Heidegger Martin - Ponderings. [1]: Black notebooks: Ponderings II-VI: black notebooks 1931-1938

Ponderings IIVI

Studies in Continental Thought

EDITOR

JOHN SALLIS

CONSULTING EDITORS

Robert Bernasconi

John D. Caputo

David Carr

Edward S. Casey

David Farrell Krell

Lenore Langsdorf

James Risser

Dennis J. Schmidt

Calvin O. Schrag

Charles E. Scott

Daniela Vallega-Neu

David Wood

Martin Heidegger

Ponderings IIVI

Black Notebooks 19311938

Translated by

Richard Rojcewicz

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

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Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Published in German as Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 94: berlegungen IIVI (Schwarze Hefte 19311938), edited by Peter Trawny

2014 by Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

English translation 2016 by Indiana University Press

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ISBN 978-0-253-02067-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-253-02074-1 (ebook)

1 2 3 4 521 20 19 18 17 16

CONTENTS

Translators Introduction

This is a translation of volume 94 of Martin Heideggers Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works). The German original appeared posthumously in 2014.

The volume inaugurated the publication of Heideggers Black Notebooks. These are small (ca. 5 7 in.) notebooks with black covers to which the philosopher confided sundry ideas and observations over the course of more than forty years, from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. The notebooks are being published in chronological order, and the five herein correspond to the years 19311938. In all, thirty-three of the thirty-four Black Notebooks are extant and will fill up nine volumes of the Gesamtausgabe.

Heidegger gave a title to each of the notebooks (these first five to be published are Ponderings) and referred to them collectively as the black notebooks. The published series begins with Ponderings II; Ponderings I is the lost notebook.

As can be imagined regarding any notes to self, these journal entries often lack polished diction and at times are even cryptic. Nevertheless, the style and vocabulary are mostly formal, not to say stilted, and are seldom colloquial. This translation is meant to convey to an English-speaking audience the same effect the original would have on a German one, with the degree of formality varying pari passu with Heideggers own. A prominent stylistic peculiarity I was unable to render in full, however, is the extensive use of dashes. Heidegger often employs dashes not merely for parenthetical remarks but for any change in the direction of thought. Sometimes dashes separate subjects and predicates, and some dashes even occur at the end of paragraphs. Due to differences in English and German syntax, I could not include all the dashes without making for needless confusion and could not place them all at the exact points that would correspond to the original text. This admission is of course not meant to imply I did capture the varied styles of the notebooks in all other respects.

The pagination of the notebooks themselves is reproduced here in the outer margins. All of Heideggers cross-references are to these marginal numbers. The running heads indicate the pagination of the Gesamtausgabe edition. I have inserted myself into the text only to alert the reader to the original German where I thought it might be helpful (for example, as indicating a play on words I could not carry over into English) and to translate any Latin or Greek expressions Heidegger leaves untranslated. I have used brackets ([ ]) for these interpolations and have reserved braces ({ }) for insertions by the editor. All the footnotes in the book stem either from me, and these few are marked as such, or from the editor and are then placed within braces.

I am indebted to Charles Bambach for an insightful review of an earlier version of this entire translation; the changes he recommended have substantially improved the final text.

Richard Rojcewicz

Ponderings IIVI

The entries in the black notebooks

are at their core
attempts at simple designation
not statements or even sketches
for a planned system.

INTIMATIONS X PONDERINGS (II) AND DIRECTIVES

October 1931

M. H.

Cf. pp. 19 and 132.

What should we do?

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 plightthat 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 evasionsremote and desultorybefore the ineluctable.

The human being should come to himself!

Why? Because a human being is a selfyet is in such a way as to lose or indeed never win himself and to sit somewhere otherwise captivated and transportedwe still scarcely see all this great being and potential for being as we gaze at wretched imitations and dried up and incomprehensible exemplarsproffered 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.

Supposing, however, that the human being had chosen and that the choice actually struck back into his self and burst it open

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 mountainhow 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!