Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Many people who seem to be considered and insightful have expressed respect for the work of Martin Heidegger. But I have found the "Heideggerian" theorists I've read to be invested in what seemed to be painfully obscure jargon, and I decided that I wouldn't make much headway without reading some of Heidegger's own writings. This relatively slim volume looked optimal, in that it is trained on topics both important to Heidegger's larger project and interesting to me. In particular, the idea of show more "technology" as a fundamental aspect of human thought and an examination of Nietzsche as an epochal thinker were more-than-tempting attractions.

Alas, I doubt that I will return to Heidegger after this experience. As I read, I constantly felt like I was getting a snow job. How else should I react to this sort of prose?

"Reality means, then, when thought sufficiently broadly: that which, brought forth hither into presencing, lies before; it means the presencing, consummated in itself, of self-bringing-forth." (160)

Is the translator William Lovitt to blame? Well, Lovitt has labored mightily to make his work transparent; the book is littered with long footnotes discussing his translation choices and analyzing the polyvalence and connotative shades of Heidegger's German diction. In his introduction to the volume Lovitt heaps adulation on Heidegger as a thinker and a stylist, but the texts at hand did not justify the praise from where I sit. Lovitt writes:

"Above all, the reader must not grow deaf to Heidegger's words; he must not let their continual repetition or their appearance in all but identical phrases lull him into gliding effortlessly on, oblivious to the subtle shifts and gatherings of meaning that are constantly taking place." (xxiii)

But I can only conclude that such a numbed trance is exactly the effect Heidegger is after with his incantations. These essays are obscurantist sermons: "philosophy" in the pontifical vein, rather than the critical. To the extent that there were worthwhile ideas here, I have seen them treated more usefully by post-structuralists who had doubtless read their Heidegger. But I will not accept Heidegger's notion of "metaphysics," nor will I be suckered by his "Being as distinct from that which is." show less

It’s hard to classify what kind of works the Ponderings (and others of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks”) are. They are not just random notes — they are much more finished than that. As the editor (Peter Trawny) says in his Afterword, Heidegger did intend that they be published as the final pieces of his complete works. The individual entries are numbered, and there is running thematic unity. They seem more than anything an outlet for a style of writing and thinking that Heidegger was show more attempting, in keeping with his rejection of the current state of philosophical writing and the demands of “questioning being.”

As an experiment in writing, I would definitely not recommend these notebooks as any kind of revealing meta-description of Heidegger’s otherwise obscure thoughts and writings. There’s no escaping the peculiar vocabulary and syntax (in any language) of Heidegger’s writing and thinking. These notebooks don’t explain anything in more common terms — as you’ll see below in my own tortured attempts to describe what he is thinking about here.

This is the first volume, Ponderings II-VI (Ponderings I, the first of the notebooks hasn’t been located). They are dated 1931-1938. That places them after the publication and reception of Being and Time, and during the formation period for his later writings on art, poetry, and technology.

One reason to read this volume in particular is that it covers the period of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism, including his rectorship at Freiburg beginning in the Spring of 1933 (this is the time of Ponderings III, the second section of the book).

Ponderings II introduces the theme that runs throughout all of these notebooks, the failure of philosophy (and contemporary culture) to ask “the question of being.” It’s difficult to characterize what Heidegger means by “the question of being” outside his own difficult vocabulary, but my own best understanding is that Heidegger is asking how it is that we have a world at all — what event or activity is it and how do we recapture it?

Of course he isn’t asking about the scientific explanation of the origin of the world — science comes much too late in the game, with its methods and criteria for what counts as real or explanatory. Those methods and criteria are themselves dependent on that initial, primordial event of a world coming to be at all.

Traditional philosophy, e.g., Kant’s question of what makes intelligible experience of the world possible, or even the questions that Heidegger himself asks in Being and Time about the structure of the everyday world, also come too late — they fail to reach back to the very basic question about where anything at all originates — how is it that there is any kind of world at all, and who are we/what is our role in that original happening of a world?

Any question about the world — any question that takes place within the world, that doesn’t suspend all assumptions and “facts” — comes too late to understand what the activity of “worlding” itself is. Thus all traditional philosophy and all science come too late. Any terms in which you’d want to ask and answer the question — “experience”, “consciousness”, “object” or “objectivity” — are embedded within the framework of the world as already structured and present. They presume an answer without ever having discovered the question itself.

Unlike Being and Time, Heidegger’s rhetoric here, and throughout this set of notebooks, is Nietzsche-like. He is making an historical call to philosophical action on the part of the community and the culture, certainly not just to philosophers per se. The problem is not, as you might think in Being and Time, a scholarly academic problem. He frames it here as an historical, cultural crisis.

By losing our connection to this “worlding” or to “the question of being”, we have lost our ability to take our part in that activity. It’s not just that we don’t have the right account — that would just be a scholar’s problem. Instead, the problem is that we don’t know how to participate in that creative act that gives birth to a meaningful world. And that includes that we have lost our ability to participate in the making meaningful activity of our own world that we live in — it resides with us as a given, objective reality, “facts” without origin or grounding of meaning. It threatens a fall into meaninglessness.

Ponderings III takes a distinct turn, presumably in keeping with Heidegger turning his attention to his rectorship at Freiburg, and to his role in National Socialism. I think the most distinctive theme running through his notes of that year of his rectorship is the possibility he sees for a rebirth of the German university, as generating with the youth to come a community of people who can ask the question he believes we have forgotten.

One thing he does not see that reborn university as doing is serving the state. Rather this German university of the future will generate everything — the world — in which the state operates. Consistently, he also scoffs at the very idea of a National Socialist Philosophy — the proper role of philosophy is prior to any political thinking (he coins the term “metapolitics” here to help get across his point).

He likewise rejects any kind of nationalism based on race or biology. Race and biology do not make the German people special — what would make a people special would be its readiness for the rebirth of the primordial thinking he believes to be the task of the moment.

There is a necessary tension between Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism and his insistence that everything that does not reach back to “originary thinking” (“the question of being”) is part of the crisis German and world culture face.

But the embrace is real, and we know of Heidegger’s active and energetic participation in the National Socialist Party. His embrace of Nazism seems rather based in his seeing in the German people and in the revolutionary energy of the Party, an opportunity for the rebirth of thinking that he believes necessary. His nationalistic fervor is based in Germany’s , and Nazism’s, historical position.

We also see toward the end of Ponderings III Heidegger’s bitter disillusionment with that opportunity for the role of the German university. I think it would be an exaggeration to interpret his disillusionment as one with Nazism per se — really, it seems a disillusionment with the readiness of the German culture and institutional world for the renaissance he thought possible. The antibodies moved in on him, at least in his own experience of the failure. All interests are served by the status quo, and none are served by the kind of radical questioning he proposes. His radical plans for the university never take off.

The failure might have been expected, in terms of his own thinking. Heidegger, like Nietzsche, speaks of himself as a “transitional thinker” — clearing the way for the radical questioning of being. He places himself at an historical inflection — when the “task” is given to us. As he says in Ponderings IV, “At issue is a leap into specifically historical Da-sein. This leap can be carried out only as the liberation of what is given as endowment into what is given as task.”

The “endowment” he is speaking of is a lack of any sense that we have lost our connection to the original (“originary”) event of being, or of a world coming to be. We live in a settled world, with the only mysteries being the things we haven’t yet figured out but will get to as knowledge progresses on the path laid out for it. We have no sense of the mystery of the world, or even of our own loss of this primordial mystery of how a world happens.

The “task” is then the recovery of this sense of loss and a rebirth of thinking. Heidegger’s characterization of the task as the “free mastery of the plight of a lack of a sense of plight” may or may not be especially helpful to you — with Heidegger, it is always a matter of trying to claw your way to a sense of what you think he is getting at.

To get more feel for the “task” Heidegger is pointing to, it may be helpful to read some of Heidegger’s thoughts on the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. The “questioning of being” is alive in such thinkers. In his lectures on Parmenides (published as Parmenides), lectures on Anaximander and Parmenides (published as The Beginning of Western Philosophy) and in the Heraclitus Seminar, Heidegger tries to enter in a participatory way the thinking of those philosophers.

Difficulties aside, I do think that reading these notebooks is helpful to trying to build an understanding of Heidegger’s thinking as he left the period of Being and Time and turned toward the later writings. In those writings emerge the roles of art and poetry as contributors to the kind of thinking he believes necessary. Those roles and themes become more and more explicit, as he leaves the vocabularies of traditional philosophy behind, along with the role of the professional philosopher, throughout the five notebooks here. Other essays written during the period (e.g., The Origin of the Work of Art in 1935-36 and What are Poets For? in 1936) focus on some of the same emerging themes.

You also see themes that get detailed focus in much later writings (e.g., The Question Concerning Technology in 1954).

Maybe it’s beyond saying by now, but this is not for casual reading. I think it best serves the purposes of someone taking on a very serious task of reconstructing the development of Heidegger’s thought during the 1930s, within the context of studying other writings and lectures.

Despite some of the talk of how these notes reveal more about his participation in Nazism, I’m not all that sure they are especially useful for that. I don’t have the detailed knowledge of politics during the period to make a strong judgment — we’ll see what those who study Heidegger’s political life have to say. show less

Technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be as much of a problem as a help. As an instrument, it can make mass killing much easier. Indeed, nuclear bombs enable the world to potentially destroy itself in less than an hour. Yet technology can enable human flourishing as well. For instance, I develop software professionally that I hope will help my domain (medical research) advance. How are we to understand technology, a concept as ancient as early Greeks, and how do we show more ensure that we use it properly? These questions, Heidegger – the famous German philosopher – considers in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” (I will not here address the other essays in this volume.)

Heidegger describes technology by the cryptic but descriptive word, an “Enframing.” That is, technology frames a truth about the world and about human nature. For example, cars encapsulate the truth about the combustion engine and also the truth that humans like motility. Technology is related to science by presenting this truth of use of combustion to provide energy, but technology is not merely applied science. Instead, technology is somewhat of an art-form that engages the human spirit. Cars therefore become an extension of who we owners are.

Understanding instruments as “Enframings” makes us understand that technology merely presents humanity with an ethical question: Should I act thusly? It is up to the human to decide this, and it is up to the arts to allow us to see our situation clearly enough to make the right choice. Science provides the truth that the instrument is based upon, but the arts engage the human soul. Used correctly, technology can have “saving power.” Used incorrectly, it can merely provides humans with estrangement and alienation. Potentially, it can lead to our destruction.

Science (first) and industry (later) have transformed civilization and produced the modern world. Some fear that the technological revolution has created a world that is run afoul of its purpose. Instead of this reactionary view that would have us return to an agrarian society, Heidegger provides a way forward by identifying technology’s saving power. In an era where American Big Tech is accused of monopolizing and censoring powers, such a saving power is still needed. That makes this essay, published originally in the 1950s (shortly after the mass destruction of World War II), more relevant than ever seventy years later. show less

Books Not To Leave To Read Until One Week Before The Essay's Due In, Part One: Sein und Zeit

Being and Time, opus of rampant Nazi and all-round right-wing bastard Martin Heidegger, will cause the most voracious and determined student a sharp intake of breath when its five hundred densely-written pages (plus abundant appendices) lands in their reading-list, causing audible squeaks from the books beneath it.

Heidegger's themes are in an incredible number of ways similar to Nietzsche's. Your show more brain will therefore, finding that Nietzsche said roughly equivalent things in more interesting and memorable ways, find gripping onto what Heidegger actually said rather like wrestling a single, specific greased eel in a pit of identical greased eels. But at the time he wrote Sein und Zeit he didn't think much of Nietzsche, so getting them mixed up is a Bad Idea. Similarly, the existentialists, feminists and various other twentieth-century schools of Continental philosophy adapted his terminology with profligate glee, and so unless you've ignored everything coming out of that tradition you'll find yourself mixing up Heidegger's concept of the Other with what de Beauvoir means by the term, and so on.

Speaking of which, old Martin was of the opinion that conceptual thought needed to be destroyed in order to reattain authenticity in one's relation to oneself and the world, and his vocabulary-building shenanigans are a somewhat less pleasant way of achieving this than a pickaxe to the back of the head. Much labour must be spent sorting out the distinctions between ontic and onological, and gaping at words like 'ownmost' that result from Heidegger's over-the-top love of the tendency, shared by both Germans and philosophers, to create a completely new term, nuanced and difficult to grasp, by violently shoving words up each others' arses.

Add to this the fact that he's generally translated by people who believe the only thing anybody could be interested in when reading Heidegger is the translation itself. You're assumed to have a working knowledge of German to really understand why the hell 'existential' and 'existentiell' are being used for different things, and the (not infrequent) Latin and Greek you're assumed to be able to deal with yourself, without the aid of footnotes. (There are appendices, supplied by Heidegger himself, but these just point you to the relevant Latin or Greek work). While doing all this, you have to work very hard to keep control of your general feeling of being creeped out by the Jew-denouncing revolutionary-conservatism underlying everything.

Don't get me wrong - there are excellent, valuable, important ideas in here. But they're very carefully obscured, so as to protect them from non-philosophers.

The good news: it's only about 40% of what the bastard was originally planning to publish. show less