time, the great problem of philosophy – Being – is re-read in the light of its history, in order that this word, so evanescent and mysterious, could be liberated from the metaphysical crystallization that had made the grammatical infinitive “to be” one entity among all the others.5 Therefore, the history of Being is not ontology. This word – as Derrida observed in a 1964 lecture – “is going to appear more and more inadequate,” because “not only is Heidegger not here undertaking the foundation of an ontology [. . .] – what is at issue here is rather a destruction of ontology.”6

In the Black Notebooks, at the beginning of Ponderings IV, which dates from 1934/5, Heidegger availed himself of an orthographic expedient, to which he also returned elsewhere, in order to distance himself from the language of metaphysics and to introduce, with an unprecedented spelling, a new way of understanding Being: no longer Sein, but Seyn – no longer being, but Beyng. And Heidegger noted the task that awaited him: to “blaze a trail for Beyng in the concept.”7 This meant to follow its unfolding or “becoming.”8

The ultimate horizon of the Black Notebooks was therefore the question of Being, understood not as a problem but rather as a historical question that demanded an answer from its recipients. The turn in Heidegger’s thinking in the early 1930s was when the question of Being became radicalized in a political sense at the same time that it was being explored more deeply, and consolidated. The more the situation intensified, the more Heidegger seemed, paradoxically, to free himself of impediments and restraints. Much later, in a letter to Hannah Arendt of May 6, 1950, Heidegger recalled that period: “Then there was another shift in 1937/1938, when Germany’s catastrophe became clear to me and this burden became a pressure that enabled me to think through the issue in a more persevering and liberated way.”9

The age of metaphysics, which was coming to an end – that long span of time between the early Greek beginning and “the other beginning” that was awaited – was marked not only by the oblivion of Being, but also by its abandonment. Beings as entities no longer seemed to find the link that connected them to Being. With an almost obsessive insistence, Heidegger denounced the Seinsverlassenheit, which he meant in a double sense – both as the abandonment of Being, but also as abandonment on the part of Being. As the end approaches, while the way is opened to the other beginning, Being withdraws. Indeed, it can be said that its withdrawal – forgotten, veiled, hidden – is an indication of nihilism achieved, of the ineluctable end of modernity, the final phase of metaphysics. It was the night of Being.

In Ponderings VIII, from 1938/9, Heidegger wrote: “the night belongs to beyng and is not merely an ‘image’ of it.” The night does not render perceptible that which is not perceptible, given that the night is “altogether nothing objective that could be represented – nothing of a being – but instead is an essential occurrence of beyng.”10 The night does not have a negative timbre; it would have, if it were judged to be the negation of the day, just as cold is judged to be the negation of heat. But “Coldness and night are the concealed coffers in which what is simple is preserved from touch.”11 The Being that belongs to the cold of the night, that has withdrawn there to find shelter, awaiting the impending end, is the dark protagonist of the Black Notebooks.

2 In An Esoteric Tone . . .

Heidegger must always have had his audience in mind, both as a writer and as a speaker. The d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Foreword
• I Between Politics and Philosophy
• II Philosophy and Hatred of the Jews
• III The Question of Being and the Jewish Question
• IV After Auschwitz
• Index
• End User License Agreement