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Ponderings II–VI
Black Notebooks 1931–1938
Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz
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Ponderings II–VI
Black Notebooks 1931–1938
Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz
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About This Book
Ponderings II–VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger's "Black Notebooks." In a series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in this volume were written between 1931 and 1938 and thus chronicle Heidegger's year as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the Nazi era. Published in German as volume 94 of the Complete Works, these challenging and fascinating journal entries shed light on Heidegger's philosophical development regarding his central question of what it means to be, but also on his relation to National Socialism and the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s in Germany. Readers previously familiar only with excerpts taken out of context may now determine for themselves whether the controversy and censure the "Black Notebooks" have received are deserved or not. This faithful translation by Richard Rojcewicz opens the texts in a way that captures their philosophical and political content while disentangling Heidegger's notoriously difficult language.
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Topic
FilosofiaSubtopic
Fenomenologia in filosofiaINTIMATIONS X PONDERINGS (II) AND DIRECTIVES
October 1931
M. H.
πάντα γὰρ πολμητέον1
Cf. pp. 19 and 132.2
What should we do?
1
Who are we?
Why should we be?
What are beings?
Why does being happen?
Philosophizing proceeds out of these questions upward into unity.
* * *
1
What we extol as blessing depends on what afflicts us as plight.
And on whether plight truly urges us on, i.e., urges us away from staring at the situation and talking it over.
Greatest plight—that we must finally turn our backs on ourselves and on our “situation” and actually seek ourselves.
Away from detours, which merely lead back to the same beaten paths; sheer evasions—remote and desultory—before the ineluctable.
The human being should come to himself!
2
Why? Because a human being “is” a self—yet is in such a way as to lose or indeed never win himself and to sit somewhere otherwise captivated and transported—we still scarcely see all this great being and potential for being as we gaze at wretched imitations and dried up and incomprehensible exemplars—proffered “types.”
But: how does a human being come to his self?
Through what are his self and its selfness determined?
Is that not already subordinated to a first choice!
Insofar as the human being does not choose and instead creates a substitute for choosing, he sees his self
1. through reflection in the usual sense;
2. through dialogue with the thou;
3. through meditation on the situation;
4. through some idolatry.
3
Supposing, however, that the human being had chosen and that the choice actually struck back into his self and burst it open—
i.e., supposing that the human being had chosen the disclosability of the being of beings and by this choice was placed back into Dasein,3 must he then not proceed far into the stillness of the happening of being, a happening which possesses its own time and its own silence?
Must he not have long been silent in order to find again the power and might of language and to be borne by them?
Must not all frameworks and specialties be shattered here and all worn-down paths be devastated?
Must not a courage, one which reaches very far back, attune the disposition here?
4 Someone who sticks fast to the foot of the mountain—how will he ever even see the mountain?
Only more and more rock faces.
But how to come upon the mountain?
Only through a leap from another mountain; but how to come upon that one?
Already to have been there; to be someone placed on the mountain and ordered to be there.
Who was already so? And is it still because no others can drive him away?
Beginning and re-beginning of philosophy!
2
5 We stand before nothingness*—to be sure, but in such a way that we do not put nothingness and this standing into effect, do not know how to put them into effect—cowardice and blindness before the opening of the being that bears us into beings.
* Indeed not before nothingness—instead, before each and every thing, but as nonbeings (cf. p. 50).
3
Must the great lone path be ventured, silently—into Da-sein, where beings become more fully beings? Untroubled by all situations?
Has it not long been folly and confusion and groundlessness to run after the “situation”?
“Situation”—at the beach and in the sand, small mussels are splashed about, into them we wriggle and see only wrigglers but never the waves and the upsurge of beings!
4
6
Nothingness—which is higher and deeper than nonbeings—too great and worthy for any individual or all together to stand before it.
Nonbeings—which are less than nothingness—because expelled from the being that negates all beings.
Less—because undecided, neither amid beings, since these latter are more fully, nor amid nothingness.
5
A disregarding of the situation is to be set in motion, but out of the positive aspect of the ineluctable—the disregarding of the situation and the justification for doing so.
We first are our situation when we no longer ask after it.
Back into the “unconscious”—i.e., not into “complexes” but into the truly happening and necessary “spirit.”
This devilish—or rather deified—farming of the situation! The semblance of seriousness.
6
7
Mankind no longer knows what to do with itself—and consequently conjectures “everything” in the end.
7
Mankind believes it must do something with itself—and does not understand that Da-sein has already done something with it (beginning of philosophy)—from which mankind fled long ago.
This—the fact that in Dasein beings have being—i.e., become more fully beings and more fully nullified—is the mission [Auftrag] of humanity in this happening.
8
Being and Time I4 a very imperfect attempt to enter into the temporality of Dasein in order to ask the question of being for the first time since Parmenides, cf. p. 24.
9
Objection to the book: I have even today still not enough enemies—it has not brought me a Great5 enemy.
10
8
Thoughtlessness toward the “tradition” and disdain of the contemporary belong to the keen-hearing diffidence before the past.
11
Jaspers writes three slapdash and uninformed volumes about that which philosophy—in creative individual works, and only so—bears in silence (silence-bearing), namely, the fact that philosophy goes to the issues. And thus every common barker and writer is handed the formula to talk on and on even about the philosophically ultimate. And thus the impotence of “contemporary” persons for philosophizing—indeed even only for a return to antiquity—is not only proven but also justified. Even “being” is now brought into the longest-winded idle talk, and each one may with equal justification maunder on about what strikes him.
12
Yet “say” it to yourself daily in your taciturnity: be silent about bearing silence. Cf. p. 17.
13
9
The essence of truth must first be transformed and must be transposed into a new sharpness and hardness so that beings may find admittance.
To admit beings—let them through “through” Da-sein. Ambiguity of the “through” [“Durch”].
14
Therefore, it was a mistaken view that Being and Time could overcome “ontology” directly. The appalling “result” is indeed only that the prattle about “being” has increased and has become still more groundless.
14a
Everything is to be set still deeper; thus first made ripe for transformation.
Everything—i.e., first and only the beginning of philosophy.
15
We are not strong and originary enough to “talk” truly through silence and diffidence. Therefore, one must talk about everything, i.e., prattle. (Cf. p. 93.)
16
10
Being is to be set more deeply into Dasein through the actual question of the essence of language.
Thus with Dasein a transformation of truth and being is to be compelled.
That is a happening of history proper; for this history the “individual” is inconsequential and counts only inasmuch as he secures for himself in effective work a possibility of repeatable impulses.
17
Being not without language—but precisely therefore not “logical.” Language not without being.
18
The law-awakening must happen out of the depth of Dasein through the fully assumed conditionality of an individual human being.
What is human resides in trusting to the depth of Dasein! The adverse criticism of human partiality is to be endured.
What is effective is not that which is deemed worthy of agreement.
19
11
The one who must philosophize “today”—and by that I mean someone under the irrevocable power of the beginning of Western philosophy in antiquity—has the assignment of maintaining constantly effective a dual attitude in all hardness and decisiveness: on the one hand, the interpretation of the ancients, as if what mattered was nothing else than to let them alone come into words (beginning and history of the question of being), and then the attitude of the most broadly and deeply interpretive questioning out of the ground of Dasein—as if at issue was nothing other than to help “being” to a bursting forth in actual work and in a first solitude (overcoming of the question of being).
This duality, however, is one (cf. p. 14)—this one nevertheless is the grace of the cal...