Richard Wolin - Heidegger in Ruins

HEIDEGGER IN RUINS

OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD WOLIN

Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption

The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (editor)

The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism

Karl Lwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (editor)

Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas

Heideggers Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays on Politics and Society

Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism (coeditor)

The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s

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For Caroline, ma femme lumineuse

Error of philosophers: The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building. But posterity discovers it in the bricks that he used and which others will often make use of again for better building; in the fact, that is to say, that the building can be destroyed and nevertheless possess value as material.

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)

CONTENTS

A NOTE ON SOURCES

IN ADDITION TO HEIDEGGER S BEING a prolific philosopheras his hundred-plus volume Gesamtausgabe readily attestshe was also a prolific letter writer. Over the course of his long, productive life (19101976), he corresponded with some two hundred interlocutors. Over ten thousand of Heideggers letters remain extant.

After some initial hesitancy, Heidegger ultimately signed off on the publication of his correspondence. He viewed the Briefausgaben as an integral part of his Gesamtwerk, or oeuvre. In keeping with Heideggers directives, in 2010 there began, under the auspices of the Freiburg-based Karl Alber Verlag, an ambitious project to publish a thirty-five-volume edition of Heideggers correspondence.

In this book, I have, at various points, relied on the informative accounts concerning Heideggers philosophical path that he himself provided in these various epistolary exchanges. Conversely, for the most part, orthodox Heideggerians have steered clear of the letters, which they view as a form of non- or extraphilosophical discourse (although one would think that, in light of their allegiance to Heideggers program of Overcoming Metaphysics, the disruptive effects of epistolary testimony might offer a welcome to source of otherness). In this note, I wish to explain my decision to rely on the letters as a valuable and legitimate source for understanding the twists and turns of Heideggers Denkweg.

Heideggers correspondence is intellectually significant for several reasons. For one, it is widely acknowledged that, as Heidegger was a philosopher of Existenz, many of his fundamental philosophical impulses derived from his own life experiences: his conversion to Protestantism circa 1917, the Kriegerlebnis (war experience) of World War Ithe defining event of Heideggers Generationthe collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of National Socialism.

Heideggers letters offer invaluable testimony concerning the ways that these transformative existential episodes impacted his Denken. As Heidegger avowed in a letter to Karl Lwith of 19 August 1921: I work in a concrete factical manner, from out of my I amfrom out of my spiritual, factical heritage/milieu/life context, from out of that which becomes accessible to me as living experience. To discount the letters would be to neglect the existential basis or ground of Heideggers thought.

Moreover, Heideggers correspondence includes exchanges with some of the outstanding figures in twentieth-century philosophy and letters: among them, Heinrich Rickert, Karl Jaspers, Rudolph Bultmann, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Jnger, and Ren Char. In these cases, Heideggers letters are, quite obviously, of intrinsic philosophical and/or cultural significance.

Equally revealing are Heideggers epistolary exchanges with close friends and family members such as Elisabeth Blochmann, Elfride Heidegger (the philosophers wife), and his brother, Fritz. This is true insofar as, in the course of these colloquies, Heidegger often paused to shed invaluable light on the nature and substance of his philosophical trajectory.

Lastly, such conceptual clarification is especially welcome in the case of a philosopher like Heidegger who, in keeping with his emphatic disavowal of publicness, inclined toward hermeticism. As Heidegger avowed in Contributions to Philosophy (193638), Only the great and secretive individuals ensure the stillness necessary for the advent of the god.

Given Heideggers predilection for philosophical esoterics, the elucidations that the letters provide remain valuable and indispensable.

HEIDEGGER IN RUINS

INTRODUCTION

Heidegger in Black

The Ontological Privilege of German Dasein

THE BLACK NOTEBOOKS PUBLICATION , BEGINNING IN 2014, has generated a new wave of Heidegger scholarship. To date, eight installments, comprising volumes 94101 of the mammoth, 102-volume Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, have appeared. (For purposes of comparison, the comprehensive Hegel edition published by Felix Meiner Verlag, which was completed in 2018, contains only 47 volumes.) In light of the fact that the Notebooks have added nearly three thousand pages of source material to Heideggers voluminous corpus, it is understandable that scholars have felt compelled to reassess Heideggers legacy in the wake of their publication. In Poesie der Vernichtung: Literatur und Dichtung in Martin Heideggers Schwarzen Heften, Judith Werner has justifiably characterized the Black Notebooks publication as an earthquake that provoked a far-reaching caesura in Heidegger scholarship.

As a philosophical notebook or diary that Heidegger meticulously maintained over the course of four decades, from 1931 to 1969, the Black Notebooks are unique. They provide unprecedented insight into the gestation of Heideggers thought: a metacommentary that sheds significant light on Heideggers philosophical development and self-understanding, especially with respect to his Turn from existential ontology to the history of Being. They are also unique insofar as they vividly document Heideggers philosophical engagement with the Zeitgeist: the interplay between fundamental ontology and