纽约时报：海德格尔的黑色笔记本

 
                
                
by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
    
It has long been one of the most contentious questions in 20th-century intellectual history: Just how much, and what kind, of a Nazi was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger?
To his strongest detractors, Heidegger was a committed National Socialist whose hugely influential ideas about the nature of being and the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and much of the modern philosophical tradition itself were fatally compromised by his membership in Hitler’s party from 1933 to 1945. To his staunchest defenders, however, he was a Nazi of convenience — a sometime personal anti-Semite, perhaps, but a philosopher whose towering intellectual achievements are undiminished by temporary political dalliances or everyday bias.
Now, the recent publication in Germany of the first three volumes of Heidegger’s private philosophical notebooks has brought the controversy roaring back, revealing what some say is an unmistakable smoking gun: overtly anti-Semitic statements, written in Heidegger’s own hand, in the context of his philosophical thinking.
 The so-called black notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941 and named for the color of their oilcloth covers, show Heidegger denouncing the rootlessness and spirit of “empty rationality and calculability” of the Jews, as he works out revisions to his deepest metaphysical ideas in relation to political events of the day.
“World Jewry,” he wrote in 1941, “is ungraspable everywhere and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.”
The anti-Semitic passages total only about two and a half of the notebooks’ roughly 1,200 pages. Still, some scholars say, they put the lie to any claim that Heidegger’s Nazism can be kept separate from his philosophy, or confined only to the brief period in the early 1930s when he was the rector of the newly Nazified University of Freiburg.
“The evidence now isn’t just undeniable, it’s over the top,” Richard Wolin, an intellectual historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of several books on Heidegger, said in an interview. “Heidegger was engaged with these issues philosophically and intellectually through the course of the whole regime.”
The black notebooks, released by the Frankfurt-based publishing house Vittorio Klostermann, are appearing as Volumes 94 through 96 of Heidegger’s complete works, according to a schedule laid out by the philosopher himself before his death in 1976. Though long whispered about among some Heideggerians, virtually no one outside the family had seen the notebooks, which are kept in the tightly restricted Heidegger archive in Marbach, Germany.
Even before the release of the first volume in late February, however, word of the anti-Semitic passages leaked into the press in France, where Heidegger’s philosophy has exerted its strongest influence, through thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida.
One Heidegger translator, during an hourlong radio program dedicated to the controversy in December, called the anti-Semitic statements shocking evidence of “intellectual bankruptcy.” But some orthodox Heideggerians went on the attack, charging the editor of the notebooks, Peter Trawny, whose monograph on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, then unpublished, was also circulating, with self-serving careerism and reckless misinterpretations.
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Mr. Trawny, the director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal in Germany, said in a recent interview that there had been pressure from some in France to stop the release of his monograph, “Heidegger and the Myth of Jewish World Conspiracy,” and remove him as editor of future volumes of the notebooks, but that the Heidegger family had been supportive of full publication.
“When I read them, I was quite astonished,” Mr. Trawny said of the notebooks. “But there was never any question of modifying the manuscripts.”
To some people, such astonishment has a whiff of Claude Rains’s shock in “Casablanca,” given what books like Victor Farias’s “Heidegger and Nazism” (1987) and the French scholar Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy” (2005) have established about both Heidegger’s activities in the 1930s and his postwar efforts to minimize his belief in the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism, as he put it in 1935.
Both those books caused intellectual convulsions and even suggestions that Heidegger’s work, including his 1927 masterpiece “Being and Time,” should be banished from philosophy to the realm of Nazi ideology. But even those who defend Heidegger’s philosophy more broadly say the black notebooks are hardly the first sign of a specifically anti-Semitic cast to his thought.
Richard Polt, a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, pointed to the student notes from a seminar that ran from 1933 to 1934 (published in Germany in 2009 and released in English in December), which showed Heidegger speaking of “Semitic nomads” who will never understand the nature of “our German space.”
“Although the presence of anti-Semitic comments in the so-called black notebooks is newsworthy,” Mr. Polt said in an email, “it should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the evidence.”
Thomas Sheehan, a Heidegger scholar at Stanford, put it even more strongly, saying in an email that too many Heideggerians “have swallowed the Kool-Aid and bought in wholeheartedly to his story about modernity” as decline, which Heidegger used to “launder” his anti-Semitism.
The scandal over the notebooks, Mr. Sheehan added, should be a chance to “rethink, from scratch, what his work was about.”
That process will take years, given the volume and notorious difficulty of Heidegger’s writing, so chock-full of neologisms, the old joke goes, that it is impossible to translate even into German. (An English edition of the notebooks is under negotiation; six more volumes remain to be published in German.) A conference on the notebooks is planned at Emory University in Atlanta next fall. Mr. Trawny will also discuss them at the Goethe Institute in New York on April 8.
In a newspaper article derived from his monograph, Mr. Trawny argues that Heidegger rejected the “biologism” of Nazi race theory in favor of a “historial” anti-Semitism (to use a Heideggerian coinage) that emanated “from the history of Being itself.” For Heidegger, in Mr. Trawny’s interpretation, the Jews are not the inventors of modern technology, but “along with the Nazis” — whom he had come to see not as a rebirth of authentic Being, but as another degrading force of modernity — “the most powerful embodiment of it.”
Heidegger, Mr. Trawny said in the interview, is not known to have kept a notebook from 1941 to 1945. And a long-missing notebook from 1945 to 1946 that surfaced in January does not contain anti-Semitic statements, according to an interview in Die Zeit with the notebook’s longtime owner, a son of one of Heidegger’s mistresses, who sold it to the archive at Marbach in March.
Mr. Trawny speculates that Heidegger’s reunion in 1950 with the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, his former lover and student, helped modify his views of Jews and of the Holocaust, a subject on which he made only minimal (and, many say, minimizing) public comment. “After 1950, we don’t have anti-Semitic passages in the black notebooks anymore,” Mr. Trawny said.
Thomas Meyer, a German scholar who reviewed the notebooks in the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, credited Mr. Trawny with addressing their anti-Semitism head-on. But he said he sees far less distance than Mr. Trawny does between Heidegger’s philosophy and actual Nazi policy.
Mr. Meyer, who is currently a visiting professor of philosophy and Jewish thought at Boston University, pointed to a passage from 1938 or 1939 (the entries are not precisely dated), in which Heidegger writes of his earlier underestimation of the “inner necessity” of National Socialism and the need to deepen his consideration of it “for intellectual reasons.”
In the notebooks for 1939 to 1941, Mr. Meyer said, Heidegger’s thought underwent a radicalization, in which the Jews become an integral part of his philosophical account of the decay of modernity, and the “final struggle” (as Heidegger put it) then underway. “I think he can imagine and does imagine a world without Jews,” Mr. Meyer said.
Some scholars ask why, given Heidegger’s postwar efforts to minimize his enthusiasm for Nazism, he didn’t just destroy the notebooks from the 1930s. Was publishing them as the capstone to his complete works an effort to come clean — or to have the last laugh?
Mr. Trawny suggests Heidegger may have wanted to show how a great philosopher “can go astray.” But either way, he said, it is no longer possible to deny the anti-Semitic dimension of at least some of his thought.
“Before, you could say, ‘We don’t have the facts,’ ” Mr. Trawny said. “But now we have the facts.”
Correction: April 1, 2014
An article on Monday about the publication of notebooks of the philosopher Martin Heidegger that shed new light on his Nazi beliefs misstated the title of Emmanuel Faye’s book on Heidegger and Nazism. It is “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” not “Heidegger: The Injection of Nazism Into Philosophy.” And because of an editing error, the article referred imprecisely to the dates of a seminar from which student notes showed Heidegger speaking of “Semitic nomads” who will never understand the nature of “our German space.” It ran from 1933 to 1934, not “in 1933 or 1934.”