Heidegger Martin - Nature, History, State_ 1933-34

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NATURE, HISTORY, STATE

19331934

Martin Heidegger

Translated and edited by
Gregory Fried and Richard Polt

With essays by Robert Bernasconi, Peter E. Gordon, Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel, and Slavoj iek

Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers

Bloomsbury Academic

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ber Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat. bung aus dem Wintersemester 1933/34 (pp. 5388) taken from Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4 Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus I, Dokumente edited by Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski 2009 Verlag Karl Alber part of Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau

Marion Heinz, Volk und Fhrer. Untersuchungen zu Heideggers Seminar ber Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat (1933/34) (pp. 5575) taken from Heidegger-Jahrbuch 5 Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus II, Interpretationen edited by Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski 2010 Verlag Karl Alber part of Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau

Heidegger in the Foursome of Struggle, Historicity, Will, and Gelassenheit adapted from Slavoj iek, Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 878903. Reproduced with permission from Verso.

This English translation and editorial material
Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2013

Individual Essays Contributors, 2013

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eISBN: 978-1-4411-3325-0

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CONTENTS

Marion Heinz

Peter E. Gordon

Robert Bernasconi

Theodore Kisiel

Slavoj iek

Gregory Fried (Suffolk University) is the author of Heideggers Polemos: From Being to Politics and (with Charles Fried) Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror.

Richard Polt (Xavier University, Cincinnati) is the author of Heidegger: An Introduction and The Emergency of Being: On Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy. Together, Fried and Polt have translated Heideggers Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Truth and edited A Companion to Heideggers Introduction to Metaphysics.

Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Question of Language in Heideggers History of Being, Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing, and How to Read Sartre. The topics of his published essays include Kant, Hegel, Levinas, and critical philosophy of race.

Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. His books include Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy and Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. He has also co-edited several books, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, and The Modernist Imagination.

Marion Heinz (Universitt Siegen) is the author of Zeitlichkeit und Temporalitt: die Konstitution der Existenz und die Grundlegung einer temporalen Ontologie im Frhwerk Martin Heideggers and Sensualistischer Idealismus: Untersuchungen zur Erkenntnistheorie des jungen Herder (17631778). She is the editor of volume 44 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe and has also edited and co-edited a variety of volumes on German philosophy, feminism, and gender theory.

Theodore Kisiel (Northern Illinois University) is the author of The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time and Heideggers Way of Thought: Criticaland Interpretive Signposts. He has translated Heideggers History of the Concept of Time and published numerous articles on Heidegger.

Slavoj iek (University of Ljubljana) is the author of books on topics including Lacan, Marxism, and contemporary culture, including The Sublime Object of Ideology, In Defense of Lost Causes, The Parallax View, Living in the End Times, Less Than Nothing, and The Year of Dreaming Dangerously.

Richard Polt and Gregory Fried

Martin Heideggers support for the Nazi regime has long been a matter of public knowledge, but only recently have we gained a clearer picture of the details of his political activities and positions. Together with other documents from Heideggers tenure as the first National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg in 19334, the seminar in this volume is an essential piece of evidence for those who wish to assess the degree to which he was intellectually committed to Nazi ideology. In the light of this text, Heideggers postwar attempts to minimize the extent of his support for Nazism are no longer credible, and any interpretation that makes a simple distinction between his philosophy and his politics is no longer tenablefor in this seminar, Heidegger sketches a political philosophy, consistent with his views on the historicity of Dasein or human existence, that explicitly supports Hitlerian dictatorship and suggests justifications for German expansionism and persecution of the Jews.

This is not to say that the text necessarily renders Heideggers thought as a whole bankrupt. We still must ask whether we can disentangle the truer or more promising aspects of his philosophy from the pernicious ones. We still must try to diagnose the errors in Heideggers views and understand the merely ideological or culturally conditioned elements in them, while remaining open to the possibility that they can provide insights that transcend the dark circumstances of this seminar. We still must judge this text in the larger context of Heideggers thought. The five essays by leading thinkers and scholars in this volume take up these philosophical challenges, offering us distinctive ways to read the seminar from appropriately critical, yet not dismissive perspectives.

The seminar

Heidegger held his seminar On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State in ten sessions from November 3, 1933 to February 23, 1934. We do not have Heideggers own notes or text for the seminar, if such existed; instead, the text consists of student protocols or reports on the seminar sessions. These protocols were reviewed by Heidegger himself, as confirmed by two interpolations he makes in the text. The protocols also generally sound like Heidegger; readers familiar with his lecture courses will recognize typical trains of thought and turns of phrase. The first protocol provides one students perspective on the discussions that took place during the opening session of the seminar; it is valuable as a glimpse of the atmosphere in Heideggers classroom and his practice as a teacher. To judge from the remaining protocols, the subsequent nine sessions must have proceeded more like a lecture course, for only Heideggers voice is present, and he develops a fairly continuous line of argument. Thus, while we cannot rely on this text as a verbatim transcript of what Heidegger said, it is reasonable to take it as good evidence of the essential content of the views he developed during this seminar.