Chapter Two

The Hidden King: 1916-1923

On 3 January 1916, Heidegger sent a letter to Elfride Petri, a twenty-three-year-old student whom he had met the previous year in December, while she was attending his seminar on “Kant’s Prolegomena”. Born on 3 July 1893 in Leisnig in Saxony, the daughter of Captain Richard Petri and Martha (née Friedrich), Elfride went to school in Wiesbaden, before completing a teachers’ training course at Kiel University. At the outbreak of war in 1914, she went to work with the National Women’s Service in Berlin before returning to Wiesbaden. In March 1915, at grammar school in Kassel, Elfride passed exams in Latin and Mathematics, which allowed her university entrance. In the winter semester of 1915, she enrolled for an economics course at Freiburg University, and it was here that she met Heidegger.

Elfride was an independent spirit. Apart from studying at the university, she was also a member of the “Freiburg Sorority” and the “Cabin Guild”, an association founded by female students in 1910 to promote nature and a healthy lifestyle. The Guild had as its base a small cabin on the Silberberg, a distant mountain near Hinterzarten in the Swabian countryside. Elfride was also, like Heidegger, a keen skier. In the seminar on Kant (perhaps because she had little to no background in philosophy: her main subject was economics), she had received personal tuition from Heidegger, during which a mutual attraction had developed, as is clear from Heidegger’s first letter to her on 9 December 1915:

“Dear Fräulein Petri,

As I was speaking to you this morning, I saw how the look on your face turned reflective and grave and anxious. My duties made me rush and so I had to leave you in a state of distress and disquiet.

No, you cannot have forgotten what I gratefully confided to you –

that those wonderfully reflective hours were repose for me.

And much, much more than that – I felt with all my heart that my thoughts soared on within your attentive soul – there has been an aura of solemnity in my study ever since – and your unaffected gratitude – God, it sprang so deeply from the source – that I shall never forget”. [1]

Elfride must have responded to Heidegger’s overture immediately, either in person or by letter, for by the time of his second letter, written a mere four days later, he has become even more intimate, and he now significantly addresses her with the familiar “du” (normally used only with family members, very close friends or, as in this case, a loved one):

“Come, dearest soul, and rest against my heart. I want to look into the depths of your fairy-tale eyes and thank you – dearest Soul. It has been given to me to experience ever new, wonderful things in you. You are mine.  Will I be able to bear this unutterable happiness? Are my hands sacred enough as they trembling clasp yours? Is my soul, harried through with all the throes of doubt, a worthy shrine in which your love may dwell for all eternity?”

Heidegger’s words constituted, in fact, a proposal of marriage, as the letter goes on to make clear, where he describes himself as going “down on [his] knees before her”. The semester came to its mid-year pause at the end of December, and Elfride and Heidegger returned to their respective homes for Christmas. The couple were now apart but their letters continued. On 1 January 1916, he wrote again in ecstatic tones, where adoration is combined with a discernible eroticism:

“Can you imagine devotion without thereby experiencing everything that is timeless: you intertwine, as it were, your inmost experience with the consciousness of your existence as a human being who knows of the deepest riches and treasures – you quaver in the fullness of experience – so powerful that it may seem like a cry of woe – the Good in itself descends and shines from the depths of your eyes – in beauty your wonderful body trembles”.

In these letters, there is only one area where there is even a hint of a difference between the couple: their attitude to, and degree of passion, for philosophy. In his letter of 1 January, Heidegger had written “perhaps we’ll have to search quite a lot more – your soul must open up even further. You have as yet to grasp the full breadth and depth of problems”. He does not say what these “problems” are, but Elfride clearly reads his words as implying that she lacks intellectual depth. This was to remain a tension throughout their married lives, symbolized perhaps by his self-exclusion in his cabin in the forest and his distance from the domestic abode in Freiburg. Philosophy or family? He attempted to hold the latter together for the sake of the former, but the symbiosis never really took place.

We do not have Elfride’s reply, but two days later Heidegger felt it necessary to placate her:

“My question about what you thought of philosophy seemed like an assault to you – the question was only meant in the dialectical sense, as an approach to the task of somehow bringing experience and knowledge into harmony with one another. What I said about the lack of a foundation was perhaps expressed misleadingly – I did not mean that you lacked the disposition – how could I?”

That philosophy was not simply a mode of academic study for Heidegger or simply a vehicle for his career, Elfride would have fully understood by now. But had she been in any doubt about its absolute centrality in his life, not only to his professional life but to his sense of identity and purpose, these early letters would have quickly dispelled such doubts. For as he wrote in the same letter of 3 January,

“Creations of the mind always require a dying, a gradual dying of everything that betokens light and sound and joy and love and happiness and rest. It is always a painful, excruciating loneliness, a casting off of everything changeable; yet this ascent is only ever successful when one has been fortified spiritually and one knows that wandering over those bleak heights, where the air is thin, will not wear us out, but that there is always a descent back into the fullness of life, to which one may bring the treasures from the heights”.

The university year resumed in mid-January, and Heidegger and Elfride were able to be together again in Freiburg. They saw each other often, either in Heidegger’s lodgings in Hohenzollernstraße 1, where he lived with his aunt, “Mina” (Wilhelmina), a short walk north of the university, or simply at the university. Heidegger resumed teaching his course on Kant in the midst of what appeared to be a world war that would never end. The number of male students attending university was constantly dwindling, as more and more men were sent to the Front. Some, however, injured or on leave, were able to attend Heidegger’s lectures. Perhaps in the face of declining faith in traditional religion, philosophy offered many young people access to the life of the mind, to the spirit. On 31 January, when Heidegger’s course resumed, Elfride was still in his class. He wrote to her the following day:

“I’d so have loved to have spoken to you after yesterday’s seminar – you saw that I heard all your questions and that they proved fruitful, if not for everyone then at least for those who have kept up with the course.

And when the young military surgeon came up to me afterwards and thanked me, I immediately invited him to come to my next few classes, because I could see in his eyes how he longed for ultimate things, and then he said to me: this time next week I’ll probably be “over there” again. My heart almost stood still as the contrast came home to me in this single moment, and all I could do was squeeze the young man’s hand”.

The experience with the young officer made a deep impact on Heidegger, and confirmed to him that philosophy had a mission to perform. Writing to Elfride a few weeks later on 5 March, he returned to his encounter with the soldier, and came to the following resolution:

“We must not give our young heroes stones instead of bread when they come back hungry from the battlefield, not unreal and dead categories, not shadowy forms and bloodless compartments in which to keep a life ground down by rationalism neat and tidy and let it moulder away –

The philosopher always suffers from life, because the questionableness of life is real in him – but when he takes pleasure in something, this pleasure is richer and more overflowing than anywhere else, because it draws its fullness and fineness from the ultimate depths of his interpretation of life”. [2]

On 6 March, Heidegger made a proposal of marriage to Elfride, which she accepted. Their engagement was not, however, made public, because Heidegger was worried about his parents’ attitude to him marrying a protestant, and because his chances of securing the Chair in Catholic philosophy would have been seriously jeopardised through a marriage with a non-Catholic. Between March and April, he spent some of his inter-semester vacation in Meßkirch, where he told his parents of his intentions to marry. Heidegger knew that Elfride was keen to be married as soon as possible but, as he explained to her in a letter of 6 April, this was out of the question. In view of this situation, Heidegger felt compelled to cancel his planned visit to Elfride’s parents in Wiesbaden, a decision that almost led to the termination of their support for the engagement.

Heidegger was also experiencing complications in his professional life. On 1 April 1916, Edmund Husserl had arrived from Göttingen to take up his appointment to the Chair of Philosophy at Freiburg, and while Husserl would later provide great assistance to Heidegger in his career, the newly arrived professor could lend little immediate support. Heidegger returned from his vacation to resume teaching in May, offering in the summer semester a weekly two-hour course on “Kant and German Idealism” and, together with Engelbert Krebs, a seminar on Aristotle. On 6 May, Heidegger wrote to his former teacher and benefactor, Heinrich Rickert (now Professor of Philosophy in Heidelberg), thanking him for the support he had provided in the past, and regretting that up to now he had been unable to establish a more personal rapport with him. If Heidegger’s letters to Elfride give voice to a triumphant self-confidence, this letter reveals a greater sense of insecurity regarding his position in the academic community:

“I find it extremely difficult to overcome my Swabian gaucheness and taciturnity when I’m with people, and hardly ever achieve it. And I have always been very sorry that this has prevented me from having a more personal relationship with you. But it remains my hope, as a young academic, that I’ll achieve this, the more so since you have often given me encouragement to do so. That was up to now, to a certain extent, a vain hope. I feel alone and feel it particularly strongly now at the beginning of the new semester”.[3]

In June, Joseph Geyser, who had been professor at the University of Münster, was appointed to the Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Freiburg. Heidegger had also applied for this position, but he did not even make it on to the short list. He was very disappointed and wrote to a member of the selection committee and a longstanding confidant, Professor Heinrich Finke, for an explanation. Finke wrote back on 23 June:

“Many thanks for your frank words. In the end [of the selection process] not everything went as well as it should have – I mean in practical rather than philosophical terms – but you came out of it all with honour. That Husserl [who was either on the selection committee or a referee for Heidegger] now clearly and fully recognises your talents, I can testify to you, if you will allow me. So don’t give up if everything doesn’t turn out right for you immediately. When more thirty years ago I had received my “Habilitation”, [Professor Theodor] Lindner had just departed from the Chair at Münster, and some gossip suggested that I was being muted as his replacement and I, like a fool, believed him. I hadn’t even been taken into consideration! It took me a long time to get over it. You also really didn’t come into consideration: it was obvious that seniority was what mattered. Keep publishing, keep publishing, advised my cousin, Professor Wolf Müller – and that is what I am telling you also”.[4]

Heidegger’s failure to be considered as a candidate for the chair meant that his marriage to Elfride had to be postponed.  To regain his composure and sense of purpose, he took refuge in his philosophy. Elfride (who was clearly surprised at the sudden upturn in his mood in their communications) may well have wanted to know the causes for this, and these Heidegger explained to her in a letter of 13 June, “you ask why I was being so communicative. Well, because I still had the sun in my heart from our hours together, because I was fresh and because I had a success. This consisted of my discovering a fundamental problem with the Theory of Categories”. This may not have been the answer she was expecting: indeed, there is a just a suggestion that tensions are developing in their relationship. Perhaps Elfride was worried that her fiancé was withdrawing into himself after his recent career setback, seeking consolations rather than concrete solutions to the material exigencies with which he and she were faced: his poor professional prospects, an engagement that still had not been made public, hostility towards the prospective marriage from his parents and doubts about his suitability as a husband from hers. This seems to have been the case, as a further (tellingly sober and brief) letter to her from Heidegger on 18 June indicates:

“I don’t know what has suddenly made you so sad – at any rate, I’m to blame for it and do apologise most sincerely – actually, I wasn’t at all in the mood for talking about the matters that you wanted clarified, as I’d been working all day on Hegel”.

The problem, as he explains in a letter of 1 July, is that he cannot focus on the practical aspects of daily life:

“Once again I beg you, my dearest, to believe my love for you comes from my innermost heart. But don’t ask me now to remember everything; otherwise I might suffer a decisive check in my creativity, forced as it is. Let me at least bring to a close the semester, which of course increases in difficulty with each lecture, as my energy is flagging. Do it for the sake of the task to which I am bound, and afterwards we will sort everything out. I beg you, my dearest soul, think of me as a man struggling, who is also experiencing the conflicts between philosophical speculation and everyday life. In a metaphysical sense, I suppose I may have maturity and assurance, but I completely lack these in normal life precisely on account of my highly speculative attitude. This is perhaps because I’ve never lived, associated, exchanged ideas with people a great deal”.

As Finke had pointed out, Heidegger’s chances of securing any future post at Freiburg or elsewhere depended upon him publishing. Consequently, Heidegger now started to make efforts to get his Scotus dissertation into print. He knew that he would have difficulties in finding a publisher, because his work did not fall into any of the standard categories of scholastic research. On 9 July, he wrote to Rickert to see if he could help him place the manuscript with Mohr Verlag (Freiburg), owned by Paul Siebeck, with whom Rickert had previously published. On 10 July, Rickert replied saying that he would do what he could, but he was not optimistic because Siebeck had in the past not been keen on publishing the work of junior academics, and now in the midst of war he would be even less inclined to do so.       

On 21 July, Husserl invited Heidegger to visit him. He regretted that as a new professor he had been very busy and hence had not been able to reread Heidegger’s Scotus manuscript when he had received it in May. Husserl was, nevertheless, sufficiently impressed by it to offer Heidegger a junior teaching position (a “Lehrbeauftrag”) for the coming year.[5] Within a matter of weeks Heidegger and Elfride had started to make plans for their wedding. In August the couple (with one of Elfride’s female friends as a chaperone) went on a holiday to the island of Reichenau on Lake Constance, where engagement rings were exchanged. It was a happy event, which Heidegger commemorated by writing the poem “Evening walk along the Reichenau”, which speaks in hushed tones of a “summer-weary evening of moist gardens” and of a bright summer day lying “heavy with fruit”. [6]

On 2 September, Heidegger sent Rickert the proofs of his Scotus book. He explained that Husserl had written to the Education Department in Berlin, recommending him for a temporary teaching position, but “this will not change the fact that my existence here [in Freiburg] has for many reasons become uncomfortable”. Heidegger does not go into detail about these reasons nor does he mention names, but it is not difficult to understand the predicament in which he finds himself. His application for the Chair in Catholic Philosophy would have been seen by many of his colleagues as an act of hubris by a twenty-seven-year-old fledgling academic, indicative of an ambitious and careerist mindset. In addition, Heidegger’s Catholic credentials were now seriously in doubt following his engagement to a Protestant, a decision that would have led some to query his earlier avowals of faith.

Heidegger could do little about the unfriendly atmosphere that he was forced to endure at Freiburg. His main task now was to oversee the publication of his book, which had, after all, been accepted for publication by the Mohr Verlag. He sent the proofs not only to Rickert but also to Elfride. Rickert, understandably, was too busy to help, but Elfride provided invaluable editorial assistance. As he tells her in a letter of 27 September:

“Over the last few weeks you’ve done me a great service with your proof reading and comments, almost all of which I have been able to accommodate. You will always be my dear, understanding helper, with a fine feeling for these things. I need this all the more now because my work has acquired an even greater interest to me, although it gives me a quite curious pleasure only during the creative process itself, in other words when I am not yet writing. Writing itself I find laborious, because I constantly see the gap between what I wish to formulate and the final formulation, and because the latter never seems succinct enough”.

In the meantime, Heidegger was doing all he could to establish a working relationship with the new professor, sending Husserl on 28 September a copy of his promotion lecture, “The Concept of Time in Science of History”. On 6 October, Rickert wrote back to Heidegger saying that he had been surprised at the appointment of Geyser, but he hoped that Heidegger was wrong in predicting that things would become “uncomfortable” for him. The fact was that a personal animosity had arisen between Heidegger and the new professor of Catholic philosophy (whom Heidegger describes to Rickert as a “china man, inordinately conceited, implacably one-sided”). Such animosities did not, however, interrupt Heidegger’s preparations for the new semester that began in November, when he offered a two-hour lecture on “Basic Problems in Logic” and a seminar on “Lotze’s Metaphysics”. As he told Elfride on 11 November, he was excited about the prospects of the coming semester:

“The very fact that in this, my first systematic course of lectures, I must leave so much open and problematic (while having nevertheless an intuitive grasp of my ultimate foundations and aims), gives the whole task an initial momentum”.

The wedding between Heidegger and Elfride planned for October had to be postponed because Elfride’s parents continued to be concerned about their future son-in-law’s career prospects. The month, however, brought some compensation in the form of the publication of his book on Duns Scotus. Perhaps realising that he had little future in Catholic philosophy, Heidegger had written a conclusion highlighting the philosophical (rather than scholastic) import of Scotus: his “return to the fundamental problem sphere of subjectivity.[7] Heidegger’s work on Scotus has allowed him to leave behind not only what he calls “the deadly emptiness” of the scholastic system, but also the discipline of academic philosophy itself and to embrace a new way of thinking, one born under the vitalistic presence of the “living spirit”. For “philosophy as a purely rational construct divorced from life is has absolutely no power”.[8]

On 28 November, Heidegger sent Rickert a copy of his newly published book, and telling him that he was now teaching a weekly two-hour course on logic. The course was well attended, and Heidegger could not contain his delight: “I have thirty-eight students, a number that in Freiburg these days is regarded as extraordinary”. On 2 December, Rickert replied, thanking Heidegger for the dedication in the Scotus book, and congratulating him on his enrolments in Freiburg. He then adds the sad observation: his classes in Heidelberg are also well attended, but only by women: the war has meant that he few if any male students.[9]

Perhaps with Finke’s exhortation, “publish, publish, publish”, still ringing in his ears Heidegger began work on a new project. On 14 December, he wrote to Rickert, muting his intention to bring out a new edition of Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s Metaphysics, first published in 1841, and which Heidegger saw an important transitional work between Hegel and the philosophers of the present, such as Windelband. Heidegger wanted to edit the text and provide an introduction stressing its historical significance. On 23 December, Rickert wrote back, noting that the Scotus book had been positively reviewed by Clemens Baeumker, Professor of the History of Philosophy in Munich, but saying that Heidegger’s hope of editing Lotze’s work for publication would be unrealistic at the present time. The project, in fact, came to nothing. Indeed, it would be exactly ten years (as some of his contemporaries would unkindly observe) before Heidegger would published his next book: Being and Time, in 1927.

In early January 1917, Heidegger returned to Freiburg from Meßkirch, where he had spent Christmas. On 7 January, he wrote to Martin Grabmann, Professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Vienna, thanking him for his essay on scholastic philosophy that he had recently sent him. Heidegger tells Grabmann, who had been impressed by Heidegger’s Scotus study, that he intends to continue working in this area, but first he must master its systematic issues, which involves confronting value-philosophy and phenomenology “from within”.[10] He adds that this is a task that requires a degree of mental application that he does not, at the moment, possess. Indeed, Heidegger’s communications at this point in time suggest a dissatisfied and restless spirit. Later that month, on 27 January, he wrote to Rickert apologising for his recent silence: you must accept “my double life as half-soldier and miserable junior lecturer” by way of an explanation. He has no wish to play the martyr, he tells Rickert, but the atmosphere in Freiburg has become poisonous. The new professor, Geyser, exudes animosity to everything that Heidegger does and has written (including the recent Scotus book). Heidegger then adds a crucial pen sketch of his self-image as a philosopher:

“The ambition to belong to “philosophers”, who write textbooks and who make it precisely the goal of their “discipline” to produce thinking horses, I have never had. But I do possess the belief that I can achieve something in philosophy, and so I am not letting myself be discouraged, even though I know that there will be hard times ahead because my material resources are low and because, on the other hand, I refuse to ruin my chances of securing a solid academic reputation by churning out publications”.

And he concludes his letter: “my main plan is to get away from here. But I don’t know to where”.

There may have been one further cause for Heidegger’s feeling of dejection: the course of the war. By 1917, it had become clear to all that there would be no immediate resolution to the hostilities: the Western Front had degenerated into a bloody stalemate, with battles such as the Loos Offensive in October 1916 costing thousands of lives. Heidegger not only had to live with this ongoing tragedy, but also with the prospect that he too might soon be compelled to participate in it.  On 28 January, he received a letter from an old friend from his student days, Ernst Laslowski, who wrote to express his concern for Heidegger. He writes: “when I consider everything: your work, your service [in the army], the lectures and now the threat of enlistment, I suffer so much on your account that I can hardly bring myself to write. My nerves have entirely given away”. The war itself is a calamity of unimaginable proportions and Laslowski, describing its reporting in the newspapers as “sickening”, voices his revulsion in tones of pain and anger:

“This sacrifice will certainly not promote God’s cause. How helpless are we now with our wisdom. The proud nineteenth century and then these three years of madness! The terrible thing is: no power is capable of stopping this brutal monster. It will rage on until it consumes itself. And mankind will be crushed. The historians appear to me like naively chattering children, and many philosophers seem like men who want to drown out the noise of the guns with their own shrill voices”.[11]

On 3 February, Rickert wrote back, responding to some of the issues that Heidegger had raised in his letter of 27 January, where Heidegger had muted the possibility of Rickert finding a place for him at Heidelberg. Rickert quickly dismisses this possibility (there are too many junior academics there already), and then he utters words that must have indicated to Heidegger that his former teacher has completely misunderstood the direction of his thinking and ambitions: “you are as a philosopher a convinced Catholic and must whatever you do remain at a university that has a Catholic-theological faculty”. Heidegger was quick to contradict him, writing on 27 February:

“I have never embraced a narrow Catholic perspective, nor have I orientated myself or would ever orient myself towards [philosophical] problems, their conception and their resolution, on the basis of an alien point of view, traditional or otherwise. I do my research and teach the truth purely according to my independent personal convictions”.

This is where their debate (or, at least, their differing perceptions of the role of Catholicism in Heidegger’s philosophical thinking) ended: there is no further communication between them until November that year. Rickert was, perhaps, too polite to point out that Heidegger had been applying for grants from Catholic sources since his student days, precisely on the basis of his avowed commitment to that religion (and, indeed, was continuing to receive an annual grant of 1500 Marks from the Catholic-minded Görres Society). This commitment was now going to be tested on a practical, personal level, and not just in terms of his intellectual development, but in the innermost nature of his private life: his impending marriage to Elfride. On 1 March, Heidegger wrote to his parents, who were putting Elfride under pressure to convert to Catholicism:

“As regards the matter of Confession, we must have patience with Elfride. I mean, such a step is not something to be taken lightly. And for her to do so purely for external reasons is certainly not in our thinking and besides would be an act of no value. Prof. Krebs is of the opinion that such spiritual matters need time to mature on their own terms”.[12]

Although this matter remained unresolved, the couple were married on 20 March at a registry office in Freiburg. The following day Father Engelbert Krebs performed a modest Catholic ceremony in the university chapel. Heidegger’s parents were not present. The couple then returned to Elfride’s hometown, Wiesbaden, where on 25 March a Protestant service was performed, followed by a reception held at Elfride’s home. On returning to Freiburg, the married couple rented a furnished two-bedroom apartment in Karlstraße, near the Old Cemetery.

On 8 April, Heinrich Finke wrote to his former pupil, congratulating him on his marriage, and reconfirming his confidence in Heidegger and his career. It is interesting to note, however, that unlike Rickert, who continued to view his young colleague as essentially a Catholic philosopher, Finke sees Heidegger as a “theoretical philosopher in history”. It was a confusion of disciplinary identity that, as Heidegger would surely have recognised, was seriously hampering his career. Heidegger offered no courses in the summer semester of 1917 because on 24 March he was conscripted into his local regiment, and consigned to the barracks in Heuberg near Balingen in Baden. Heidegger’s military duties started to increase in preparation for his deployment in the war. He undertook a lengthy process of training in a military information unit, which went well beyond simple postal matters to include gathering logistical data relating to terrain and weather conditions. Part of this training took place in the hotel Luisenhöhe near Horben in the Black Forest, about fifteen miles south of Freiburg. On 28 May, during one such training exercise, Heidegger wrote to Elfride, including a photograph of himself together with three other members of his unit, two academics (including the noted psychologist, Karl Ludwig Bühler) and an artist from the Freiburg area: all unlikely-looking conscripts in a war in which they were unwilling participants. By now, Heidegger had had the opportunity to observe Husserl teaching, and he was not impressed either with the man or his philosophy:

“I cannot accept Husserl’s version of phenomenology as a final position (even if it does have some connection up with philosophy) because in its approach, and accordingly in its goal, it is too narrow and bloodless, and because this is an approach that cannot be made absolute. Life is too rich and too great for relativities that seek to come close to its meaning (that of the absolute) in the form of philosophical systems. What is essential is to discover the liberating path in its absolute form”.

In June, the Heideggers found a new apartment, 8 Lerchenstraße, in the district of Herdern, and Elfride immediately set out to renovate it, arranging furniture to be made for her husband’s study. On 1 July, she was given a teaching position in a local high school in Freiburg, teaching French and religion. Her duties did not commence until the end of August, during which time she and Heidegger visited her parents in Wiesbaden and his in Meßkirch. Heidegger had no university teaching during this time, but he did give a talk on “The Essence of Religion in Schleiermacher” on 1 August. Informal gatherings were arranged with Krebs and with a circle of Elfride’s female students and contemporaries who met as the “Little Group”  (possibly fellow members of the nationalist inclined Youth Movement). The war, however, had dampened everyone’s spirits, particularly the spirits of those senior academics, such as Husserl and Rickert, who had lost sons in the fighting. On 24 September, the former wrote to him saying that he will “gladly help [Heidegger] in the furtherance of [his] studies”.[13] There is, however, no encouragement, no curiosity as to what those studies might be: just cursory and laconic words of recognition. Indeed, as is clear from a letter that Husserl sent on 8 October to Paul Natorp in Marburg (where a vacancy had just appeared in the philosophy department, one that Heidegger might well have been interested in), Husserl still sees Heidegger as “tied in his confession [to Catholicism]”, and hence lacking independence in his philosophical inclinations.[14]

Heidegger was clearly out on a limb. On 19 November, he wrote to Rickert, congratulating him on being appointed to the Chair in Vienna (which Rickert did not accept), before launching into a description of the general degeneration of philosophy in Germany, and lamenting its failure to provide an “intellectual and critical position on the problem of German existence”. As the year ends, the full bitterness within Heidegger comes to the surface, and no one is spared from his scathing critique: both the great figures of the past, such as Meinecke and Troeltsch, and those nearer home, such as Geyser and even his friend and colleague Krebs: all stand condemned, as vegetating in “a quagmire”, unable to point the way forward for “the coming decisive period in the spiritual life of Germany”.[15]

These sentiments of frustration and anger deepen throughout 1918, as Heidegger himself was drawn into the war after being called up as a “Landsturmmann” (a member of the Home Guard) on 12 January to serve in the Freiburg reserve battalion 113 (14^th company). On the 30th of that month, he received a letter from Husserl. Once again, the two have failed to meet (a common occurrence), and Husserl, quite without any sense of the incongruity of his words, wishes his younger colleague a period of “quiet contemplation” in the army. [16] On 11 March Heidegger was transferred to Heuberg, and on the 17th he wrote the first of his almost daily letters to Elfride, telling her of his duties as a squad leader (since he was now a corporal). Although Heidegger was fully involved in route marches and night exercises, there were, nonetheless, periods, where he was able to think not only about himself and his philosophy, what it was and where it was heading, but about the war and what that might mean, won or lost, for the future of Germany. On 12 May, he writes: “I’m suffering so dreadfully on account of my surroundings – the worthlessness that erupts here can hardly even be put into words, and the worst thing is one cannot escape it. One is there in the middle of it and has to go along with it”. But then (in the same letter) comes something quite new in Heidegger’s thinking: politics. Heidegger had given voice to anti-establishment sentiments before, but these sentiments had been largely confined to his antagonism to the status quo in university circles and to the conservative hierarchy that he felt was stifling opportunities for younger academics. The war, however, has brought him into contact with that larger structure of social and political organisation: the state:

“What the state in its present form, with its lack of ethical-metaphysical orientation, has already curbed, poisoned, inhibited and destroyed in the way of inner wealth and potential of personality cannot be calculated in terms of national debt – nor can it be measured using prevailing yardsticks. But perhaps we acquire our value precisely by giving up any original assessment of us on the part of the state anyway”.

The war, in fact, politicises Heidegger, and he will return again in his letters to what its conduct and its consequences will mean for the German people at that time and in the future.

On 17 May, Heidegger was given leave and he returned to Freiburg. It was during this period that he received his first letter from Elisabeth Blochmann, a friend of Elfride. She had just paid the Heideggers a short visit, and this was her thank-you note. We know little about the background to this initial contact, It is most likely that she was someone whom Elfride had met through a women’s’ group or through her participation in the “Wandervögel” movement. Born in Weimar in 1892 into an assimilated German-Jewish upper-middle-class family as the first child of the lawyer Dr. Heinrich Blochmann and his wife Anna (née Sachs), Blochmann trained as a nurse before moving into teaching. After serving as a nurse in a lazaret in Weimar during the early years of the war, she enrolled in 1917 at the University of Jena to study history, philosophy, German language and literature.

Heidegger responded to Blochmann’s initial letter on 15 June, encouraging her to stay in touch. He also gives her a mini lecture on best teaching practice (she had now started studying pedagogy), expressing his conviction that educational theory, as with philosophy, can only reach others when it is taught from personal experience and from the heart, and he makes the following generalisation:

“Intellectual [‘geistig’] life can only be formed and made into a living experience, when those who participate in it are seized by it directly in their own inner lives. But the evaluation of intellectual realities, of the understanding of duty, and the realisation of goals can only become potent and permanent if they are the fruit of a nurtured inner growth, when they are without theoretical and didactic resources and techniques”.[17]

On 5 July, Heidegger was instructed to report for duty again at his local barracks in Freiburg, and was then sent two days later to undertake an eight-week training course in Berlin in meteorological logistics. As he wrote to Elfride, “we are to provide the artillery and air force with expert and systematic observations on temperature, barometer, wind etc.  One station is usually under a lieutenant or staff sergeant and five more men, one of them with scientific training and previous experience”. Heidegger, like all the members of his group, was expected to cater for himself, and he writes frequently to Elfride asking her to send food parcels (potatoes are what he particularly would like). He had to find his own accommodation and, after a few days of looking, he eventually found a small apartment at Droyserstraße 6 in the Charlottenburg area of the city. Initially, Heidegger’s impressions of Berlin were positive. As he tells Elfride in a letter of 8 July, he admires the “discipline” of city life, traffic control, and the educational amenities. But his mood soon changes after a few days when with a colleague he visits the centre of the city, including the red-light district of the Friedrichstraße.  “I presume we only saw the surface”, he tells Elfride on 21 July,

“but it is wilder than I ever could have imagined. I’d never have believed that such an atmosphere of artificially cultivated, vulgar and devious sexuality was possible; but now I do understand Berlin better – the character of the Friedrichstraße has rubbed off on the entire city – and in such a milieu there can be no true intellectual culture – a priori there cannot be – and even if every perfect remedy were to hand – it lacks what is simply Great and Divine“.[18]

And to his parents, in a letter written on the same day, he is even more scathing:

“To write about the war is pointless. If things turn out bad for us, then we will have deserved it – one only has to look at Berlin. As long as our politics do not change we cannot even think about an end – we certainly can’t think about a victory; that would be sheer madness: the military engagements at the moment show this. I have long given up reading the newspapers”.[19]

On 23 August 1918, Heidegger and his comrades were transferred to Montmédy in the Meuse department in Lorraine. As he told Elfride on 28 August, he was pleased to be there: “we’re located somewhat outside the village (350 inhabitants, 80 are still here) 18 km north-east of Verdun – lovely plateau with woodland and pretty meadows”.  But this was, nonetheless, war, and Heidegger must soon confront his “elemental existence”, the poor food, cramped living quarters and the often unwelcome proximity of others, that war brings. This was, however, a good environment in which to think and to think deeply. As he tells Elfride on 4 September: “in the primitiveness of existence issues of ultimate significance approach one another with due immediacy, strength and clarity”.  And one issue in particular was approaching: his Catholic faith. Elfride was being put under pressure by his parents to convert to Catholicism, something that she was resisting. In the same letter of 4 September, Heidegger encourages Elfride to hold firm to her convictions, and he makes the following remarkable confession:

“All my earlier insecurity, untruthfulness and casuistry are the simple consequence of an ultra-Catholic education, which I, for my part, always sought to break out of with inadequate means. And the same factors are still present in my parental home (I’m not here reproaching my parents) especially as it’s so much a part of the parish house – but ultimately everything is due to the inner lack of freedom of the Catholic system – and the pious-acting despotism of conscience. All this today I see with complete clarity”.

On 10 September, Heidegger received a letter from Husserl, who had been impressed by both the spirited tone and intellectual content of Heidegger’s earlier letter of 21 July: “you have such eyes and such a heart and such words. My goodness!” Husserl enthuses, seeing in his young colleague the voice of a youth that he hopes will survive the war.[20] Throughout September, Heidegger had continued to write to Elfride describing conditions at the Front, including with one letter on 22 September a photograph of his hut, the centre of operations for his unit: “at night from the tower we can watch the firing of the guns and even more the impact of the bombs, which make everything in the hut shake. But you get used to it, and can even go on sleeping”. These letters also reveal that Heidegger is giving thought to greater matters, to what a new Germany might look like after the war. On 17 October, less than a month before the ceasefire in 1918, he wrote to Elfride:

“Only the young can save us now, and creatively allow a New Spirit to be made flesh in the world. Come what may, we must keep alive within us our belief in the spirit as firmly and with as much trust as we are capable of building up, building up perhaps whilst remaining in outward poverty, privation and many a hindrance; but only at times such as these has the hour of the rebirth of the spirit ever been awakened. We are bogged down in a horribly deformed culture, which has only the spurious appearance of life”. And then he adds words that foreshadow an ominous turning in German politics in the twentieth century:

“Aimlessness, hollowness and alienation from values have dominated political life and the concept of the state, in general. The only thing that can help here is the emergence of new human beings, who will harbour an elemental affinity with the spirit and its demands, and I myself recognise ever more urgently the need for leaders: only the individual is creative (even in leadership); the masses never”.

That Heidegger can and will play a part in this reformation of the German spirit, he has no doubt. Ten days later, on 27 October, he wrote once again to his wife, committing himself to a radically new philosophy, for which “the language and concepts have as yet to be discovered and be created in silent contemplation”, but which will then inform “the unity of research, teaching and education which is to be created”. This is his “calling”, and he wishes to start immediately on this task when he returns to Freiburg:

“I’d like to give a couple of one-hour lectures on what the essence of the university and academic study is, starting from the basic orientation described above. I have an inner conviction that this would help make young people inwardly aware and strong so that they could go out as a “leaven” into the future life of the state and the people, undivided attentively to what is positively creative, casting off everything that is merely short-lived and determined by milieu but fostering instead the important engagement with [philosophical] principles”.

These are sentiments that Heidegger also imparts to Elisabeth Blochmann, with whom a deep friendship was clearly developing. On 6 and 7 November, he sent her two letters in quick succession. Although Heidegger offers detailed advice regarding her doctoral dissertation on Schleiermacher, the main focus of these letters is on the “saving” of the German nation, which requires that a “truly spiritual people”, particularly a young people, should step forward and take the leadership in guiding the nation. He has no doubt that Elisabeth Blochmann will play her part in this.

Heidegger was discharged following the Armistice of 11 November, and he returned home to Freiburg. But now he must confront a problem of a more private nature, as the birth of his son, Jörg (born 21 January 1919), is impending. Elfride still had not converted to Catholicism, and had no wish for her child to be baptised a Catholic. Matters were now coming to a head. On 17 December, Heidegger had written to his parents, including with his letter one from Elfride. The couple presented a united front: their son will not be baptised a Catholic, not only because Elfride does not share that faith but also because – and this would have come as a complete shock –their son has lost his. Lest his parents, however, should worry that he has forsaken the one true religion for a false one, he writes again, on 21 December, to make his position absolutely clear: “I am in no way antagonistic to the Catholic faith. On the contrary, I will never lose what was of value in it. Even less so can I commit myself to any specific direction in the Protestant faith”. In early January 1919, Elfride paid a visit to Engelbert Krebs, to explain to him that the baby that she was expecting would not be christened a Catholic. This was followed, on 9 January, by a letter to Krebs from Heidegger himself, explaining this critical turning point in his faith:

“The past two years, in which I have struggled for a fundamental clarification of my philosophical position and put aside all narrowly specialised academic tasks, have led to me concluding that I would not be able to hold and teach freely if I were bound to a position outside of philosophy.

Epistemological insights extending to a theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity and metaphysics – these though I approach in a new sense”.[21]

Heidegger’s wording is curious. What, Father Krebs may well have asked himself, is the “system” of Catholicism other than the Catholic Church itself and the Catholic faith? And what possible difference could it make to Heidegger’s apostasy that he still affirms his faith in Christianity and metaphysics (as if the two are in any way related)? Heidegger’s letter would not, however, have come as a surprise to those who knew him well: it was the final clearing of the way so that the true faith in his life could emerge unhindered: philosophy.

In January 1919, Husserl wrote to the Ministry for Science, Arts and Education in Berlin, applying for Heidegger to become his assistant, starting from the winter semester that was to commence on 25 January. This was to be a “Kriegsnotsemester fur Kriegsteilnehmer” (a special wartime semester for those who had fought in the war). Heidegger was duly employed as a “Privatdozent” (an assistant lecturer drawing a salary from student fees rather than from the university), and delivered his first lecture on 2 February in a course on “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews”. Heidegger was giving this lecture in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil sweeping through Germany. The failed Berlin Spartacist uprising of 15 January had been followed by a temporarily more successful one in Munich on 6 April, where Ernst Toller had declared the establishment of a Bavarian Council Republic, and there is something of these radical energies in Heidegger’s first course of lectures, for they are intended to be a critical intervention into reigning models of philosophy and the institutional ethos that supported such philosophies in the university.

In “Science and University Reform”, Heidegger confronts that ethos, arguing for a renewal of philosophy through “a rebirth of genuine intellectual [‘wissenschaftlich’] consciousness and its relationship to life”. This alone, he argues, will get us out of the “wretchedness of the desert”, and he adds the words from the Old Testament: “And God our Lord let grow … the tree of life in the midst of the garden – and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (I Moses 2.9).[1] The sentiments are inspirational, evangelical even; and yet what Heidegger is arguing for is not the creation of subjectively inclined transformative philosophy in the manner of his contemporary, Ludwig Klages, whose post-Nietzschean vitalism, refashioned through the guise of a “biocentric metaphysics”, likewise promised the renewal of the life of the mind. Heidegger certainly portends a philosophy that is transformative, but that transformation, following Edmund Husserl’s exhortation “back to things themselves”, will take place on the solid ground of phenomenological fact by projecting a new way of approaching the material world, because, as he argues in his opening lecture, “the awakening and heightening of the life-context of intellectually-developed [“wissenschaftlich”] consciousness is not the object of theoretical representation but of exemplary pre-living [“Vorleben”] – not the object of a mechanical provision of rules but the consequence of primordially motivated and personal Being”. Consequently, “we must immerse ourselves, with the highest degree of clarity, in this lability of fact and factual knowledge, of the factum, until it is unmistakable in its givenness”. [2]

“But what is this “givenness”, and how do we make it an object of knowledge? “How are we to obtain the essential determinative moments of this idea and thus the determinateness of the indeterminateness of the object? On which methodological path are they to be found? How is the determinable itself to be determined?” [3] Heidegger devotes much of the first part of his lecture course, “The Idea of Philosophy as a Founding Discipline [‘Urwissenschaft’]”, to methodological issues, whilst in the second set of lectures, “Phenomenology as a Pre-theoretical Foundational Discipline”, he points the way forward through phenomenology, for it alone permits a “leap into another world, or, to be more exact, into the world at all”.[4]

“This concern for the priorities of individually lived life also characterises Heidegger’s own way of philosophising in this lecture course, and it emerges in one one memorable episode that takes place midway through a section titled “The Experience of the Surrounding World”, where Heidegger joins his students in a act of shared perception:

“You come as usual into this lecture room at the usual hour and go to your usual place. You can focus on this experience of ‘seeing your place’. Or you can, alternatively, adopt my perspective: coming into the lecture room, I see the lectern. There is absolutely no need to put this experience into words. What do “I” see? Brown surfaces at right angles to one another? No, I see something else. A largish box with a smaller one set upon it? Not at all. I see the lectern at which I am about to speak; you see the lectern, from which you are to be addressed, and from where I have spoken to you previously. In pure experience, there is no, as one says, “founding interconnection”, as if I first of all I see intersecting brown surfaces, which then reveal themselves to me as a box, then as a desk, then as an academic lecturing desk, then as a lectern, so that I can attach lectern-hood to the box like a label. All that is simply bad and misguided interpretation, diversion from pure seeing into experience”. [5]

This was a new voice in philosophy, and one that did not cloak itself in the fabricated aura of professorial wisdom but, eschewing theoretical jargon, drew its conceptual thrust out of a recourse to shared common experience. The episode contains in nuce the major themes of Heidegger’s philosophy in this early stage of its formation: the insistence that we are all bound to this world, and that our interpretation of it must arise out of our concrete place within it; that experience and analysis are not the same; that the environment that surrounds us is already invested with meaning (and hence our intentionality must work with the pre-existent), and that we register on a pre-theoretical level the significance of physical objects quite independently of their material properties (because they already have a practical function). This was a thematic matrix that Heidegger would further develop in subsequent lecture courses, before it reached its eventual destination in Being and Time.

The winter semester, and hence Heidegger’s lecture series, ended on 16 April, and he immediately set off for a holiday to Lake Constance – by himself. He stayed with an old friend, Theophil Rees, a doctor at a local hospital. On 22 January, Heidegger had written a letter to Elfride, who was visiting her parents in Wiesbaden to show them the new baby boy, with sentiments that were brimming with domestic bliss: through the birth of Jörg, the couple have received “a new consecration”, and Heidegger is experiencing “a quietness of a deep reverential joy”. He writes again later on 17 April from Constance, but both the tone and content of this letter are quite different. Clearly, a major change has taken place in their relationship, for how otherwise can we explain these words:

“I have been thinking from time to time recently about the weeks that have passed since the little Blackamoor arrived [their son, Jörg]. Both of us have lived intensely, haven’t we, in our own way? From the summer though I’m hoping for one more thing: that we can talk things through with one another once again, can ‘chat’ “.

He does not tell us in this letter what these “things” are that need to be talked through. For that we must wait until 1 September. Here it becomes clear that Elfride has become romantically involved with another man: a doctor at the university hospital in Freiburg, Friedel Caesar. Towards the end of August, Elfride had written to her husband, telling him about the relationship. Heidegger now replies:

“Your letter came this morning, and I knew beforehand what it contained. Saying many words about it and analysing it all is fruitless. It’s enough that you’ve told me in your plain, assured manner. Mind you, I don’t understand your “inner conflict”, nor do I ever want to be presented with any psychological demonstrations in the matter – not because I am indifferent but because I want to have you directly the way I can have you, and that Friedel loves you I’ve known for a long time – asking you about it would have seemed petty to me – I have often been surprised that you didn’t tell me about it sooner. It is also typical of him that Friedel felt inhibited by me and all the more natural as in me he sees merely the clumsy, awkward, narrowly focused pedant who just goes along with things. It would be naive of me and a waste of time if I were to hold this against him in the slightest”.

Heidegger will return to this pained matter later in the year, a year in which much remains unclear in his private life. Hints, it is true, are given in his other correspondence, such as a letter of 1 May to Elisabeth Blochmann, who seems to have divined that something is amiss. “You have indeed touched on a number of things”, he writes, “but I cannot exhaustively reply to you”. He then gives her a revealing insight into his state of mind: “it is a rationalistic misunderstanding of the essence of the ebbing and flowing of personal life, when one asserts and demands that it must always move in the same broad and resonant amplitude as it does in those few blessed moments that surge upon us”. Those blessed moments seem to have disappeared for Heidegger: he is now alone, without Elfride.

This letter was written during the short vacation following the “Kriegsnotsemester”. In the summer semester, which ran from late April to early July, Heidegger gave two lecture courses (together with a seminar on Descartes’ Meditations): one on “Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Transcendental Values (“Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie”) and another (“On the Essence of the University and Academic Study” (“Über das Wesen der Universität und des akademischen Studiums”). In his letter of 1 September to Elfride, sent from Constance (where he was again in the company of Rees) Heidegger looked back on his first semester with mixed feelings. It had been only a partial success because, in his thinking, he had not as yet freed himself from the influence of his erstwhile mentors. He felt he could do better:

“I have learnt one thing: to immerse myself in concrete problems. This is now the great task: to make concrete problems the focal point and guiding thread of the lectures, and let the connections arise from the analysis itself. For I suddenly [in that earlier lecture course] found myself once again indulging in construction, which is an old vestige of Rickert’s way of philosophising. Yesterday I again tried to work once more through Rickert’s “Object of Cognition” for the [new] lecture course, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t go on reading. It was as if I had an inner hostility towards this unparalleled style of constructive and yet unmethodical thought”.

By “construction” Heidegger meant that he felt he was still at the stage of the explication of other philosophers’ ideas. However, in the summer semester lectures, Heidegger gives clear evidence of new ideas and a new way of philosophising. In his introduction, “Guiding Principles of the Lecture-Course”, Heidegger explains what the goal of his lecture course is:

“General character of the lecture course: not a systematic, summarising comparison in a descriptively complete overview of two opposing positions and systems (that would result in either a poor imitation of a much better original or a worthless one-sided picture, which would only add to our problems).

Aim: concrete problems that arise out of the central trajectory of problem-posing, and group themselves around a central concrete fundamental problem. Judgement as acknowledging. (In general: intentionality, the tendency of lived experience, and the question of how far values can be excluded in teleologically interpreted tendencies!)”.[6]

In the first part of the course, “Historical Presentation of the Problem”, Heidegger subjects the dominant philosophical models of his day, including those of Wilhelm Windelband (the leading Neo-Kantian of the Baden School and exponent of the philosophy of value), Wilhelm Dilthey (an influential philosopher of the human sciences and exponent of hermeneutics) and Heinrich Rickert (Heidegger’s professor at Freiburg and a Neo-Kantian promoter of transcendental philosophy), to a succinct critique, arguing that a recourse to the history of philosophy or further work in inductive metaphysics can add nothing new to our understanding of the world. Phenomenology, with its concern for intuition, intentionality and the reception of immediate data, must replace these philosophies, to allow us to “press forward into the genuinely primordial level of a genuine philosophical problematic and methodology”. [7]

But how can this be achieved? What is the “primordial level” that phenomenology alone is capable of reaching? Heidegger goes at least part of the way to answering these questions in the second set of lectures given in this summer semester, “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study”. Heidegger attempts here to sketch out the basis for an existentially inflected phenomenology as an engagement with what he will later call a “Being-in-the-world”. He will seek to integrate the main components of phenomenology, as it has been developed by Husserl (its stress on cognition and intentionality, for example) into the experience of human facticity, a state of actuality that Heidegger sums up in the concept of “situation” (from the Latin “situare”, meaning “to place”):

“Situation in the life-context: a situation is a certain unity in natural experience [“Erlebnis”]. Situations can interpenetrate one another: their durations do not exclude each other […] In every situation, a unitary tendency is present. It contains no static moments but “events”. The occurrence of the situation is not a “process” – as could be theoretically observed in the physical laboratory, e.g. an electrical discharge. Events “happen to me”. The basic form of the life-context is motivation. In situational experiences it recedes. The motivating and motivated are not explicitly given. They pass implicitly through the “I”. The intentionality of all experiences of a situation has a definite character, which originates from the total situation”. [8]

As these inceptive words suggest, central to the formation of Heidegger’s philosophy at this early stage is a new concept of the experiencing self, the “I”. Heidegger is working towards a model of selfhood that will retain its integrity of position (what we might loosely call its “independence”), but link that integrity to the environment in which it necessarily exists. Heidegger calls this new subject the “situational I”:

“The situational I: the I-self, the “historical I”, is a function of “life-experience”. Life-experience is a continually changing context of situations, of motivational possibilities. Life-experience in the pure environing world is a mixed structure. Nevertheless, it can be quite definitely described in its structure”. [9]

But how? Heidegger does not answer this question, but he is not being evasive: he knows that it is a problem, as the constant return to methodological issues throughout this short lecture course testify. As he observes towards its end, “theoretical comportment requires renewal. Theoretical objectivity is accessible only through an ever new fresh impetus”. [10] What is required, indeed demanded, of philosophy by those who wish to establish a foundational originary philosophy beyond the lifeless problematic of academic philosophy is a “new comportment”, and Heidegger outlines (finally arriving at the purported subject matter of his lecture, the “nature of the university and academic study”) what this new comportment will entail for him, as a philosopher and university teacher. It is both a call to arms and a testimony of faith:

“Pure dedication to the subject-matter. Situational content of studying: every life-relation is suppressed. I am fully free of every life-contexture and at the same time fully bound to truth. To all other subjects, I simply have the obligation of absolute veracity”.

” By entering into these pure states of affair, I will obtain the opportunity for unlimited knowledge. But I also lay myself open to the risk that, if I infringe upon the condition of this life-contexture, I would have to withdraw from the scholarly life-contexture. Therefore, the “vocational question” stands right at the beginning of the theoretical life-contexture: can I maintain within myself the disposition of absolute veracity?” [11]

[1] Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), pp. 4–5 and 65. Heidegger frequently describes serious philosophy as a “Wissenschaft”, and this term is normally translated as “science”. But in English this refers to a particular group of disciplines founded on experimental and practical procedures, such as physics or chemistry. Heidegger’s use of “Wissenschaft” is best translated as “intellectual discipline”, and “wissenschaftlich” as “intellectual”.

[2] Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), pp. 5 and 49.

[3] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), p. 15.

[4] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 63

[5] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, pp. 70–71.

[6] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 121.

[7] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 127.

[8] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 205.

[9] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 208.

[10] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 210.

[11] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 213.

On 9 September 1919, after the end of the summer semester, Heidegger returned to Constance, and from there wrote to Elfride once again regarding her relationship with Friedel Caesar. His words were conciliatory: “I’ve never despised Friedel”, he tells her. It is simply they have nothing in common and come from a completely different background and upbringing. If Elfride felt that she was being neglected and that philosophy was Heidegger’s true companion, this letter would have done nothing to allay these suspicions, for here he moves directly through the problem of their marriage to speak about his “calling”. Through the intensity of his work he has been in a state of “mysterium tremendum”, a feeling of dark mystery and transgression brought about by his attempt to push beyond established forms of philosophising:

“I’ve now spent three weeks in such a mood – the views, the horizons of the problems – genuine strides in fertile solutions – seeing the principles anew, possibilities for the most surprising formulations and coinages, forging genuine connections. All this is so overwhelming”.

Soon after, Heidegger went to visit his parents in Meßkirch, and wrote to Elfride on 13 September, saying that he hoped she would have him to stay in Freiburg to celebrate his thirtieth birthday on the 26th. We do not know whether she did, but Heidegger did return in time to attend his son’s baptism in a Protestant ceremony.

Towards the end of his lecture course on “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews”, Heidegger had argued that what we are seeking through phenomenology is an “Ur-etwas”, a primal something that precedes theoretical thinking, a reality that has up to now evaded philosophical systems, which have sought to categorise and explain (and explain away – or simply ignore, as something not worthy of philosophical scrutiny) the brute facticity of life. For “the original meaning of ‘something’ must phenomenologically be perceived on a purely intuitive way”. [1] According to one student present, Franz-Joseph Brecht (whose lecture notes form the basis of the written account of this lecture), Heidegger then drew on a blackboard a sketch of what this theoretical and pre-theoretical model would look like. It consisted of a series of terms that centred on “life”, ‘experience”, the “aesthetic” and “motivation”, concepts that were joined by their affinity with what at this stage Heidegger could only designate as “Etwas” (“Something”).[2]

The lecture course, “Basic Problems of Phenomenology” (“Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie”), which ran through the winter semester from November 1919 to the end of January 1920 (and was taught in conjunction with a seminar on “Exercises in Connection with Natorp’s General Psychology”), is an attempt to bring these ad hoc insights into systematic form. It constitutes Heidegger’s first attempt to integrate his own ideas into a new version of phenomenology. Heidegger initially establishes what phenomenology is not. Although it takes concerns with cognitive modes such as intentionality and intuition as its starting point, it is not a “substitute for experimental psychology”. Nor is it a “new epistemology”, either of the transcendental or Realist type, although it is certainly concerned about how we know the world.[3] Rather, phenomenology is, as Heidegger makes clear in the second section of his lecture course, the “Original Discipline [‘Wissenschaft’] of Factical Life in itself”, an ingress into (shifting the focus away from Husserl’s emphasis upon perception) what Heidegger calls the “factive” world, the world as an “area of living”.[4]

But what does “living” mean here? What is “life”? The concept had underwritten Heidegger’s earlier lectures but now he engages with it directly, as in Section 7, “Preliminary Delimitation of the Concept of Life itself”, in breathless and assertive words seeking to give it an immediate shape:

“Life – my life, your life, their life, our life is something we want to get to know in its most general typicality and, indeed, in such a way that we remain within it, looking around within it in its own way, with the aim that we likewise look at it, at this life, ever more clearly, that within itself and its vital pull and in its directions and destinies, in that which always and everywhere and here in each case moves it in different ways and keeps it moving”.

The “fundamental aspect” of this “life” Heidegger calls “self-sufficiency” (“Genügsamkeit”), which embraces all we do, and yet seems to remain independent of us. Finding a language to bring it to philosophical light is not easy:

“Self-sufficient – the form of fulfillment – its intentional structure, a basic directedness in each case and always into the world (also the world of self) – towards transcendence (that also comprises the factually immanent). This “form” is the mode of life’s own direction that it takes exactly there to where it wants to fulfil and satisfy itself. Structurally, it does not need to come out of itself (it does not need to turn itself out of itself), in order to bring its genuine tendencies to fulfillment. It always addresses itself but only in its own “language”. It gives itself tasks and demands, which always remain solely in its own sphere, whereby it seeks to overcome its limitations, its imperfections, to fill out the perspectives that take place within it, again and again, and only “in” the basic character that is prefigured by its most internalised [“eigenste”] self-sufficiency and its forms and the means derived from them, so that one does not even see, whilst remaining within oneself, that it cannot be addressed in any other way”. [5]

Looking back from Being and Time, where “life” is refracted across a complex ontological analytic and articulated through a nuanced terminology, the struggle that it cost Heidegger to reach that point can be clearly felt in this passage. The ideas fall over themselves in definitional profusion, generated by a euphoric insistence on the primacy of lived life, which at times takes on an almost human guise, endowed, for example, with the capacity to “fulfil and satisfy itself”. Heidegger wishes us to be brought close to life, but, at the same time, he takes pains to stress its independence, its integrity, its “self-sufficiency” (“Genügsamkeit”), which is a curious anthropomorphised term that Heidegger will later abandon in favour of “Being” (“Sein’). Indeed, as the reference to “intentional structure” suggests, Heidegger may already be working towards the notion of “Dasein”, of a being that is self-conscious about (its) Being that looks “into a world (but also the world of self [Selbstwelt”]”. Heidegger’s model of life includes both the material here-and-now of existence; but it also contains or seeks to reach, or is directed towards, the “transcendent”, which also contains (“umfasst”) the “immanent”.

Throughout the lecture course, Heidegger struggles with methodological issues. As he observes right at the very beginning, “the problem sphere of phenomenology is thus not immediately and simply pregiven: it must be mediated”, and he queries, in a subsequent passage where he has been arguing for the need to ground philosophy in the “original region of life”, “how do we wish to establish a strict science in this constantly flooding fullness of life and worlds? What is the ‘original region of life’ supposed to convey here and how is it supposed to be forced open in strict scientific research? How is it supposed to be something that is altogether accessible only in this way?” [6] Now in the final section of his lecture-course, “Phenomenological Preparation of the Ground of Experience for the Original Science of Life”, Heidegger outlines a framework in which he might be able to answer such questions. That this framework is itself composed of questions is not a paradox but the result of the perpetually interrogative nature of Heidegger’s philosophising. As his way forward, he sets himself a number of “tasks:

“To ‘attain’ the motivating basic experience and, indeed, the pre-theoretical, motivating basic experience. This leads likewise to the process of sense genetically emerging from the identification of the pre-theoretical constitution of the world in general.

Heidegger had voiced this goal before in his earlier lectures, but now he is concerned to qualify his new paradigm. He is seeking

“To determine if the theoretical-scientific tendencies of expression growing out of that are the only possible ones, or whether or not other ones claim equal validity as theoretical tendencies;

That leads to the question of whether a world experience as such admits of a number of typical basic experiences or only of one, which then branches out into various directions of motivation from which the various theoretical contexts of expression initially arise”. [7]

Heidegger will devote all of his subsequent lectures to providing a substance for this ambitious but as yet skeletal project, until his task comes to at least provisional resolution in Being and Time.

[1] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 218.

[2] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 218.

[3] Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans Scott M. Campbell (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 13.

[4] Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), p. 65.

[5] Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20), p. 31.

[6] Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans Scott M. Campbell (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 23 and 74.

[7] Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans Scott M. Campbell (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 75–76.

Elfride and Heidegger were increasingly spending less time together. At Christmas, each wrote (separate letters) to Heidegger’s parents in Meßkirch, wishing them a happy family festive occasion, but explaining that they would not be there. Heidegger spent much of January (after he had finished his lecture course) through to March staying with friends at Sankt Märgen, a village twenty-five kilometers from Freiburg in the centre of the Black Forest. On 4 January 1920, he wrote to Elfride, saying “my truest happiness is that you can find yourself fully and freely at my side”. He gives us no further indication of what it might mean for Elfride to “find herself fully”, but it is clear that she is seeking to lead her own life. Being true to oneself is also, he goes on to say, essential in philosophy if one is to find “a more elemental grasp of life”, and he adds:

“This is also what puts me such poles apart from Husserl today, and – simply to support us financially – I must now find the possibilities of going along with him without violent conflict”.

Those who stood close to Heidegger, such as Frau Szilasi, the wife of the Hungarian philosopher, Wilhelm Szilasi, then studying at Freiburg, had also been struck by the differences in the philosophical temperaments of the two men: “Even in the first weeks she’s noticed the great contrast between Husserl and me  – how appalled she was by Husserl’s mathematical ethos – how surprised she was that I should associate thus with the little rogue”.[30]

On 8 February, Heidegger wrote once again to Elfride, who has become something of a stranger to her husband, and Heidegger rather pathetically enquires: “I’d love to know how you are – couldn’t you drop me a short line every once in a while?”  He then adds words that might explain why Elfride is so rarely in contact with him: “our marriage represents something very rich and strong even if it does perhaps lack love itself, which is something that I cannot really picture anyway”.  But it is precisely love that Elfride wants and has found with Friedel Caesar, with whom she is now expecting a child. Heidegger visited her shortly afterwards in Freiburg, but stayed for one week only before returning to Sankt Märgen, where he remained until the end of the month.

On 21 January, Heidegger had received a letter from Heinrich Rickert, who apologised for his long silence but hoped that his young colleague would stay in touch with him. Heidegger replied on 27 January, sending Rickert not only a letter of support and affection, but also a detailed outline of how his philosophy had developed since they had last been in contact. He begins by tracing his emergence from his earlier studies, in which he had trod a path that had ultimately led into his current activities in phenomenology. He concludes his letter by explaining the difference between his version of phenomenology and that of Husserl:

“While Husserl is essentially oriented to the mathematical natural sciences, and from there not only construes his problems but also perhaps determines which ones can be validly treated, I, on the other hand, attempt to secure their foundation in living day-to-day [“geschichtlichen”] life itself, and indeed in the factive experience of our environment, in their phenomenological illumination”.

In the summer semester, between May and July 1920, Heidegger gave a series of lectures on the “Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression: Theory of Philosophical Concept-Formation”. Heidegger emphasised that philosophy had reached a critical juncture: it can either persist with the conventional schools of neo-Kantianism or the natural sciences, or it can reach beyond all theoretical models to a genuine grasp of life through phenomenology. Heidegger was soon to find an ally in this project of philosophical renewal.  On 8 April, shortly before the commencement of teaching, he had met the young professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, Karl Jaspers, who was visiting Freiburg on the occasion of Husserl’s sixty-first birthday. Jaspers, born in Oldenburg in 1883, had graduated from Heidelberg University medical school in 1908 and, dissatisfied with the way the medical community of the time approached the study of mental illness, had set out to improve the practice of psychiatry. In 1913 he had been awarded his “Habilitation” at Heidelberg, in the same year publishing his first book, General Psychopathology. In 1914, he had gained a post there, teaching psychology, and in 1919 had published his Psychology of Worldviews, a study in which he formulated an historical taxonomy of mental and philosophical dispositions.

Heidegger was not unknown to Jaspers. As Jaspers tells us in his autobiography:

“What I had first heard about Heidegger at the end of the First World War gave me hope that there was a genuine philosophical talent amongst academics. He was seven years younger than I, a junior lecturer and assistant of Husserl, obviously still unknown, and yet there was already the beginnings of a legend around him”. [31] The two men finally met:

“In the spring of 1920, my wife and I spent a few days in Freiburg, and I took the opportunity of talking with Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl’s birthday was being celebrated. There was quite a large group of people sitting around the coffee table [at Husserl’s home]. Frau Husserl described Heidegger as the “phenomenological progeny”. I recounted how a female student of mine, Afra Geiger, a first-rate person, had come to Freiburg to study with Husserl, only to be rejected by him because she didn’t meet the enrolment requirements for his seminar.  Thus both he and she had, because of the rigidity of the academic rules, lost a good opportunity simply because he had not bothered to meet the person. Heidegger immediately joined the conversation, vigorously supporting my point of view. It was a solidarity of two younger men against the authority of the abstract status quo”. Jaspers felt alienated by what had happened that afternoon, finding Husserl and his environment constrained, petit bourgeois and lacking any “intellectual spark”. Heidegger, however, he thought was different:” I went back to his place, sat alone with him in his den, saw him working on Luther, saw the intensity of his application, and felt an empathy with his forceful, terse way of speaking”.[32]

Both Heidegger and Jaspers were disillusioned with philosophy as it was being taught in universities, where they felt that it had degenerated into a lifeless exercise in disputations between different schools of thought (Jaspers in his autobiography described them as a “Zumpf”, a “clique”), presided over by magisterial professors more intent on advancing their careers than in expanding the boundaries of knowledge.[33] This initial meeting between Jaspers and Heidegger led to further meetings in Freiburg and Heidelberg, and produced a body of correspondence that would stretch (with a significant hiatus during the Nazi period) over a period of forty years. Heidegger sent his first letter to Jaspers on 21 April 1920, after visiting him briefly in Heidelberg on his way to Wiesbaden, where on 14 April, he had given a talk on Oswald Spengler. He regrets that on that occasion he had to leave early (he had a train to catch) but hoped that they would stay in touch because he had the “feeling” that, “from the same basic position”, they were both “working towards a rejuvenation of philosophy”.[34]

Karl Jaspers was not the only one who had this perception of Heidegger. The young Hannah Arendt, who went to Marburg to study under Heidegger in 1924, was likewise attracted to his dynamic personality and the energy of his teaching. Heidegger was for her the “hidden king”, who “reigned in the realm of thinking”: The rumour about Heidegger was quite simply: thinking had come to life again. The cultural treatises of the past, believed to be dead, were being made to speak, in the course of which it had become clear that they proposed things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities that they had been presumed to propose. The feeling was: there exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think. This thinking may set tasks for itself; it may deal with “problems”; it naturally, indeed always, has something specific with which it is particularly occupied with or, more precisely by which it is specifically aroused; but one cannot say that it has a goal. It is unceasingly active, and even the laying down of paths itself is conducive to an opening up of a new dimension of thought, rather than to reaching a goal sighted beforehand and guided thereto.[35]

Heidegger remained immersed in philosophical problems throughout 1920, something that was clearly imposing a strain on his marriage. On 28 July, he wrote to Elfride: “it is touching how [Frau Husserl] must have borne with [Edmund Husserl] in the time prior to the Logical Investigations; he said that for thirteen years he had driven his wife to distraction. I don’t really know what you think about my work at the moment, and you would also probably find it difficult to say what you think, as you hardly know what I’m working on”. On 1 August, Heidegger accompanied by his friend, Theophil Rees, visited Beuron Abbey, a short distance from Meßkirch.  As he tells Elfride, he is glad to be away from an academic environment:

“Here I am quite free and far away from any surroundings that remind me of the University and the philosophical business of the Schools, of discussions and chatter. I’m gradually beginning to feel physically fresh again too. When I now think back on the semester, it was like an assault, where one cannot stop and think things over but must just keep on running”.

On 20 August, Elfride gave birth to a baby boy, Hermann, and Heidegger wrote to her the following days with congratulations. Heidegger was not the natural father and his sentiments in his letter come across as strained and somewhat distant: “I’m glad now that I know where you are and how you are. I can come to you often now and share in your great joy”.  The couple have, in effect, an “open marriage”, an arrangement which Heidegger saw as presaging a new future for that institution:

“I often find myself thinking how pale, untrue and sentimental everything is that is usually said about marriage, and whether we aren’t giving shape to a new form of it in our lives – without a programme or intention – but just by letting genuineness come through everywhere”.

On 27 August, Heidegger wrote to Rickert, complaining of the pressure he was under in his teaching duties at Freiburg, which left him little time for independent research. One project that he was able to bring to completion was a review of Jasper’s book The Psychology of Worldviews published the previous year, a work that Rickert had also reviewed (and negatively). Heidegger had hoped to place his review with the journal the Göttingischen Gelehrten Anzeigen, but its editors had found it too long and too convoluted. Rather than merely offering an assessment of the book, Heidegger had tried to demonstrate “what possibilities [for future philosophy] present themselves out of the concrete work that Jaspers has undertaken there”. In short, he had used his review as a vehicle for the formulation of his own phenomenological ideas, something that, according to the editors, went well beyond his brief. But even if it is to remain unpublished, Heidegger tells Rickert, the work that he has done on it has brought home to him the necessity of finding a more incisive conceptual terminology to the “vague and tepid” terms that have been used (including by himself – he mentions the concept of ‘intuition”, “Anschauung”, that he has been discussing in his recent lectures) to explicate the phenomenology of thinking. And he adds significantly (because this will later be an issue affecting his career) that the quest for such a terminology means “unfortunately renouncing the usual tempo of academic publishing that is pursued by my peers in the faculty”.

On 30 August, Heidegger returned with Jörg to Meßkirch to continue his preparations for the coming summer semester. On 8 September, he wrote to Elfride, describing his rediscovery of nature and specifically the local countryside that he had been able to reach on the field-path that he had so often walked as a boy. In the winter semester, between November and March 1921, Heidegger gave an “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion”, offering at the same time the seminar, “Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners in Connection with Descartes’ Meditations”. Although Heidegger had outlined his methodology before, he could not assume that his present students were familiar with the content and aims of phenomenology, and began thus his first lecture with a series of questions:

“What is phenomenology? What is a phenomenon? This can be only indicated here in formal terms. Every experience – as an experiencing, as that which is experienced – can “be taken up as the phenomenon”. That is to say one can ask:

1. After the original “what” which is experienced therein (content).
2. After the original “how” in which it is experienced (relation)
3. After the original “how” in which the relational meaning is enacted (enactment).

But these three directions of sense (content-, relational-, enactment sense) do not simply coexist: “phenomenon” is the totality of sense in these three directions. “Phenomenology” is the explication of this totality of sense; it gives the “logos” of the phenomena, “logos” in the sense of “verbum internum” [a capacity to receive “inner meaning”] (not in the sense of logicalisation)”.[36]

On 21 January, Jaspers wrote to Heidegger asking for his advice about a student. It was a letter that initiated a lengthy period of correspondence, during which theoretical matters were discussed on a continuous basis, confidences exchanged, inside knowledge conveyed and opinions canvassed, regarding academic and university matters. In this particular letter, Jaspers asked Heidegger for his opinion of Friedrich Neumann, a student of Heidegger’s who had applied to undertake a PhD at Heidelberg with Jaspers. The following day, Heidegger sent his opinion: “Herr N. is in his second semester here. I won’t say that I know him, for that is quite difficult – not because he has a highly complex nature but because he is completely unstable, sloppy and perhaps fundamentally a poseur”. Neumann began as a supporter of Husserl, before switching to Heidegger. Heidegger, in fact, had a poor opinion of students in general:

“I have lost all my optimism regarding today’s students, both the male and even the female ones. Even the best are either religious fanatics (theosophists who have also established themselves in protestant theology), followers of [the cultic poet, Stefan] George and those like him, or they are part of an unhealthy eclecticism, where they know everything about nothing, and nothing about everything”.

At the end of the semester, Heidegger went on a skiing holiday to Mittelberg on the German-Austria border. Once again, Heidegger was taking his vacation alone, without Elfride, but the letter he sent to her on 2 March was positive and companionable in tone. It seems evident that their marriage has, after the birth of Hermann, stabilised: “we must definitely come up here – when we can. The post seems to be very slow – I still haven’t got anything from you. I wonder what the lads [Jörg and Hermann] are doing”, he writes.

On 15 March, Heidegger wrote to Rickert, thanking him for sending the latest edition of his book Cultural Science and the Natural Science, and regretting that he could not send him something of his own in return. It is a moment of soul searching for Heidegger, who has not published a book since his postdoctoral work on Scotus in 1916. In spite of Husserl’s advice that he should publish something from his lectures, and the fact that these lectures have been a great success with students, Heidegger does not think that his work has as yet reached the high standards that he has set himself. As he explains to Rickert:

“Perhaps this may look a little risky to others, a little too idealistic and unprofessional, particularly when “so many professorial vacancies are around today”. But one has the years between thirty and forty only once, and if one doesn’t use them properly it would be better to be a mere amanuensis – rather than having to say later that one just churned out routine things and ad hoc books that pulled the wool over the eyes of the learned community. That one must first have written ‘the book’ in order to be counted as a philosopher is one of the strange “benefits” of a philosophical research culture, and underscores the prejudice that philosophising can only be judged in terms of books. I suppose it is a good stimulus, but I don’t need this stimulus and make no apology for my lack of publications”.

In the summer semester, between May and July, Heidegger gave a lecture course on “Augustine and Neo-Platonism”, together with the seminar, “Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners in Connection with Aristotle’s De anima”, all of which were vital steps in the formation of Heidegger’s own philosophy. In the meantime, his friendship with Jaspers was to enter a critical stage. At the start of the semester, Jaspers had visited Heidegger in Freiburg and asked him for a copy of his review of his book on the psychology of worldviews, which Heidegger duly sent on 25 June. The previous year, Heidegger had written to Rickert saying that Jaspers’ book would have “to be opposed in the most determined way”. The finished review bears out this critical animus. Heidegger begins by complementing Jaspers on the breadth of his work, its ambition to “comprehensively examine the being of the human mind in its substantial totality and classify its ultimate positions”. And he adds: Jaspers’ book “expands our ‘natural’ psychological understanding, rendering it more receptive and versatile, i.e. more perceptive regarding the nuances, dimensions and the different levels of our psychic being”. [37] Heidegger’s piece does not follow the standard format of a review: there is no description of the content of the book beyond these generalisations. Instead, what Heidegger writes is a sustained critique of the underlying assumptions of Jaspers’ work, its premises, its methodology and its conceptual apparatus. As Heidegger explains, “what our review of Jaspers’ work really needs to do is to highlight his preconceptions [‘Vorgriffe’] in a still more precise manner, delve into the motivation, the sense and the scope of the direction of enquiry that led to such preliminary conceptions, and become aware of what is demanded by the very sense of these preliminary conceptions, even though the author himself may not have actually understood these demands in an explicit manner”. [38] This requires “reflecting on method in a more radical way” than Jaspers does in his book.[39] Jaspers uses concepts like “life” and “existence”, as if these were self-evident realities. These are, however, concepts that cannot be taken for granted: they must be approached “with reference to historical contexts rather than to contexts of classification that have been elevated to the stature of categories within an anonymous system”. [40]

But there is something even more cutting in Heidegger’s review. Running as a subtext throughout is the implication that, in the final analysis, Jaspers is not really a philosopher, but rather something akin to a sociologist of knowledge or an intellectual historian, someone who sees it as sufficient purely to describe and classify the various worldviews that is his object of study. As Heidegger concludes, Jaspers fails to see that process of classification posits notions of mind and selfhood that must be seen “as fundamental problems in philosophy”.[41] On 25 June, Heidegger sent a copy of his review to Jaspers. Just over a month later, on 1 August, Jaspers wrote back:

“I think that your review is the only one of all those that I have read that uncovers in the deepest way the roots of my thinking. Therefore, it affected me profoundly. Nevertheless, I still missed – even in the pronouncements on “I am” and “historical” – any positive method. As I was reading it, I often got a sense that there was a real potential for moving forward, only then to be disappointed finding that I had already come so far myself, for the mere programme touches me just as little as it touches you. A number of your judgments I found unfair, but I will postpone further comments until we have a chance to talk about them. I get more out of questions and answers than I do out a lecture. But no one from amongst the younger “philosophers” interests me as much as you do. Your criticisms might be beneficial for me. They have already been beneficial, for they have been an encouragement for real reflection and have permitted me no rest”.

Thus Jaspers to Heidegger in his letter of 25 June 1920. But years later, in his autobiography, he gives us a different, less conciliatory perspective on his reaction to Heidegger’s review:

“He sent me the manuscript of his review. It seemed to me unfair. I read it in cursory fashion, but it did not really provide me with anything of importance: my work was going in a different direction to the one he was advising. I also didn’t feel inclined to fully engage with his criticisms, to grapple with them and in a discussion to bring to the surface just exactly what had formed their aims, their questioning and their demands. For this, at that time, would have been no easy matter, since my efforts in philosophy were still in statu nascendi and hence were a long way from where I could have given them support. So I probably disappointed Heidegger. And yet his empathy with the content and points of view of my book – which emerged less in his critical review than in our conversations – was so substantial and so positive that I felt encouraged”. [42]

Perhaps out of his feelings of friendship for Jaspers, Heidegger dropped the idea of publishing the review, and it remained unpublished until 1976, when it appeared in his volume of essays, Pathmarks (Wegmarken).

In the meantime, Heidegger’s career seemed to have reached an impasse. He had hoped to find a position in Heidelberg but, as Jaspers explained to him on 1 August, that was out of the question (he gives no reasons). On 5 August, Heidegger wrote back saying that he had already been tipped off that this was the case, but he was sorry that he would not be able to make the move because he felt that in Heidelberg his work would have been “more free and uninhibited”.

Indeed, Heidegger seems during this period to be particularly unhappy at Freiburg. His lecture duties were too onerous and he felt that the students were not worth the effort. There were, however, exceptions to this rule: Karl Löwith was one of them. Born in Munich in 1897, the son of Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism, he had fought in the First World War, had been wounded in the Italian campaign of 1915, and had spent three years in captivity. Upon returning to Germany, he enrolled first at the University of Munich and later at Freiburg, where he studied under Heidegger. In August, Löwith, who was nearing completion of his dissertation, wrote to Heidegger seeking guidance. The latter responded on the 19th abruptly: “your letter contains two matters: (1) a justification of yourself, and (2) and an enquiry into what a ‘correct’ interpretation of my ‘philosophy’ might be”. Heidegger deals with the issues rather dismissively: he has no interest in providing Löwith with some philosophical blueprint for his work or for reasons to pursue his course of study: all of this must come from within Löwith himself. Heidegger also rejects the comparisons that Löwith and other students such as Oskar Becker (who is about to complete his “Habilitation” and will later go on to become Husserl’s assistant), have made between him and Nietzsche: such comparisons have no meaning: “I simply do what I must and what I regard as necessary, and do it the best I can”. As for his own “philosophy” (although Heidegger does not like using the word): this is emerging from his own personal, characteristic engagement with the world:

“I work in a concretely factive [“faktisch”] fashion out of my “I am” – out of my essentially intellectual factive background – my milieu – life circumstances, out of what is accessible to me from them as a living experience and from which I live. This facticity is existentially no mere “blind form of being”; it exists as part of existence, which means, however, I live it – as the “I must”, and about which one does not speak. With the just-as-it-is-facticity, with the historical [the experience of past-present-and future], existence rages up, which means, however, that I live the inner commitments of my facticity as radically as I can understand them”.[43]

In August, Heidegger spent some time with his parents in Meßkirch, before returning to Freiburg and shortly afterwards, in September, visiting Husserl at the latter’s house in Sankt Märgen. In the winter semester, between November 1921 and March 1922, Heidegger gave a lecture course on “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research”, together with a seminar, “Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners in Connection with Husserl’s Logical Investigations, vol. 2, 2nd Investigation: First Stage”. Students expecting from the lectures an introduction to the work of Aristotle would have been disappointed. Apart from the first lecture, “Aristotle and the Reception of his Philosophy”, the course is dedicated to the problems confronting contemporary philosophy and the importance of the phenomenological method in solving those problems. Heidegger exhorts his students to start again in their philosophising with a tabula rasa, taking nothing for granted, abandoning all assumptions and preconceptions:

“Those [of his students] who have already acquired certain fixed positions – and, a fortiori, those who believe that they are secure in their grasp of the task and in their way of dealing with it – must once again, out of concrete work, undertake a methodological examination of their conscience with regard to the originality and the genuineness of their goals and the true appropriateness of their methods”.[44]

Heidegger bgan his process of philosophical interrogation not by making assertions but by asking questions:

“The two questions asked in philosophy are in plain terms: 1. What is it that really matters? 2. Which way of posing questions is genuinely directed to what really matters? [To which he adds] What is the discourse [of philosophy] about when it is discourse in the most proper sense of the word?” [45]

These are questions that Heidegger will spend his lecture course attempting to answer; indeed, in one sense, these are questions that Heidegger will spend his entire life attempting to answer.

For the Christmas break, Heidegger remained with his wife and sons in Freiburg instead of visiting, as he would have normally done, his parents in Meßkirch. He did, however, write two letters to them during this period, on 18 December and 29 December, sending them his greetings for the festive season. What he expresses in these letters are (as was so often the case in his correspondence with his parents) conventional sentiments, which as usual focused on domestic developments. The second letter, however, contains a revealing moment of self-reflection. It is as if Heidegger is taking stock of his life and his future:

When we go into the New Year let us reflect on what may be before us. The only thing we know for sure about this [the future] is that we must be prepared for what we may not achieve, for that which may go against our expectations, just as much as we are prepared for what may meet our hopes. If we firmly embrace this disposition, then that is an indication that we know what we should do in this life.

In January, Heidegger went on a skiing holiday near Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, twelve miles south-east of Freiburg. On his return to Freiburg he fell ill, as did Elfride, who had to be hospitalised. On 26 January, he sent her a letter, giving her news of the boys. He also broached once again his views on the nature of his philosophical quest:

I can hear the voice ever more clearly: be true to yourself now and to your goals as they develop, pursue the substantive task and don’t look to the right or left – the effect one has depends on other forces – a strong feeling of servitude towards a task that is forming within oneself – and I cannot help myself – this dreadful feeling of isolation – not springing from a consciousness of being exceptional and such like, but from the realisation that no one can help and the task that has been glimpsed must be done by sacrificing the possibility of all relaxation or repose.

In February, when Heidegger and Elfride returned to the Todtnauberg region for another skiing holiday, she conceived of the idea of building (drawing perhaps on funds provided by her parents) a small cabin in the area, for use during future holidays but also substantial enough to provide a modest dwelling on other occasions. Looking back from 1934, Heidegger described the cabin and its location:

On the steep slope of a broad high mountain valley in the southern part of the Black Forest stands, at the height of 1150 metres, a small ski hut. In its layout, it measures six by seven metres. The low roof covers three rooms: the joint living-kitchen room, the bedroom and a small study. On the narrow valley floor and on the facing slope, farm houses lie dispersed and broadly spaced out, with their large eave-like roofs. On the slope above, the meadows and pastures stretch up to the forest with its old, lofty, dark fir trees. Over everything lies a clear summer sky, in whose beaming space two hawks ascend in broad circles.[46]

In the summer semester, Heidegger taught the lecture course “Phenomenological Interpretations to Aristotle: Ontology and Logic”, together with a seminar on “Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners in Connection with Husserl’s Logical Investigations, vol. 2, 2nd Investigation”, a course that may have been a repeat of the seminar given in winter semester 1921–1922 or a further elaboration of its content. Towards the end of that academic year a full professorship became vacant in Göttingen, and a full professorship and an associate professorship in Marburg. On 30 June, Heidegger sent his CV to Professor Georg Misch, head of the selection committee at Göttingen, and rather than just provide Misch with a list of dates and publications, he sent him a synopsis of his research-in-progress (that he had drawn from a longer essay already sent to Marburg): “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”. Although Misch was impressed by that essay (even if he found it “profuse” and over elaborate), he was even more impressed by Heidegger’s growing reputation as an inspiring teacher.[47] As Misch noted in his submission in November to the Department of Culture and Education in Berlin: “Heidegger exercises such a strong influence as a teacher that his fame precedes his literary [i.e. publishing] achievements”.[48] In the end, Heidegger was put second on the list, the successful candidate being Moritz Geiger.

In the meantime, Heidegger’s friendship with Jaspers was flourishing. On 27 June, Heidegger thanked him for sending a copy of his recently published book, Strindberg and Van Gogh: An Attempt of a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Hölderlin. Heidegger knew little about either Strindberg or van Gogh, but he could recognise that Jaspers was attempting to identify and explicate a deep-seated and problematical aspect of the human psyche. In this respect, Heidegger decides, Jaspers is working parallel to Heidegger in his own attempt to establish a phenomenology of selfhood. They share a common task, and this task, as Heidegger quickly explains, is formed around the following question: “how can these spheres (e.g. of the schizophrenic) be fitted into a model of life that is unifying in principle and conceptually categorical?” And he adds:

It must be made clear as to what it means to make up human existence [“Dasein”], to participate in it; but that means that both the sense of the being of life-being and of human-being must be won out of its original source and determined categorically. The psychical is not something that the human being has consciously or unconsciously, but something that it is and that lives in it. That means principally: there are objects that we do not have but are.

That finding theoretical categories for such phenomena will require reforming the conceptual apparatus of traditional philosophy, “the old ontology”, with its roots in Greek philosophy, particularly in Aristotle, Heidegger fully admits. It is a radical vision, and he has no illusions about the difficulties that will be involved in carrying out this project, but he has no choice:

Either we are serious about philosophy and its possibilities as a principal form of scientific research, or we must accept that we are scientific persons of the greatest deficiency, in so far as we babble on and on in worn-out concepts and vague intentions,  doing serious thinking only when required.

Heidegger was trying to break away from this form of philosophical existence, and he recognised that Jaspers too wasattempting something new. Like Heidegger, Jaspers’ “investigations are set in the correct positive direction toward the problem, and that strengthens in me the consciousness of a rare and independent comradeship-in-arms that I otherwise –even today – can find nowhere else”.

Jaspers wrote back quickly on 2 July, inspired by Heidegger’s words of solidarity. He too is convinced that “university philosophy” must be reformed from within and from the base up, but this requires publications, notes Jaspers, dropping a heavy hint to Heidegger. Jaspers was not seeking to take the moral or professional high ground here. It is true that he had published a great deal (as he tells Heidegger, his study of the psychology of worldviews is about to go through its second edition), but he feels that he has as yet not engaged with the vital issues of philosophy. He is still struggling over “the proper way to claim to be a professor of philosophy”. Indeed, Jaspers’ words suggest that he is just a little in awe of his younger colleague: “I also believe that we have both reached the same point in our developments: you perhaps more consciously and critically; I more clumsily and gropingly”. Jaspers ends his letter with the hope that the two men will be able to meet in Heidelberg to discuss these matters in greater detail. On 6 September, he extended a formal invitation (although he pointed out that his apartment was not really suitable for guests: “bed will have to be made up on the chaise-longue in the study, and ablutions will be in the toilet – it can’t be otherwise in our narrow apartment”). He is, however, certain that their exchange of ideas will not be unduly affected by these straightened surroundings. Jaspers was keen that Heidegger should visit before his wife returns on 14 September, so that the two of them can devote themselves entirely to philosophy and he sends his impecunious colleague money to cover the rail fare.

Heidegger accepted the invitation, spending eight days with Jaspers, the first of a number of visits that he was to make to Heidelberg. Jaspers was rarely able to go to Freiburg, because, as a professor, his commitments were greater than those of Heidegger, who was still a junior lecturer and hence enjoyed greater flexibility in his movements. Jaspers tells us in his autobiography how they spent their time:

Whenever Heidegger came to visit, the two of us would work during the day, just stopping every now and then to engage in conversation. From the outset, I felt inspired by our discussions. One can hardly imagine the satisfaction that I derived from them, finally to be able to talk seriously with an individual who was at the centre of philosophical life. But in what did our common bond exist? If we had ever felt for a short time to be on the same path, that was, seen retrospectively, ultimately perhaps an illusion. But it was for me a truth then that even today I cannot deny. Apparent was the shared opposition to traditional professorial philosophy. Although what was unclear, but still stirring in our depths, was the indefinite certainty that in the institution of professorial philosophy, which we had both entered with ambitions to teach and to change, something like a radical turning was necessary. We felt committed to a renewal not only of philosophy but also of the entire shape of philosophy as practiced in the universities at that time. We also shared a deep enthusiasm for Kierkegaard. In our conversations, it was mostly I who did the talking. The temperamental difference between us was great. Heidegger by nature was inclined to silence, which at times led to excessive volubility on my part. [49]

On his return to Freiburg, Heidegger was asked by Husserl to come and see him urgently regarding his Marburg application. Heidegger had been seeking a secure university position for a number of years, and now it looked like he had found one. On the twenty-seventh of the month, he wrote to Elfride:

Malvine [Husserl’s wife] read out to me a long letter from Natorp [professor in philosophy at Marburg]: they’re determined to have me. Natorp mentions [Professor Richard] Hamann, who has been fully informed about my effectiveness (obviously by [Professor Hans] Jantzen – saying that he had recently heard the very best things from Marburg students (PhD students who have been here with me over the last two semesters). In Marburg, they want a phenomenologist and also someone with a critical command of the Middle Ages (those theologians!). Natorp has asked Husserl for a report on my teaching activities, as well as a report on forthcoming publications.

In the absence of forthcoming publications, Heidegger sent Natorp a copy of his “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle”, a lengthy essay that was, in effect, a detailed synopsis of a book that he was intending to write on Aristotle, and which combined the two points of study that Heidegger had been pursuing in his recent lecture courses: phenomenology and Aristotle. As Heidegger explained in the introduction to that essay, his intention was to interpret Aristotle through the perspective of an hermeneutically informed phenomenology directed towards concrete “factive” existence:

“Insofar as the phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity endeavours, as a form of interpretation, to make a contribution to a radical appropriation of contemporary philosophy (and does this by calling attention to concrete categories and allowing them to be specified in advance), it sees itself directed towards the task of loosening up the today prevailing state of traditional forms of interpretation with respect to their hidden motives and their unexpressed tendencies and modes of interpreting, so that it can, by way of a deconstructive regress, penetrate into the original motivational sources of these tendencies”.[50]

Heidegger, at this stage in his philosophy, was not seeking to offer a ready-made alternative to “traditional forms of interpretation”: his approach was one of questioning, of challenging established forms, compelling them to reveal the assumptions, epistemological and ontological, upon which they are based. In the case of Aristotle, this means asking questions such as:

In what kind of object, with what kind of characteristics of Being, was human being, i.e. “Being in life”, experienced and interpreted [by Aristotle]? What is the sense of human existence [“Dasein”], in terms of which Aristotle’s interpretation of life initially approached human being as its object? In short, in what kind of preliminary having of Being [“Seinsvorhabe”] did this object stand?  Further, how was this Being of the human being explicated in concepts, out of what soil did this explication arise as a phenomenon, and which categories of Being grew out of that which was seen in this fashion? [51]

Heidegger applies these questions to key passages of Aristotle’s writings, notably the Nichomachean Ethics (Book VI), the Metaphysics (A 1–2) and Physics (A, B, Gamma 1-3), submitting a number of concepts such as “aesthesis” (“sense perception”) and “aletheia” (truth as a self-revealing, a concept that would later become central to his own philosophy) to detailed scrutiny. Throughout, Heidegger brings the reader back to the essentially pragmatic nature of these concepts: the fact they perform a function within factive life, for, as he concludes in the final pages of his essay:

The origin of the “categories” does not lie in “logos” as such. Nor are these “categories” read off from “things”. Rather, they are the basic modes of a particular kind of addressing of a particular domain of objects that are maintained in preliminary having in terms of their “look” and consist of those objects that one deals with and with which one is concerned in our routine tasks. [52]

Heidegger would have to wait until June the following year for a response from Marburg to his submission, but that the essay had been well received is clear from the recommendation that the philosophy department sent to the Department of Education in Berlin (which vetted all such applications) on 12 December:

In first place [for the appointment to associate professorship] we recommend Martin Heidegger, instructor in Freiburg i. Br. (born 1889, “Habilitation” 1916 [sic], who already in 1920 was placed on our list of recommendations [for an earlier vacancy]. Having come from Husserl’s circle of students, he treads the paths of phenomenology, but he has struck out on his own direction within this area and pursues a completely independent course. Among the phenomenologists, he is the first to have attempted to make this new method serve the purposes of historical research [meant is Heidegger’s work on Aristotle], an attempt which has aroused the lively interest of his philosophical peers. [53]

On 19 November, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers, explaining the critical juncture that he had reached. He is pessimistic about his chances of getting the full professorship at Göttingen or even the associate professorship at Marburg, which he thinks will go to his colleague, Dr Richard Kroner (author of Kant’s Worldview, published in 1914). He also feels alienated by the networking required to secure such applications: “I am even less known by [the educational departments in] regional governments than I am by the faculties. The necessary business trips are not in my line”. The whole process was having a depressing effect on him: “this being led on with half prospects, bungling with recommendations etc, brings one into a terrible state, even when one has made up one’s mind not to get caught up in it”. The only substratum of consolation during all of this was his family and his growing friendship with Jaspers, and Heidegger looks back in his letter to his recent trip to Heidelberg:

The eight days spent with you [in September] are continually with me. The spontaneity of those days (which were uneventful externally), the sureness of style in which each day unaffectedly merged into the next, the unsentimental, austere steps with which friendship came upon us, the growing certainty from both sides of a mutually secure comradeship-in-arms – all of that is uncanny for me in the same sense as the world and life are uncanny for the philosopher.

The increasing bond between Heidegger and Jaspers was reflected in a letter sent by the latter on 24 November. They have become fellow conspirators in a campaign against the hegemony of academic philosophy and, in order to consolidate their views and bring them to a greater public, Jaspers suggests that they publish a “truly critical journal” with the title: The Philosophy of the Age: Critical Writings by Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. This will be an occasional publication “dealing with the topical philosophies: all aspects of philosophical and anti-philosophical attitudes to life”. The articles will engage with philosophy as it is being (badly) taught in the universities, and will offer proposals on how it should be taught: “we will not revile anyone, but the discussion will be no-holds-barred”. And Jaspers adds one important proviso: “it will happen, however, only when you get a position”.

In the winter semester, between November 1922 and March 1923, instead of a lecture course Heidegger offered two seminars: “Exercises in Phenomenological Interpretations in the Context of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics 6; ‘De anima’; Metaphysics 7”, which were advertised as “private”, in other words only for selected students, and “Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners in the Context of Husserl’s Ideas, vol. I.” At the end of the semester, in March, Heidegger went with his son, Jörg, to stay with the Szilasis family on the Starnberger See.  On the twenty-seventh of that month, he sent a letter to Elfride from Munich, where he had gone to visit Karl Löwith. Heidegger knew by then that his application for the Chair of Philosophy to Marburg had not been successful, rejected by the Department of Education in Berlin on account of his lack of publications, and he was in a mood for recriminations. He feels that he is a victim of malevolent forces both in Marburg (he names Nicolai Hartmann, professor of philosophy there), and beyond, naming Max Scheler, professor in Cologne, who “is behind all of this agitation against me”. Yet Heidegger is still in the running for the associate professorship at Marburg, although he is not optimistic. He wrote again to Elfride a few days later, just before Easter on 1 April, to vent his anger and frustration once more:

“I work all day long, and wish to myself that the whole appointment business would come to an end. It’s disgusting the way they’re conjecturing, wangling and scheming–; that in Berlin I’m regarded as the phenomenologist is obviously an empty phrase – and is worth just as much as if I were to profess my respect for someone and then spit in his face”.

Heidegger sought respite from this professional imbroglio in his teaching. The summer semester of 1923 was the busiest of his teaching life so far, involving not only a lecture course on “Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity”, but also three seminars: “Phenomenological Exercises for Beginners in Connection with Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics”, a “Colloquium for Advanced Students on the Theological Foundations of Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone: Selected Texts” (a course taught in conjunction with his colleague, Julius Ebbinghaus), and “Exercises in Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle”, a continuation of the seminar on the same topic given in the winter semester 1922–1923. The lecture course represented a seminal stage in Heidegger’s move away from phenomenology (at least as it had been understood to date), and into his version of ontology. In these lectures, Heidegger formulated a number of concepts such as “being” and “facticity” that he would develop further in his work, concepts that were intended to open up avenues to what Heidegger calls the “encountered character of the world”.[54] Such concepts would later form the basis of his first major publication in Being and Time (1927).

Heidegger’s courses were attended by the twenty-three old Hans-Georg Gadamer who, attracted by the growing legend surrounding the philosopher, had come from Marburg, where he had just completed his doctorate, specifically to study with Heidegger. Impressed by the energy and commitment of his new teacher, Gadamer was able to send a positive report back to Natorp in Marburg, at a crucial juncture in Heidegger’s application for a position there. On 18 June, Heidegger’s period of waiting finally came to an end with the offer of an associate professorship with the status and rights of a full professorship. The following day he wrote to Jaspers to share the good news. This was Heidegger’s first full-time appointment, and he asks Jaspers to advise him on what he should be expecting in terms of conditions of employment. In spite of all the hard words he has uttered about Marburg and its professors over the preceding twelve months, Heidegger concludes his letter on a simple and positive note: “I look forward to the peaceful little town and to undisturbed work”. Jaspers responded two days later with congratulations and with regret that the professorial clique in Heidelberg had not seen fit to appoint Heidegger there. This was a missed opportunity for all. Jaspers also gives Heidegger the information that he had requested, advising him on what he should look out for when he goes to the Department for Education in Berlin for negotiations with respect to salary, what he should expect by way of a pension, not only for himself but for Elfride, should she become a widow, and how to arrange for an advance sum payment to cover his removal and accommodation costs. Jaspers is looking forward to Heidegger’s next visit (this time with Elfride), but warns him once again not to expect anything more than the very basics in accommodation (although, as he tells Heidegger, his new apartment at Plöck 66, near the university library, is a little more spacious than his old one in the Handschuhsheimerlandstraße). Should Heidegger find himself in any pecuniary difficulties during this financially demanding time, Jaspers would be all too happy to help him out.

News of Heidegger’s appointment had also reached Husserl. On 8 July, Heidegger told Elfride that in their last meeting Husserl had categorically asserted that he wanted his young colleague to be his successor in Freiburg, but that this wish should be kept under wraps for the moment. After years of stagnation in his career, things were now moving for Heidegger. Writing to Jaspers on 14 July, he says that what he most welcomes about the appointment in Marburg is that he will be able “to effect change by example”, adding “I am now free”. He feels that he is involved in “the fundamental reconstruction of philosophising”, not just the creation of a new philosophy to be added as yet another system to existing ones, but a new way of approaching philosophy, thinking it, absorbing it as a process of living ideas (and he is scathing about his colleagues who see their sole duty in writing books: “I leave to the world its books and literary goings-on”). His tone is proselytising, evangelical even. Heidegger sees himself as the head, the spiritual leader perhaps, of an “invisible community” of like-minded souls. This means that he has no intention of falling in with the powers-that-be in Marburg, particularly the head of the department, Hartmann; on the contrary, “I will make hell hot for him. A shock troop of sixteen persons [his postgraduate students] is coming with me. Many are inevitable fellow travellers, but some are entirely serious and very capable”.

So much for Hartmann, Heidegger’s new foe. But Husserl (another pillar of the loathed philosophical establishment) does not fare any better. That there had been tensions in their relationship from the very beginning is confirmed by the adverse comments made in letters to Elfride as far back as 1917. But now that he is finally and permanently out of Husserl’s presence, Heidegger, writing to Jaspers in July, can deliver his final judgement on the man and his philosophy:

“Husserl sees himself as praeceptor Germaniae, but he is completely falling to pieces (if the pieces were ever together in the first place, which has lately become more and more questionable to me). He swings back and forth between this and that, and talks trivialities, so that it would move one to pity him. He lives with the mission of being the founder of phenomenology, but no one knows what that is”.

There is, of course, space in the firmament of German philosophy for only one praeceptor Germaniae. “Le roi est mort; vive le roi!” Perhaps this was all too much for Jaspers, because he did not reply until November, and perhaps Heidegger too knew that he had gone too far, for when he next wrote to Jaspers on 2 September, he has toned down his abrasive and self-obsessive sentiments, simply thanking Jaspers for a copy of the latter’s recently published book, The Idea of the University, which Heidegger hopes to discuss when they next meet in Heidelberg. In the same letter, Heidegger informs Jaspers about how his planned move to Marburg is progressing. His centre of operations is the home of the Szilasis in Feldafing on the Starnberger See, and on 1 October Heidegger wrote to Elfride from there, explaining that he had not yet found suitable accommodation for them in Marburg. As he rather pathetically observes in a letter to Jaspers on 9 October, “my wife will stay [in Freiburg] with the boys and rent. I will also leave my library here, so I will lead a monk’s existence again with table, chair and bed. I would be very happy if you would write to me in Marburg, for I will certainly have time to answer”.

Heidegger finally found rooms in 21 Schwanallee. The first couple of weeks were difficult: he was without friends or family, and his living conditions were meagre. Things, however, soon improved. His impressions of his new home town were positive: “the little place is quite delightful –it’s just right for me. Yesterday afternoon the sun came out and I strolled through the bumpy streets with their pretty little houses”, he tells Elfride in a letter of 14 October. His teaching started on 1 November, with a lecture course “Introduction to Phenomenological Research”, a topic that he had taught a number of times in Freiburg but was new to the students of Marburg (and possibly to his colleagues in the philosophy department). As we know from his letter to Jaspers written on 14 July, Heidegger had set out to confront, shock even his new university in a spirit of uncompromising reformism. But now that he has actually arrived, he becomes more modest, self-effacing even. As he writes to Elfride on 27 October, “on Wednesday, I’m being officially introduced to the Faculty”. His erstwhile radicalism seems to have melted away: “everything is resolving itself nicely now, after the nasty first fortnight, and every day the responsibility of my task weighs ever more heavily on my mind, and I hope to myself that I will at least partly meet expectations and can be totally committed to my work – then we will build up a vibrant life here”. These were to be expectations that not only Heidegger nurtured: they were also harboured by those students who had come with him from Freiburg, and would come from elsewhere in Germany, expecting great things, perhaps nothing less great than the renewal of the German mind. They included Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt.

[1] See “Mein liebes Seelchen”. Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride, 1915–1970. Ed. Gertrud Heidegger (München: btb Verlag, 2007), p. 19. The English translation is Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 1915–1970. Transl. R.D.V. Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Future references to this correspondence will simply cite the date of the relevant letter in the main text. I have modified the translations as necessary.

[2] And this is what Heidegger presumably told the audience in his talk, “Philosophy in the War-faring Countries”, which he gave, according to Krebs, on 29 February. The talk has never been published. For details, see Alfred Denker, “Heideggers Leben- und Denkweg 1909–1919”. Eds. Alfred Denker i.a.  Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, (Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2004), pp. 97–122 (p. 116).

[3] Martin Heidegger/ Heinrich Rickert, Briefe 1912 bis 1933 und andere Dokumente, aus den Nachlass. Ed. Alfred Denker (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), p.25.

[4] “Briefe Heinrich Finkes an Martin Heidegger (1916–1917)”. Eds. Alfred Denker i.a., Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens (Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2004), pp. 71–72 (p. 71).

[5] Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel. Band IV. Die Freiburger Schuler. Ed. Karl Schumann (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), p.127.

[6] The poem is translated in full in Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 69.

[7] Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), p. 344.

[8] Heidegger, Frühe Schriften, p. 352.

[9] Martin Heidegger/ Heinrich Rickert, Briefe, p. 33.

[10] “Brief Martin Heideggers an Martin Grabmann (1917)”. Eds. Alfred Denker i.a.,  Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, pp. 73–74 (p. 74).

[11] “Briefe Ernst Laslowskis an Martin Heideggers (1911–1917)”. Eds. Alfred Denker i.a.  Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, pp. 26–57 (p. 54).

[12] Martin Heidegger, Briefwechsel mit seinen Eltern (1907–1927) und Briefe an seine Schwester (1921-1967). Eds. Jörg Heidegger and Alfred Denker (Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013), p. 14. Future references will be given in the main text simply as a date. Elfride makes a similar argument in her letter to Heidegger’s parents on 15 March, saying that she has consulted with Catholic dignitaries in Freiburg, all of whom have advised patience in this matter. See Heidegger, Briefwechsel mit seinen Eltern, pp. 18-20.

[13] Husserl, Briefwechsel, p. 128.

[14] See “October 8, 1917: Edmund Husserl to Paul Natorp”. Eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 355–356 (p. 355).

[15] Rickert, Briefe, p. 43.

[16] Husserl, Briefwechsel, p. 129.

[17] Martin Heidegger. Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechsel, 1918–1969 (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990), p. 7. Future references to this correspondence will simply cite the date of the relevant letter in the main text.

[18] Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, p. 45.

[19] Heidegger, Briefwechsel mit seinen Eltern, p. 34.

[20] Husserl, Briefwechsel, pp. 131–132.

[21] “Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs (1919)”. Ed. and transl. John van Buren, Martin Heidegger, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to “Being and Time” and Beyond, (Albany: State University of New York, 2002), pp. 69–70 (p. 69).

[22] Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), pp. 4–5.

[23] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 63

[24] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 65.

[25] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 121.

[26] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 215.

[27] Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 218.

[28] Theodore Kiesel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 23.

[29] Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), p. 65.

[30] It is ironic to note that as Heidegger’s opinion of Husserl is declining, Husserl’s assessment of Heidegger is becoming more positive. Writing to Paul Natorp on 11 February 1920, Husserl now retracts the judgment that he has made in an earlier letter of 8 October 1917, where he had categorised Heidegger as a purely Catholic philosopher. He now tells Natorp that Heidegger “has worked his way into phenomenology with the greatest energy, and he is striving to lay the most secure foundations for his philosophical thinking”. “11 February 1920: Edmund Husserl to Paul Natorp”. Eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, pp. 366–368 (p. 367).

[31] Karl Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1977), p. 92.

[32] Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, pp. 92–93.

[33] Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, p. 92.

[34] For the German edition of the correspondence, see Martin Heidegger/ Karl Jaspers. Briefwechsel, 1920–1963. Eds. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990). The English translation is The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920–1963). Eds. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner. Transl. Gary E. Aylesworth (New York: Humanity Books, 2003). Future references to this correspondence will simply cite the date of the relevant letter in the main text. I have modified the translation here and elsewhere where necessary.

[35] Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty”. Ed. Michael Murray, Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, (Yale University Press: New Haven 1978), pp. 293–303 (p. 295). Translation modified.

[36] Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Transl. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 43.Translation modified.

[37] “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1920)”. Ed. and transl. John van Buren, Martin Heidegger, Supplements, pp. 70–103 (p. 71).

[38] Heidegger, “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1920)”, p. 77.

[39] Heidegger, “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1920)”, p. 78.

[40] Heidegger, “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1920)”, p. 92.

[41] Heidegger, “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1920)”, p. 104.

[42] Karl Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1977), p. 95.

[43] Martin Heidegger/ Karl Löwith, Briefwechsel, 1919–1973. Ed. Alfred Denker (Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2017), pp. 52 and 53.

[44]  Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Transl. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001), p. 11. Translation modified.

[45]  Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle, p. 11.

[46] Quoted from Hans Dieter Zimmermann, Martin und Fritz Heidegger: Philosophie und Festnacht (Munich: Beck, 2005), p. 60. Heidegger’s description is taken from an article published on 7 March 1934 for the Kampfblatt der Nationalsozialistischen Oberbaden.

[47] A reputation confirmed in the reference that Husserl wrote for Heidegger and sent to Misch on 31 May 1922. Describing Heidegger as “an absolutely independent personality, thoroughly original”, Husserl emphasises his popularity with the students: “his impact is extraordinary, in view of the heavy demands that he makes on the students who work with him”. “May 31, 1922: Edmund Husserl to Georg Misch”. Eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, pp. 370–372 (p. 371).

[48] Georg Misch, “Recommendation of Heidegger for Associate Professor at Göttingen (November 1922)”. Eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, pp. 339–342 (p. 341).

[49] Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, p. 95.

[50] Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”. Ed. and transl. John van Buren, Martin Heidegger, Supplements, pp. 111–145 (p. 124).

[51] Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle”, p. 127.

[52] Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle”, p. 144.

[53] “Recommendation of Heidegger for Associate Professor at Marburg (December 1922)”. Eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, pp. 342–344 (p. 343).

[54] Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), p. 93.

Chapter Three: 1924 –1928

Time as Being

Hannah Arendt and Being and Time

 In the summer of 1923, Heidegger arrived in Marburg to take up his appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy.  Marburg (an der Lahn), in the state of Hesse, was in 1923 a town with a population of less than twenty thousand. The town dated back to the early twelfth-century, and still possessed many architectural signs of its medieval past, such as a hilltop Schloss, built in the eleventh century as a fortress, a Gothic church of almost cathedral proportions (the “Elizabethkirche”), and an established botanical garden. Although it had few if any industries, Marburg was an important service provider and administrative centre for the surrounding areas. The university, founded in 1527, was noted for its achievements in medicine and the natural science, and included amongst its distinguished professors Robert Bunsen, Karl Ferdinand Braun and Emil von Behring. Marburg was also noted for its teaching in theology, with Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann being exact contemporaries of Heidegger.

Initially Heidegger’s impressions of Marburg were positive. On 19 June 1923, he wrote to Jaspers, “I look forward to living in this peaceful little town and to undisturbed work”. As he later told his wife, Elfride, in a letter of 14 October, “the little town is quite delightful – it’s just right for me. Yesterday afternoon the sun came out and I strolled through the bumpy streets with their pretty little houses”. [1] But within a few short months, his attitude had changed. What had originally been found quaint and picturesque now seemed provincial and boring. As Heidegger lamented to Erich Rothacker on 4 January 1924, “here in middle Germany everything is extremely mediocre”, and the atmosphere of Marburg is “flaccid”.[2] It was an opinion that was not to change during the entirety of his stay. Even after three years of productive service, he still found, as he wryly noted to Jaspers in December 1926, “the university boring and the students simple-minded, without any particular motivation. As I am very much occupied with the problem of negativity, I have here the best opportunity to study what nothingness looks like”. Heidegger felt isolated. As he wrote in a letter to Karl Löwith On 1 October 1924, “I realise that I will be on my own, and all help from beyond is an ‘allurement’ ”.[3] And on 26 March, he added the following rider likewise in a letter to Löwith: “the damned thing about my work is that I have to do it surrounded by old philosophy and theology, and that I am forced to adopt a critical position on irrelevancies such as ‘categories’ ”.

Heidegger felt suffocated by the arid narrowly academic focus of the philosophy department and, as he described it in a letter to Löwith on 6 November, its “Exam milieu”.  Its leading light, and from 1922 head of department (due to an ailing Paul Natorp), was Nicolai Hartmann, author of Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis (Foundation of a Metaphysics of Knowledge, 1921). Hartmann had been impressed by Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle”, in which Heidegger had subjected Aristotle’s categories of Being to phenomenological scrutiny, and was responsible for bringing the younger academic to Marburg. Hartmann had sent his doctoral student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, to Freiburg the previous year to prepare a report on Heidegger, which had been entirely positive. It is quite possible that Heidegger’s essay, which argued for the relevance of a revitalised ontology to contemporary philosophy, had influenced the direction of Hartmann’s own work, and had perhaps encouraged him to find a position beyond Neo-Kantianism. Just one year after reading Heidegger’s essay, Hartmann published a lengthy paper titled “How Is Critical Ontology Possible?” (“Wie ist kritische Ontologie überhaupt möglich?”). Here Hartmann argued that “there is no question of knowledge without the question of being”, and had added but “what can we know of real being as such?”.[4] Hartmann appears to embark on a path remarkably similar to Heidegger’s own, for providing an answer to this question “means nothing less than dealing with and taking up all together the great aporias of the metaphysical Weltanschauung”, and Hartmann subjects one category after another (he calls them “errors”) of the traditional metaphysical systems to critical scrutiny. [5] In his Aristotle essay, Heidegger had posed  similar questions, writing, “in what kind of object, with what kind of characteristics of Being, was human being, i.e. “Being in life”, experienced and interpreted [by Aristotle]? What is the sense of human existence [“Dasein”], in terms of which Aristotle’s interpretation of life initially approached human being as its object? In short, in what kind of preliminary having of Being [“Seinsvorhabe”] did this object stand?” [6] Hartmann, like Heidegger, is also seeking to establish the facticity of Being, and adopts the same emphasis upon the pre-theoretical when he argues that “wishes, intentions, suppositions and prejudices also have an a priori character”. [7]And yet Hartmann does not proceed beyond this point. Instead, he simply proposes his own alternative system of categories to replace the existing ones, for only “categorial analysis”, indeed a “theory of categories” can resolve the aporias, the errors of metaphysical thinking. [8] We have returned to yet a further self-enclosed paradigm. There is no sense of working towards something new, no sense of struggle, of the pushing of boundaries, conceptual and linguistic. Terms such as “reason”, “thinking”, “human cognition” (just to list three problematical constructs from one sentence alone on the concluding page of his paper) are treated as if they are self-evident.[9]

Hartmann sought to teach philosophy as a discipline that had its accepted framework and methodological assumptions. Students were excepted to work within this framework, not to question it.  One of his better pupils, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was studying for his doctorate under Hartmann (which was awarded in 1922 for “The Essence of Pleasure according to Plato’s Dialogues”), described the latter’s method of teaching as “reflexionlos” (lacking in self-reflexion or enquiry).[10] Heidegger offered something much more than this: not a ready-made system but philosophy as an activity of the mind, an activity that would push against limits, not only those placed by others, but those placed by himself. It was Gadamer, once again, who was able to witness this challenging energy at first hand:

“No matter what he lectured on – whether it was Descartes or Aristotle, Plato or Kant that formed the starting point – his analysis always penetrated behind the concealments of traditional concepts to the most primordial experience of Dasein […] And what else is interpretation in philosophy but coming to terms with the truth of the text and risking oneself by exposure to it?” [11]

The force of Heidegger’s philosophising was both thematic and personal, a matter of an entirely new way of thinking about philosophy and an entirely new way of presenting that thinking. As a teaching experience, the former could not be disengaged from the latter. As his student, Karl Löwith, observed:

“The power of fascination that emanated from him was partly based on his impenetrable nature; nobody knew where they were with him […] Like Fichte, only one half of him was an academic. The other – and probably greater – half was a militant preacher who knew how to interest people by antagonizing them, and whose discontent with the epoch and himself was driving him on”.[12]

Heidegger’s presentation of self, even the way he dressed, was intended, if not to provoke, then at least to assert his idiosyncratic character, a character that had its roots in his Swabian homeland. As Rüdiger Safranski notes:

“Heidegger cut a striking figure in Marburg in his personal appearance. On winter days he could be seen walking out of the town with his skis shouldered. Occasionally he would turn up for his lectures in his skiing outfit. In the summer Heidegger wore his famous loden suit and knickerbockers – these were his glorified scouting garb. The students called these clothes his ‘existential suit’. It had been designed by the painter Otto Ubblohde, and to Gadamer suggested something “of the modest resplendence of a peasant in his Sunday best”. [13]

Heidegger saw himself possessed of a mission, and in the opening words of his first lecture in Marburg he sounded this mission as a call to arms, committing himself to a “stripping away of mistaken expectations”, which he intended to replace – with nothing: “no foundation, neither a programme nor a system”. As he continued to tell his dumbfounded students in that lecture, “not even philosophy should be expected. It is my conviction that philosophy is at and end”. In the place of philosophy, Heidegger promotes an attitude of mind, “a passion for genuine questioning”, which will not only interrogate the objects of its enquiry but will confront even its own assumptions and prejudices. Following this path will involve a readiness to “hold out for years in uncertainty”, until the requisite maturity of perspective has been found.[14]

Heidegger’s iconoclastic sentiments may have enthused his students, as they well may have confounded his colleagues, but there were others who found in his words precisely the inspiration that they required for their own work. Rudolf Karl Bultmann was one of them. He was an unlikely adherent to Heidegger’s cause, and it is significant that Heidegger had to go beyond the confines of the philosophy department to find him. Bultmann, five years older than Heidegger, was a Lutheran theologian and Professor of the New Testament. He had been appointed Assistant Professor of Theology at Breslau in 1916, then had gained a full professorship at Giessen in 1920 before returning to Marburg (where he had been a student) as a professor in 1921, in which year he published his History of the Synoptic Tradition (Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 1921), a study of the various narratives that constitute the New Testament. Bultmann was a leading voice in German liberal theology, someone who had questioned “the foundations of systematic and historical theology through his critique of the mythical picture of the world as it was adhered to in the approach of conventional theology to the New Testament”.[15]  Faith, Bultmann argued, must be a determined vital act of will, not an extolling of canonical texts. Indeed, the latter had to be de-mythologised, in order to allow the individual to return to the core of Christianity: the life and Passion of Jesus Christ.

Bultmann had established his critical theology well before encountering Heidegger, but it was what Bultmann calls Heidegger’s “existential philosophy” that allowed him to consolidate that position. As he explained in a short autobiographical sketch written in 1956, “I found in [Heidegger’s philosophy] the conceptuality in which it was possible to speak adequately of human existence and therefore also of the existence of the believer”.[16] Heidegger clearly saw in Bultmann’s critical attitude to religious tradition and conventional theology the same deconstructive will to uncover truth that he was pursuing in his own “de-structive” philosophy. In his first semester in Marburg, Heidegger joined Bultmann’s theological seminar on “The Ethics of St. Paul”, and on 14 and 21 January he gave a two-part talk on “The Problem of Sin in Luther”. Heidegger’s opening words establish precisely that existential imperative that underscored Bultmann’s credence in repristinated faith: “the object of theology is God. The theme of theology is man in the how of his being-placed before God. But the being of man is at the same time also a being in the world, and there exists for him also the problem of the world”. [17] Bultmann became a close friend and adherent of Heidegger, the two meeting frequently as members of the “Graeca” society, which was devoted to the study of Greek literature, and which met every week in Bultmann’s house.

As Heidegger was beginning to find a new soul companion in the shape of Bultmann, he was in the process of losing an older one: Edmund Husserl, his erstwhile mentor and senior colleague in Freiburg. On 22 February, Husserl wrote to Heidegger, addressing him as “dear friend” and saying that he was hoping to see Heidegger on his next visit to Freiburg during the inter-semester vacation, which Heidegger and his family were spending in Todtnauberg. He writes, “I have been looking forward for months to your visit and to the opportunity of having a proper philosophical discussion with you. I am hoping that you will be able to stay with us, at least for a few days”.[18] The tone is affable and accommodating: this is one philosopher talking to a fellow philosopher: Heidegger is his equal. But as Husserl was moving closer to his younger colleague, the latter was, at the same time, moving further away. The tensions between Husserl and Heidegger had long been clear to anyone familiar with the two philosophers in Freiburg. As early as 1920, Heidegger had come to realise that he could not follow Husserl and his particular type of phenomenology. In a letter of 27 January of that year to Rickert, he emphatically stated the differences between himself and his senior colleague:

“While Husserl is essentially oriented to the mathematical natural sciences, and from there not only construes the problems but also perhaps determines which ones can be validly treated, I, on the other hand, attempt to secure their foundation in living day-to-day [“geschichtlichen”] life itself, and indeed in the factive experience of our environment, in their phenomenological illumination”.

But now that he is finally (and permanently) out of Husserl’s presence, Heidegger can deliver his final judgement on the man and his philosophy. As he had written to Jaspers on 14 July 1923:

“Husserl sees himself as praeceptor Germaniae, but he is completely falling to pieces – if the pieces were ever together in the first place, which lately I have become more and more to doubt. He swings back and forth and talks trivialities that would make you weep. He lives off his mission of being the founder of phenomenology, but no one knows what that means”.

Heidegger’s lecture course in his first semester at Marburg, the “Introduction to Phenomenological Research” (offered in conjunction with a seminar on Aristotle, Physics B), which had begun in November, was now coming to an end. In the earlier sections of the course, Heidegger had explained how phenomenology in the work of Husserl had confronted the philosophical systems of the past, from the Aristotelian, through to the modern period (historicism and Dilthey are specifically targeted), by interrogating the foundational premises of these systems through his transcendental “purification of consciousness”, which permits a bracketing out of all assumptions about the world and investments in the a priori. But when Heidegger turned in the second part of his lecture course to that other great philosopher of the modern period, Descartes, a remarkable turn takes place in his account of phenomenology. In this final section of the course, given in February 1924, Heidegger made his objections to Husserl explicit, airing them in a public arena for the first time (and he may well have repeated such sentiments in his seminar: “Phenomenological Exercises for beginners: Husserl, Logical Investigations II: I”). It now becomes obvious that there is an early and late Husserl, that what began as a project of a phenomenological recovery of “things themselves” in Logical Investigations eventually degenerated into a form of post-Cartesian idealism, which saw things solely as constructs of a purified consciousness. “There is no longer any acquaintance at all with the entire ontological, basic framework as such”.[19] As Heidegger subsequently goes on to argue, this is a direction “that must be reversed, insofar as it is necessary to see that this point of departure is not an original one. The concept of consciousness has, in fact, simply been taken over by Husserl from Cartesian psychology and Kantian epistemology”, whose basic categories “do not owe their origin to an analysis of Being in the sense of an inquiry into the specific character of Being”. [20]

Heidegger proselytised not only amongst his students but amongst his colleagues. On 10 April, he wrote to Rickert, thanking him for sending his article on Emil Lask, and expressing his determination that philosophy should be made to develop an “instinct for tangible conceptualisation [‘Begrifflichkeit’]”, because only through that will it make an impact on the present, for “the present age must be taught once again to really persevere with a thing and to think it through to the end”. [21] And one week later he wrote to Jaspers in fighting terms, extolling their “comradeship-in-arms” [“Kampfgemeinschaft”].[22] Heidegger is “disposed to fight”, and is committed to a “confrontation with the present age”, but he has come to realise that he must be strategic about how this confrontation should take place: “I have become more and more unpolemical – not in the sense of not disputing anything, but from a growing realisation that what is decisive is correctly directed, positive work”.

Heidegger’s zeal and idealism were to be sorely tested by one tragic event in his private life. On 1 May, he was suddenly called to his parental home in Meßkirch: his father was dying. Heidegger arrived too late. As he wrote to his wife the following day, “father had been up in the afternoon – ate with the best of appetites and smoked two more cigars. Half an hour before the end he went all quiet. Fritz [Heidegger’s brother] held father’s hand and could feel that his pulse had stopped. It was lucky for father that he was unconscious when he died – he’s said to have been terribly afraid of Hell”. Heidegger had intended to spend time with his family in Meßkirch, but had to cut short his stay. As he wrote on 20 May to his mother. “my career has quickly called me back again [to Marburg], but my thoughts are still with you in these days”. [23]

Indeed, Heidegger’s career was flourishing, as was his reputation. In June, soon after the commencement of the Summer semester, in which Heidegger was offering a course on the “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy”, he was contacted by a Japanese student, who had been instructed by an newly-founded educational institute in Japan to offer him a three year contract to teach there. Heidegger decided not to go. It was a wise decision. His professional future could only have been secured by his remaining within the narrow system (he called it a “Sumpf”, a “bog” or “mire”) of German academic philosophy and its professors, who were, because of his lack of publications, making further advancement for him difficult. But it was precisely the pressure of the “Sumpf” on Heidegger that would eventually force him to return to work on his magnum opus, Being and Time. Teaching in Japan would have been an unnecessary distraction, with perhaps permanent consequences for his work and career.

On 18 June, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers, complaining once again of the intellectual torpor in Marburg: “nothing is happening at the university. I’m just passing the time away. It is soporific, mediocre, without energy, no stimulus. The only worthwhile person: the theologian Bultmann, with whom I meet up every week. Quite lively”. In fact, it was the Theology rather than the Philosophy department that was to provide an opportunity for him to make his research public. On 25 July, he presented a paper to that department on “The Concept of Time”, which some have seen as stating in nuce the main concerns of Being and Time.[24] The talk was a success. As he later wrote to his wife on 2 August, the room was crowded and the audience “excited”. It is true that he was talking to theologians rather than philosophers, but “in this way a good many things can be said more simply – albeit less precisely. But I do have confidence in the subject matter itself – not as something finished, but as a concrete directive for real work”.

“The Concept of Time” does, indeed, provide a blueprint for the future. Here Heidegger sketched the thematic trajectory of what would be one of the central themes of Being and Time: the determination of time upon the human subject (“Da-sein”), and he sets out how that might be grasped by the new discipline of phenomenology. As Heidegger explains at the commencement of his talk: “the following deliberations belong perhaps to a pre-science, whose business it is to conduct investigations into what could ultimately be meant by what philosophy and science can say, by what the expository and discourse of ‘Da-sein’ says about itself and about the world”.[25] Putting the experience of time that “Da-sein” undergoes into words requires not only a new “pre-scientific” form of exposition but also an entirely new philosophical terminology, and Heidegger shows in his own writing what this entails. Analysis, logical argumentation, referring to tradition must now give way to a probing self-revelatory discourse that takes the personal human subject, the self, as its point of departure, as is evident in one remarkable passage that constitutes an almost fugal meditation on the trope “now”:

“This time now, as I look at my watch, what is the now? Now, as I do this, as the light goes out here, for instance. What is the now? Is the now at my disposal? Am I the now? Is every other [person] the now? Then time would indeed be I myself, and every other [person] would be time. And in our being with one another, we would be time – everyone and no one. Am I the now, or only the one who is saying this?” [26]

This is a radically new tone in the discourse of philosophical speculation. Heidegger’s words describe a universal subject, but they emerge from the singular perspective of an individual self, and more particularly from one particular individual self: that of Martin Heidegger. The abstractions of philosophy are here assertively lined to personal experience, and instead of a series of obiter dicta, generalisations that are laid out in the way of a priori self-evident truths, we have questions and self-interrogation.

The public resonance of Heidegger’s talk (many in the audience made transcripts) could not hide the fact that he continued to feel an outsider in Marburg, and this would continue. On 17 August, Paul Natorp died. With his death, Heidegger lost his only personal bond with the philosophy department in Marburg, as he explained in a letter of 23 August, to his to wife: “Yes – Natorp. I wander around here and now realise that I no longer have anyone at the university to whom I can look up to with admiration. They say I am a severe critic – yet when I find someone I can admire and venerate, I don’t hesitate to do so”. Heidegger’s unique style of philosophising had drawn many into its ambit, but it had also perplexed and frustrated others. That Heidegger and his style of philosophising could only with difficulty be accommodated in the rubric of conventional academic philosophy is shown by the contorted process that he went through in an attempt to get his paper on the concept of time published by the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, a newly-founded journal edited by Paul Kluckholm and Erich Rothacker. Heidegger had been contacted by Rothacker in October 1922, and invited to submit an essay for publication. Rothacker had described Heidegger to his fellow editor as a “highly interesting and scholarly eccentric [“Sonderling”]”, but he clearly felt that Heidegger was an eccentric with a future. [27] Nothing came of this initial invitation: Heidegger was not convinced that the journal had serious philosophical credentials, and he had little to publish, anyway. The editors, however, persisted, partly out of respect for Heidegger and his growing reputation, partly because (as Rothacker rather cynically wrote to Kluckholm on 1 January 1923) a philosophic component to their journal would help boost sales.

But with the presentation of his paper on “The Concept of Time” in July, Heidegger now had something that he could submit for publication. On 21 September, he wrote to Rothacker, offering to send him his paper, which was now subtitled “Comments on the Dilthey – Yorck Correspondence”. As he explained, “I have taken the central question regarding ‘historicity’ out of this correspondence, and will attempt through detailed analysis to make it comprehensible”. Matters looked promising. On 10 October, Rothacker wrote to Kluckhohn, noting that “interest in Heidegger is rapidly increasing”. He was keen to publish Heidegger’s piece in the first issue for 1925. On 2 November, Heidegger wrote to Rothacker regarding the forthcoming publication (the essay would be submitted by post on 3 November). The delay in submission was due to his attempt to shorten the article. It was the first sign that things were not what they should have been. The article duly arrived, and although the editors had not as yet read it they remained positive. As Rothacker wrote to Kluckhohn on 4 November, “the whole world is waiting for Heidegger, who has published nothing at all since his post-doctoral dissertation [on Duns Scotus], but who is regarded by his students as a prophet”. The editors read the essay quickly, and responded to Heidegger within a matter of days. We do not have their letter, but as is clear from what Heidegger wrote to Rothacker four days later that they had two major concerns: with its length (it was seventy-five pages long), and with its intelligibility (the difficulty of its vocabulary). Heidegger replied immediately, writing to Rothacker on 8 November. His reply suggests that the editors (notably Rothacker, who was responsible for the philosophical contributions to the journal, the “Geisteswissenschaften” side: Kluckholm looked after those in the literary sphere) had gone into some detail, and critical detail, on this matter. As Heidegger explained in his reply: he is very aware that there are difficulties with the way he writes:

“The terminology of my essay is a matter in itself. Concern [“Besorgen”] is determined by care [“Sorge”]. In general, there will be much from a terminological perspective that will be found “repellent”. The main thing is that phenomena should be clearly seen – otherwise it could probably be said much “more elegantly”.

I only have one wish that the clumsiness of the form [of the essay] is not found too off-putting.

Since I’ve been grappling with these matters for a long time, I may have failed to notice when I have expressed myself in ways that are incomprehensible or might be easily misunderstood”.

As is clear from Rothacker’s letters of 13 and 16 November to Kluckhohn, there were differences between the editors regarding the publishability of Heidegger’s piece. Rothacker was sympathetic to Heidegger’s idiom; Kluckhohn was not. Also, as Rothacker pointed out, if they did not publish it another journal almost certainly would. Rothacker saw no point in asking Heidegger to further shorten his article, but he agreed to ask him nevertheless. On 18 November, Heidegger wrote back to Rothacker, remaining resolute in resisting the editorial requests to shorten his essay. He wrote in non-compromising tones that were self-confident and, indeed, as Rothacker complained in a letter to Kluckhohn the following day, even somewhat haughty. Heidegger was certain that his essay would appear in another journal: he was not prepared to make sacrifices. This is the end of the matter.

Heidegger’s self-confidence had its foundations in his success as a teacher and as a public speaker, a role in which he was increasingly in demand. In early December, he gave a series of talks for the Kant Society on “Existence and Truth after Aristotle” in Hagen, Elberfeld, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Essen, and culminating on in Dortmund. As he wrote to his mother and brother on 4 December, “an entirely new world is opening up”. He describes how, in Cologne, he stayed with the professor of philosophy Max Scheler, and how during the course of their many discussions it became clear to him that his work was far better known than he had imagined. The hidden king, although still not crowned, was no longer hidden. In the winter semester, between November 1924 and March 1925, Heidegger gave a lecture course on Interpretation of Platonic Dialogues: Platon: Sophistes.[28] The course was attended by a cohort of students who, drawn by Heidegger’s charismatic personality and the urgency that he brought to the study of philosophy, had come to Marburg specifically to study under him. They included Hermann Deckert, Hans Jonas, Gerhard Kruger, Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss. Hans Jonas (born in 1903 in Mönchengladbach) had followed Heidegger from Freiburg, after coming from a period of study at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Jonas gained his doctorate under Heidegger in 1928 with a thesis on Gnosticism entitled The Concept of Gnosis, which served as the basis for his later book, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity. Jonas emigrated to North America in 1948, and went on to become a noted philosopher of social ethics, best known as the author of The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age. Karl Löwith (born in Munich in 1897) was the most senior of Heidegger’s acolytes. He had studied Biology and Philosophy in Munich, before transferring to Freiburg in 1919 to study with Husserl and Heidegger. In 1922 he returned to Munich, and took his doctorate under Moritz Geiger with the dissertation on “The Process of Self-interpretation in Nietzsche”. In 1928, he received his Habilitation under Heidegger with “The Individual as Social Being.”

Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith and the others were drawn to Marburg by Heidegger’s reputation which, in the absence of any substantial publications from the philosopher, had spread by word of mouth. These were not simply students in philosophy but participants in an intellectual revolution, although some, such as Hans Jonas, felt alienated from the cultic pretensions of Heidegger’s adherents. As he wrote in his autobiography, “the Heideggerian cultural community amongst the philosophy students, who had a bigoted arrogant outlook and gave themselves airs as if they were in possession of divine truth, was unbearable. This was not philosophy but something more like a sect, almost as if it were a new faith”. [29] This group of Heidegger acolytes also included the eighteen-year-old Hannah Arendt, who had come to Marburg in October 1924 specifically to study with Heidegger, after previously studying in Königsberg (her home town). As she later enthused, “his name had travelled all over Germany like the rumour of a hidden king”:

“The rumour about Heidegger was simply this: thinking had come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, were being made to speak, and in doing so it turned out that they were proposing things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities they we had presumed they were saying. A teacher has now come; one can perhaps learn to think […] This thinking may set tasks for itself; it may deal with “problems”, it naturally, indeed always, has something specific with which it is particularly occupied or, more precisely, by which it is specifically aroused; but one cannot say that it has a particular goal. It is unceasingly active, and even the laying down of paths itself is conducive to opening up new dimensions of thought, rather than an attempt to reach a goal sighted beforehand and guided thereto”.[30]

Arendt had come to Marburg to study Philosophy, Protestant Theology and the Classics, and had enrolled for Heidegger’s lecture course, “Plato’s Sophist” (“Platons Sophist“] in October 1924. which was offered as a phenomenological reading of that dialogue. Lectures on a further dialogue, Philebus, were foreseen but only the lectures on the Sophist were completed. Heidegger’s goal was to bring his students (and himself) to a “penetrating understanding” of the key concepts developed in that dialogue, so that they should understand distinctions between “Being and non-being, truth and semblance. knowledge and opinion, concept and assertion, value and non-value” (see Martin Heidegger, Plato’s “Sophist”, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indiana UP, 1997, page 5). To make that understanding possible, he will apply a phenomenological approach, and Heidegger cites Husserl (and in positive tones that should be noted, since his relationship with his mentor was soon to deteriorate) and the latter’s Logical Investigations. “These investigations have as their theme specific phenomena out of the domain of what we call consciousness or lived experience. They describe specific types of lived experience, acts of knowledge, of judgment; they question how these really appear, how their structure is to be determined” (page 6).

Phenomenology seeks to make visible what resides in phenomena, and this precisely the goal of Heidegger’s course (and he puts that goal in personal and inspirational terms that drew so many students to him): “the goal of our interpretation of the Platonic dialogues is to take what has become obvious and make it transparent in its foundations. To understand history cannot mean anything else than to understand ourselves – not in the sense that we might establish various things about ourselves, but that we experience what we ought to be” (page 7). Indeed, this is what the Greeks understood by truth: “aletheia”, where the truth means “to be hidden no longer, to be uncovered (page 11). Beyond scholarship, “aletheia”, which “means to be disclosing, to remove the world from concealedness and coverdness”, is the very “mode of Being of human Dasein” (page 12). The philosopher who “for the first time and before all else” and “who saw and interpreted on the ground the multiplicity of phenomena, the multiplicity of the various possibilities of “alethinein” [that which has been disclosed by “aletheia”] was Aristotle. His interpretation “was accomplished in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Chapters 2-6″, and that is where Heidegger began his lecture course.

Hannah Arendt attended Heidegger’s lectures and joined a seminar group that met in the evenings. Matters elided from the academic, indeed, the studiously philosophical, into the personal, during the course of a consultation hour (Heidegger’s weekly “Sprechstunde”, where he would give one-on-one advice to his students about their work). She later told her close friend, Hans Jonas, what had happened. When the consultation was over and she got up to leave, Heidegger went with her to the door, and then something quite unexpected happened. In Arendt’s words: “suddenly he dropped before me on his knees. I bent down, and he stretched his arms up to me while still on his knees. I took his head in my hands, and he kissed me and I kissed him”. And so, Jonas, adds, it began.[31] We do not know exactly when this took place, but it is possible that it was in January 1925, after Arendt had returned to Marburg from a short Christmas break with her family in Königsberg to resume her studies. Soon after, On 10 February, Heidegger sent her his first impassioned letter:

“I must come to see you this evening and speak to your heart.

Everything should be simple and clear and pure between us. Only then will we be worthy of having been allowed to meet. You are my pupil and I your teacher, but that is only the occasion for what has happened to us .I will never be able to call you mine, but from now on you will belong in my life, and it shall grow with you”.[32]

We might be tempted to read such sentiments as the pretext for seduction: the differences in age and status would seem to lend weight to such a reading.[33]  But Arendt was attracted to Heidegger well before this meeting, drawn to him on account, as she later confides, of his “passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one”. [34]  And if rhetoric is involved here, it is rhetoric that has an ancient lineage in the discourse of lovers. Hannah Arendt had gone to Marburg seeking Heidegger, and now she had found him. In her autobiographical narrative, “Shadows” (“Die Schatten”), written at this time, she describes her restless spirit and her need for an “unbending devotion to a single one”.[35] We do not have her letters, but the fact that Heidegger had observed in his first letter that she seemed to have lost her “disquiet” clearly indicates that he had known her at a distance for a while, at least since he had first seen her in one of his lectures, looking up towards him with a gaze that “struck him in the middle of his heart”. “Oh, it was and is as if eternity had come close to him”, as he later noted.[36]

Heidegger and Arendt met on park benches or in her room, and went for walks, out towards the surrounding countryside, where they would not be recognised. And they wrote to one another, frequently. The nature of their ensuing relationship, and the correspondence that accompanies it, is detailed and complex.[37] We are following a love affair between philosophers, and both take the opportunity to use their relationship to explore the universal meaning of love and its effect on the human subject. In his second letter sent on 21 February later, Heidegger pondered:

“Why is love rich beyond all other possible experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves. Then we want to thank the beloved, but find nothing that suffices. We can only thank with our selves. Love transforms gratitude into loyalty to our selves and unconditional faith in the other. That is how love steadily intensifies its innermost secret.

Here, being close is a matter of being at the greatest distance from the other – distance that lets nothing blur – but instead puts the “thou” into the mere presence – transparent but incomprehensible – of a revelation. The other’s presence suddenly breaks into our life – no soul can come to terms with that. One human fate gives itself over to another human fate, and the duty of pure love is to keep this giving alive as it was on the first day”.

Heidegger cannot help himself: this is a lecture on the phenomenology of love, which seeks to explore (and celebrate) the reconstruction and opening of selfhood that love makes possible. It is impossible to establish the degree of their intimacy at this early stage. Heidegger had asserted that everything must be “simple and clear and pure between us” and apologises in one letter for having “forgotten himself” during a recent walk. Aware that their relationship may be a distraction from academic work, Heidegger had argued from the very first letter that love could provide a path of self-fulfillment for Hannah Arendt that was worth more than scholarly pursuits, involving a freeing of her “purest feminine essence”, of “intuition, longing, blossoming”, an uninhibited commitment to the other, which is “the source of goodness, of faith, of beauty, of unending womanly giving”.

In the winter semester between November 1925 and February 1926, Heidegger gave a lecture course on “Logic: The Question of Truth”. “What is the subject matter of the science of logic?”, he asks himself in the first lecture (see Logic: The Question of Truth, translated by Thomas Sheehan, Indiana UP, 2010, page 5). In his later approaches to logic, Heidegger will stress its delimiting restrictive nature, the way that it insists upon the observance of a strict consequential methodology based on rational criteria. But in this lecture course, Heidegger’s take on logic is expansive and wide ranging, and brings his discussion into matters relating to psychology, ethics and time, as in section 23, “The Interpretation of Time in the Transcendental Analytic”. The reason for the conceptual plenitude of the “logic” lectures was that Heidegger was in the midst of writing Being and Time and he (so to speak) transcribed a number of concepts elaborated in that work into his lecture course. This is the case with section 17, “Care as the being of existence. Concern-for and concern-about authenticity and inauthenticity, and the final section, number 37, whose concluding preoccupation is with “time as an existential of human existence – temporality and the structure of care”, concerns which seem to leave conventional logic far behind. Indeed, Heidegger concludes his lecture course with the words, “should more radical temporal possibilities be found in the temporality of human existence, these would necessarily set essential limits to traditional logic and ontology” (pages 343).

The winter semester came to an end in March, and both Heidegger and Hannah Arendt went their separate ways: he to his wife and their mountain retreat in Todtnauberg, and she to her parents’ house Königsberg. But the two continued to write. He tells her in a letter of the 21 March about the inspiration he finds in nature: “this is a homeland of pure joy. Here there is no need for anything ‘interesting’, and my [scholarly] work takes on the rhythm of a man chopping wood in a distant forest”. He does not want to return to the “flatland” of Marburg and his academic duties there, teaching reluctant students who do not wish to learn, when his research is reaching a critical point (his manuscript of Being and Time). Isolation is what he needs. Even his visit to Husserl in Freiburg, made between 25 and 29 March, is disappointing: “he is very tired and ageing remarkably quickly”. (But we can read these dismissive words as indicating that Husserl was not impressed by the direction that Heidegger was taking in his work.)

The mid-year break was almost over, and Arendt wrote in early April saying that she would soon be back in Marburg. Heidegger replied on the 12 April: “I live in a frenzy of work and of joy at your impending arrival”. He was going to Kassel (in northern Hesse) to lecture on “Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview” on the 16 April and would stay there until the 22nd.[38] Although he had not extended an invitation to Arendt, she wrote to say that she would like to be with him in Kassel. This would be the first time that she will have seen Heidegger outside Marburg. It is clear that their relationship was about to enter a new phase. Perhaps recognising this, Heidegger outlined in a letter of 17 April an itinerary for the couple: “I am lodging near Wilhelmshöhe Castle, very exclusive. Perhaps you can stay at the ‘Stift’ ”. After the lecture, he will, he tells her, “take leave of my acquaintances and hosts and get on the No. 1 tram to Wilhelmshöhe, the last stop. Perhaps you can – discreetly – take the next tram. Then I’ll take you home”.

During the break in the university year, Hannah had been thinking and writing: about herself, her love and her life. When she met Heidegger in Kassel, she brought with her a five-page manuscript, “The Shadows”, which she presented to him. Although written in the third person, it is clearly an autobiographical document.[39] The text begins:

“Every time she woke up from that long, dreamy and yet deep sleep, in which one merges entirely with what one dreams, she felt the same shy, hesitant tenderness toward the things of the world, which made clear to her how much of her actual life had sunken completely into itself – like sleep, one might say, if there can be anything comparable to it in normal life – and how much had run its course. For already early in her life, strangeness [“Fremdheit”] and tenderness had become inseparable. Tenderness meant shy, reticent affection, not surrendering, but a probing that was caress, joy, and surprise at strange forms”. [40]

“Shadows” tells of a “close-minded and self-absorbed” young woman, who feels ostracized from the common feelings of life, and suffers from a “lack of tranquillity” that is threatening to destroy her.[41]  The sentiments might be regarded as conventional: the predicament of alienated youth, particularly of over-intellectualised alienated youth, had been thoroughly explored by writers of the Expressionist generation from the beginning of the century, as in Hermann Hesse’s Peter Camenzind.  What is original about Arendt’s brief study is its critical distance from its female subject (the narrator is without any trace of sentiment), and the existential hue of the writing, its reading of emotional states not in terms of psychology but of certain defining qualities of the human condition.[42] As we are told at one point in the narrative:

“She had fallen prey to fear, as she once had to longing, and again, not to a somehow identifiable fear of something determined in any particular way, but fear of existence itself […] fear of reality, a meaningless, baseless, empty fear, whose blind gaze turned everything into nothing, the fear that is madness, joylessness, distress, annihilation. With this fear, nothing is more frightening than one’s own reflection upon it”.

The young woman is also subject to longing; but this is not a longing for any particular thing “but a longing as to what makes up a life, what can constitute it”. It is a longing for meaning, and she cannot find it. She feels condemned to a rootless existence, indeed, to an “absurd” one, a state of being that throws her “back on herself, so that her age concealed and obscured both her vision of herself and her access to it.” Once again, the narrator makes it clear that what is being described here is a generalisable condition: “the potential for such despair is within the realm of the human, awake at every moment and available like any other potential”. “Potential” may seem an overly positive designation of such a state, but the narrator takes it further, for “it is such suffering that makes anything worthwhile”:

“There may have been something similar about the way she fell prey to fear [“Angst”] and to longing, namely, the act of falling prey to something, of being trapped in a craving – that fixation on a single thing, when the empty gaze forgets multiplicity or, taken over by craving and passion, considers nothing else. But that longing may have opened up empires for her, strange, colourful empires that she was at home in and could love with a living bliss that never changes”.

The intimate world drawn in Arendt’s “Shadows”, and the vulnerability of its protagonist, deeply moved Heidegger (he called it her “diary”). Heidegger saw the pained personality of the anonymous female protagonist as a thinly-disguised version of Hannah herself: both author and character possess, as he observed in a letter of 1 May, “a shy freedom and [the] soul’s unthreatened hope”, adding that “Shadows” was “symbol of how you will live in my work”.

Indeed, Arendt’s “The Shadows” anticipates some of the key themes of Heidegger’s Being in Time, particularly those explicated in section 40, which is given over to Angst as an ontological condition of “Dasein”. There Heidegger explores the non-motivated nature of anxiety, and delves into the potential for despair that exists as a constituent part of the human psyche, something that “is already ‘there’, and yet nowhere; it is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and yet is nowhere.[43] This feeling of hopelessness and despair, however, is also a condition (as Arendt too had made clear) for the authenticity of the self in the world. States such as Angst are “moods”, which have no basis in our rational assessment of the world but belong to a residual responsiveness to being-in-the-world, that Heidegger called “Befindlichkeit”, and we must look beyond conventional philosophy for any explanation of them. After their meeting in Kassel, the relationship between Heidegger and Arendt deepened intellectually and, almost certainly, physically, as seems clear from a letter that he wrote on 24 April:

“Your letter to Kassel left me moved for days. The “if you want to have me” – “if you like”: what can I still do in the face of such shy and yet so resolute waiting, such persistence? What have I brought you but the most difficult burden, and has it not been a continual sacrifice of your soul? And your shy quiet “yes” in the train station”.

A model of the human subject is being created, an “us”, which transcends the limitations of individual selfhood. On 8 May 1926 Heidegger wrote, “we could not only say that the world is now no longer mine and yours – but ours – only say only that what we do and achieve belongs not to you and me but to us”. It is a spiritualised, transcendent reading of love, appropriate words for which Heidegger finds in the writings of Saint Augustine, the sole Church Father who had survived Heidegger’s apostasy of 1919. On 13 May, he wrote Arendt a letter full of gratitude:

“Thank you for your letters – for how you have accepted me into your love – beloved. Do you know that this is the most difficult thing a human is given to endure? For everything else, there are methods, aids, limits, and understanding – here alone everything means: to be in one’s love = to be forced into one’s innermost existence. Amo means volo, ut sis [which means as] Augustine once said: I love you – I want you to be what you are.”

We do not know how Arendt responded to such letters (hers were either lost or destroyed), but in 1929 she published the doctoral dissertation that she had just completed under the guidance of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. Titled, Love and Saint Augustine (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation), it examines the interrelationship between the love of God, love of mankind and carnal love in Augustine’s work. But her book is not simply an exegesis or an exposition; as the subtitle “interpretation” indicates, it clearly reflected Arendt’s own views on love and loving. At one point we read:

“Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it”.[44]

Is this Augustine, Arendt or Heidegger speaking? Love is a reaching out towards the other, and has its source in caritas (“care”): “Caritas is but the road that connects man and his ultimate goal. Stretching out in this purposive direction, caritas possesses a provisional sort of eternity. By the same token, the world, as a mere means toward this end, loses its awesome character and gains some sense by being made relative through this process. Love as desire always faces this alternative of either use or enjoyment. This is true for divine love as it is for human love”.[45]

Arendt celebrates care in absolute terms, as the medium of the experience of love, which is capable of relativising indeed, perhaps abolishing existential dread. It is a form of love that may or may not have characterised Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger. By the time he sent her his letter of 13 May, the summer semester had begun, and Heidegger was back in the midst of a heavy teaching load. He lectured, with Arendt as one of his students, on the “History of the Concept of Time”, a course that ran through to July. Although his classes were held between 7am and 8am, the course attracted one hundred and twenty students. For first-year students, he offered the seminar, “Preliminary Exercises in Connection with Descartes ‘Meditations’ ”. The lecture course represented an extension of his paper on the concept of time, and it anticipated in many ways the work that he would later do in his Being and Time. Towards the end of the course, Heidegger added new material. As Theodore Kisiel observes, “going beyond his prepared manuscript, Heidegger in these last two hours of [summer semester 1925] lectures on the topics of death and conscience. This course, presented under the title “History of the Concept of Time” is in effect the second draft of [Being and Time], mainly of its First Division. Heidegger will utilise his copy of [his student] Simon Moser’s transcript of the course as the basis for the final draft of [of that work]”. [46]

Heidegger’s career and his writing were progressing. On 19 May, he wrote to Jaspers saying that he was content in Marburg, but found the intellectual niveau low (“the philosophy done by [Erich Rudolf] Jaensch is itself too primitive, even for elementary school teachers”). His colleagues were, however, supportive, and expected him to receive promotion to a full professorship soon. Indeed, Heidegger had already been muted as successor to Hartmann, who had been called to the Chair of Philosophy in Cologne earlier that year. Heidegger was the preferred candidate for the vacant Chair, and his name was put forward by his department. There was concern about the paucity of his publications, but not about him as a philosopher. On 26 June, Husserl wrote to Erich Rudolf Jaensch at Marburg, saying “in the new generation [Heidegger] is the only philosophical personality with such creative, resourceful originality”. And he continued: “in my eyes, Heidegger is without doubt the most significant of those on their way up and is predestined to be a philosopher of great style […] He has kept silent for years so as to be able to publish only what is completely mature and definitely compelling. His publications, which are soon to come out, will show just how much he has to say and how original he is”. [47] Similar sentiments were uttered by Heidegger’s colleagues on 24 June, during the all-important second meeting of the selection committee. When Heidegger’s publishing record was queried by one member of the committee, the following exchange was recorded in the minutes: “[Professor Rudolf] Wedekind asked which of Heidegger’s writings have been published. Hartmann replied that there is a new and outstanding work by Heidegger forthcoming but that, as with his earlier work [the “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”], it had not as yet been published yet.[48]

The departmental memo was entirely accurate. Throughout the year, Heidegger had been using every opportunity to push on with the manuscript of Being and Time. He had rearranged the rooms in his home (Schwanallee 21) to provide himself with a more conducive space, away from noise. Certainly, things did not always go smoothly. On 17 July, he wrote to Hannah Arendt, complaining: “I am quite weighed down with the business of exams, meetings and paperwork, and feel more like a civil servant than a human being”, but he did find an opportunity, nevertheless, to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a novel in which notions of time and personal responses to time play a major role. Heidegger spent time looking for a tranquil location in which he could resume work on his manuscript. On 24 July, he wrote to Jaspers regarding his travel plans: “I am going to the cabin on 1 August, and I am very much looking forward to the strong air of the mountains – this weak, light stuff down here ruins you over time. Eight days of wood chopping – then back to writing again”. And he added in a letter of 23 September to Jaspers, once again: “I have no desire for the company of professors; the peasants are much more pleasing and even more interesting”. The academic year was at an end, but while his family went up to Todtnauberg, Heidegger was compelled to remain in Marburg, because he had been invited to attend the Faculty meeting to discuss the criteria for electing the new professor. He was the favourite candidate, but colleagues needed to be reassured that he was on the eve of publishing a major work. Finally, the decision was made. On 5 August, the Faculty of Philosophy put Heidegger’s name in first place as its preferred candidate for the vacant Chair. As if to anticipate reservations on the side of the Education Department in Berlin, the recommendation was accompanied by the following note: “In addition [to the earlier work on Aristotle], there is a systematic work of recent origin – now being printed – on ‘Time and Being’, which shows us yet another side of Heidegger, as an independent and constructive philosophical thinker. The work is nothing less than a new elaboration of ultimate ontological questions. It thus represents a synthesis of the phenomenological way of research – here for the first time free from all subjectivism – with an assessment of the great wealth of the tradition of ancient, medieval and modern metaphysics”. [49]

On 31July 1926, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers, bemoaning the professorial hullabaloo in Marburg, and saying he hoped to visit him in the first part of October.  Heidegger was intending to go up to his hut (“eight days of chopping wood – then back to the writing”) and continue writing. He was looking forward to the “bracing air of the mountains – this soft flaccid atmosphere down here gradually ruins you”). As he wrote to Hannah Arendt on 23 August, “I am once more with nature and native soil, and I seem to feel even the ideas growing”. Heidegger wrote throughout the summer, in a rented room in a farmhouse at the foot of the hills in Todtnauberg, so that he could get away from the noise and commotion of his young family, adding section after section to his manuscript, concluding with (as he noted to Karl Löwith on 24 August) an all-important chapter on death. It was then time to return to Marburg for the winter semester, a prospect he did not welcome. He was, as he wrote to Arendt on 14 September, “dreading the semester – not just because it will bring more nonsense, but because it will tear me away from really productive work”. The isolation and the intensity of his writing had brought about changes in his personality: “I have already forgotten what the ‘world’ looks like, and I will feel like a mountain man going down to the city for the first time. But in such solitude, which can yield unsuspected powers, even human experiences become simpler and stronger. […] We must bring ourselves to the point where everything is as new as it was on the first day”.

Heidegger was making good progress with his writing. As he wrote in a letter of 14 September, new ideas were forming, leading him to revise his existing draft and to return to an earlier focus upon “the radicality of Greek ontology”. The new draft reflects the course that he is about to teach in the coming summer semester starting in November, “History of the Concept of Time”, which stresses “the full force of the interrogative experience” through which phenomenology is made to uncover the “question of the being of beings”. [50] This new draft of his manuscript also moves Dasein into the central role that it would ultimately play in the final published book.[51] Heidegger’s pace of writing was intense. He sought to avoid interruptions, and declined an invitation from Husserl, citing the demands of his work: “my innermost ideas are quite urgent now”. The reasons, however, were as much personal as philosophical. As he explained in a letter to Arendt on 14 September, he felt that Husserl was “no longer moving forward, and that his productivity had come to an end”. As Heidegger’s estimation of Husserl continued to decline, his opinion of Jaspers was rising. On 22 October, he wrote to his wife: “from time to time, I compare Husserl and Jaspers – looking at their philosophical existence – then it’s like night and day: on the one hand (to exaggerate) interest in the school [meaning institutional matters] – acknowledgement of the master – lack of understanding for destiny and decisions – on the other hand, sovereignty – modesty – personal commitment and a real sense of a man who takes action”.

Since he was not to begin lecturing until November, there was no reason to return to Marburg. On 15 October, he travelled to Meßkirch to attend the wedding of his brother, Fritz, and then continued his journey, visiting Jaspers and wife in Heidelberg. On 18 October, he wrote to Hannah Arendt from there explaining that he was trying to push on with his writing but the “bureaucratic nonsense” (the imbroglio around his candidacy for the vacant Chair) will not allow him to do so, and there is another important meeting next week. After his extended sojourn in the mountains and the concentrated and lonely writing of his manuscript, Heidegger was having difficulty re-adapting to the academic life-style: “everything seems quite unreal, above all, the fact that I have to lecture”. He wonders whether it is worth putting so much into teaching instead of research. But there are, he concludes, positive rewards in teaching, even if they often remain hidden.

Heidegger returned to Marburg on the 20 October, and two weeks later began his lecture course on “Logic: The Question of Truth” (“Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit”). Hannah Arendt was present at his first lecture, and three days later he sent her a letter: “Today I greeted you during my lecture, and was happy you were there”.  This letter was, in fact, the first they had exchanged since the 18 October. Heidegger noted the gap in correspondence, but did not offer an explanation. Whilst working on his manuscript in the mountains, he had remained in touch with her, describing how his writing was progressing and how he was being sustained by his natural environment. Although the letters were enthusiastic, they were without the rapturous tones that had characterised his earlier letters. It seems that a cooling in their relationship has taken place. This may simply have been because, with the end of the academic year in July, Arendt had returned home to Königsberg, severing thus their physical proximity. At the same time, Heidegger was also deeply engrossed in his writing, as he repeatedly tells her in his letters.  On Hannah’s part, she may well have been giving serious thought to the wisdom of continuing indefinitely a relationship with a married man in a world as small as the academic community of Marburg. It is also possible that in their long periods together in the mountains with his wife confidentialities had been shared.[52] There may be one final reason. We are not in possession of Hannah’s letters to Heidegger, but we know from his response on 24 July to one of them that as a student she felt that she had “lost” the previous semester: he had made great progress in his writing and career; she had achieved nothing. His greeting in a letter of the 5 November was his last communication with her until the 10 December, when he asked her “to come to our bench tomorrow”. It was followed by a final letter sent on 6 January the following year. It is the briefest and most formal letter that he has ever written to her: “I would be very glad if you came to see me today (Saturday) at 8.45 in the evening. If the light is on in my room, then I am home”. What was discussed here we do not know; but it seems clear from a letter that Heidegger wrote to here on 10 January that Arendt told Heidegger that she would be leaving Marburg to study to study with Jaspers in Heidelberg, which she did in either March or April for the 1927 summer semester. Although their relationship in Marburg is over, they stay in touch until 1930. In a poem written that year, she looked back on their relationship. The poem possesses a tone of stoical acceptance, and there is melancholy but no self-pity. The central stanza reads:

“I think of him and of the love –

As though it were in a distant land;

And the “come and give” is foreign:

I hardly know what bound me”.[53]

In the meantime, Heidegger was waiting for a response from the Education Department in Berlin to his application for the Chair of Philosophy at Marburg. As he wrote to Jaspers on 30 November, “all kinds of machinations are taking place in Berlin”. The mid-semester vacation was approaching. He writes to Jaspers about Hegel, and on 20 December, to his mother on domestic matters. Xmas is spent en famille in the cabin. Heidegger is waiting. On 27 January 1926, the Education minister, Carl Heinz Becker, wrote to the Philosophy Faculty in Marburg saying that he did not judge Heidegger to be suitably qualified for a full professorship: “while acknowledging Professor Heidegger’s success as a teacher, it seems, nevertheless, inappropriate to grant him a full salaried professorship for a Chair of such historical proportions before he has brought out substantial scholarly publications that have received the acclaim of his colleagues and which are in keeping with such an appointment”.[54]

On 17 February, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers informing him about the decision of the Education Minister, but saying that the department in Marburg was continuing to support his application. Heidegger claims to be indifferent to these deliberations: what matters is to keep the momentum of the previous semester going on his work on his manuscript. The latter had reached a critical stage, and over March and April, Husserl spent the Easter vacation at a guesthouse in Todtnauberg to assist Heidegger during his writing of Being and Time. There is much that Husserl did not understand about the work. He was particularly alienated, as he later wrote, by its “newfangled language and style of thinking”, although he admired its “exceptional, albeit unclarified intellectual energy”. [55] During the course of March, Heidegger finished the manuscript of Being and Time up to section 77 (“The Connection between the previous Exposition of Temporality and the Research of W. Dilthey and the Ideas of Count Yorck”), and was able to get a hand-written copy of the first thirty-eight sections to his printer on 1 April.[56] On 8 April, at a gathering in Todtnauberg, he presented Husserl with a copy of these sections, with a dedication. On 24 April, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers that the Philosophy Faculty in Marburg intended to nominate him again for a full professorship and had attached the printed sheets of his manuscript of Being and Time to this application, but he felt that he has made enemies and that there were intrigues against him. Heidegger and his family returned to Marburg on 30 April, where he was due to teach in the summer semester beginning in May the lecture course “Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy” (“Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie”). On 21 May, Heidegger wrote to his mother, wishing her the best on the occasion of her name day. He notes that “almost half of my book has been printed”. On 24 May, he thanked Jaspers for his positive words regarding the early chapters of Being and Time and adds, “I expect only a few will study it; only you will understand what I am trying to achieve. I regard it on the whole as a transitional work. From the fact that Husserl finds the whole thing ‘disconcerting’ and he can no longer bring it under the rubric of phenomenology I conclude that I have de facto gone further than even I envisaged or thought possible”.

On 18 June, the Faculty of Philosophy at Marburg reapplied to Berlin to have Heidegger appointed to the Chair of Philosophy, sending the galley proofs from the First Division of the forthcoming Being and Time as evidence of his scholarship. The application was rejected yet again, with the comment “insufficient”. In August, the Heideggers moved into their new apartment, Barfüßertor 15, near the university. There would be more space, and it would be a quieter location for his writing. It was now the end of the summer semester, and Heidegger had been invited by Husserl to stay with him for a few days in August. The love affair between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt had effectively ended in January, but through his ex-student, Hans Jonas, who was a friend of Arendt and also studying with Jaspers in Heidelberg, he had acquired her address there (on the Schwimmbadstrasse) and was seeking to rekindle their relationship. On 29 July, he wrote, suggesting a rendezvous in Weinheim, a town in Baden near Freiburg, where Heidegger was travelling to meet up with Husserl. We must assume that they met, and then possibly again the following month in August. On 7 December Heidegger wrote a letter, apparently in response to one received from her. We do not know about the level of their intimacy, but at least on the level of linguistic profusion, the former ardent intensity had returned. Heidegger begins with the adage from Augustine that he has used before: “Volo, ut sis”, [“I want you to be who you are”], and he continues “although you have remained as present to me as you were on the first day, your letter brought you particularly close. I hold you loving hands in mine and pray for your happiness”. The exchange of letters continued, with Heidegger writing twice in February the following year. Arendt sent him photographs, and Heidegger responded in exultant poetic tones, as in the letter of 19 February: “Dear, I know you are often with me on my most solitary paths – as a mountain flower waits by a broad cliff, or, rather, is simply there. I think of that as ‘eternity’; I cannot find it any other way”. Further assignations are planned in Heidelberg, while Heidegger is visiting Jaspers, such as one on 18 April. But it is possible that this meeting this did not take place, or that it was not a success.  Heidegger wishes to have their old relationship back, but it is clear that this has gone. Their correspondence from this period concludes with two letters, written this time by Hannah Arendt: one on 22 April 1928, registering the failure of a planned meeting; and a second and final letter, written on 30 September 1930. On 26 September 1929, Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern (later known as the author, Günther Anders), who has also been a student of Heidegger in Marburg. This final letter narrates an unhappy incident at a railway station where, possibly, the three were to meet and best wishes for the future exchanged. Or perhaps this was to be one final glimpse of the loved one. This final letter offers no explanation; only sentiments of guilt, confusion and pain.[57]

Thus, the vicissitudes of love. These were taking place while Heidegger was in the final stage of writing his book. On 4 October 1926, he wrote to Jaspers saying that he was unable to visit him because he needed to work on his manuscript, which was increasing in size: “I suspended the printing in the middle of the summer semester and, after brief period of rest, went back to it again with further revisions. The book has become more extensive than I envisaged, so that I must now divide it about every twenty-five sheets [“Bogen”, amounting to sixteen pages]. I have to deliver the remaining parts of the first volume by 1 November, so every day is precious”. Similar sentiments were made on 13 October, in a letter to Bultmann: “I have made such good progress that I have to divide the entire manuscript about every twenty-six sheets. The rewriting and the delay in the printing has been worth it, even if everything is not as perfect as I would have liked”.[58] In the winter semester, beginning in November, Heidegger lectured on “History of Philosophy from Thomas Aquinas to Kant” (“Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant”).  On 1 November, he completed the draft of Division II and sent it to the printer.[59] On 26 December, he sent further sections of the manuscript to Jaspers, sheets 17 and 18, noting “I will bring the rest with me [when I come to stay in Heidelberg], up to 23. Four sheets are still missing”. And he added (perhaps unnecessarily, but this has now become an idee fixe) “if the treatise is written against anyone, it is written against Husserl, who saw this immediately but has stayed positive from the very beginning”.

On 1 January 1927, Heidegger travelled to Heidelberg. On the following day, he wrote to his wife: “J[aspers] is reading through my manuscript and becoming more enthusiastic with every page. Above all, he sees the work that is behind it. It is only now that I am coming myself to realise what attention and stimulation mean. New things are awakening in me and, above all, I see more clearly the limits and necessities of what has been achieved”. On 1 March, Heidegger sent off the final sheets of the corrected version of his manuscript to Helene Weiss (one of his Marburg students, now living in Berlin) who was checking its final stages. Although Being and Time was reaching completion, Heidegger saw that work as representing not the end but the beginning of new philosophical activity. As he wrote to Rudolf Bultmann on 14 March, “we ought to view ourselves as fortunate that we can clearly see (as far as possible) our positive tasks for the future and grasp them. All the noise and confusion around us [the ‘Professoren-Stickluft’, the ‘poisonous atmosphere of the professors’] should not concern us at all. It will be good enough if we can successfully grow into the future”. “But”, as he wrote in a further letter to Bultmann on the 29 March, “we will only make progress if we work in the most radical way from within the most extreme positions”.

In early April, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) was published as a supplement in volume 8 of Husserl’s journal, Annual for Philosophy and phenomenological Research (Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung}, and later that year as a book by Max Niemeyer in Tübingen. Being and Time when it appeared was dedicated to Husserl “in friendship and admiration”. Between 6 and 19 April, Heidegger visited Husserl in Freiburg, and on 8 April (Husserl’s birthday), Heidegger presented the latter with a bound copy of the “Special Edition” of his book with a personal dedication to Husserl. On 18 April 1927, Heidegger sent Jaspers a copy, and on 1 May Jaspers wrote back, thanking him for the book. He did, however, have mixed feelings about it. He wrote: “I haven’t read much of it yet. I have only leafed through it and perused a few dozen pages. It seems to me, as it did at Christmas, as if we have climbed to a new level, but are unable to find our way around on it; hence our sharing of origins that have not as yet been formulated, and the deviation, indeed mutual strangeness of the initial steps and the still half-blind orientation from both of us. A truth gleams here that is almost buried under so much detail. I feel the same way about my own writing”.

Jasper’s language is cryptic, almost encoded. He wants to be positive and to associate himself with Heidegger’s work, but he can’t. He does not wish to alienate his friend, so he feels obliged to include himself with we” and “our”, as if the book is the result of a joint enterprise of philosophical renewal. We might paraphrase his sentiments thus: “I feel now as I did when we last discussed the manuscript at Christmas that we have reached new heights in our work but do not feel as yet quite comfortable there, because the philosophical foundations of our work have not yet fully formulated. This reveals itself in our breaking with convention and in the shared strangeness of our initial attempts and the half-blind orientation that each of us makes”. The final sentence of Jaspers’ response, however, where he talks emphatically about “my” projects, entirely undermines this fiction of collaboration. What he is implicitly saying is that there is Heidegger’s work; and there is mine. It was only later in his autobiography that Jaspers felt he could be entirely honest about his reaction to Heidegger’s work: “the appearance of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) did not bring about a deepening in our relationship, but rather led to an estrangement between us, which I did not properly notice at the time […] Heidegger had already read several pages from his manuscript to me in 1922. I found them unintelligible. I favoured a more natural mode of expression […] I was delighted at the achievement of a man with whom I was close, but I had no desire to read the work and soon got stuck, because its style, content and way of thinking had nothing to say to me at all”.

Jaspers’ reservations about Heidegger’s Being and Time were shared by others. Writing to Bultmann on 7 September, Heidegger showed himself aware of the difficulties that readers would have with his work. He fully understands why Max Deutschbein (a colleague at Marburg) “cannot make heads or tails of it. But at least he tried”. Otherwise: “I am still waiting for any opinion on the book. I have received only assurances that people are eagerly reading it”, and he mentions one colleague whose opinion should have been voiced by now: Nicolai Hartmann. Being and Time was, however, being read, and indeed diligently read. One such reader was Edith Stein, the erstwhile research assistant of Husserl in Freiburg (indeed, Heidegger had replaced her in that role). Stein had become a convert to Catholicism in 1922, and was now teaching at St. Magdalena, a Dominican sister’s school in Speyer. It was a position that did not prevent her from reading philosophy, and new philosophy too. On 19 October, she wrote to her friend, the noted philologist, Roman Ingarden, that she had come into possession of a copy of Being and Time. Her response to the book was entirely positive:

“I believe that Heidegger is on the point of becoming famous, and that he can put us all in the shade. Up until now, I didn’t really see it, or rather, I saw only the effect, that is, his great influence on the young generation. I read a good part of the book during the vacation but I am not quite through. The last part went by the wayside, with everything else going on since then. I do not know how Husserl has come to terms with the great differences [in their philosophies]. He has to be clear about them. I found out that, on the contrary, he is less open than before to different thinking”.[60]

On 8 May, Jaspers wrote a letter of condolence to Heidegger, whose mother had passed away the previous week. Her death had been a painful and protracted one, which Heidegger had followed at close hand. He had paid her a brief visit on 5 February, and continued to write to her throughout the following weeks, offering her consolation and expressing his belief that she would come through this trial. “It pains me particularly”, he wrote on 29 March 1927, “that you have to undergo such a stubborn but unpredictable illness. I think of you a great deal, but it is so disconcerting knowing that you are so ill, when once you were so sprightly and energetic”. Elfride also wrote, sending her love and that of the children. In her final days. Heidegger’s letters to his mother became longer and longer, and are full of detail, describing the natural environment around Todtnauberg, the gradual passing of the seasons, his skiing jaunts, and the impending publication of his book, which his mother had helped bring about, as he told her in a letter of 14 April, through her love and care: “and so is that work also a piece of your work”. Then the final letter on 30 April, written from Marburg. He has just paid her a visit that would turn out to be his last: “those days spent with you were very distressing, when I had helplessly to remain by your side, without being able to bring any relief to your suffering”. And now, Martin Heidegger, a lapsed Catholic for almost a decade, must find the rights words to comfort his true-believing mother, and he finds them: “you were at this time an unforgettable model of courage and endurance and of an unshakeable trust in God”. Johanna Heidegger died three days later on 3 May at the age of 69.

On 24 May, Husserl sent a letter to Heidegger saying that he had written to the Education Department in Berlin once again in support of Heidegger’s application for the Chair at Marburg, and had encouraged them to at least grant Heidegger a pay rise.  Husserl also mentions his impending retirement: he is being compelled to retire at 70, but feels “no diminution of his powers beyond the physical”. In May, Heidegger began his summer semester lecture course on “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology” (“Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie”), which he taught until July, when he left Marburg for his summer vacation in Todtnauberg. The complex relationship between Heidegger and Husserl continued to unfold throughout that summer. In the early days of his reading of the manuscript of Being and Time, Husserl had been unsure about exactly what Heidegger was trying to achieve. He had struggled to understand both the philosophy and particularly the language of the work, and had put his reservations about the book down to the fact that he had only been able to read sections of it. But now it has been published, Husserl has had the opportunity to study it in greater detail and comes to the realisation, as he wrote on 3 August to Dietrich Mahnke (the recently arrived professor in the philosophy of mathematics at Marburg), that “on the face of it, [Being and Time] distances itself entirely from my analytic phenomenology”. [61]

But, as Husserl soon sees as he continues reading, what Heidegger is doing is much more than putting a “distance” between himself and his former mentor; he is openly rejecting the latter’s entire thinking and his version of phenomenology. As Husserl later wrote to Alexander Pfänder (Professor of Philosophy in Munich and the leading member of its phenomenological school), “Heidegger’s phenomenology is something totally different from mine; rather than furthering the development of my scientific works, his university lectures as well as his book are, on the contrary, open or veiled attacks on my works, directed at discrediting them on the most essential points”.[62]

Such an assessment was the result of Husserl’s careful reading of Heidegger’s book, which he studied in great detail, registering his queries and criticisms of the text in the margins of his copy. There is much that he did not understand, and he signaled this by placing questions marks after quotations from the work. This is the case in his response to Section 58, “Understanding the Appeal, and Guilt”, where Heidegger examines the ontological condition of “thrownness”. Statements such as “In being a self, Dasein is the thrown entity as a self” are greeted by a question mark, that is followed in the ensuing paragraph with the query “is a presentation like this possible?”. [63] On other occasions, Husserl has grasped with Heidegger is saying, but simply disagrees with him. Heidegger’s assertion that “a regard that looks at things only ‘theoretically’ fails to understand their usefulness” is dismissed with the words “but naturally a theoretical look at the implement is required if we are to grasp and have it as such objectively and explain it descriptively”, comments that fail to appreciate the originality of Heidegger’s factive and instrumental nature of Heidegger’s approach to the object world, which argues that we see it as something we use and which in our use defines us. [64] Ultimately, Husserl’s major objection is that Heidegger is not Husserl. When, in section 62, Heidegger argues that Dasein, and his mode of understanding, is already in the world (and hence is not working out of an “inner sphere”), Husserl writes: “But how can all of this be clarified except through my doctrine of intentionality (validity), especially as experiencing? What is said here is my own doctrine, but without its deeper grounding”. [65]

And yet, is it possible that, in spite of this, Husserl felt within himself that Heidegger was the future of German philosophy, and that he was able to overcome his reservations about his younger colleague for the sake of this future? For within a few short weeks of uttering these sentiments, in early September, Husserl had invited Heidegger to collaborate with him on an article on Phenomenology that he had been commissioned to write by the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Heidegger intended his book to be in two volumes, but only the first volume was completed. Being and Time has six chapters, which are divided into eighty-three sections. All sections are linked by the concept of “Dasein” (literally “being here” or “being there”). Throughout the course of Heidegger’s exposition “Dasein” is defined in ontological terms as what it is and how it acts and is acted upon by the world (and the former is largely defined by the latter). “Dasein” is not the transcendental ego posited by Husserl, a privileged viewing subject. “Dasein” is caught in the material world as an entity dispersed across a complex of experiences and attitudes, from care (“Besorgen”, section 83) to anxiety (“Angst” section 40), from decisive self-determination “Entschlossenheit,” section 44) to mood (a quality of “Befindlichkeit, section 29), and all are framed within the impositions of temporality and in recognition of the final destination: death.

And who/what is “Dasein”. It is an active and continual point of reference in Heidegger’s discourse, a free floating subjectivity responding to itself and the world within objective parameters (although Heidegger’s entire project is to collapse notions of the “subjective” and “objective”). Those objective parameters are constituted by material facticity. Husserl had exhorted philosophers to return “to things themselves!” But what are “things”? In his work, they had largely a theoretical presence, existing as objects of perception, but inert until they come to the focus of consciousness. Objects are passive entities to be ordered by the intentionalist mind. But in Being and Time things come to us. The moon shines, the car indicator indicates, hammers hammer and chalk chalks. There are houses, trees, people, mountains, stars. There are shoes made for wearing, clocks made for telling the time. And there are materials: leather, nails, thread and similar things, which are either manufactured or come from nature: stone, rocks and wood, some transformed into timber, steel, iron. Dasein moves within this world of objects: they are part of its facticity; indeed, they make Dasein as an entity possible. Objects may be banal, quotidian (indeed, they are necessarily so because they belong to everyday experience), but they define all that we do: they are acted upon and they act upon us.

Things, therefore, are not merely inert objects that we make contact with through touch, taste, smell and sight: that is simply their immediate (un-mediated) reality, a reality that has traditionally been approached in terms of substantiality, materiality, extendedness, proximity. To communicate the broader existential of their Being, Heidegger uses the term “Zeug” (“equipment”). Equipment never simply “is”: to the Being of equipment there always belongs its collective environment, which allows a piece of equipment to be what it is as a particular entity having a specific task and fulfilling a specific function at a particular time. Equipment is “something that is in order to …”, and the various types of “in-order-to”, such as serviceability, adaptability, useability and handiness, constitute the range of its Being that Heidegger explores in his book.This complex network of modes of visibility, relations and purposes, in which equipment comes to presence, Heidegger calls “involvement” (“Bewandtnis”), a polysemic word that has remained one of the most challenging in his vocabulary. Involvement covers an array of procedures that define and make possible the activity of objects in the world. It incorporates the relevance of equipment to its task, its capacity to carry out that task and the way that equipment is used. These pragmatic modes are ontologically defining of entities (objects and people) whose Being consists in doing

What Heidegger was attempting in Being and Time was not a new definition of personhood but to identify the conditions in which personhood (by any definition) can be said to be in the world, either in an authentic or inauthentic way. In other words, there is no clearly demarcated inner versus outer world for personhood. Heidegger’s radically new methodology (and language) make that opposition impossible. Semantically, the terms themselves, “inner” and “outer”, and structurally, their crude binary opposition, make no sense in ontological terms. These conditions may be internal or external, and in certain modes such as “Gerede” (‘hear-say”, section 35) both. The latter is the product of “das Man”, (“the They” or “the one”. In expression, for example, “one found the party rather boring”, who is “the one” here? It is a vague anonymous collective subject that speaks with authority but has no specific identity. For Dasein to fall in with what “one” does or says, it to fall into inauthenticity.

“Dasein’s” conditioning factors are sometimes subject to rational explanation (as in the determination of “Entschlossenheit”), but at other times reason has departed, as in the case of anxiety (“Angst”, section 40). Here there is a void that resists the classificatory language and logic of philosophy. At such times, Dasein engages with the world through the recognition of a mystery that it cannot fathom, as something that resists analysis, and because of that it is experienced as a threat. Whereas fear has an objective cause (it is fear of something), with anxiety what is threatening is already there, and yet it is nowhere: anxiety is fear of nothing. “Anxiety is the deepest form of interiority: it needs no contact with the world: it is a recognition of an ultimate homelessness. Not only do the activities and priorities of the They disappear from view for Dasein, so does facticity itself, which had given weight to the presence of Dasein but which now loses its purpose. When Dasein is in this mode of Being, the totality of involvement discovered within the world is, as such, completely without relevance. The world has the character of complete insignificance”.[1]

“Angst” may seem a form of nihilism, in the way that death is, but for Heidegger both are modes of Being. The common approach is to see death as a brute fact of nature, something experienced as pure loss: it is a simple negativity because it leads to something which is not. “The everyday being towards death is a constant flight from death, an evasion of death, a concealing of it”. This is an inauthentic (if understandable) approach and Heidegger treats it with compassion. But for Dasein, “being-towards-the-end [is] being towards one’s own-most, non-relational and unsurpassable potentiality-of-Being”. Biological death is something that must be expected, but in that expectation lie the roots of an authentic attitude that Dasein can adopt towards the present. For, “death is a possibility for Being, which Dasein itself has at all times to accept. With death, Dasein stands before itself in a potentiality for Being that most truly belongs to it. In this possibility, what is at stake is nothing less than the being-in-the-world of Dasein. Its death is the possibility of a no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. When Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it is entirely apprised of its most truly possessed potentiality for Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all of its connections with other types of Dasein are undone. This possibility of a most truly possessed disconnectedness is at the same time its most extreme one. As a potentiality for Being, Dasein cannot outstrip the possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus, death reveals itself as the possibility of the most truly possessed, disconnected possibility that cannot be outstripped.  As such, it is a defining form of the imminent. Its existential possibility is based on the fact that Dasein is disclosed to itself in its essence, and, indeed, in the form of a being-ahead-of-itself”.[2]

[1] See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, zwölfte, unveränderte Auflage (Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 1972), p. 186.Translation modified.

[2] Sein und Zeit pp. 250-251.

In the meantime, the annual visit to Jaspers in Heidelberg was approaching, and on 27 September, Heidegger wrote to him to arrange this. As with his relationship to Husserl, Heidegger’s friendship with Jaspers was complex. In the early days, they had formed a vanguard in contemporary philosophy, seeking to unsettle the professional status quo and the reigning philosophical orthodoxies in German universities. But by 1927, it would have become evident to both of them that philosophically they had little in common. On 1 October, Jaspers wrote to Heidegger, looking forward to his visit, although he admitted that he still had not studied his book in any detail. In a brief but very revealing aside, Jaspers also gives an insight into his work practices, practices that would have dismayed Heidegger: “my lecture should provide me with the fifth chapter of my project [an unpublished book]: metaphysics. if it doesn’t suffice, then I’ll take the usual, cheaper way out: history, which, as a precaution, I have already announced in parentheses”.

Later that month, Heidegger wrote to his wife, telling her that he would be staying with Husserl in Freiburg between 10 and 20 October so that they could collaborate on the Britannica article. He had not been impressed with what Husserl had written so far: “the article for the Encycl. Britannica article on ‘Phenomenology’ (which Husserl had already sent off to Oxford to be translated) was in my view simply hopeless: sprawling, full of repetitions, unstructured and without a short and clear presentation of the central point […] the translation was stopped immediately and since Wednesday afternoon we’ve been sitting together and hard at work”. But this had not been a positive experience. As he added in a subsequent letter of 21 October, “Husserl has become incredibly clumsy in written expression and form. Often his prolixity and repetitions cannot be eliminated without making substantive interventions, so further discussions were frequently called for”. But there are grater problems, of a philosophical nature, notably that the account of phenomenology that Husserl is producing is pre-Heideggerian. Its focus is on the transcendental ego, that model of purified consciousness that Heidegger had dedicated himself to deconstructing and replacing with with his own ontology founded on factive “Dasein”. Defining phenomenology in this short article had brought sharply to the surface the fundamental differences between the two philosophers. The relationship between the two men had reached a crisis. The following month, on 19 November, Husserl wrote to Roman Ingarden, after completing a detailed reading of Being and Time: “Heidegger has become a close friend of mine, and I am one of his admirers, as much as I must really regret that, regarding method and content, his work (and his lecture courses too, for that matter) seem to be essentially different from my work and courses; in any event, so far there is still no bridge between him and me that the students that we have in common might cross. As regards any further joint philosophical projects, a lot depends on how and whether he works his way through to understanding my general intentions. Unfortunately, I did not determine his philosophical upbringing; clearly, he was already into his own way of doing things when he began studying my writings”. [66]

On 19 October 1927, Heidegger was finally made a full professor in the Faculty of Philosophy. Later that month, he returned to Marburg to begin his lecture course on “Phenomenological Interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (“Phänomenologie Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft”). He was planning a further book, and this lecture course on Kant would be its basis. But Heidegger had also been thinking in broader terms about his attitude to philosophy and about his (perhaps overly) iconoclastic mindset, and in a letter to Jaspers on 8 November, speaks critically of his own “negative philosophy – which indeed has only a narrow positive window”. The facility for objective self-criticism Heidegger sees as essential, but difficult to attain: “it is not easy for me to retain distance from my own work, and to hold it open for new overturnings”. In the second week of November, Heidegger travelled to Berlin to finalise the details of his appointment at Marburg with the Education Department. While he was there, he visited Elisabeth Blochmann. On 10 December, after returning to Marburg, he wrote thanking her for her hospitality but advising her to leave Berlin as soon as possible and go somewhere where she “could move in total freedom”. He then added words reflecting a growing conservatism in his outlook, and which presage possibly the political direction that he will take a few years later: “When I now from a distance compare in my mind Pragerstrasse [where Blochmann lived in Berlin] with the Black Forest, then I really appreciate what a few days in my hut means to me. Indeed, I have entirely eliminated one factor [from my existence]: modern life, that which is fully in the midst of historical events. That became clear to me in Berlin, as it did in Bonn and Cologne”.

On 31 December, in response to Bultmann’s query on how he should write about him in an encyclopedia article on “Heidegger”, the latter offered the following summary of his recently published Being and Time.  Although the book may be a torso of the more substantial work that was originally planned, Heidegger felt, nevertheless, that he had taken up some major concerns of Western philosophy: “My work is directed towards a radicalisation of ancient ontology and at the same time towards a universal extension of the same in relation to the region of history. The basis of this problematic is established by starting from “the subject”, as properly understood as “human Dasein”, so that with the radicalising of this approach the real matter within German Idealism may be properly seen. Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard are philosophically essential for the development of a more radical understanding of Dasein, Dilthey for an interpretation of the “historical world”, Aristotle and scholasticism for the strict formulation of certain ontological problems. All this in a methodology guided by the idea of a scientific philosophy, as it has been founded by Husserl. Not without influence on me were the logical and theoretical investigations of Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask”.

On 4 January 1928, Jaspers wrote to Heidegger, thanking him for his last letter and saying how much he had enjoyed Heidegger’s visit: “the complete loneliness to which one is condemned in philosophical thinking is then lifted for a moment. That another person finds this intellectual exertion important – or even more important than I do – is not only a satisfaction but in its very fact a powerful impulse”. Jaspers also broached a matter that had bedevilled Heidegger during the composition of Being and Time: “I have been working quite intensively up to now, and am involved with very difficult ideas about which many people would query whether they are deep or simply foolish. For me the only query concerns the best form of expression and communication [of these ideas] and not the substance of what I am thinking about. This is our fate: a new world is revealing itself to us, and we are pitiful human beings who are able to “notice” it but not able to put it into philosophical, or what would be even more important, poetic form”. It is just possible that the audacity of Jaspers’ final point may well have subtly registered itself with Heidegger only to emerge in the future, in his final work.

On 10 January 1928, Heidegger returned early to Marburg after spending the Christmas period with his family in Todtnauberg. He wrote to Elfride complaining about his new role as a “bureaucratic professor”. He was an ex officio member of a number of committees, including selection committees for new staff. Initially, he finds the work irksome, but on 21 January, he wrote to Elfride in more positive tones, saying that he quite welcomed his new professorial role: “I’m glad that I’ve recently been more involved than otherwise in outside life. After all, I’ve learnt all sorts of necessary things about tactics and social interaction and ‘judgement’, which is important, although I don’t have the slightest intention of ever become a ‘faculty animal’ ”. The following day, Heidegger received a postcard from Husserl. In spite of their differences, Husserl had been busily working behind the scenes to have Heidegger installed as his successor in Freiburg. The postcard reads:

“Dear friend,

Committee resolution: unico loco [the only candidate to be considered].

Absolute silence to be maintained, of course.

Kindest regards from us both.

E.H.”

Husserl was not a voting member of the selection committee but he was a consultant, and drafted a letter to the Education Department in Berlin in support of Heidegger’s candidacy. In the letter, he lauded Heidegger’s “exceptional powers as a teacher and researcher”, but significantly rather than highlight his contributions to phenomenology, Husserl stressed the broader range of Heidegger’s philosophical interests: “What characterises his professional work is the broad and deep grounding of his systematic research in historical and especially medieval philosophy”.  On 7 February 1929, Heidegger was unanimously chosen by the Faculty of Philosophy in Freiburg to be the next professor after Husserl’s retirement.

Heidegger was supportive of his best students, and scathing of others who did not rise to his high standards of intellectual and scholarly commitment. Hans Jonas and Karl Löwith had been amongst his star pupils in Marburg, and both had reached critical milestones. While he was in Marburg, and now in Freiburg, Heidegger had been in continual contact with Löwith, advising him on how best to handle the professional networking and academic intrigue that was a feature of university life. Löwith had completed his Habilitation and was now seeking to gain a position in a philosophy department, and Heidegger continues to offer his support, as in a letter of 7 February, encouraging him to stay calm and remain optimistic about his chances. Heidegger will do all he can, and will consult with the Dean of Arts about a possible grant for Löwith. Heidegger offers the same support for the younger Hans Jonas. The latter has only reached his doctoral stage, but this is a crucial point in his career. He has submitted his doctorate and is now preparing for the oral examination, which takes place on 29 February, where he must defend his thesis on “The Concept of Gnosis”. Jonas has been well prepared by Heidegger, who arranges for his close friend, Bultmann, to be one of the examiners. Jonas came away with high honours, and secured a place at Heidelberg with Jaspers, who wrote to Heidegger later that year, on 6 June, praising his former student.

In February, In advance of Heidegger taking up his new professorship, land is acquired for a house in the Rötebuck area of the Freiburg district of Zähringen. Much of the external and internal design is done by Elfride. On 2 March, Jaspers made his first entry in a series of notebooks that he kept between 1928 and 1964, and which will later be collected and published in 1978 as Notizen zu Martin Heidegger. The first note consists of a series of concepts and topics of philosophic interest that Jaspers intended to discuss with Heidegger during their tête-à-têtes in Heidelberg. On note (possibly related to Jaspers’ critical reading of Being and Time) reads: “to query: the overloading of the concept of time. The engulfing of the clarification of ‘Dasein’, of existence and metaphysics in Heidegger”.[67] Other communications between Heidegger and Jaspers at this time demonstrate that radical philosophy and economic pragmatism are not mutually exclusive. On 6 March, Heidegger wrote to his friend outlining the conditions of the Freiburg offer. They seem generous: “Beginning of service on 1 October; basic salary according to the fourth level of salary group A with 11, 600 Marks. Housing bonus 1, 728. Children bonus; instructional fee guarantee [for research assistance], 3, 000 Marks; renumerations of moving expenses; years of service calculated from the time of my Habilitation (re: retirement); and housing construction bonus”. On 28 March, Heidegger was summonsed to Berlin by the Education Department to finalise the details of his contract.

On 2 April 1929, Heidegger wrote to Bultmann saying that his sole regret in leaving Marburg was that he would no longer be with his old friend. He had always seen Bultmann as one of the few “free spirits” who, in their teaching and research, had attempted to reach “the mother of the essential”. Heidegger must leave Marburg and hence Bultmann, but they will remain close friends. In the same letter, he tells Bultmann that he is editing an early work by Husserl: his lectures on the consciousness of time, which dates back to 1904–1905. Husserl’s erstwhile assistant in Freiburg, Edith Stein, had already attempted to bring the lectures into order, but the task of final editing was left to Heidegger, and he undertook it in a positive spirit, and at a time when he has just been burdened with the administrative duties of a new professor. As Heidegger observes to Bultmann, “even if [Husserl’s] problematic is entirely different from my own, I still think it is a valuable one – above all, because it brings to light a connection between time and intentionality”.

In the summer semester between May and July 1928, Heidegger lectured on “The Metaphysical Origins of Logic in its Foundations in Leibniz”. On 13 May, he wrote to Jaspers to see if he would be interested in coming to Marburg as his replacement professor. Heidegger admitted that such a move did not have much to recommend itself: “I cannot cite anything that speaks for Marburg. I haven’t felt at ease here for a single hour. The faculty is the same as anywhere else – the students heavily oriented toward exams or completely given over to fraternities. The only good thing: the theologians – but that is a patchy matter”. On 4 June, Jaspers wrote to Heidegger about Max Scheler, who had died three weeks earlier. Jaspers wanted to commemorate Scheler in a seminar at the university, but in the end decided that he could not. In spite of his intellectuality, something was missing in the man: “he was not a light that showed me the way; he was a will-o-the wisp […] It was clear to me that Scheler will not accompany me in that human space where my heart beats”. It was an act of bonding with Heidegger, who possessed precisely those qualities that Scheler lacked: assertive individuality, creativeness of mind and presence as a person.

In September, Heidegger travelled to Riga to give a series of lectures on “Kant and Metaphysics”, and once back in Todtnauberg wrote to Jaspers on the 24th describing his journey to this distant location on the Baltic. The trip brought Heidegger into contact with for him an unfamiliar form of nature: water. As he observed: “It was rather stressful in Riga. In the boat journey from Stettin to Riga, the sea was a mirror – so I hardly felt anything of the ocean’s vastness. I must say, all in all, the sea strikes me as boring and unimportant – that is just the one-sided impression of a mountain-dweller”. He also commented on the reception of Being and Time; or, rather, the lack of it: “I no longer think about the fact that a short time ago I published a so-called book – I am only occasionally reminded of it by reviews”. The few reviews that have appeared have viewed him and his book as a mere meeting ground for the influence of other philosophers: “how often have I read that I am the actual synthesis of Dilthey and Husserl – which others planned long ago – with a few spices thrown in from Kierkegaard and Bergson”. And in the final words of the letter, he looks forward, with a certain amount of trepidation, to his move to Freiburg: “Freiburg will again become a test for me as to whether something of philosophy is there or whether everything has been absorbed in erudition”.

Heidegger should have shown greater patience. The reviews of Being and Time were already in press. It was perhaps inevitable that in a work as philosophically complex as Being and Time, reviewers should focus on that aspect of the text that they could best approach their own individual philosophical perspectives. In his “Drei Richtungen in der Phänomenologie”, the Jesuit priest and philosopher, Erich Przywara, for example, saw in Heidegger’s work a “glaring contradiction” between his notion of Being, which has its roots in the Aristotelian-Thomasian tradition of ontology, and the promotion of the inner-worldliness of Dasein. This was an Aristotelianisation of Dilthey, where Ontology, Przywara argues, has given way to anthropology.[68] That Heidegger had produced a new version of “Existenzphilosophie” was a common view, represented by F. Heinemann in his Neue Wege der Philosophie (1929), who felt that Heidegger had not only provided an analysis of the degeneration of the modern world but had also shown, in the closely knit formal structure of his ideas, a path to it overcoming.[69]  For Heidegger’s erstwhile pupil, Karl Löwith, Being and Time had to be understood within the cultural context of the period. Reading it from that perspective would allow us to see it, as he argued in his essay, “Gründzuge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie zur Philosophie und ihr Verhältnis zur protestantischen Theologie” (1930), as a form of intellectual “New Objectivity” (“Neue Sachlichkeit”), a book that in its coldly analytical deconstruction of metaphysics embodied the sobriety and factualism of that movement in the arts. [70]  Above all, it was Heidegger’s language and particularly his neo-logistic formations that draw the attention of many of his fellow philosophers, such as Georg Misch (who had been so impressed by the early work of Heidegger and had almost appointed him at Göttingen in 1922). In his book, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie (second edition, 1931), Misch also invoked the cultural movements of the day to explain Heidegger’s unique discourse: “he conducts himself like an Expressionist artist, who releases words out of the atmosphere in which life reverberates and gives them a local colouration, in which they are supposed to show up their real meaning. This real meaning, however, is by no means really their original one, but often enough the one that is imposed on them by their constructive relationship with the ontology of ‘Dasein’ ”. [71] Whatever the reservation of some critics, the publication of Being and Time, according to his former pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer, “propelled him into the public light, and with a single blow made him world famous” (see Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995, page 210).

On 27 September 1928, Heidegger wrote to Elfride saying that with his return to Freiburg as professor, and with the new house, he felt that a fresh beginning in their relationship and, indeed, in his life, had started. He now had a true home of his own, and he looked back to his first home and life as a child: “however much and however valuable there is that I owe to my parental home, there were some things there that I couldn’t assimilate, and even less so in the years of my boarding school existence, which took up such a decisive period of my youth. From all of this, I am and have been only slowly finding my way into real freedom”. On 20 October, Heidegger and his family moved into their new house. On 14 November, Heidegger wrote to Bultmann telling him about his research activities, and noting in passing that a second edition of Being and Time was being planned since the first edition had been sold out.

Between November 1928 and March 1929, Heidegger gave his first lecture course as professor in Freiburg, an “Introduction to Philosophy”. He has now started teaching and his reputation has preceded him. Heidegger was known as a rebel and an iconoclast, and he attracts students and members of the public alike who find him a curiosity.  As he wrote to Jaspers on 10 November, “I have my first week behind me and right now I can only say that the curious are many. There is something like a travelling public, with spies amongst them – a strange feeling, that others in my position could not have”. Heidegger brought the same application to his teaching in Freiburg that he brought to his teaching in Marburg. He thinks about his teaching style and adapts it to his perception of his students. In a letter four weeks later, he tells Jaspers, “in contrast to Marburg, there are very many young students here, and it is all the more essential [to be careful about] what one does and how one does it”, and on 18 December he writes to Bultmann in a similar vein, describing how busy he is in Freiburg, because the number of students who really participate is far greater than was the case in Marburg.

Being and Time had been out for a year and a half, and it has made Heidegger a celebrity. He received a steady stream of invitations to lecture in public, including one to lecture at a forthcoming debate in Davos, Switzerland, where he will speak together with the noted neo-Kantian, Ernst Cassirer. Heidegger has become very nonchalant about what such occasions offer. As he wrote to Jaspers in a letter of 21 December, “I presume that you have received an invitation to Davos. I would accept, if only for the mountain skiing – theme: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the task of laying the foundation for metaphysics. Please come as well, and indeed, so that we will be together up there in the mountains. I am down to speak between 17 and 27 March [next year]”. Heidegger’s words are casual, off-hand even. He is playing down what will be a crucial encounter in modern philosophy, where a new direction, ontological-existential, and vehemently anti-academic, will shift from its position of dominance one that fully belongs to “the system”, the gentleman’s club philosophy of Neo-Kantianism.

[1] See “Mein liebes Seelchen”. Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride, 1915–1970. Herausgegeben, ausgewählt and kommentiert von Gertrud Heidegger (München: btb Verlag, 2007), p. 93. The English translation is Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 1915–1970, translated by R.D.V. Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Future references to this correspondence will simply cite the date of the relevant letter in the main text. I have modified the translation here and elsewhere as necessary.

[2] See “Martin Heidegger und die Anfänge der Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte; Eine Dokumentation”. Eds. Joachim W. Storck and Theodore Kisiel. Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 8 (1992–1993): 181–225 (p. 203).

[3] Martin Heidegger / Karl Löwith, Briefwechsel: 1919–1973 (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2017), p. 106.

[4] Nicolai Hartmann, “How Is Critical Ontology Possible? Toward the Foundation of the General Theory of the Categories (Part One)”, translated Keith R. Peterson. Axiomathes (2012) 22: 315–354 (pp. 316 and 321).

[5] Hartmann, “How Is Critical Ontology Possible? p. 323.

[6] Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”. Ed. and transl. John van Buren, Martin Heidegger, Supplements, pp. 111–145 (p. 127).

[7] Hartmann, “How Is Critical Ontology Possible? p. 317.

[8] Hartmann, “How Is Critical Ontology Possible? p. 323.

[9] Hartmann, “How Is Critical Ontology Possible? p. 352. Heidegger seems to have studiously ignored Hartmann in Marburg, and Hartmann returned the favour in his New Ways of Ontology (Neue Wege der Ontologie, 1949), a work that describes how the old ontology has been replaced by a new one, without once mentioning Heidegger.

[10] Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Einzug in Marburg”. Ed. Günther Neske, Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), pp. 109–113 (p. 110). But Marburg University was no exception to the rule. As Hannah Arendt notes, throughout the philosophy departments of German universities at this time “philosophy was not so much communicated as drowned in an ocean of boredom”. Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978), pp. 293-303 (p. 294).

[11] Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heidegger and Marburg Theology”, in Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated and edited by David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 198–212 (pp. 200 and 201).

[12] Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 28.

[13] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 131.

[14] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 1-2. Translation modified.

[15] Gadamer, “Heidegger and Marburg Theology”. In Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated and edited by David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 198–212 (p. 200).

[16] Rudolf Bultmann, “Autobiographical Reflections”. In Bultmann, Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, selected, translated and introduced by Schubert M. Ogden (New York: Meridan Books, 1960), pp. 283–288 (p. 288).

[17] Martin Heidegger, “The Problem of Sin in Luther”, in Heidegger, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to “Being and Time” and Beyond. Ed. John van Buren (Albany: State University of New York, 2002), pp. 105-110 (p. 105).

[18] Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel. Band IV. Die Freiburger Schuler. Ed. Karl Schumann (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), p. 138. Future references will be given in the main text simply as a date.

[19] Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, p. 206.

[20] Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, p. 208. Heidegger critiqued Husserl throughout his lecture courses in this period. For a full account, see Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931): The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, the Amsterdam Lectures, “Phenomenology and Anthropology” and Husserl’s Marginal Notes in “Being and Time” and “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics”, edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Amsterdam, 1997), p. 18.

[21] Martin Heidegger/ Heinrich Rickert, Briefe 1912 bis 1933 und andere Dokumente, aus den Nachlass herausgegeben von Alfred Denker (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), p.25.

[22] For the German edition of the correspondence, see Martin Heidegger / Karl Jaspers. Briefwechsel, 1920–1963. Herausgegeben von Walter Biemel und Hans Saner (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990). The English translation is: The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920–1963). Edited by Walter Biemel and Hans Saner. Translated by Gary E. Aylesworth (New York: Humanity Books, 2003). Future references to this correspondence will simply cite the date of the relevant letter in the main text. I have modified the translation here and elsewhere where necessary.

[23] See Martin Heidegger, Briefwechsel mit seinen Eltern (1907–1927) und Briefe an seine Schwester (1921-1967). Eds. Jörg Heidegger und Alfred Denker (Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013), p. 67. Future references will be given in the main text simply as the date of the letter.

[24] Theodore Kisiel, “Why the first draft of Being and Time was never published”. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 20 (1989): 3–22 (p. 19).

[25] Martin Heidegger, “The Concept of Time”. Eds. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007), pp. 200–213 (p. 201). Translation modified.

[26] Heidegger, “The Concept of Time”, p. 203. Translation modified.

[27] For the full documentation, see “Martin Heidegger und die Anfänge der Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte: Eine Dokumentation.

[28] See Martin Heidegger, Plato’s “Sophist”, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schwur (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997), p. 457.

[29] Hans Jonas, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2003). p. 108. And yet as Hannah Arendt notes, “there was never a circle [around Heidegger] and there was nothing esoteric about his following”. See Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty” p. 294.

[30] Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty” pp. 295 and 296. Translation modified. Indeed, Arendt would have experienced something of Heidegger’s missionary zeal in her first class with him in November 1924, a lecture on Plato’s Sophist. Heidegger began it with a tribute to Paul Natorp, who had died earlier that year. It was an occasion not only to celebrate Natorp but also the youth of pre-war Germany, who had “pledged to form their lives out of inner truthfulness and self-responsibility. Many of these best have fallen. But whoever has eyes to see knows that today our Dasein is slowly being transposed upon new foundations and that young people have their part to play in this task”. Martin Heidegger, Plato’s “Sophist”, pp. 3-4.

[31] Hans Jonas, Erinnerungen, p.114.

[32] See Letters 1925–1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Trans. from the German by Andrew Shields (London: Harcourt, 2004), p. 3. The German edition is Hannah Arendt / Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere Zeugnisse (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998). Future references to this correspondence will simply cite the date of the relevant letter in the main text. I have modified the translation here and elsewhere as necessary.

[33] This is Safranski’s interpretation. See Beyond Good and Evil, p. 138.

[34] Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty”, p. 297.

[35] As quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 53.

[36] Quoted in Manfred Geier, Martin Heidegger (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005), p. 49. Arendt had also been a regular at one of Heidegger’s evening reading groups. See Arendt/ Heidegger, Letters, p. 8.

[37] See Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt Martin Heidegger (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), and Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (New York: Norton, 2010).

[38] Heidegger was pleased that his lectures had been well attended, attracting 60-70 people. The lecture itself was an important intellectual milestone for Heidegger, representing a final break with Husserl and his “ahistorical” notion of Being (by which Heidegger means not “history” as a chronological account of events, but a state in which Being is grounded in the here and now of the facticity of the world). See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 360-361.

[39] According to Young-Bruehl, it is a “self-portrait”. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 50.

[40] Arendt/ Heidegger, Letters, p. 12.

[41] Arendt/ Heidegger, Letters, p. 13.

[42] As she later observed of Schlegel’s novel, Lucinde, the plot is “couched in terms so general that only a mood, no real events are represented”. Quoted in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 50.

[43] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Row, 1962), p. 231.

[44] Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 18.

[45] Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, p. 34.

[46] Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, p. 479.

[47] Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), p. 19.

[48] Heidegger/ Jaspers, Briefwechsel, p. 231.

[49] Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, pp. 479–480.

[50] Quoted in Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time, p. 362.

[51] Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, pp. 363-366.

[52] Young-Bruehl is confident that the termination of the relationship was the result of “Heidegger’s decision to respect his obligations, particularly to his wife and family”. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 56.

[53] Quoted in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 55.

[54] Heidegger / Jaspers Briefwechsel, p. 232.

[55] Letter to Alexander Pfänder, quoted in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), p. 22.

[56] Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), p. 20.

[57] Elzbieta Ettinger attempts to reconstruct the scene in Hannah Arendt Martin Heidegger, pp. 34–35.

[58] Rudolf Bultmann/Martin Heidegger, Briefwechsel, 1925–1975, ed. Andreas Grossmann and Christof Landmesser (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann/ Tubingen, Mohr Siebeck 2009), p.4.  Future references to this correspondence will simply cite the date of the relevant letter.

[59] Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, p. 489.

[60] Edith Stein: Self-Portrait in Letters: Letters to Roman Ingarden, translated by Hugh Candler Hunt (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 2014), p. 254. Translation modified.

[61] Quoted in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), p. 23.

[62] Quoted in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931, p. 23.

[63] Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931, p. 365.

[64] Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931, p. 365.

[65] Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931, p. 310.

[66] Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), p. 24.

[67] Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1978), p. 25.

[68] Claudius Strube, “Kritik und Rezeption von ‘Sein und Zeit’ in den ersten Jahren nach seinem Erscheinen”. Perspektiven der Philosophie 9 (1983): 41-67 (p. 42).

[69] Strube, “Kritik und Rezeption von ‘Sein und Zeit’ ”, p. 46.

[70] Strube, “Kritik und Rezeption von ‘Sein und Zeit’ ”, p. 47.

[71] Strube, “Kritik und Rezeption von ‘Sein und Zeit’ ”, p. 48.

Chapter 4: 1929–1933

Consolidation:

(10 June 2024)

At the end of February 1929, Heidegger completed the lecture course that he had begun in November the previous year, his first lecture course as the new Professor of philosophy at Freiburg. It was titled simply “Introduction to Philosophy” (“Einleitung in die Philosophie”). Under the rubric of the first lecture, “Menschsein heißt schon philosophieren” (“to be human means already to philosophise”), he immediately passed beyond the standard definition of an “introduction”, projecting a vision for a new philosophy expressed here in words that reproduce the proselytising tones of his first Marburg lecture in 1923, where he committed himself to a “stripping away of mistaken expectations”, which he intended to replace – with nothing: “no foundation, neither a programme nor a system”. As he continued to tell his disbelieving students in that lecture, “not even philosophy should be expected. It is my conviction that philosophy is at an end”. In the place of philosophy, Heidegger promoted “a passion for genuine questioning”, which will challenge not only the objects of its enquiry but also its own assumptions.[1]

The same radical sentiments informed his first lecture in Freiburg. Philosophy was not simply an academic discipline. “We don’t want to learn philosophy here. We don’t want to multiply our university courses by adding yet one further course”.[2] Philosophy (or, more accurately, philosophising) is a vital part of our engagement with the world and with us. “Even when we expressly know nothing of philosophy, we are already in philosophy, because philosophy is in us and even belongs to us”.[3] The frame of reference is personal and immediate. Philosophy was not a mere object of study but an activity of the mind (page 4). We do philosophy “in our Dasein as it exists in the here and now” (page 6). It is an “act that has been grasped in freedom (page 5). It allows us to pose “the question concerning the subjectivity of the subject in a real and radical way” (page 11), enabling us to make contact with the “uniqueness of our Dasein” (page 8), in the spirit of the motto of the Classical Greek philosophers: “erkenne dich selbst” (“gnothi sauton”, “know thyself”) (page 11).

Heidegger was appealing to the idealism of German youth. Our “profession” is a calling not an occupation: it is an “inner task” (page 6), and he dismissed the world of careers, social status and “exam grades” (page 7) in words meant to console a generation unsure about its professional and material future. To these, he offered an inspirational philosophy and philosophical “Führerschaft” (“leadership”), which he defined as a pathway to a “coming into the possession of the higher and richer possibilities of human existence” (page 8). Before we get to philosophising, however, we need “Vorverständnisse” (page 5), to understand the premises and history of philosophy and the relationship of philosophy to adjacent disciplines such as the various sciences and the then modish discipline of intellectual history. This lecture course, therefore, would pose the following questions: “is philosophy a science or a worldview? Or is philosophy both science and worldview? Or is philosophy neither science nor?” (page 9). Heidegger was quick to answer his questions. “Philosophy is not a science” (page 14). It is something that is “ursprünglicher” (“more original”) than all of these (page 17), “ursprünglich” in both senses of the word: temporal and theoretical, because philosophy was not only “the first science” but it is also “its purest” (page 18), the deepest, something that reaches into the plenitude of the mind. Philosophy possesses “an essential superfluidity” (page 17), whereas “science is methodological, exact and a universally ‘valid’ knowledge” that is reluctant to leave its analytical parameters (page 42).

Ultimately, science closes down the world, whilst philosophy opens it up, and Heidegger returned in his lecture to the critique of scientific rationality that he had first made in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). The modern scientific conception of truth was based on the scholastic model of adaequatio intellectus ad rem, on the premise that truth is something that has its quality primarily in appertaining to a statement, to a judgment. The adaequatio model was founded on two tenets: “1. The ‘locus’ of truth is the proposition (judgement); 2. The essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgement with its object”. The model is clear and economical to the point of being axiomatic, but it shows no understanding of its premises nor of the broader context in which “true” statements are, in practice, made. For “what is tacitly co-posited in the relational totality – adaequatio intellectus ad rem? What is the ontological character that is being co-posited here?” he queried, continuing “it is not sufficient for the clarification of the structure of truth simply to presuppose this relational totality, rather we must go back and ask about the context of Being which supports this totality as such”.[4]

Heidegger then moved his focus from the mechanical sciences to the intellectual sciences of the “Geisteswissenschaften”, and in particular to their use of “worldviews”. The latter are historically determined conceptual frameworks, the discourses used by successive generations to interpret the world in generalising notions of what it is to be human and what the natural order of the social and intellectual world is or should be. According to Heidegger, the world-view approach had hardened into an academic orthodoxy, and he then turned his attention to the individual practitioners of that approach, notably Wilhelm Dilthey, the author of Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883) and The Essence of Philosophy (1907). Dilthey’s model possessed two components: an intellectual-historical typology, and a descriptive-psychological analytic. In his lecture, Heidegger focused on the latter. This was predicated on the assumption that “there always remains an elusive and unfathomable personal factor in the formation of any world-view”.[5] It was a mentalist approach that Dilthey classified as “structural psychology”.[6] For Dilthey “the problematic of Dasein is one purely relating to psychology, i. e. his approach is one that establishes an ontic relationship between psychic events, between facts of consciousness and psychic events. It neither questions what manner of existence (“Seinsart”) these psychic events possess, nor even whether in this determination they even suffice to make the essence of Dasein into an analytical issue” (page 350). Philosophy, however, cannot leave explicative matters in “the unfathomable”. “Not only can one, but one must, enquire about what lies behind these psychic facts” (page 353). Dilthey talks about the “inner structure” of the worldview, but we must ask the fundamental question: “what is the originary structure in which the inner possibility of the worldview justifies itself?” It is a question that Dilthey does not, indeed, according to Heidegger, cannot answer.

Heidegger’s second target in these lectures was the intellectual historian Ernst Cassirer, who was soon in March to become Heidegger’s sparring partner in a philosophy debate at Davos, Switzerland. In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, published in three volumes between 1923 and 1929, Cassirer sought to explicate the language and symbolism involved in the mythic grasp of the world. In volume 2, he attempted to uncover “the reciprocal relationship between man and God that is established in the progress of the mythical and religious consciousness”, “for the religious spirit has its true and deepest root not in the world of ideas but in the world of feeling and will”. “Consequently, we find the true objectivization of the fundamental mythic religious feeling not in the bare image of the gods but in the cults devoted to them”.[7]

We have with Cassirer moved away from the conceptual structures of “world-views” to the significance of the latter in terms of “magic and sorcery and the corresponding forms of sacrifices and cults, the vegetative rites” (page 359). But, as Heidegger observed, “ ‘pantheism’ and the like are all bad names and concepts, theologically but not ontologically-metaphysically enlightening” (page 359). In the final analysis, the concept of the “world-view”, in general, cannot be accepted: “it is indeed possible in a freely formed statistical method and typology of world views to organise the main types into some sort of scheme […] but in doing so you are forgetting one thing: what the world view is in its essence, in its lived character, which has its roots in the happening of Dasein, which it at the same time determines” (page 356).

The sciences are too mechanistic to provide the intellectual energy for philosophising. Likewise, the world view mode is too generalising in its attempts to capture universal experience. Both approaches neglect the tangible specificity of Dasein’s grasp of the world. “Only in worldview as comportment [‘Haltung‘] is philosophy possible” (page 397), comportment being ideas as they impact upon the forms of behaviour of Dasein, in its being-in-the-world. Going beyond the terminology of Being and Time, Heidegger attempted in his lecture to find new words to describe this comportment. The latter arises from a “metaphysical disinterest, a peculiar form of serenity, in which Being itself comes to word” (page 214). Following the philosophy of his earlier magnum opus, he argued that Being must be allowed to emerge from within itself, without the imposition of elaborate theoretical grids: “we showed [in our earlier lectures] that the essence of the theoretical lies in the letting-being of Being in itself and named this letting-being the originary experience of Dasein” (page 214).

This is philosophising’s “ontological design” (page 214), which Heidegger envisioned (and his tone reflected the inspirational sentiments of his opening lecture) as a “primal act by Dasein; indeed, the happening of the space of freedom for Dasein itself”. He concluded his lecture course in a flurry of pregnant formulations that were intended to encapsulate his new philosophy of “philosophising”: “Philosophising is this grasping through a letting-happening, which has been displayed through problematics related to Being and the world, of transcendence in its essential purpose” (page 396).

Heidegger finished his lecture course at the end of February 1929 and immediately started to prepare his contribution to the International Davos Philosophy Conference. The latter ran on an annual basis between 1928 and 1931 and took place this year between 17 March and 6 April at various locations in Davos but mainly in the Grand Hotel “Belvédère”. The conference was attended not only by established academics and professors of philosophy but also by students. The topic this year was “Humankind and Generation” (“Mensch und Generation”), but for most of the participants the main interest was generated by the confrontation between Heidegger and Cassirer (representing two completely diverging modes of philosophy) each giving the diverging notions of Kant’s treatment of freedom and rationality.[8]

Their debate was a study in a contrast of personalities. The tall Cassirer, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg and author of Kant’s Life and Teachings (1918), with his magisterial mane of white hair, towered over Heidegger physically but not (according to some) as the development of the debate would show, intellectually. The conference consisted of a variety of speakers, but it was the debate of the former that proved the greatest attraction. The debate lasted for a week, with Cassirer speaking in the morning, and Heidegger responding in the afternoon. The 26-year-old Otto Friedrich Bollnow (who had studied with Heidegger both in Marburg and then in Freiburg) left a detailed eyewitness account. He had been overwhelmed by his reading of Being and Time, which he saw as “an event of nature, elemental, coming over me like a storm, something authentic, passionate, emerging out of the depths of philosophising, which questioned everything that I had previously regarded as philosophy” (quoted in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, edited by Günther Neske, Pfullingen, 1977, page 25). Bollnow had been impressed by the book; now he was impressed by its author. “The confrontation of these two men, who were so different right up to the way they looked, made a great impression. They seemed to incorporate the very philosophical situation of the age”. [9] “One felt that two different periods met in them: one that represented the full maturity of tradition, embodied in Cassirer; and opposing him, in Heidegger, a new age that was dawning with the realisation of a radically new beginning”.[10]

As a further contemporary recounts, Heidegger “stood in the centre [of the debate] and came to dominate it, a domination that grew almost continuously in extent and in intensity”.[11] It was a view that was generally shared. “Cassirer represented the established academic position. He was a ‘distinguished professor of philosophy’ but he was no philosopher. He was erudite but he had no passion. He was a clear writer. but his clarity and placidity were not equalled by his sensitivity to the problems”.[12] Heidegger impressed not only on account of his intellect but also because of his energetic demeanour. He was a keen skier and made use of the mountainous terrain around Davos to conduct skiing parties with his students, appreciating, as he wrote to Elfride on 21 March, the “wealth of scenery, the views that change completely every 50m”. It was an activity that liberated him from the stifling formal atmosphere of the Grand Hotel, and he would return to the latter late in the afternoon, still dressed in his skiing outfit, enjoying the effect his unconventional outfit had on the other professors. “This immediate unity of technical research work and completely relaxed and joyful skiing was simply too much for most of the professorial delegates, something unheard of”.[13]  Skiing was, at least partially, a symbolic act, reflecting the youthful vitality of his philosophy compared with ageing rigidity of academic “philosophy”, and helping to promote his image as “the author of a fundamentally new kind of philosophy destined to replace the hegemony of the neo-Kantian tradition and to supplant the remaining ‘rationalist’ tendencies in Husserlian phenomenology as well”.[14]

The letters sent to his wife suggest that Heidegger was tolerating rather than enjoying the papers given by the other delegates. There were, however, benefits of a different nature. On 23 March, he wrote “although there is basically nothing for me to be learnt here, I’m still very glad to join in with such things now and again – my personal flexibility, my handling of people and a certain outward assurance do benefit”. And on 21 March, we read: “the courses themselves are fairly strenuous, but I skive off most of the things ‘one’ is supposed to go to”. Such sentiments may suggest professional negligence, but his mind was entirely focused on the main reason for his being there: the debate with Cassirer, in which, to many observers, he played the major role. As he wrote to Elfride five days later, “I have just got a two-hour public discussion with Cassirer over with, which went very well and – quite apart from the content – made a big impression on the students”.

Heidegger’s targets were Cassirer and the practitioners of neo-Kantianism, who had formed a “school” at Heidegger’s former university, Marburg, initially led by Hermann Cohen and then by his colleague, Paul Natorp. These, according to Heidegger, saw Kant purely “as a theoretician of the mathematico-physical theory of knowledge”.[15] Heidegger had already taken issue with neo-Kantianism in his lecture course, “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics” (published as a book in 1929), and upon which he drew extensively throughout the debate, often verbatim. In his book, he undertook an investigation into what he termed “fundamental ontology”, by which he meant “the ontological analytic of the finite essence of human beings”. It was an investigation that involved a critical re-reading of the metaphysical structure of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. [16]

Heidegger opened the debate with a short talk on “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Task of Laying the Ground for Metaphysics”.[17]  Contrary to the neo-Kantianisms, Heidegger argued that “Kant did not want to give any sort of theory of natural science, but rather wanted to point out the problematic of metaphysics, which is to say the problematic of ontology” (and he made frequent reference to his Being and Time as the site in which this problematic had already been aired).[18] In his reply, Cassirer signalled the epoch-making significance of Heidegger’s statement, and thereby the debate as a whole: “neo-Kantianism is the whipping boy of the newer philosophy” (and we should note that Cassirer said “the” newer philosophy, and not “a” newer philosophy).[19] What Cassirer proffered as a counter-weight to this new philosophy was his model of symbolic forms. At one point, Heidegger asked “what path does man have to infinitude?” [20] Cassirer replied, “in no other way than through the medium of form. This is the function of form, that while man changes the form of his Dasein, i.e. while he now transposes everything in him which is lived experience into some objective shape in which he is objectified”.

Cassirer consistently referred to and engaged with Heidegger’s Being and Time, as if he were trying to find a middle ground between the two of them and involve Heidegger in his thinking. He did not succeed. Heidegger’s tone throughout was assertive and non-compromising; Cassirer’s was expository and conciliatory. Phrases such as “Heidegger rightly said”, “on one point we agree” and “this I concede without further ado” reoccur throughout the debate.[21] As Heidegger later noted to Elisabeth Blochmann, “in our discussions, Cassirer was exceedingly polite and almost too agreeable. I found thus little resistance, which prevented the discussions from giving the necessary sharpness to the formulations”.[22]

Heidegger, for his part, was quite insistent that his “metaphysics of Dasein” was quite different from the “cultural philosophy” of his opponent.[23] He rejected both its idealism and its emphasis upon form. Heidegger’s central argument, already anticipating the contrary approach that Cassirer would take, was that we “must pose the question concerning the essence of human beings in a way which is prior to all philosophical anthropology and cultural philosophy”.[24]  “What I describe by Dasein does not allow translation into any concept of Cassirer’s. Should one say “consciousness”, that is precisely what I reject. What I call Dasein is essentially codetermined – not just through what we describe as ‘spirit’, and not just through what we call ‘living’. Rather, what it depends on is the original unity and the immanent structure of the relatedness of a human being which, to a certain extent, has been fettered in a body”. [25] Our engagement with the world is an engagement with the objects in that world. Heidegger had already made this clear in Being and Time. Philosophy does not take place in imposing Kantian categories of judgement upon matters, but in understanding why we succeed or fail in our meeting with facticity. In section 15 of Being and Time, Heidegger gives us an example of how engagement interacts with one particular object: the common hammer. Knowledge takes place when we find that the hammer does not work as it should (its head is loose). Here we are confronted with an expectation of rational use only to find that it does not apply. It is that recognition philosophy takes place. The hammer itself has no need of “symbolic forms”. There was, thus. no meeting of minds, however much Cassirer may have wanted this. At one point, one delegate observed, “both men speak a completely different language”.[26] This was, however, precisely the dialectic that Heidegger wished to sustain, believing that it was good for philosophy. As he made clear in his final talk, “it is essential to see precisely how the differentiation of standpoints is the root of the philosophical endeavour”.[27]

Heidegger returned to Freiburg and in a lengthy letter to Blochmann sent on 12 April he described how his first semester had gone off with great élan, and how positive the reaction had been from his students (and these included some who themselves would become philosophers, such as Herbert Marcuse, Eugen Fink and Emmanuel Levinas). He wrote, “working with the young ones was particularly refreshing and productive. In my lectures, I think I have succeeded in reaching just the right amount of freedom of expression and breadth of material to be able to do justice to the entirety of my subject”.[28] He then turned his attention to the recently held Davos debate, “I didn’t take anything really philosophical from it, but on a personal level I enjoyed the company of Riezler, the curator at the University of Frankfurt, and Cassirer”, and he added “the programme was too diverse and confusing”. “Basically, the issues were far too difficult for public discussion”.

Davis had now gone and the international must give way to the local. Nerveless, Heidegger was in the midst of his most productive lecturing duties, engaging with issues ranging over two hundred years of classic German philosophy. In the summer semester 1929, he gave a lecture course on “German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and the Philosophical Paradigms of the Present” (“Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophischen Problemlage der Gegenwart”). The structure of the course was bipartite. In the first part, Heidegger critically engaged with what he saw to be the two dominant modes in contemporary philosophy: the anthropological and the metaphysical. In the second part, he returned to the major figures of German Idealist thought, most notably Hegel. This was to be something more than a purely “comparative viewing that would register and establish differences, as if we were comparing two different objects. For the object of comparison is us, ourselves: we, the present readers”.[29] I am not interested in “boring seminar reporting”, he went on to make clear, distancing himself from conventional academic goals once again, as he had done in his introductory lecture given earlier that year. On the contrary, “we have here the opportunity to seek out the seeds and the ground, to discover genuine tasks. Seeking – and in doing that bring ourselves into the sober passion of questioning where we pretend to nothing. [30]

Above all, “we must ask what German Idealism has to say to us”, and he called this asking an “Auseinandersetzung”, an “argument” or “confrontation”. What is the relevance of German Idealism to the present? What is its relevance to today’s philosophising? Heidegger wishes to set up a dialectic of engagement between his students and their object of study, and this can only be achieved through a critical engagement with the texts, through reading. And then he asks the essential question. “But can we still read? Do will still have the inner strength and willingness to allow something to speak to us?” [31] To achieve real reading and allow the text to come to voice, “we must bring the essential within us to the task”. To read philosophy requires our inner transformation. And now something strange has happened: “the object of comparison, that is us, has now become the subject that must be addressed”.[32] Futher questions follow. We address the past out of the present, but what is the present? Is it what is modish in philosophy, the latest trends? Are all trends equally valid? Is philosophy something that is merely taught at universities or taught beyond them? Heidegger now asks in a flurry of questions, pursuing the self-interrogative mode that was a major characteristic of his style of philosophising in this period.

These questions concerning the present can only (paradoxical as it may seem) be answered by turning to the future, for only out of the future can we understand active Being [‘Geschichte’]. Only in this way does it come to a voice, where our studying is no longer a mere comparison but a dialogue that has to be set in motion – a dialogue and a necessary confrontation, i.e. a struggle [‘Kampf’, and he would surely have been aware of the political connotations of the word], something that, of course, is entirely different from what calls itself ‘academic polemics’ “.[33] This is a highly personal, existential experience, for any confrontation with philosophy must start with a confrontation with oneself, because everything that is decisive is presented to us ourselves and entrusted to our freedom”. Philosophising is a liberating experience in which the inner greatness of a person is permitted to emerge: “for the inner greatness of man lies not in that and how he uses things, but in the opportunity to transcend himself and to commit himself. Philosophising is nothing else than the letting-happening of this commitment”.[34]

In winter semester 1929–1930, Heidegger lectured on “Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World-Finitude-Solitude” (“Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit”). He delivered his course against growing political and economic turmoil. “Everywhere there are upheavals, crises, catastrophes, emergencies: the misery in today’s society, the political mayhem, impotence in the university disciplines, the hollowness of the Arts, the rootlessness of academic philosophy, the ineffectuality of religion.”.[35] Perhaps for this reason, Heidegger was more than ever determined to distance himself from official academia and from the irrelevance of the discipline of philosophy as it was taught in the universities. Indeed, he feels frustrated with and alienated from university life in general. (although his self-understanding within that the university system seems to vacillate with each letter, anticipating an ambivalence that will increase with the years to his expulsion from the system). But at the present moment, he wishes to see university life undone, “in fact, the process has long since begun, and is underway to such an extent that some are already beginning to sense the barrenness and waywardness of university activity. Something perhaps already been shattered at the very heart of the machinery. Is it now held together only by the obtrusiveness and banality of organisation and convention? Is there a falseness and a hidden despair somewhere in all this activity?” (see Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics – World, Finitude, Solitude, Indiana UP, 1995, page 1) The answer is in the affirmative to all these questions.

Where, then, does real philosophy lie? Putting it under the rubric of an academic scholarship [‘Wissenschaft’] is not helpful; neither is viewing it as a worldview. Perhaps philosophy cannot be determined as being something else “but can be determined only from out of itself and as itself – comparable with nothing else in terms of which it could be positively determined. In that case, philosophy is something that stands on its own, something ultimate” (The Fundamental Concepts, page 2). But this is purely the formal structure of philosophy. What is its content? Heidegger offered an answer to this question, drawing upon an unlikely source: the German Romantic poet. Novalis believed that the urge to philosophize was a “homesickness, a desire to be at home everywhere” (page 5). As Heidegger further explained, “to be at home everywhere means to be at once and at all times within the whole. We name this ‘within the whole’ and its character of wholeness the world” *page 5). Two dimensions of the world attract Heidegger’s attention: “finitude”, an “oscillating to and fro between a neither/nor, “an unrest of the not” (page 6), and “solitude”, a state in which “everyone stands for him- or herself as something unique in the face of the whole” (page 8).

We find that we are attuned to the whole in various ways, but one way in particular interests Heidegger in this lecture: boredom, and at the center of his course is a lengthy analysis of the basic attunement (“Grundstimmung”) of boredom (“Langweile”). It is a remarkable addition to the phenomenology of disposition that had characterized his depiction of Dasein in Being and Time. Far from being simply a matter of individual disposition (although it is that), boredom (as the translators of the work, William McNeil and Nicholas Walker point out), “comes to be identified by Heidegger as being “the concealed destination of modernity” (The Fundamental Concepts, page xx). “Profound boredom draws back and forth like a silent fog in the abysses of Dasein” (page 78). “Contemporary man has become bored with himself” (page 132), suffers “a strange indifference” (page 139). “Dasein is now merely suspended among beings and their telling refusal of themselves as a whole” (page 140). Boredom is the result of a levelling process of value and quality. “Everything is worth equally much and equally little” (page 145).

Heidegger identifies three forms of boredom: “becoming bored by something”; “being bored with something and the passing of time belonging to it”; and “profound boredom as ‘it is boring for one’ “. The differences between these forms are subtle, and Heidegger devotes much time to explaining these subtleties, the difference, for example, between a “determinate boring thing” (and he cites waiting for a train), and “something indeterminate that bores us” (and he cites being at a dinner party (page 114). What the various types of boredom have in common is the entrapment of Dasein within time. This may well be time in the contemporary world where we seek novelty, change, “the new”, but it is also time as experienced on a personal level, where “boredom [‘Langweile’] is a while [‘Weile’], tarrying a while [‘Verweilen’], a particular remaining, enduring” (page 96), where our engagement with the world is held in limbo, and where we become aware, perhaps, as we do with that other form of attunement, Angst, of the emptiness behind all that exists.

On 6 December 1929, Heidegger repeated his inaugural professorial talk, “What is Metaphysics”, to the German student council at the University of Heidelberg, and then spent two days with Jaspers who had attended the lecture (and he also met up with Rickert). As Jaspers told Heidegger soon after the lecture: “I cannot think of a time when I listened to anyone as I did to you today. I felt as if I were free, in a pure air of perpetual transcending. What I heard in your words (which were at times strange to me but I could relate them to my own and which showed what is so completely self-understood between us) is that philosophy is still alive!”. Heidegger had already given this talk on 24 July, as his inaugural professorial lecture at Freiburg University. From the very outset, he made it clear that he was not interested in providing a definition or general overview of metaphysics. Rather than offering a definition, he “instead will take up a particular metaphysical question”.[36] The question that he would take up was one that must have startled his audience: “what is nothing?” and Heidegger framed that question in language that was unique: “what should be examined are beings only, and besides that – nothing; Being alone and further – nothing; solely beings, and beyond that – nothing” (page 95). Nothing, however, is not simply the absence of something (this is the way it is construed, for example, in science). Nothing is a particular type of something, and Heidegger summarises its status with the neologistic tautology: “the nothing itself nothings” (“das Nichts selbst nichtet”) (page 102).

To explain this particular type of nothing which is something, Heidegger’s explicative mode elides from the philosophical-analytical into the existential, where he focuses on one particular type of nothingness: anxiety (“Angst”). “With the fundamental mood of anxiety, we have arrived at that occurrence in human existence in which nothing is revealed and from which it must be interrogated” (page 101). Anxiety is a particular inflection of nothingness. Anxiety should not be confused with fear: the latter has a cause and an object (we are scared of something). In anxiety, there is no such cause and no such object. Anxiety is an ontological state. “Anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole” (page 101). Anxiety is a state that makes communication with others impossible. “Anxiety robs us of speech, because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds around. In the face of anxiety, all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent” (page 101). And Heidegger concludes by emphasizing the philosophical importance of understanding anxiety and its source in nothingness: “the question of the nothing pervades the whole of metaphysics, since at the same time it forces us to face the problem of the origin of negation” (page 108).

The academic year resumed after the Christmas break. Heidegger’s enthusiasm for his students, as expressed on 12 April the previous year to Blochmann, had not lasted. As he wrote to Bultmann on 15 January 1930, “I live intensely for my work and purely for my own development, if one can call it that, and set little store on university education or students”. From early to mid-March, he stayed up at the cabin in order to write the two lectures, “The Present Problematic of Philosophy” and “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics”, which he was to give later that month in Holland. From the cabin, on 12 March, he wrote to Elfride. Perhaps the bond between them has become tentative for he is now was seeking to draw her into his writing: “I’m quite immersed in work, and yet do miss you all greatly and having you around me – for, odd though it may seem, it is above all when working most intensely that I am close to you and know how elementally you form a part of me”.

Heidegger had become a celebrity, and this was reflected in his growing reputation in university circles. On 28 March, he was offered the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin . Jaspers had read about the offer in a newspaper, and on the following day he wrote to his friend assuming that the latter would accept the nomination. The capital city possessed the most prestigious university in Germany and Heidegger would be able to promote his distinctive philosophy more effectively from there: “you are taking up the most noteworthy post [in German philosophy] and will through that experience will be able to develop previously unknown impulses for your philosophising”. On 30 March, Heidegger visited Jaspers in Heidelberg to discuss the Berlin offer, and then attended the interview in Berlin. He turned down the offer. The reasons he gave are murky. He cites the onerous administrative demands, and the political role he would have been expected to play. But the real reason for his rejection of the offer lay elsewhere. As he wrote on 6 April to Elfride, “I really am quite indifferent to the city and everything there. The sheer groundlessness of the place is dreadful, and in the final analysis it provides no genuine opening for doing philosophy”. These are sentiments whose source was a self-image that was intimately connected to rural Germany and to one part of rural Germany in particular: Swabia. It was here that he dwelt and created philosophy (his “philosophy”) in his beloved hut in Todtnauberg. Berlin dissipates, the cabin concentrates. Ultimately, Heidegger was unimpressed by the entire business, distancing himself from what he called the “psychosis of ‘professorships’ ” that afflicted his friends and colleagues.

Heidegger did not accept the Berlin offer and, on 17 May, he wrote to Jaspers explaining why. The reasons he gives are purely material. Both financially and in terms of teaching commitments matters had been more complicated than he had originally thought. In letters written to the Minster for Education, Adolf Grimme, on 10 and 17 May, he officially declined the offer, explaining that his total commitment was to philosophy rather than to teaching or to administration, adding: “today, when I have just arrived at the beginning of secure work, I do not feel sufficiently able to fulfill the demands of the Berlin professorship in the manner I must expect of myself and everybody else. Truly enduring philosophy can only be one that is a true philosophy of its time, i.e., that is in control of its time”.[37]   

Support for Heidegger’s nomination, however, had not been unanimous. Some on the selection committee thought that, at forty-one, he was simply too young for the position. A week later, on 24 May, Jaspers wrote to him saying that he fully understood and agreed with his decision to turn down the offer, and he proffered the following insightful observation on his friend’s unique form of philosophy: “what is still slumbering philosophically in you, and which is discernible only to yourself, can really only come to light here in the south [of Germany], in one of the oases of the present-day [philosophical] desert”. On 30 May, Heidegger sent Rickert a letter explaining the reasons why he refused the Berlin offer, “a few days ago, I finally declined Berlin. Not because of a calculation of advantages and disadvantages but because of a final and residual ‘feeling’ that spoke to me right from the beginning that I don’t belong there but really only to philosophy itself, and for me that means the quiet development of it – this is more urgent moreover than a teaching regime that I would not really be in control of”.

In the summer semester 1930, between May and July, Heidegger lectured “On the Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy” (“Das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Eine Einleitung zur Philosophie”). The terms of the title are general, even vague. It seems that he has little new to say. His philosophic mind seems elsewhere, perhaps being diverted by the writing of his Kant book. In the preamble, he tells his students, “the human being, whose freedom we are going to consider, is one being amongst all the others. The totality of beings is what we usually call world, and the ground of world is what we commonly call God”. “If we bring to mind, however indefinitely, the totality of known and unknown beings, at the same time thinking specifically of man, it becomes clear that human beings occupy only a small corner within the totality. Set before the forces of nature and cosmic processes this tiny being exhibits a hopeless fragility, before history with its fates and fortunes an ineluctable powerlessness, before the immeasurable duration of cosmic processes and of history itself an inexorable transitoriness. And it is this tiny, fragile, powerless, and transitory being, the human being, of whom we are to treat”.[39]

We are to treat it with reference to one particular dimension of this transitory being: its freedom. “The question concerning the essence of human freedom thematizes the totality of what is, world and God, not just the limit or border”.[40] Certainly, Heidegger accepted that the focus on freedom could provide only one basis for an introduction to philosophy, but “in the end this is not an inadequacy. Even less does it require an apology as, for example, by appealing to the fragility of all human endeavour.  Perhaps the strength and striking power of philosophising consists precisely in this: that it reveals the whole but only in properly grasped particular problems.” Once again, Heidegger was seeking to dissociate himself from the business of academic philosophy. “Perhaps the popular procedure of bringing all philosophical questions together in some kind of framework, and then speaking of everything and anything without really asking, is the opposite of an introduction to philosophy, i.e. a semblance of philosophy, sophistry. [41]

After this preliminary discussion of the problem of freedom, he devoted Part One of the course primarily to the problem of Being in Greek philosophy, this providing the framework for his interpretation of Kant’s treatment of freedom and causality in Part Two. In terms of its structure and the quality of its writing, however, the lecture course suggests a work in progress rather than a finished entity. Indeed, in his discussion of Aristotle and Kant, Heidegger was drawing upon earlier lectures, as in the concluding section 30, “Freedom as the Condition of the Possibility of the Manifestness of the Being of Beings, i.e. of the Understanding of Being”, which drew on material from Being and Time. It is as if Heidegger was drifting in his philosophy, trying to find some anchor (most notably in the Greeks), but still unsure of his ultimate destination.

Until this moment, Heidegger’s politics had been covert – something private almost, comments to friends and family, revealing an inclination growing within himself, premonitions, an “if only” disposition. But now a quite decisive act took place, superficial perhaps in appearance but highly suggestive. On 2 October, he wrote to Elfride telling her that he had visited her parents in Wiesbaden. Heidegger had brought with him a copy of the Nazi Völkische Beobachter. Elfride’s father was very interested in the copy of the newspaper, and a significant conversation seems to have ensued. Likewise in a letter written on 17 August 1931, he gives what seems a throwaway line, a piece of trivia, telling Elfride that “the second volume of Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum [A People without Living Space] that you were looking for is in my desk”. It seems a casual remark, and in a cursory reading of the letter might easily be overlooked, but Hans Grimm was a noted Nazi sympathiser, and his novel, published in 1929, became a slogan for the Nazi Party and its racial geo-politics. This, and the fact that Heidegger was reading the Völkische Beobachter and Hitler’s Mein Kampf (a copy of which he sent to his brother as Christmas present in 1931, seems to suggest that Heidegger’s politics (and those of Elfride) had by 1931 noticeably veered towards the Right.

Perhaps to find a space beyond the imbroglio of contemporary politics, Heidegger chose to revisit the monastery of Beuron: peace amidst the storm. Over a ten-day period, he went through the rigours of a monastic regime. As he wrote to his wife on 19 October: “we get up shortly before 4 am, and then there is almost two hours of divine office in church. At 7 o’clock, breakfast – then time for working until a quarter to 9. Then it’s high mass. From 11 to 12, work time again. At 12 noon, I eat with the monks in the refectory. Then recreation, when the monks are permitted to speak. Then at 2.30, vespers, afterwards coffee, then it’s work time until supper at a quarter to 7. Then half an hour of recreation and at 8 the compline, the evening prayer. At half past 8, everything is quiet”. The ascetic regime was in keeping with his philosophical needs and temperament, and he allowed “the full richness of this wisdom of this monastic existence to take effect”, permitting him “to reflect and find inner strength” to resist the “rootlessness and superficiality of our contemporary Dasein”.

Heidegger’s wish to provide a re-evaluation, and in a radical fashion, of the classics of German philosophy remained a driving force in his thinking. In the winter semester between November 1930 and March 1931, he gave a lecture course (to a select group of students) on “Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit”. In the introduction, Heidegger distanced himself from common readings of his philosophy. “It was never my idea to preach an ‘existential philosophy’ ”, he told his audience in the preamble. “Rather, what I have been concerned with is renewing the question of ontology – the most central problem of Western philosophy – the question of Being, which is related to ‘logos’ not only in terms of method [‘Mittel’] but also in terms of content”.[42] The question that must be addressed, then, is: what is Being? One crucial attempt to answer it was made by Hegel. “By really carrying through the question, he brought to completion the task that was implied in ancient philosophy. (Accordingly, Being as such, the actual in its genuine and whole reality, is the idea or the concept. The concept, however, is the power of time, i.e. the pure concept annuls time. In other words, the problem of Being is properly conceived only when time is made to disappear.) Hegelian philosophy expresses this disappearance of time by viewing philosophy as a science or as absolute knowledge.”[43]

The course proceeded to unravel Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit according to the two central concepts that inform it: “consciousness” and “self-consciousness”. These in turn are analysed by Heidegger in terms of the key supporting notions that give these concepts substance, such as (in section 7c) “the infinity of absolute knowledge as the being-sublated of the finite as dialectic”, or “the reciprocal distribution of the contradictory one and ‘also’ of the thing to perceiving as taking and reflection” (section 9b). The final part of the course was titled “The Being of Self-consciousness”, and was an attempt to read the deliberations that Heidegger had made on the connection between Being and time (in that early work of the same name) back into Hegel’s Phenomenology. Heidegger concluded by addressing the students directly: “I close by breaking off and foregoing an artificial summary. Everything should remain open. You are not supposed to snatch up a fixed opinion about this work, or even a point of view for judging it”. On the contrary, this course should act as an incentive to ask more universalising questions such as “what should man do as an existing Being? Where does he stand, that he should or should not make the leap and so become something other than man? Can and should man as transition try to leap away from himself in order to leave himself behind as finite? Or is his essence not abandonment itself in which alone what can be possessed become a possession?”

The fiasco with the Berlin chair continued to occupy his thoughts. On 8 April 1931, Heidegger wrote to Blochmann, telling her that the Berlin episode had not brought to an end his period of introspection and self-analysis. On the contrary, it was only its beginning. He was now asking himself serious questions about what his attitude to his career, to university life and to philosophy, as it was taught in general, was or should be. The last was becoming increasingly worthless, “what calls itself philosophy is an activity for the crowd that surrounds one, and what is written is pure idle chat that destroys one’s peace of mind and comportment”. Heidegger was coming increasingly to feel himself an outsider. On 19 May, he wrote to Jaspers: “the greater the fuss that is around my name, all the more do I live for my work alone”. The preconditions for belonging to a higher entity (perhaps a political one) were being laid.

Heidegger’s lecturing interests at this time move between the classical German philosophers (such as Kant and Hegel) and the Greeks. There does not seem an apparent inner logic linking these diverse interests. It is possible that the former interest was dictated by the academic requirements of his students; the latter, by his own intellectual needs. In the summer semester, between May and July 1931, he gave a course on “Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta] 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force” [“Aristoteles, Metaphysik [theta] 1—3. Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft”]. Heidegger re-translated and offered a detailed commentary on the first three chapters of Book IX of the Metaphysics, combining a phenomenological interpretation with a critique of metaphysics, from whose conventional discourse he, once again, distanced himself.[44] “Do we really know what this thing is that we so commonly call ‘metaphysics’? We do not. Nowadays the word bewitches us like a magical incantation with its suggestion of profundity and the promise of salvation. But the information that this treatise by Aristotle is metaphysical not only says nothing; it is downright misleading. And this is true not only of today; it has been true for the last two thousand years. Aristotle never had in his possession what later came to be understood by the word or the concept ‘metaphysics’. Nor did he ever seek anything like the ‘metaphysics’ that has for ages been attributed to him”.[45]  Heidegger went on to reinterpret Aristotle’s work around the notion of “kinesis”, and he did so in three sections as “force understood as movement” (section 1), “the division of ‘δύναμις’ into ‘κίνησις for the purpose of elucidating its essence” (section 2), and finally “the actuality of ‘δύναμις’ as ‘κίνησις or capability”. Throughout his exegesis, the terms of Heidegger’s appropriation are vitalistic, and stress the ceaseless movement of Aristotle’s ideas.

Is it possible that Heidegger was seeking here to return to the sources of his own philosophy? In his final year in Constance, he had been given a copy of Franz Brentano’s On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle (1862), a book that was “the rod and staff of my first ungainly attempts to penetrate the mysteries of philosophy”.[46] Heidegger built upon this fledgling knowledge in subsequent encounters with Aristotle, such as the lecture course given between November 1921 and March 1922, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research” [“Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung”], where Aristotle is read through the perspective of an hermeneutically informed phenomenology, directed towards concrete “factive” existence.

On 21 and 22 March 1931, Heidegger gave two lectures to the “Scientific Association” in Amsterdam. On 1 August, he travelled to Holland yet again to run a workshop on Being and Time. Whilst there, he encountered the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. This was to be a formative experience, an experience that would pave the way for his later essay on “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”, (“The Origins of the Work of Art, 1935 revised in 1936). It is a text that represents a major moment in Heidegger’s (“Kehre”), where art and increasingly poetry allow him to expand the conceptual parameters of his philosophy, “opening the way to a new, non-metaphysical experience of Being” (Alfred Denker, Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit, Klett-Cotta, 2011, page 160). As Heidegger wrote to Elfride on 17 August, “the paintings made a great and very deep inner impression on me”, and he was drawn to one painting in particular, Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes”. Looking back in that essay, Heidegger used his interpretation of the painting to define “the equipmental character of equipment [‘Zeug’]: what makes a thing in its thinginess”. [47] The shoes have a practical function to perform but are worn by the woman in an entirely unselfconscious way: “the peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them. She stands and walks in them. That is how shoes actually serve”.[48]

In the concluding pages of his exposition, Heidegger’s language elides into the poetical, as the shoes take on an allegorical significance, where the peasant woman, the earth and the shoes become as one. The woman sets off into nature: “from the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself”.[49]

Van Gogh’s painting allows the tangibility of the shoes to emerge with a tactile immediacy that no technical description could ever provide: “the equipment quality of equipment has been discovered by us. But how? Not by a description and explanation of a pair of shoes actually present; not by a report about the process of making shoes; and also not by the observation of the actual use of shoes occurring here and there; but only by bringing ourselves before Van Gogh’s painting. This painting spoke. In the vicinity of the work, we were suddenly somewhere else than we normally are”. [50]

On 17 August 1931 Heidegger wrote to Elfride, who was on holiday on the East Frisian Island of Spiekeroog. We must read between the lines in this letter, but the fact that Elfride has absented herself once again with her children from Freiburg and away from Heidegger points to tensions in their marriage. It is possible that the latter’s involvement with other women has continued. Certainly, we know that he retained throughout his life a personal attachment to Elisabeth Blochmann, an attachment that seemed to go beyond the purely professional (and it is significant that Blochmann either destroyed or at least chose not to publish most of her correspondence with him that she penned during the 1920s). In this letter to Elfride, Heidegger wrote, “I know deep down that I belong to you and that you alone can help me build my life anew. I am only slowly learning to be hard towards myself and really have to bear and assume the burden of what is difficult in me – instead of ignoring it. And I know that all that matters now is action, the daily work that I do to improve myself. The eyes in your heart will see whether I make progress or not. I’ve given you enough promises”.

On 9 September, Heidegger wrote once again to Elisabeth Blochmann, with whom he seems increasingly to share an intimacy in disposition that was often lacking (in spite of his rhetoric of endearment) with Elfride. Their friendship could well be (as here) simply intellectual, but there is a familiarity of tone that goes well beyond this. He tells her that he has just spent three days walking through the Black Forest by himself. The letter was a paean not only to nature but to the joys and necessity of introspection: “those three days of hiking belong to me as the most special blessing that are to us humans. And I need this blessing so much – more than other people do”. And he added “people wander through many paths; the only true path is to be found by he who remains true to himself, in the circle of his heart, which will provide his inner protection”. On 11 October, he wrote again to Blochmann. He had been reading D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love (published in 1927 in German translation as Liebende Frauen), and was impressed by the novel and by its open and subtle treatment of female sexuality: “throughout the book, there pulses a genuine ‘eroticism’; I mean that this is no frippery and no mere passing rapture, but also not a cheap denial of the body and the exultation of the senses – but the blood of both, which shines in a beatitude”. His words were intended to describe a novel, but what is being played at here was an act of love making: with Elisabeth Blochmann.  

On 14 November 1931, Heidegger told Bultmann that the sterility of philosophy as he found it at the universities has prompted him to return to the classical Greeks for inspiration. Indeed, as a reference to “this rootless age” suggests, he saw nothing but emptiness around him and he equated that vacuity of academic philosophy with the lack of values and purpose that was being demonstrated by contemporary society as a whole. What the Greeks teach us, as he noted to Blochmann on 20 December, is that “we must learn to gain silence again” in order (and the paradox is central to Heidegger’s imagination) “to find the strength and power of language”. And he added, “mankind today has no idea how to make a new start and for that reason in the end wastes everything and becomes a dupe of whatever is currently fashionable”.

Heidegger’s unique and perhaps provocative style of philosophizing (as in Being and Time) had its detractors. In December 1931, Rudolf Carnap, a leading voice in the logical-positivist school in philosophy, published “The Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language”. His target was what he regarded as the semantically vacuous nature of metaphysical statements, which are “pseudo-statements”, because the language they use to describe the world is incapable of verification or objective assessment. The “meaning” that such language generates is false and illusionary, the result of a figurative and stylistic léger de main. As Carnap argued, “the meaningless words of metaphysics usually have their origin in the fact that a meaningful word is deprived of its meaning through its metaphorical use”.[51] As an example, Carnap cited a passage from Heidegger’s lecture “What is Metaphysics?” (“Was ist die Metaphysik?”), which included the phrase “nothing nothings” (“das Nichts nichtet”) (Carnap, page 229). This sentence, Carnap argued, represented a “violation of logical syntax”. It is meaningless, and for two reasons: firstly, because it is “based on the mistake of employing the word ‘nothing’ as a noun (instead of simply using it as a predicate of ‘is’, as in ‘there is nothing in the room’), and secondly, it fabricates the meaningless word ‘nothings’, which has no dictionary status”. Such statements are neither true nor false, and hence do not inform us about the world because “a hypothesis must be capable of entering into relations of deducability with (true or false) empirical statements, which is just what pseudo-statements cannot do” (232). Because Heidegger’s words do not correspond to the requirements of a verifiable empirical statement or to the terms of propositional logic, they are, quite literally, non-sense.

On 20 December 1931, Heidegger wrote to Karl Jaspers, who had just published The Spiritual Situation of the Times. The book, both in style and content (and in its modest price), was an attempt to reach the broadest possible readership. During the same period, Jaspers published the three volumes of his Philosophie. This publication was not philosophy (as Heidegger understood it), but a writing about “philosophy” and close to the intellectual and cultural history of Ernst Cassirer. Nevertheless, Heidegger wrote positive words to Jaspers (perhaps even overly positive, possibly as a recompense for his earlier disparaging attitude towards the latter): “what is important is that with your work there is finally in philosophy today something indispensable and whole. You speak out of the clear and decisive comportment of the victor and from the richness of one who has been existentially tested”.

For his part, Heidegger could not share that sense of positiveness in his own philosophy, and in the same letter he went into an introspective mode regarding himself and his work: “for a long time now – even before the Berlin episode – I have been shocked over my ‘dubious’ success, and have known ever since that I ventured too far beyond my existential strength and without clearly seeing the confines of what I was materially questioning”. It is difficult to tell whether Heidegger’s self-deprecation was a purely rhetorical gesture aimed at securing the sympathy of Jaspers or whether it truly reflected his feelings that Being and Time was too narrow in its philosophy. This is certainly how he was later, after his “Turning” (“Kehre”), to view that work. In his “Letter on Humanism” (1947), he looked back to Being and Time and judged it largely as a failure, because he had remained within “the language of metaphysics”, simply explicating the conditions under which Being could be said to exist rather than allowing Being itself to manifest itself in its own language. Everything had been mediated by a need for systematic and categorical exactitude (almost in the fashion of Aristotle’s systems of classification), which had sought to find ever more precise inflexions for being-in-the-world. Such a methodology had been a mistake, because “all ‘contents’, ‘opinions’ and ‘itineraries’ within particulars must necessarily take us away from the heart of the matter”.[52]

In the winter semester between November and March 1931–1932, Heidegger lectured on “The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Theaetetus” [“Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet”]. He is starting to return to and work over existent material. already delivered as lectures. There seems to be something else on Heidegger’s mind at this time, but from a biographical point of view all we have are the gaps. We can surmise; we can speculate, but we can do nothing more, although the causes almost certainly lie in his growing concern with what is taking place in the political arena. As so often in Heidegger’s lectures, before we get to the content we are enlightened about his radical methodology. As he asserts in his opening remarks, “we want to speak of the essence of ‘truth’: what is that? The answer to the question ‘what is that’ brings us to the ‘essence’ of a thing”.[53] In answering these questions, Heidegger in his “introductory observations” effectively traverses the conceptual terrain of Being and Time. Here, he explicated the adaequatio intellectus et rei model of scholastic philosophy (where truth is the “appropriation of thought and a judgement on a thing, i.e. agreement with it, or also commensuration, in measurement with something [‘An-messung’], a self-measurement with something”.[54]  In place of this correspondence model of truth, he advanced the Greek notion of “aletheia”, “Unverborgenheit”: “the Greeks understood, what we call the true, to be the un-concealed, the no longer concealed; that which is without concealment, where concealment has been torn away, at the same time robbed from a thing”. [55] In short, truth is not about factually establishing something, but about unveiling the essence of an object, with or without factuality. Heidegger’s discussion of correspondence model (originally scholastic, but foundational for later empiricist philosophies) acted as the necessary backdrop to the substantive part of this lecture course: his analysis of Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic and in the Theaetetus. The analysis involved engaging with Plato’s theories of perception, which for Heidegger were allied to a phenomenology of the body, as in the Theaetetus, which speculates upon the “the rooting of abstract character of Being in the unity of bodily Dasein. And its difference from self-less nature lying in its transcendence in originary longing”. [56]

On 24 March, Heidegger wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann thanking her for sending a copy of Ortega y Gasset’s The Tasks for our Times (the German translation of La rebelión de las masas, 1930). Y Gasset was a noted critic of what he termed “mass society”, “the accession of the masses to complete social power”.  As Y Gasset (who upheld the principle of a “radically aristocratic interpretation of history”) observed in that work, “as the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering the greatest crisis”.[57] “We have to make a choice”, Y Gasset concludes. [58] These were sentiments echoed in full by Heidegger in a letter to Blochmann sent just one month later, and he thanked her for the book in tones that were overtly intimate: “this shy self-revealing of your heart, which I see in the sending of your letter, has not failed to leave me since then.” Heidegger wrote again to Blochmann the following month, on 10 April, and it was politics that was foremost in his mind. It was 1932 (the year in which the Nazi Party made a decisive electoral push for political power), and critical decisions needed to be taken: “in this year our Dasein is penetrated by what the Greeks called ‘arche’. The blade of the knife upon which everything will change and be decided”. In the absence of further documentation (Heidegger does make his political commitments explicit until after 1933) it is difficult to establish the exact contours of Heidegger’s political thinking at this time, although it was showing increasing signs of non-democratic politics. It is clear that he feels a moment of truth is coming, both for the individual and the nation.

And for philosophy. Heidegger had become increasingly convinced that Western philosophy had reached a crisis point. The Nietzschean moment of termination had not been overcome. The alternatives, such as Logical Positivism, were not philosophies but arid critical methodologies. We must return to where philosophy as thinking started. Between May and July, Heidegger lectured on “The Beginnings of Western Philosophy: Anaximander und Parmenides” [“Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie (Anaximander und Parmenides)”]. As he stated in the Introduction, “our task is to investigate the termination of philosophising, i.e. the end of metaphysics as the original seeking after the ‘sense’ (truth) of Beyng”.[59] In many respects that had always been Heidegger’s task, stretching back to Being and Time and earlier, but here it would be framed within the work of two pre-Socratic thinkers. He was seeking to use these philosophers to explicate “das Seiende”: a plurality in a singularity. As he explained: “Being [‘das Seiende’] is also, however, not merely a connection between all individual Beings, but it is more than this but at the same time less than this Being – that means: Being before and around us, under and over us – and ourselves included in all of this”.[60]

He began by analysing a fragment from Anaximander, which reads: “from where however things have their origins, there they must also have their extinction, as a necessity, for they must pay their punishment and their retribution for their profligacy according to the judgment of time”.[61] Heidegger took Anaximander’s esoteric saying as the starting point for an explication of “ta onta” (“Being”), the origin of Being but also its relationship to “kronos” (“time”). The second part of the course was devoted to the “Lehrgedicht” of Parmenides, and here he returned once again to “aletheia” (as embodied in the goddess of the same name) as the way to truth. The cryptic fragments of Anaximander and Parmenides allow Heidegger to keep the question of Being open. As he observed in his brief conclusion: “we have the question of being that is discussed, and further discussed. Being is becoming worthy of discussion. We understand something of the tired, overused ‘is’ – or understand at least that there is something there to be understood. This understanding has its own law and its own measurement. The law of philosophy too; it has its own. What we pose for ourselves there is a matter purely for us.”[62]

On 20 June, Heidegger wrote to Elfride saying that he was “ever more certain that we would rebuild things anew”. These are words that she had heard many times before. They contain no doubt some degree of sincerity and affection, but the fact that he needs Elfride to organise his practical life to make his solitary writing in the cabin possible. The line between the personal and pragmatic are here, as elsewhere in their marriage, impossible to draw. The tones are introspective and suggest that Heideggerwas in the midst of a personal crisis: “the clearer it becomes to me where I belong and what I must still demand from my work and this time from my innermost self – everything up to now has just been a prelude – the lonelier I feel. I’ve lost all contact with my youth – not as a straggler – but as one who runs on ahead”. He expressed the same degree of self-scrutiny regarding his teaching methods: “even though I have the large lecture hall firmly in my power, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that it [his lecturing] passes them [his students] by and if it does not hit the mark, it is hardly worthwhile”. But it was politics and their current crisis that he returned to at the end of this letter: “as I’ve written before – however much of an effort the Nazis [who continued to attract popularity in the elections] require of one, it’s still better than the insidious poisoning to which we have been exposed in recent decades under the catchwords of ‘culture’ and ‘spirit’ “.

In the winter semester 1932–1933, Heidegger took sabbatical leave. On 29 August, he wrote to Bultmann about Jaspers. Heidegger’s attitude to the latter is becoming increasingly complicated. He needs him as a friend and they share the same anti- university establishment views, but there is little intellectual respect involved. Heidegger now writes, taking back the positive words he had made about the work of Jaspers in a letter of 20 December 1931: “I have not as yet read his weighty work [Jaspers’ three volumed Philosophy] and will not be able to read it in the following year. It really doesn’t appeal to me at all. And I am incensed over his new paperback [Jasper’s The Spiritual Situation of the Age]. I regret that he should have written something like this”. Heidegger cannot accept Jaspers’ appeal to the popular philosophic mind and resents (perhaps even envied) Jaspers’ self-promotion as a spiritual guide to the age,

On 6 October, Heidegger wrote to Elfride from the cabin. Elfride had asked him in a previous letter a question: why do you choose to work for weeks on end in the cabin instead of in Freiburg (a cabin that is only six metres long and five metres wide)? He replied, “I gather and clarify my real intentions there, and in addition prepare the blocks of the coming work. I’m already hewing one block into shape – I don’t speak to anyone about it: it is the essence of space – I discover and suspect that it [the block of new ideas] is more than and different from what has hitherto been thought. It as well the form and receptacle of things and their dimensions, wholly in regard to what is most outward and passable. But it is also something more than this. And ‘time’ also changes as a consequence, and everything is under reconstruction, and not one stone is left on top of another. New ones have to be dug up and discovered.” The cabin and Freiburg represent, in fact, two different worlds for Heidegger. The differences are both physical and symbolic: physical in that the cabin allows for contact with the natural elements that surround him there, and that contact forms a unique authenticity, and symbolic in that the intensity of his thought is not contaminated by bourgeois domesticity. And, most importantly, except when he invited them, there were no people in the cabin. Solitude was the precondition of the individual impetus behind his philosophic thinking.

The style of this passage is as important as the content, in which he describes his work practice through metaphors that tie space to structure in a discourse underscored by nature.  Heidegger’s use of language, in fact, from Being and Time onwards, became increasingly figurative, where new ideas were often cast in non-discursive language. The poetic idiom was gradually becoming a medium for his thinking, a tendency already apparent in the same letter. Autumn has arrived: “yesterday the first hoarfrost arrived, making itself felt at once. In the early morning the meadows, pastures and woods were white. The air is hard – the sun’s out – but a thin, smoky mist settles in front of its rays. The smell of the potato fires pervades the air – autumn is here in earnest. In the Alps there must be fresh snow. At night there are storms.” It was a world of pristine purity, and it relativised what he saw to be the increasingly meaningless activity [“Betrieb”] of university life: “professors and everything that goes with them – have come to seem so remote from me – and I don’t feel the slightest need of their worries and machinations”.

His alienation from university life was to increase during this period. On 24 January 1931, Heidegger had written to Bultmann lamenting the “general decline of the university, which is increasingly becoming a school for careers that are dependent on groups and factions, and this must happen because they themselves and those that work in them no longer possess vital ideas”. And he continued: “the only way out of this is through the founding of an independent ‘aristocratic’ – understood as intellectually ‘aristocratic’ (to which a down-to-earth mentality adheres) – exemplary independent academy. Whether in the near future, this is a factual possibility is another matter. The main thing is that we prepare people inwardly and develop in them a mentality that knows real values again and produces in them a genuine validity.  The work we do in the universities has only sense and meaning with regard to the awakening of this nascent development”.

As the year of 1932 comes to a close, the political validity of the Weimar Republic reaches a critical and terminal phase, and the references to this crisis in Heidegger’s letters take on an increasingly strident tone. 1929 heralds in the Great Depression; unemployment has gone beyond the five million mark; there is hyperinflation; one democratically elected government and a series of ineffectual presidential cabinets are installed by von Hindenburg, but fall one after the other. On 9 June, Heidegger wrote to Elfride, expressing his dismay over the deteriorating condition of German politics. Radical solutions are beckoning. Heidegger sees Communism as the major threat. As he wrote in that letter, “Baumler” [a colleague in the philosophy department a Freiburg] does not consider communism to have been repelled at all – only fragmented for the time being. If a man comes along who pulls the cause together, he will be a terrible force; the whole Jewish intellectual world is going over to it”. These were views that Heidegger was clearly expressing in other contexts (to his colleagues, for example), and his name was coming increasingly to be associated with pro-Nazi politics. So much is clear from a letter he sent to Bultmann on 16 December disclaiming claims that he had joined the Nazi Party: “that I have joined the NSDAP is an empty rumour [‘Latrinengerucht’] – as one says in the army – that someone or other has recently been spreading around, for I have often been quizzed about this. I am not a member of this party, and never will be. On the other hand, it is true that I feel very positive about much about it, exactly in the sense in which you describe things – in spite of severe reservations that I have, for example, about its intellectual standards [‘Geist’] and niveau in cultural matters”.

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on 3 May 1933.

[1] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 1–2. Translation modified.

[2] Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), p. 10.

[3] Einleitung in die Philosophie, p. 3.

[4] Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Zwölfte unveränderte Auflage (Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen, 1972) pp. 214-219.

[5] Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 326.

[6] Wilhelm Dilthey, p. 235.

[7] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. Two: Mythical Thought, translated by Ralph Manheim (New Have: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 219.

[8] Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press), p. 95.

[9] Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Gesprache in Davos”. In Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger. Ed. Gunther Neske. Pfullingen: Verlag Gunther Neske, 1977. 25-29, pp. 26–27.

[10] Gespräche in Davos. pp. 27–28.

[11] Quoted in Gordon, Continental Divide, p. 98.

[12] Quoted in Gordon, Continental Divide, p. 97.

[13] Martin Heidegger / Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918 – 1969 (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft: 1989), p. 29.

[14] Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), p. 3.

[15] Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, translated by Richard Taft (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 172. The Heidegger-Cassirer debate is reprinted as an appendix to this volume.

[16] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 1–2.

[17] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 169.

[18] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 172.

[19] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 171.

[20] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 171.

[21] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 184.

[22] Martin Heidegger / Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918 – 1969, p. 30.

[23] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 178.

[24] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 171.

[25] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 181.

[26] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 180.

[27] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 185.

[28] Martin Heidegger / Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918 – 1969, p. 29.

[29] Martin Heidegger, Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophischen Problemlage der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), p. 1.

[30] Der deutsche Idealismus, pp. 2–3.

[31] Der deutsche Idealismus, p.3.

[32] Der deutsche Idealismus, p. 4.

[33] Martin Heidegger, Der deutsche Idealismus, p. 6.

[34] Martin Heidegger, Der deutsche Idealismus. pp. 6 and 7.

[35] Heidegger quoted in Manfred Geier, Martin Heidegger (Rowohlt, Reinbek, 2005, page 77, from GA 29/30: 243).

[36] Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics? translated by Gregory Field and Richard Polt (Yale UP, 2000). p. 93.

[37] Martin Heidegger “Entscheidung gegen Berlin” and “Der Sache true bleiben”. In Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910-1976 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), pp. 61–65.

[38] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, translated by  Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 211–212.

[39] Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, translated by. Ted Sadl (Continuum: London, 2002), pp. 1–2.

The Essence of Human Freedom, p. 9.

[41]The Essence of Human Freedom,  p. 10.

[42] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 13.

[43] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 12. Translation modified.

[44] Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3, translated by Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 1.

[45] Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3, p. 1.

[46] Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1988), p. 81.

[47] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (Harper Row: New York, 1971), pp. 17–87 (pp. 33–34). Translation modeified.

[48]“The Origin of the Work of Art” (pp. 33–34). Translation modified.

[49] “The Origin of the Work of Art”, pp. 33–34. Translation modified.

[50] “The Origin of the Work of Art”, p. 35.

[51] Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache, in Erkenntnis 2 (1931), pp. 219-241, p. 230.

[52] Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den Humanismus”. In Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004), pp. 313–364 (p. 328).

[53] Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Hohlengleichnes und Theatet ((Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988). p. 1.

[54] Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 8.

[55] Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 10.

[56] Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. viii.

[57] Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (London: Unwin Books, 1969), pp. 15 and 9.

[58] The Revolt of the Masses, p. 31.

[59] Martin Heidegger, Der Anfang der abendlandischen Philosophie: Auslegung des Anaximander und Parmenides (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosermann, 2012), p. 1.

[60] Der Anfang der abendlandischen Philosophie, p. 4.

[61] Der Anfang der abendlandischen Philosophie, p. 2. Translation of the Anaximander by Diels.

[62] Der Anfang der abendlandischen Philosophie, p. 264.

Chapter 5

National Socialism:

1933-1934

In 1933, Heidegger found history. On 19 January, he wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann, apologising for his late response to her earlier letter: “that I am only writing now is due to one thing only: the fact that in recent weeks a great storm has come over me, which I dared to greet with ‘full sails open’. In this storm, the old guard is now in tatters. There can be no mere patching up of things anymore”. The storm that had overcome Heidegger, and to which he had fully opened himself (with ‘vollen Segel’), was the “storm” of Hitler’s rapid rise to power in the final days of the Weimar Republic. Here, between 1932 and 1933, chancellors from the conservative ruling elite, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, were removed by President Paul von Hindenburg after a short term in office. The old ruling system was falling apart and could not, according to Heidegger, be mended or “patched up”. It was obvious to all who the next chancellor would be.

For those who could read between the lines of Heidegger’s pronouncement, the signs had been there since at least 1928: the disgruntlement with the Weimar “system, dismay at the patty corruption and careerism, at the vapid intellectual life of the universities (and the “open sails” suggests the liberation of a boat that has been becalmed) and, frustration with conventional modes of philosophy. These were all possibly apolitical dispositions, but mental sets nonetheless clearly susceptible to political articulation should the opportunity arise. That opportunity had now arisen.

The Nazi Party had reached power following its stage management of the Reichstag fire of 27 February (which had conjured up a Communist threat to the nation) and the election results of 5 March. Hitler had already been nominated as Chancellor on 31 January, and his ascension to the Chancellery ushered in a new and volatile period in German politics, the so-called “German revolution”, a period of organised turmoil that would end only with the law promulgating the new formation of parties on 14 July. Between these dates, the Nazis succeeded in temporarily and then permanently suspending those clauses of the Constitution safeguarding civil liberties: on 28 February and through the Enabling Act of 23 March, banning and forcing into voluntary liquidation the Communist, Social Democratic, Centre and Nationalist parties and placing many of their members in custody in newly constructed concentration camps; implementing on 1 April the boycott of Jewish businesses, and the removal of members of the Jewish faith from positions within the judicial, educational, medical and even sporting institutions; and removing the political self-determination of the individual German Länder substituting the federal system of government with a single structure of command based in Berlin. A secret police office (SD) under Heinrich Himmler was created (26 April), and Trade Union organizations were abolished and replaced with a Nazified Labour Front (2 May), in a month that saw the ritualistic book-burning ceremony (10 May). By 1 July 1933, the National Socialists had not only successfully occupied almost all of the key positions within the political and parliamentary institutions of the newly constituted German State, they had also successfully removed any likely source of future opposition to their policies by Nazifying the judiciary, the Protestant Church and the universities. The promulgation of the “Gesetz gegen die Neubildung von Parteien” on 14 July was a law which effectively turned the Third Reich into a one-party state.[1]

We should not assume, however, that Heidegger was fully aware of what was taking place. When in his letters he discussed the radical turn of events in German politics, he rarely cited matters in detail or mentioned specific political actions or personages. Heidegger’s appropriation of the Nazi “revolution” seemed largely to stem from wish fulfilment (a “Wunschtraum”. See Alfred Denker, Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit, Klett-Cotta, 2012, page 115), where Heidegger imposed ideals of national renewal on a reality that he did not look closely at or consider in detail. Heidegger was in history, but curiously distanced from it. Rüdiger Safranski puts this paradox succinctly, “the events to which he reacted were political events, and his actions took place on the political stage – but it was the power of philosophical imagination that governed his reactions and actions. And this philosophical imagination transformed the political scene into an historical-philosophical stage on which a play from the repertoire of the history of Being was being enacted. Real history was scarcely recognisable in it”.[2] As even Hugo Ott (one of the philosopher’s harshest critics) observes: Heidegger’s “programme was built on high hopes and expectations”, which were soon to be overtaken by the reality.[3] Indeed, for all of the later talk about the need to put in place a practical realisation of National Socialist ideology, his own discourse, as in his later Rector’s speech, was largely made up from generalisations and abstractions, and constituted perhaps (as Karl Löwith, who was amongst the audience, noted) “an attempt to import the conceptual terrain of his previous philosophy into the pragmatics of the new state”.[4]

But that Heidegger was by the end of March 1933 fully committed to the politics of Nazi Germany, there is no doubt. In a letter to Kurt Bauch, Professor of Art History at the University of Freiburg, written on 14 March, just one week after the election success of the Nazi Party, Heidegger wrote, “in my opinion, we can only avoid misjudgments when we awaken within ourselves an awareness of the necessity for an entire [political] transformation, and one that will not to be achieved through mere ‘measures’ but calls for decisive action and the resolution of the will power which is the mission of today’s youth”. And again, in a letter to Elisabeth Blochmann written on 22 March, the same sentiments were expressed, but now an inspirational note was being sounded, as Heidegger prepared himself for the challenges that the new Germany would bring. Here he would need complete determination and the total acceptance of what was taking place, for “all that will come will bring with it onerous tasks, and we should take care that we do not take them lightly”.

Eight days later, Heidegger wrote once more, this time to Elisabeth Blochmann. “The present turn of events – just because much remains in the dark and is unpredictable – has for us an enormously concentrated power. It empowers our sense of purpose and gives us the self-confidence to be able to act in the service of a great cause and to participate in the formation of a national [‘volklich’] world. For a long time, the meagre nature and lack of substance of mere ‘culture’ and the unreality of so-called ‘values’ has degenerated for me into a nothingness, compelling me to seek Dasein in a quite different area.”

In March or April, Heidegger joined the “Cultural-Political Work Community of German University Teachers” (“Kulturpolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Hochschullehrer”, the KADH), a group that had been newly formed in Frankfurt by the rector of that university, Ernst Krieck. This was “a kind of National Socialist group within the German Academics’ Association, the official organization of university staff. The members of this ‘community’ regarded themselves as the vanguard of the Nazi revolution in the universities. They advocated the early ‘Gleichschaltung’ (political integration into the Nazi Party and state) of the German Academics’ Association, the introduction of the Führer principle in the universities, and the ideological alignment of teaching–a point on which there were considerable differences” (Safranski page 235). Indeed, whilst in its early days, Heidegger was at one with Krieck and the other members of the group this soon changed as the group degenerated into a clique of unsupportive individuals seeking to promote their careers, highlighting thus one of the realities of Nazi politics: that contestations for personal power were often greater than a shared ideology.

These tensions would, however, emerge only with time. In the early days, Heidegger could only see in Nazism the positive. As he wrote to Blochmann on 19 January, Heidegger viewed National Socialism as the sole force capable of overcoming the “counter-spirit of the Communist world” and the “dying spirit of Christianity”. The former was a dangerous threat in the present; the latter a pernicious influence from the past. As he told Blochmann, National Socialism was a spiritual revolution, the manifestation of a power comparable to the revolution of the mind achieved by the Ancient Greeks. What would it be like if we possessed that culture now, and totally intact? All that is routine and empty would be swept away. The struggle against what remains, however, must be set in motion, and we must bear this beginning in its greatness – while we are still bordered by doubt and darkness – into the future and convert it into a mission”.

In the past, Heidegger had written extensively about individual Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato (as in his “Phenomenological Interpretations in connection with Aristotle”, 1922, and his lectures on Plato’s Sophist, 1924–1925), and he would later go on to enlist pre-Socratic figures such as Parmenides and Heraclitus in the rejuvenation of his own philosophy. But that is not the case here. Heidegger’s appropriation of the Greeks is a deification that is at the same time a reification. The Greeks have become homogenised into an anonymous collective, a collective that anticipated, Heidegger argued, and could merge into the collective that was National Socialism, where the latter would take on the archetypal presence of the former. Heidegger’s invocation of the Greeks was, however, not only a tenet within his political reading of the present; it also formed the context for a personal engagement with the same. In December 1932, he had sent Elisabeth Blochmann a copy of Plato’s Politeia (known in English as the Republic), reminding her of his earlier recommendation, made in September 1932, that she should also read Plato’s “Seventh Letter”. The reference had a clear political symbolic content. Heidegger was seeking to draw a parallel between what he hoped to achieve in the coming National Socialist state with what Plato had hoped to achieve in his two visits to Syracuse in 368 and 360. Particularly in the second visit, Plato had sought to influence Dionysius and his son in their governance of Sicily by converting them into philosopher-kings. AS then, so too now: philosophy was to inform politics, undertaking the “weightiest task of providing the new state with intellectual leadership”. This, Heidegger now decided, was precisely his mission. He would act as a (perhaps the) guiding figure in this new world.[5]

What Heidegger did not tell Blochmann, however, was that Plato had not been seeking to turn his pupils into wise aristocrats but into exponents of democracy, precisely the discredited form of government that Heidegger believed that National Socialism would and should replace. For as Plato wrote in 1 Cf. Plat. L. 7.336d, Plat. Laws 961a ff. “And one piece of counsel I add, as I repeat now for the third time to you in the third place the same counsel as before, and the same doctrine. Neither Sicily, nor yet any other State—such is my doctrine—should be enslaved to human despots but rather to laws; for such slavery is good neither for those who enslave nor those who are enslaved—”.

The parallels that Heidegger drew (at least implicitly) between himself and Plato founders on a second point: that fact that Plato’s mission to bring philosophical enlightenment to the rulers of Syracuse was a total failure. Plato made two visits to Syracuse. A.E. Taylor describes what happened: “Plato made another voyage to Syracuse and spent nearly a year there, 361-360, in the hope of remedying the situation of bringing together a union of the two tyrants, Dionysius and Dion, in the spirit of philosophically enlightened rule. On this occasion something was achieved in the task of drafting the preliminaries to a constitution for the proposed federation of the Greek cities, but the influence of the partisans of the old regime proved too strong. Indeed, Plato seems at times to have been in real personal danger from the hostility of Dionysius’ barbarian supporters, and it was with difficulty and only by the mediation of Archytas of Tarentum that he finally obtained leave to return to Athens (360 BC)”.[6]  Heidegger would have done well to have taken on board this point in 1933, before he was forced to relive it as nemesis in 1934, when he gave up, in the most abject way, all ambitions to participate in the ideological momentum of the new Nazi state.

Whatever his dreams of Syracuse, Heidegger had to remain in Freiburg and teach. Between November 1933 and February 1934, he offered a lecture course on “Sein and Wahrheit” [“Being and Truth”].  Even here, however, with concepts that seem simply to promote philosophical investigation, a political ambience is evident. Before beginning his lectures, Heidegger addressed his students in words that were to remind them that they were the harbingers of a new Germany (indeed, Heidegger was, in this period, towards the end of 1933, increasingly turning to students rather than to his colleagues as the likely bearers of the future of National Socialism as a pedagogy).[7] He tells them: “you can no longer simply be ‘listeners’. Your duty is to be fellow-knowers and participants in the creation of the university of the future in the German spirit”.[8]

In his opening lectures, Heidegger explicated the premisses and assumptions of a series of traditional philosophical positions, from the origins of metaphysics through to the “mathematical-logical” methodology of recent philosophy. But in the Introduction, he spelt out what philosophy must become in the new Germany. Under the rubric “the basic question of philosophy”, Heidegger brought into view “the fundamental question and fundamental events of our history”, where we learn what “the intellectual-political mission of the German people” is. Understanding this mission means accepting “the challenging knowledge about what it is, above all, and which must be for everything else, if the nation is to rise to its full stature”.[9] Doing philosophy is still a matter of questioning, but that must now replace abstract questioning regarding matters of ontology (and Heidegger did not appear to recognise the irony of his position) with a questioning about who we are as members of the new state. For, as he explained, “we are seeking ourselves in a challenging-debating-reverential way. We seek ourselves when we ask who we are. Who is this people [‘Volk’] at this historical point in time and what is its fate in the essence of its Being?”.[10]

Heidegger had welcomed the political developments that were taking place in Germany, but his close colleague and friend, Karl Jaspers, had not. Between 18 and 23 March, Heidegger visited Jaspers in Heidelberg. In his autobiography, Jaspers recounted what happened: “at the end of March 1933, Heidegger paid us for the last time a lengthy visit. In spite of the March election results for the victorious Nazis, we conversed as we had always done. He had bought a record of Gregorian church music and we listened to it together. Then he suddenly said: ‘one must go along with [‘sich einschalten’] what is happening’, with reference to the quickly developing national socialist reality. I was amazed but did not query him” (page 100).

This was the last opportunity for Jaspers to speak his mind but, as Harold H Oliver observes, there was an “asymmetrical relationship” between Jaspers and Heidegger, and the former seemed possessed of an “uncanny need to be judged favourably as a philosopher by his younger colleague” (Oliver page 1).[11] It was a dependence that prevented Jaspers from challenging Heidegger at crucial moments such as these (although such a confrontation would not have steered Heidegger away from the path that he had already taken).

In the notebook that he kept to record his engagement with Heidegger, Jaspers went into greater detail regarding his ambivalent relationship with his friend and colleague, and confessed how much to him was “unclear” in that relationship.[12] He also spoke of his “self-deception” regarding Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, seeing Heidegger’s decision to embrace it as a tactical move undertaken “to protect the university” (presumably so that it should avoid having a hardline Nazi rector imposed on it from outside) (Notizen pages 181-182). Jaspers, however, was not oblivious to the flaws in his friend’s character, speaking at one point of Heidegger’s “Treulosigkeit”, by which he meant not his lack of fidelity but his refusal to open himself to and engage with his friend and close colleague on a personal and philosophical level (Notizen page 182). But that Heidegger was not a calculating politician, Jaspers also made clear. “He did not possess a trace of that crafty politicking that step by step, following the ignis fatui of power, deceiving itself and others, was paving the way towards the destruction of Germany” (Notizen, page 183).

That Heidegger was aware of the radical political differences between himself and his friend we know from a letter that he sent to his wife on 19 March during his visit to Heidelberg, in which he wrote: “Jaspers is also quite receptive to the actual happenings that constitute the current German Revolution – though with respect to specific decisions he is hampered by an ‘intellectuality’ that hasn’t quite shaken off the Heidelbergian in him”. That “intellectuality” was, however, the result of Jaspers’ critical assessment of what was happening in German politics, events that Heidegger had totally welcomed. But there was a further reason for Jaspers’ reservations: “I find it unsettling”, Heidegger wrote, “how this man sees our destiny and tasks in a thoroughly German way, and with the most genuine instinct and the highest demands, and yet is tied down by his wife”.

Heidegger was being disingenuous. He knew very well that Jaspers’ wife was Jewish and would have witnessed the coming to power of the Nazi Party with dismay. Heidegger would have done well to have registered at this point the impact that his own wife, Elfride, was having upon his political direction. Writing in a letter to her friend, Elfriede Lieber, in 1932, Elfride described Germany as a “completely defenceless and economically ruined people”, and she railed against “bolshevism”, which she saw not only in Communism but also in the SPD [German Socialist Party] and its “Jewish-Marxist preparatory work”. What was required to destroy this evil was a “fanatical Peoples’ [‘völkisch’] Movement”, which would meet force with force. And where today to find such a Movement if not with Hitler?” (Quoted in Payen, page 249).

On 3 April, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers once again, feeling perhaps that he had not quite convinced his longstanding friend of the probity of his course of action: “although much is still in the dark and unresolved, I am increasingly convinced that we are becoming part of a new reality and that the previous age has gone. Everything depends on whether in our philosophy we can create the right point of participation and promote this development through words. We must incorporate the dynamic movement of the present into philosophy”. Jaspers did not reply to the letter. We must wait for a direct confrontation between the two until June later that year, but the premises of an altercation were increasing with every moment of contact (and the fact that Heidegger did not announce to Jaspers that he was to give a lecture in Heidelberg in June is testimony of the growing divide between the two men).

But now the pained private world interceded once again. Later that month, on 21 April, Elisabeth Blochmann wrote to Elfride, asking her to act as an intermediary with her husband on her behalf. A “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service” (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Beamtentums”) had been promulgated on 7 April, drafted by the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick. The law was accompanied by a questionnaire requiring details of the racial background of employees. The ultimate goal was to exclude Jews from employment in all branches of the Civil Service, including educational institutions, where they would no longer be permitted to teach. This would have put an end to the career of Blochmann (who was half Jewish). The only solution to this impending crisis in her life and career would be if the increasingly influential Heidegger might intercede on her behalf with the Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. It was strange request, for Elfride had been even more enthusiastic than Heidegger in her support for National Socialism in the 1920s and would have fully supported the new law. Elfride, however, duly passed on Blochmann’s request to her husband and, as a postcard sent to Blochmann on 10 June testifies, Heidegger did indeed write to the relevant authorities in Berlin, attempting to have her exempted from the law. Blochmann was proud of her German identity and had difficulty in coming to terms with what was happening. On 18 April, she wrote to Elfride expressing her dismay: “I have very painful days behind me. I would never have imagined that such an expulsion would be possible. Perhaps I have lived too naively in the certainty of a deep solidarity of mind and feeling – and that is why I found myself initially defenseless and prey to despair” (quote in Payen, page 361).

On 21 April, Heidegger was unanimously elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. He replaced the incumbent rector, the Professor of Anatomy, Wilhelm von Möllendorff, who had only taken up office in December the previous year, but whose occupancy of the position was curtailed because he was a social democrat. It has been observed that “when Heidegger took over the rectorate, he had not yet made clear his political intentions and would not do so until formally designated Führer by the university”.[13] Indeed, it is possible that Heidegger was elected precisely because he had apparently remained aloof from the more radical sections in the Party, but the fact that he was known as a supporter of National Socialism was regarded as positive by many of his younger colleagues.[14] That his fellow deans had voted for Heidegger, however, because they expected him to pursue “a wise and measured higher education policy” (Geier, page 87) seems unlikely.

On 3 May, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. As he wrote to his brother, Fritz, the following day, “yesterday I became a member of the Party. I did this not only out of inner conviction but from the realisation that this is the only way that an understanding of and insight into the movement as a whole is possible”. He also attempted in the same letter, to persuade Fritz to make the same commitment, offering yet a further idealist construction of National Socialism that he should not view the movement from below but through the eyes of the Führer and his great goal. Heidegger also confided that he had suspended his own philosophical work in the service of carrying out his duties as the new rector.[15]

Heidegger was an efficient administrator. His involvement in the pedagogy of the new state has been described as the work of a “philosophical dreamer” (Safranski, page 234), but there was nothing dream-like about Heidegger’s carrying out of his duties as a rector. He took to his new role with zeal. On 27 April, he wrote to his colleagues exhorting them to participate in the “Day of National Work”, where at the university there would be a procession, which would culminate in a series of addresses and in the singing of the “Horst Wessel Lied”. Two days earlier he had sent a memo to his fellow deans, specifying the percentage of non-Aryan students that could in the future be admitted to the university: “the determination of the policy on the selection of non-Aryans is that for individual faculties under 1.5% for new students, and under 5% for returning ones. Further details are being formulated now in the Ministry and will be sent to all faculties once they are present”.[16] The Nazification of university life in Freiburg was proceeding with grim momentum. On 3 May, Heidegger passed on to his colleagues a missal from Eugen Fehrle, the Minister for Higher Education section in Baden. It read: “students who have recently taken part in the struggle for national revival conducted by the S.A., S.S. or other militia are to receive special dispensation in terms of fees and grants etc, on the submission to their professors of proof of their participation. On the other hand, Jewish or Marxist students are not to receive such dispensations” (Nachlese zu Heidegger, p. 14).

In the following months, Heidegger advocated his duties in various ways depending upon context and audience, whether he was talking to his colleagues, students or, as on a rare occasion on 24 January 1934, workers. Irrespective of the context, the message was the same:  the seizure of power of the National Socialists had brought about a “German Revolution” and helped create a new state that stands in the service of the People [“Volk”]. It was the duty of all citizens to integrate themselves into and participate in this new state. Universities had a special function to perform, since educators, professors and students were best placed to explain and disseminate the mission of National Socialism, and should “in an inner way”, as he later noted, “work together with the collectivity of the People in an authoritative way”.[17] Heidegger, assuming the role of a “praeceptor Germaniae” circa 1933, saw his duty as rector to make this process possible. He envisaged, however, a greater national arena of power, and sought to broaden that process beyond Freiburg to the other educational establishments of Germany through speeches and lectures, “to put into play the facilitating powers and essential goals” of National Socialism” (Das Rektorat 1933/34, page 24).

But Heidegger had to start with his home base. On 6 May, he addressed a congregation of newly matriculated students in Freiburg. By now, Heidegger’s concept of the new Nazi state had become entirely formulaic, and his talk was correspondingly structured around a series of standard National Socialist tropes: “the German People (“Volk”) as a totality has found the way back to itself under great leadership. Through this leadership, the People, who have come to their true selves, have created the state. The People that has shaped itself in this way is growing into a nation. That nation assures the destiny of the People”.

Heidegger’s promulgation of National Socialism took place not simply in language but through language. The above passage is remarkable in its repetition of a small number of recurring tropes, whose full weight only emerges in the original German: “das deutsche Volk im Ganzen hat sich selbst zückgefunden unter einer grossen Führung. In dieser Führung schafft das zu sich selbst gekommene Volk seinen Staat. Das in seinen Staat sich hineingestaltende Volk wächst hinauf zur Nation. Die Nation übernimmt das Schicksal ihres Volkes”.[18] Heidegger had prided himself in his lectures on his ability to make direct contact with students, and by so doing inspire them with his own type of interrogative thinking, which sought to keep all theoretical issues open to allow the enquiring mind to develop. Here, however, his students were presented with a litany intended to close down the enquiring mind. It was not just the content of Heidegger’s talk that was one dimensional: the very composition of Heidegger’s text is oppressive. The circular structure of his address, its hypnotic phrasing, which is sustained through the near chiasmus of each sentence (where the concluding words of the previous line provide the opening words of the following), the repetition of evocative tropes and the continuous use of self-reflexive formations (“sich”), the latter intended to give the impression that what was happening in Germany was emerging out of an inner process of self-determination. All are techniques that linguistically speak of a one dimensional mind.

Attempting to establish his credentials in the highest of places, on 20 May, Heidegger sent a telegram to Hitler asking for the postponement of the scheduled announcement of the managerial committee of the German university “Verband” until that organisation had been thoroughly “gleichgestaltet” (integrated into the Nazi state).[19] The telegram was largely gestural, an attempt to make contact with the Führer. It was an act of personal allegiance, since decisions of this nature were typically taken by the Minister for Education, Bernhard Rust. It is unlikely that Hitler would have read the telegram.

Heidegger wrote to the Führer, but he too was a Führer, in his own realm. On 23 May, he sent a lengthy memo to his colleagues on how they should conduct themselves in the forthcoming commemoration ceremony for Horst Wessel (an S.A. “storm-leader” assassinated by Communists in 1930), due to take place three days later. Heidegger’s concern for detail in his instructions was impressively meticulous. Precise times were given, as were locations, and the organisation of the procession specified according to the rank of the participants; he made clear what type and colour of robe or gown the participants should wear but, above all, what type of behaviour was expected: “right from the beginning of the procession, as well as at its end, strict silence is to be maintained and no greetings are to be exchanged”. Once seated, the Horst Wessel song would be sung, and on the repetition of the opening lines the right arm lifted (Nachlese zu Heidegger, pp. 15-16).

Within three weeks of becoming rector, Heidegger’s identification with the new state was total. The philosopher had become a bureaucrat. He sent out missals to his colleagues with an efficiency and a surety that suggested that he had finally arrived and that his theoretical pronouncements now had a greater purpose. One such memo was sent on 24 May, in which he instructed his colleagues to fill out the questionnaire that accompanied the new ethnic law for civil servants by 1 June. He drew their attention, in particular, to clauses 4: a and b, where “non-Aryans” were asked whether they could not see their exclusion from public life as early as August 1914 (the outbreak of the First World War). It was a strange and provocative question, where answering “yes” or “no” was equally damming.

The martyrdom momentum of National Socialism (its generation of hatred out of a persecution complex, a mentality to which Heidegger seemed particularly drawn) reached its apogee in the commemoration of Albert Leo Schlageter held each year on 26 May. Schlageter had been a member of the German Freikorps, a paramilitary organisation formed after the First World War and committed to undermining the Weimar Republic by carrying out acts of sabotage against the occupation French forces. Schlageter was arrested in 1923 for destroying a railroad track in the Ruhr, and was executed by the French military. For those who stood politically to the Right, he became a symbol of heroic resistance to the imposed “system” of the Weimar Republic. The carrying out of the annual commemoration, in which Schlageter was sanctified as the saint of self-sacrifice, gave full scope to the ritualistic character of National Socialism, and its mobilisation as an ersatz religion.[20] As Farías observes, “in 1933, Schlageter was declared the first National Socialist German soldier and was thereby … elevated as a cult figure”.[21] In Heidegger’s speech, given on the front steps of the university, and surrounded with the full pomp of banners and uniforms, he attempted “a political application of his authenticity philosophy” (Safranski p. 242), stressing the solitude of Schlageter’s final hours and the “hard death” that he gave himself over to – not a heroic death in battle but one in front of a firing squad. But it was a death willingly given for a future Germany, and, as Heidegger stressed, “the participants in the memorial ceremony should let the ‘hardness’ and ‘clarity’ of that death ‘stream’ into their very selves’” (quoted in Safranski, page 242).

It was standard practice for new rectors to give an inaugural speech, to demonstrate that they had reached this position through academic achievement and participation in university life. Accordingly, on 27 May, Heidegger gave a talk on “The Self-determination of the German University” (“Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität”). The event was attended amongst other dignataries by the minister for culture in Baden, the rector of the University of Heidelberg, and the archbishop and mayor of Freiburg. As with the Horst Wessel commemoration the previous day, the occasion was an opportunity for a nationalist pageant. In his talk, Heidegger exploited the same lofty tone and the same cultic solemnity evident in the Horst Wessel ceremony. Was this an act of identification with the Nazi martyr? (an identification already made in the Schlageter commemoration. Indeed, is this how Heidegger really wished to engage with National Socialism – on a ritualistic-symbolic level?). The ceremonial tones of the occasion took his colleagues by surprise. As Manfred Geier relates (drawing upon contemporary sources), “many of the conservative and liberal members of the Plenary Senate, who had voted for the famous philosopher, because they expected from him a wise and measured higher education policy, were shocked by the theatre [of the event], which Heidegger himself had stage managed. They had to stand upright and sing both the “Deutschlandlied’ and the Horst Wessel song … on the fourth line they were to raise their arms and shout ‘Sieg Heil’ ”.[22]

In his speech, Heidegger identified three forms of duty that students must in the future perform. Existing alongside Wissensdienst (the service of Knowledge i.e., the university)”, there was Arbeitsdienst (service in the government-organised emergency labor force), and Wehrdienst (paramilitary service in the Sturmabteilung force). In his vision of National Socialism all three were connected in a “community of struggle”, a “Kampfgemeinschaft”, although, typically, Heidegger does not say how this would happen (indeed, according to the later testimonies of Heidegger’s colleagues, these three duties in fact interfered with one another, physical-cum-quasi martial exercises displacing the time and energy of the students for academic work). [23] The speech was elevated in tone and rhetorically dense. As Karl Löwith, one of his erstwhile pupils who was in the audience, observed, Heidegger enlisted the philosophical concepts formulated earlier in Being and Time in the service of political expediency. “Heidegger’s speech was philosophically demanding – a minor stylistic masterpiece. But from a strictly philosophical standpoint, it was strangely ambivalent from beginning to end. It succeeded in positing existential and ontological categories at a specific historical ‘moment’ (Sein und Zeit, para 74) in a way that suggested that their philosophical intentions a priori go hand in hand with the political situation, and that academic freedom goes with political coercion”.[24]  Nowhere, as Löwith continues to tell us in his account, was the logic of this connection spelt out.

At the centre of Heidegger’s speech lies one crucial question: is academic scholarship (“Wissenschaft”) of any relevance today? The answer that he gave would have dumbfounded the party faithful. Scholarship is certainly relevant to today’s Germany, but only if “we place ourselves under the power of the beginning of our intellectual-historical Dasein. This beginning is the flowering of Greek philosophy. In it for the first time, Western mankind stood up out of its identity as a folk on the basis of its language against existing powers and confronted and grasped true Being”.[25] For the Greeks, scholarship and intellectual activity were more than a mere superficial matter of culture; they formed the very core of their lives, as they lived it in the polis: “for the Greeks, scholarship was not simply a cultural asset but the most inward determining form of the Dasein of the entire national state” (Heidegger Selbstbehauptung, page 110).

The new Germany must take unto itself the legacy of the Greeks. Their philosophy knew no distinctions of historical time or place, and neither does the spirit of the new Germany, for “the beginning is still here. It lies not behind us, as something that is long since gone, but is before us in advance anticipating the greatest of all that will come” (Selbstbehauptung, page 110). It is by incorporating and mobilising the primal energies of Greek thinking, and integrating them into the dynamic politics of the present, that scholarship and learning in the universities can go forward: “it is only by identifying with the People [‘Volk’], by being cruciallyaware of the role of the state, and realising what our intellectual duty is that will produce in us true knowledge about the essence of scholarship, whose bringing to fruition has been given to us as a task” (Selbstbehauptung, page 110). These were sentiments drawn from the political rhetoric of the day, and most listeners might well have expected Heidegger to have ended his speech with appropriately concluding words, such as a trenchant quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, since the redolent trope of “Kampf” had been used throughout the talk. Heidegger, however, did not quote Hitler. He found a different and, for many in the audience, a surprising author for his concluding sentiments: Plato, from whose Republic Heidegger took the maxim, spoken by Socrates, that “everything great stands in a storm” (Republic 497 d, 9) (Selbstbehauptung, page 117). As Manfred Geier observes, “storm” is an idiosyncratic way of translating the Greek “episphale”, which can more accurately be rendered as “swaying” or even “uncertain”.[26] But the “storm” motif had become part of Heidegger’s vocabulary in describing the events of 1933 (and had already appeared in the letter to Blochmann of 19 January, where he had first expressed his enthusiasm for National Socialism). Here, as the concluding word in his speech, “storm” is intended to convey a sense of energy and drama, of a natural force or event that was taking place in the immediacy of the moment and is, as was the Nazi “revolution”, unstoppable.

Although one reviewer, Richard Harder, professor of Classics at the University of Kiel, praised the “Rede” as a “militant speech, a call to arms of the mind, a determined and compelling commitment to the present”,[27] many in the audience would have been mystified by it. Most Party faithful would have expected a Germanic content and would have seen the recourse to the ancient Greeks either as a distraction from the actual goals of the new Germany, or even as something worse, a reactionary position, elitist even and not in keeping with the levelling process aimed at in the “Volksgemeinschaft”. The play with conflicting notions of time (past, present and future are all elided into the same space at one point in his speech) and the focus on the potency of language introduce a degree of intellectual sophistication that some might have felt to be not in keeping with pragmatic needs of the day. Others might well have viewed Heidegger’s reference to “volklich’” instead of “völkisch“, as an expression revealing political confusion. Indeed, those members of the audience (and many were wearing S.A. uniforms) expecting a forthrightly political focus, an inspirational paean to the new regime, could not have helped but notice that there was a complete absence of reference to Hitler or National Socialism. And the final use of the “storm” motif might have been seen by many as simple literary affectation.

But there were problems not only with the content of Heidegger’s talk but also with its delivery. Nazi culture was a physical culture where the body and demeanour mattered. In his talk, Heidegger did not make a good impression, either as a speaker or as a man. Bernd Martin (drawing upon the observations of a contemporary historian, Hermann Heimpel, who was amongst the audience), offers us the following brief but very revealing pen sketch of the reception of Heidegger’s talk. If Heidegger was seeking to impress the National Socialist youth, which he had repeatedly extoled as the harbingers of the new Germany, he did not succeed: “the new generation of power bearers looked completely bored throughout the speech, and had shown more interest in gazing at their brown boots stretched out in front of them. The little man standing up there at the lectern, dressed in his academic robe, they disregarded as not of their own”.[28] This would not be the last time that Heidegger, purely on his looks and comportment, would be deemed as foreign to the new Germany.

In a private tête-à-tête following the talk, the Baden minister of culture, Otto Wacker, criticised Heidegger and his speech on a number of accounts, but most notably for its lack of reference to the importance of race. The views that Heidegger had expressed in his talk, Wacker concluded, represented a type of “private National Socialism”, one that approximated to an idealistic “deutscher Sozialismus” centred purely on the moral and spiritual will of the community. It was a version of National Socialism that, in the view of Wacker, as Heidegger later related, “evaded the perspective of the Party programme” and did not represent the political agenda of the new state (Das Rektorat 1933/34, page 30). Heidegger, indeed, was fully aware of the importance of race as “Volk”, but for him the latter was not a concept based on genetics or biology but was something that adhered to the local regionality of selfhood (and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that he was “working to build” “the racial policy” of the Third Reich, pace Payen page 373), For Heidegger, race was tied to the notion of “Heimat”, a position that became clear in his later essay, “Creative Landscape: Why do we remain in the provinces?” (“Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?”, 1934). “Volk” for Heidegger was an ontology of collective selfhood, particularly of a rural collective, although that there could, however, be a critical slippage between these two versions of “Volk”, between Nazi racism and idealised ethnicity, was something that Heidegger did not seem to have realised.

In the same period, the public and the private seem to have been moving in two different directions for Heidegger. On 10 June, he sent a postcard to Blochmann following her request of 21 April that he might act as a mediator with the Minister for Education regarding her suspension as a non-Aryan from her teaching duties in Halle. Heidegger had, indeed, attempted to intercede with Minister Rust, but his entreaties had got no further than one of the minister’s deputies, Alfred Baeumler. No decision had as yet been taken (the eventual decision was negative: she was suspended). This is so to speak the official record, but Blochmann should have known that Heidegger and particulalrly Elfride were staunch supporters of the new Race law.The postcard also reveals for the first time (and this is just less than two months after he had become rector, and only one month after he had joined the Nazi Party), Heidegger’s frustration with what he terms the “dilettantism” of administration within the Nazified educational hierarchy.[29]

Heidegger overcame his doubts and continued to promotewith vigour his vision of a unified National Socialist university system. On 10 and 11 June, he gave a paper in Berlin on “Teaching and Research”, and on the 18th he attended a meeting of the Academics’ Association in Berlin, which was later that week followed by a talk in Heidelberg on “The University in the New Reich”, a paper that led to a confrontation with Jaspers. What appalled Jaspers was Heidegger’s systematic denigration and dismissal of university culture (evident in Heidegger’s caustic comment that “the traditional university is dead”). Jaspers was also dismayed by the fanatical mindset expressed in statements such as “the possibility could exist that the university will suffer death through oblivion and forfeit the last vestige of its educational power” if it does not fully adopt the policies of the new state and free itself from “humanising Christian ideals”. Teaching and true research must be “interlocked with the whole through its rootedness in the Volk and its bond to the State”. During their conversation afterwards, Heidegger had come across to Jaspers like “a man intoxicated, with something threatening emanating from him’” (Jaspers quoted in Safranski, page 250). In his autobiography, Jaspers explained what happened later that evening: “at dinner, he said, in a very angry tone, that there were too many professors in Germany, that this was a absurdity, that we should only have two or three. ‘Which two or three then?’, I asked. No answer was forthcoming. I then said, ’how can such an uneducated man such as Hitler come to rule the country’? ‘Education is irrelevant’, Heidegger replied, ‘just look at his wonderful hands’ ”. (Heidegger Jaspers Briefwechsel page 257). The two men did, however, stay in touch, but the end was close.

Jaspers was not the only friend or colleague to be alienated by Heidegger’s uncritical worship of the new state. Rudolf Bultmann was another. The two had been colleagues in Marburg, and Heidegger seems to have developed a particular respect for Bultmann due to their shared affiliation with theology. Heidegger regarded Bultmann as a person of integrity who, unlike Jaspers, did not hanker after public recognition. The correspondence between the two is voluminous and detailed. On 18 June, Bultmann sent a letter to his friend. The former had read extracts from Heidegger’s rector’s speech in the newspapers. He wrote, “they deeply moved me and continue to move me – so that I was unable to send just a short message of thanks – because I lacked the peace of mind for it”. These are sound positive words, and Heidegger might well have been expecting that the letter would continue in this vein, but it did not. The real reason that Bultmann could not write a note of congratulation was because he had severe reservations about what his friend was doing and the values that supported that doing. Unlike Jaspers, who had been reluctant to confront Heidegger with his reservations, Bultmann went into critical detail. Heidegger had written in his speech, “we want to be ourselves!” [“wir wollen uns selbst!”]. Bultmann retorts, “how blind this wanting seems to me” It is an empty activism. It has nothing to do with the “struggles that are taking place within the world of the spirit”. Bultmann then goes to the heart of the matter: what the Nazis have brought about is “an atmosphere of hubris and clandestine fear that oppressively spreads around everything”. And he concludes by sending his friend his best wishes, but these wishes come “out of a concern that you have not committed yourself to the right place at the right time”.

Heidegger believed his mission was to establish a National Socialist pedagogy in German universities, and he travelled the length and breadth of the country in furtherance of this. But there were moments when he suspended this public role in response to an inner need and something that possibly might be called conscience. On 12 July, Heidegger wrote to the Baden Education Minister, Eugen Fehrle, who had instructed him to pension off two of his Jewish professorial colleagues, the classicist, Eduard Fraenkel, and the chemist, George de Hevesy. Heidegger wrote to Fehrle saying that he was fully aware of the necessity of implementing the measures outlined in the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”, but both of these men had international reputations and the standing of the University and that of German academia would be seriously impaired by their dismissal. And he added, “in my opinion, in these cases the precondition of excepted probation in a fully exceptional measure is realised”. There is, however, no such clause as “exempted probation” in the 1933 Law.[30]  Fraenkel had also failed to meet certain requirements spelt out in the questionnaire, particularly regarding his efforts in the First World War. On 19 July, Heidegger wrote again to the Ministry, pointing to a number of mitigating circumstances that prevented Fraenkel’s participation in the war effort. De Hevesy was allowed to stay, but Fraenkel was dismissed.

For all his avowed commitment to National Socialism, Heidegger could not accept one of its central tenets (indeed, perhaps its central tenet): antisemitism.[31] During the course of his professional life (and, indeed, in his personal life) Heidegger had befriended many from that faith, from students such as Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt in Marburg to Herbert Marcuse and Emmanuel Lévinas in Freiburg. And for all of his differences with the Jewish Edmund Husserl (who had been forced to retire from his position at Freiburg, but well before Heidegger became rector) there is nothing to suggest that these differences were founded on anything other than philosophical divergences.  Even in 1933, he was still writing to his erstwhile pupil, Karl Löwith. (It is possible to see here one further reason for his later marginalisation from the hard-line Nazis in the educational establishment).

On 21 August, a new constitution for German universities was put in place by the Education Department in Baden, designating Heidegger as the Führer rector, which allowed him to make decisions unilaterally without consulting the senate. He had been rector since May and ambassador for the National Socialist reconfiguration of German universities since then, but he clearly felt his direction had not produced the results that he hoped for. On 22 August, he wrote to Carl Schmitt, jurist and major figure in the legal establishment of the Nazi government, the author of The Concept of the Political (1932), ostensibly regarding a publication of the latter, but the real matter was Heidegger’s growing disillusionment with the institutional direction of the universities and their failure to put the tenets of National Socialism into place. He vented his frustration to Schmitt: “unfortunately here things are desolate. The cohort of intellectual forces that should lead us into the future is becoming ever scarcer”.[32] It is a note of disillusionment that will increase over the coming months, although Heidegger did all he could to suppress it and to push on with plans for institutional reform.

Matters had become critical with Jaspers. On 23 August, he wrote to Heidegger, who had sent him a copy of his rector’s speech. Jaspers wrote back in positive tones, praising the speech: it had a “real substance”, which makes it the “only document until now that has any actual academic sense of purpose that will last”. In reality, however, Jaspers was appalled at what he had read, but he withheld his damning judgement in the interest of their friendship. As he noted regarding the concluding words of Heidegger’s speech “everything great stands in a storm”: “the image is pure gesture and full of false pathos, without truth” (Notizen, p. 35). He was later to write, “Heidegger’s intellectual quality was still there, but the content of his speech and Heidegger’s actions had sunk to an unbearably abject and alien niveau” (Heidegger Jaspers Briefwechsel, p. 258). What so dismayed Jaspers were sentiments such as the following: “the much-lauded academic freedom is being expelled from the German university, for this freedom was a fake freedom because it was only a negative one. It primarily meant being disengaged, arbitrary in one’s views and inclinations, uncommitted in one’s actions and behaviour” (“Selbstbehauptung”, page 113). Independent thinking, promoted by Heidegger himself in all of his earlier lectures, and the encouragement to say no to existing models of philosophy, is here undone. Philosophy now meant not critical thinking but adhering to the dominant ideology of the period.

Heidegger’s efforts to integrate National Socialism into the university system continued through the following months. On 30 August, writing to Blochmann from his cabin in Todtnauberg, Heidegger had explained how he set great store on the “Dozentenschule” that was being planned by the education department in Berlin. “Everything depends on the education of the teaching staff. As the primary educators, they must educate themselves [in National Socialism] thereby finding a secure and constant form. Otherwise, the whole thing will choke on mere organisation”. What was required was the decisive will to implement such policies. Heidegger supported the initiative but, once again, feared that there were insufficient numbers of committed people to see these measures through. In fact, Heidegger was wavering in his optimism regarding the new state, and started to express for the first time disgruntlement with the demands of being a rector. In the same letter, he said that he was sorry that things had still not been clarified in Berlin regarding Blochmann’s exemption from the Aryan clause of the questionnaire, and that he was not able to reassure her that there would be a positive outcome. His personal intervention in her case meant little because he was, he felt, being schemed against: “they are very distrustful [of me], and there are also intrigues”.

On 4 September, Heidegger received for the second time the offer of a chair from Berlin University (the first offer was made on 28 March 1930). It came, as he explained to Blochmann the following day, “connected with a political duty”. He travelled with Elfride for the interview on the 8. On the 30th, he declined the nomination. He gave his reasons in a memo sent to his Freiburg colleagues: “I will not be going to Berlin but will stay at our university and try, through the possibilities that are available according to the provisional constitutional rules set down in Baden, to reach a genuine and lasting reality in order to prepare a unified plan for a future university constitution for entire Germany. At the request of government departments in Berlin, I will for the future remain in the closest contact with the work being done there”.[33]

It was at this time that Heidegger declined similar a similar nomination to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Munich, but this was less a matter of Heidegger rejecting Munich as Munich rejecting Heidegger. In general, Heidegger’s modus operandi and presentation of self were becoming suspect. One internal report from the philosophy department at  Munich described his philosophy as a “methodologically disorganised confession of a faith”, adding “he is less an educator as someone who attempts to inspire and intoxicate young people through his language” (quoted in Martin page 33). As Martin summarises, Heidegger’s “frenetic activity, his ritualistic promulgation of a new beginning, his dictatorial treatment of his colleagues” were starting to give signs that there was an egregious messianic quality to his character (Martin page 36).

On 14 September, Blochmann wrote again saying that there had been a change of personnel in Halle and that she thought she would find greater favour now. On the 19th, Heidegger replied, saying that her appeal had still not been resolved in Berlin. On the 23rd, Blochmann wrote to say that she had been officially dismissed from her post. Heidegger was, in fact, as he related in his letter of the 19, having his own problems in Berlin. The call to the Chair had been tied to an administrative assignment as leader of the Prussian Union of Teachers. “Academic activity was a secondary consideration”. Behind all these machinations, he felt that there lay a “higher power” and that he had become a pawn in a political-administrative game, as competing groups, and specific individuals within those groups, jockeyed for control of the educational apparatus of the Third Reich. It was gradually dawning on Heidegger that, on account of his national and international reputation, he was being treated simply as a titular figure.

The key players within the academic policy formation of the new state were Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baumler. Both were at the centre of power: Baumler in Berlin, and Krieck in Frankfurt. In terms of propaganda , Krieck, as editor of the journal A People in the Making (Volk im Werden) was the more important of the two, but in terms of institutional centrality, it was Baumler who exerted the greatest influence, as professor of philosophy in Berlin and director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy. The relationship between Heidegger, Krieck and Baumler was complex and fraught. Through his encounter with them, Heidegger came to feel that, within the educational politics of the new Nazi Germany, he did not have the support from the higher echelons that Krieck and Baumler had, both of whom were confidants not only of the Minister for Education, Bernhard Rust, but also of Alfred Rosenberg, leader of the Party’s Foreign Policy Office and recognised as the leading theoretician in the Nazi Party. The subtleties of the power games were, as Heidegger confided to Blochmann on 19 September, “bottomless”.

It was also in this visit to Berlin in September 1933 that Heidegger seems to have realised for the first time that his personal vision of National Socialism and the reality of Nazism were not the same. On the level ideology (its anti-Communism, the promotion of a völkisch state and Germanic fundamentalism) they looked the same, but beneath that ideology Nazism worked on a different level. Indeed, on this latter level, Nazism possessed the internal dynamics of closed groups such as the Mafia: both employed the use of violence, which the Nazis demonstrated in the Night of the Long Knives of 30 June-2 July 1934, where brutal political pragmatism was infused with personal vendettas. Indeed, as with the Mafia “aggression was a socially sanctioned form of action”.[34] Nazi party organisations were crisscrossed with similar petty contestations for power on a local level, the same sleezy quid pro quos, the modus operandi of personal preferment, exploitation of fear, the cultivation of insecurity, cronyism, sycophantic affiliations, and jockeying for positions within the hierarchy, the same practice of intimidation and strong-arm techniques to achieve personal ambition. It was a system of terror framed by the absence of humane ethical standards. As with the Mafia, the Nazi Party too could be typified as a “central criminal association, with a strict code of honour and its own constitution and initiation rites” (see Arlachchi, page  3). It was this alliance, in Hannah Arendt’s words “between the mob and the elite”, that Heidegger failed to recognise in 1933 (Arendt quoted in Safranski page 231).

This was not a world to which Heidegger belonged or wished to belong, as he made clear in a prose work of this period, published in March 1934: “Creative Landscape: Why do we remain in the provinces?” (“Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?”). The text is, in fact, a distantiation not only from Berlin but (indirectly) from those who inhabited that world – including the careerist self-promoting aspirants in the Nazi Party. “Provinces” in the title is not quite the right word, for where Heidegger chooses to remain is in his cabin in Todtnauberg. It is a place of retreat, beyond time and history, where he can be on his own (“but this isn’t loneliness, it is solitude”).[35] His only human contact is with the local small farmers (translated in the English version of the text as “peasants” but “small farmers” lacks the pejorative connotations of “peasant”). It is in his cabin, surrounded by an ever-changing sky and a landscape that knows its own rhythms, that Heidegger has his “work-world”, and where he can make contact with an inner self that is “rooted in the Alemannia-Swabian soil” (“Creative Landscape”, pages 9 and 11). But when he tells us this, he is careful to emphasize that this is an experiential reality, and that he is not just mouthing the “dishonest chatter about ‘folk-character’” that has become fashionable in certain circles (and Heidegger can only mean amongst the ideologues of the Nazi Party). Their ideological appropriation of peasant culture Heidegger views as a “pernicious falsehood” (“verderblichen Irrglauben”) (“page 12). The text “Creative Landscape” represents, in fact, Heidegger’s first step away from what he had come to regard as the wrong type of National Socialism.

And yet, Heidegger did not give up hope that the right type of National Socialism might be found. Between 4–10 October, Heidegger hosted a camp (“Lager”) in Todtnauberg, “a mixture of scout camp and Platonic academy founded around the “philosophy” of National Socialism” (quoted in Safranski,page 260). The camp was testimony to Heidegger’s conviction that the future of his pedagogic plans lay with students and not with professors. As well as his own students intending to attend his lecture course in the coming semester, students from Tübingen and Heidelberg were also invited. In his own words, the camp “was intended to prepare teachers and students for the work of the semester proper, to explain my views on the nature of academic scholarship (“Wissenschaft”), and to put these views up for discussion and debate” (quoted in Hugo Ott page 227). As he had written in a letter sent out to forthcoming participants, “the success of the camp depends on how much new courage we can muster, on our clearness of vision and alertness for what is to come, on how we can free ourselves as far as possible from the past, and on the strength and resolve of our embrace of loyalty, sacrifice and service. From these powers spring true allegiance. And this alone can sustain and strengthen genuine German fellowship” (quoted in Hugo Ott page 229).

On 13 October, Blochmann wrote again: she was emigrating to England since she could see no way of securing a livelihood in Germany. As she explained, several universities there had departments dedicated to the education of social workers (an area in which she had expertise), but she would also be happy to teach German in a girl’s public school. Heidegger replied three days later, telling her not to give up hope but, if she were to go abroad, she “should go as quickly as possible, show up in person and do the rounds, of course, with all the necessary documents”. It was advice that Blochmann took, leaving Germany in January 1934 and, via Holland, arriving in England soon after. After unsuccessfully seeking employment in London, she finally secured the position of “Lektorin” at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (the initial invitation was for two months, but it was extended). She then became tutor of German in the same college, from where she wrote to Heidegger on 26 February 1934, saying that she had not entirely abandoned hope of coming back to Germany. She eventually did return but not until 1952, when (now a British citizen) she was appointed to the newly founded Chair of General Education (Pedagogy) at the University of Marburg.

Heidegger’s hopes for a transformation of German higher education and for his role in that transformation were by the end of 1933 fading. What was not fading, however, was his faith in Hitler. On 11 November, he attended a celebration of the Führer in Leipzig. Hitler had called for a plebiscite the following day to confirm him as the sole source of political power in Germany and to give support to his decision that Germany should leave the League of Nations. The outcome was a formality, but one (according to Heidegger) that was supported by the “fundamental law of honour” inscribed into the new state. As Heidegger made clear in his speech given at this time (in terms whose logic is convoluted and specious): “the German People have been called to cast a vote for the Führer, but the Führer asks nothing from the People. Rather he is giving the people the most immediate possibility of a free decision, the noblest one – that is, to know if the entire People want their own existence or if they do not want it. Tomorrow the People decide nothing less than their own future” (quoted in Victor Farías page 157). For Heidegger, Hitler was an absolute who transcended the petty machinations for power in which Heidegger was increasingly becoming embroiled. This and other speeches at the time (he gave a further one a few days later in Tübingen) is clear “evidence of an irrational infatuation, of a desperate clinging to an ideal whose actual development had long since gone” (Quoted in Bernd Martin, page 35).

Towards the end of 1933, a new imperative came to the fore in Heidegger’s thinking. Clearly frustrated by his attempts to implement National Socialism in the universities, he now decided that students must cease to view themselves purely as scholars.  On 25 November, he gave a radio talk on “The Student as Worker”. This would be the first in a number of talks that Heidegger would give over the following months stressing the bond between intellectual work and manual labour. As was clear from his “Call for Work Service”, given on 23 January 1934, the concept of manual labour was becoming an ideal, the pivotal value in his vision of a university that would have immediate practical value, “for such service creates the basic experience of toughness, of closeness to earth and tools, of a rigour and the discipline of the simplest physical activity and, with it, what is most essential working in a group’ (GA 16: 238). The concept of intellect, which the ‘educated and their envoys still wish to retain as the actual position of the ‘intellectually creative’, will be entirely abolished” (GA 16: 238-239). It is an educational policy that brings with it a totally new conception of academic knowledge: “the knowledge [“Wissen”] of genuine scholarship [“Wissenschaft”] is essentially not at all different from the knowledge that farmers have, or lumberjacks or excavators and miners. For knowledge means: to know one’s way around in the world into which we have been put, collectively [“gemeischaftlich”] or singly” (Nachlese, page 201).

It is a utopia of converging wills uniting “those who labor with their hands with those who perform brain work”.[36]  But Heidegger’s rhetoric floats free from its subject. His notion of “knowledge” remains undefined, and the practical ways that the knowledge of lumberjacking might engage with university education are left unspecified. Indeed, it is inconceivable how a unified concept of “knowledge” as posited in Heidegger’s talk could be arrived at to merge these two practices. But such is the imperative for Heidegger in this and other speeches to find unity and convergence in his vision of the new state that he simply occludes the logical aporia that this process entails.

This was, however, “Führertum” conducted in the suburbs of Freiburg. No one is listening other than the local Party faithful and those who worked for the provincial Nazi newspaper, the Alemanne. The speech to the workers was one of Heidegger’s final speeches as rector of Freiburg University. Towards the end of February 1934, he announced his intention of resigning from that post, this resignation to take effect from 23 April. The signs had been there as early as September of the previous year, when he declined the chair in Berlin, and when he realised that his own idealised version of National Socialism was entirely ineffectual and out of keeping with the power politics that was the reality of Nazism. More specifically, Heidegger’s authority to appoint and retain staff was being undermined by the Education Department. As he was retrospectively to note in 1945, “the growing disapproval of my work as rector by the ministry was soon manifested in the impertinent request that I replace the deans of the Faculties of Law and Medicine (Professor Wolf, Professor Möllendorff) with other figures, on the grounds that they were politically unacceptable. I refused to accede to this request and tendered my resignation“ (quoted in Hugo Ott, page 235).

Such sentiments cast Heidegger in an overly positive light. Hugo Ott’s explanation is more in keeping with the logic of the situation: “Heidegger had aspired to a leading role – perhaps the leading role – within the new university system of the Third Reich. That hope had proved chimeric” (page 244). Heidegger would have agreed. As he related later in an interview to Der Spiegel interview: “I spoke with the Minister [Rust] in November 1933 in Berlin. I presented my views to him on academic scholarship and the universities and the possible structure of the faculties. He listened to everything so attentively, that I had hope that my presentation would have an effect. But nothing happened “ (page 33).

There were, however, other reasons for Heidegger’s marginalisation . Heidegger had attracted many enemies both to his person and to his style of philosophy from within the Nazified academic and educational hierarchy. As Hugo Ott writes, there existed a “conspiracy between his Freiburg colleagues, the Minister of Education and the Heidelberg faction that controlled him – by which Heidegger meant Gauleiter Scheel and the rector of Frankfurt University, Ernst Krieck” page 235). Krieck, along with Heidegger and Baumler, was a member of a committee of university professors dedicated to promulgating National Socialism (the KADH). The members of this group shared an ideology, but otherwise they had little in common. in a letter of 30 March to Elisabeth Blochmann Heidegger described Krieck’s programme as “subaltern” and, on a personal level, Krieck gave the impression of a “small, upwardly-mobile, self-promoting” type who, in spite of his “control of the phraseology of the day”, lacked any “knowledge of the greatness and severity of tasks ahead of us”. The personal hostility was tangible, and it was here that Heidegger would find his greatest challenge: in the terrain of personal interaction.

In addition, many from within the Nazi Party saw Heidegger’s quest for a new philosophical style not as a vital matter in his developing methodology but as a wilful and idiosyncratic expression of a peculiar mind. Both his person and philosophy, according to a former colleague in Marburg, the Professor of Psychology, Erich Jaensch, was “talmudic-rabulistic” (and, as the allusion to the Talmud suggests, being “Jewish” was no longer purely a matter of race but a way of thinking). Heidegger was a “dangerous schizophrenic”, the producer of “psycho-pathological documents” (quoted in Victor Farías, page 167). Heidegger’s neologistic language was unnecessarily difficult, linguistically opaque, obscurantist, and the tone of his writing and lectures arrogant. His tendency to question everything in philosophy had resulted in the destruction of any point where an intellectual hold on matters could be achieved. Krieck saw in Heidegger’s philosophy “a ferment of dissolution and subversion for the German People” (quoted in Manfred Geier page 93). As Krieck’s reference to “das deutsche Volk” implies, Heidegger lacked sympathy with the popular mind, something that was reflected in his use of language which, like that of Georg Simmel (with whom Heidegger has often been aligned), possessed a “Jewish quality”.[37] Heidegger, in fact, pursued an “un-German” line of total mystification. Regarding the terminology Heidegger used in Being and Time, where he attempted to find a new vocabulary for shades of meaning and contact with the world not hitherto brought to the surface, Krieck observed, “it is the goal of his philosophy to make the straightforward twisted, the elementary obscure, the simple confusing, the clear impenetrable, the sensible unsensible” (“Vom Deutsch”, page184).

Things were, however, already over for Heidegger. On 2 May 1934, he wrote to his successor as rector at Freiburg, the jurist professor Eduard Kern, explaining that he had resigned because he had not been able to achieve his “volkspolitischen” educational goals. He also made it clear that he would not be prepared to participate in any way in the traditional handing-over ceremony of the rectorship. The latter Heidegger now regarded as a superannuated office (a view that he did not hold a year earlier with his own ascension to the rectorship). In the meantime, Heidegger continued with his teaching duties. In the summer semester of 1934 (May – August), he gave a lecture course on “Logic as the Search for the Essence of Language” (“Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache”). In its opening words, Heidegger set out the problematic in which he and his students must work: “we will not join those who refuse to accept and learn the rules of logic, for they simply surrender themselves to inherited conceptual practices and pattern in an uncritical way. Those who think that they are freeing themselves from the formal rubbish of logic become the lowliest slaves to established forms of thought”.[38] So, logic must not be dismissed. What is necessary is that, in philosophical terms, it is undone from within. As Heidegger went on to argue in his lecture, we must identify what the real enemy was and destroy it: “what is required is a struggle (“Kampf”), in which our intellectual-historical Dasein becomes decisive. This requires a struggle but one for which today we still do not possess the relevant weapons, and there is something that is even more problematic, we do not even know who our enemy is, and therefore always run the risk, that instead of attacking and destroying him, we inadvertently make with him common cause.” (GA 38: 8-9). Heidegger’s lecture does not mobilise on any explicit level the ideology of National Socialism, but it nevertheless in places reproduces the spirit and, in place, the terminology of that ideology, as in section 13, which is a lengthy disquisition on what it is to be a ‘Volk’. In particular, the notion in the above passage of an enemy that lies within but cannot be seen parallels the Nazis’ claim that they were fighting a hidden enemy within the nation that was Communism and Jewry. Heidegger’s introductory words to his lecture reveal a political subconscious of which the philosopher seems unaware.

The bloody events of the Röhm putsch took place between 30 June and 2 July. As Heidegger tells us later, after that date it was blatantly clear what type of regime that any office-holder in the state, including in the universities, one would be dealing with (Das Rektorat 1933/34 page 40). And yet Heidegger was still a part of that state. Heidegger may have been disengaging himself from the public sphere, but academic commitments made the previous year had to be honoured. On 15–16 August 1934, he gave two lectures in a course for overseas’ students at Freiburg University. The lectures culminated in “the Essence of the National Socialist Revolution as the Transformation of German Reality”. Heidegger may have stepped back from his office as rector, but he still harboured hopes, as his paper “On the Establishment of a Docent School”, penned on 29 August, indicates, of giving some direction to the pedagogic development of the new state (even if his personal involvement will be minimal). The planned school was intended to prepare university teachers for the goals of the future German university. But this is, once again, the projection of a National Socialist ideal on a reality that does not exist.

Heidegger seems to have registered this at some level because he now retreated to his cabin in Todtnauberg – to think. As he told Elfride from there on 11 October, he has started to write again after almost eighteen months of sterility brought on by his political and administrative commitments. The uncritical idealism regarding Nazism has gone; the voice of reason returns: “I’ve now started writing again and – regardless of the new lecture course and its preparations [for the coming semester] – I’d like to keep writing for as long as there’s a storm blowing. In the months after the rectorship, I felt drained and was afraid that I had a long barren period before me. But now it [the will to think and write] is here again and quite different too – quite free, simple and essential, I feel – and yet it is difficult to hold on to because a new and unaffected language is needed”.

Perhaps in search for such a language or, more accurately, in search of a model for such a language, Heidegger turned not to philosophy but to literature, and to one author in particular, Friedrich Hölderlin. Heidegger had discovered Hölderlin’s poetry during the First World War while stationed in France through the edition published in 1913 by the young Norbert von Hellingrath, who was killed in action at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. As Heidegger had written to Elfride on 30 August 1918: “Hölderlin is at the moment turning into a new experience for me – as though I were approaching him wholly primordially for the first time”. Now, too, in 1934, Heidegger draws inspiration from the poet, in the solitude of his cabin. As he wrote to Elfride in a letter of 11 October: “it is difficult being alone with Hölderlin – but it is the difficulty of everything great”. In fact, Heidegger will return throughout his writing, in essays written typically as lectures over a number of years, from “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (1936), through to a final study, “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” (1959), celebrating a poet in whom he saw the voice of “the great beginning that may possibly come”, a poet who found his poetry “in the shining of earth and heaven, in the holy which conceals the god, in the poetising-thinking Being of mankind”.[39]

On 30 November, Heidegger travelled to Constance to deliver a paper to the “German Society”. Its title was “The Contemporary Situation and the Future Task of German Philosophy” (“Die gegenwärtige Lage und die künftige Aufgabe der deutschen Philosophie”), in which he argued that the “historical Dasein” of a People is established “through poetry and the actions of the state”.[40] What purported, however, to be a statement on contemporary philosophy (although no contemporary philosophers are mentioned) soon elided into a treatise on history and the “inner possibility of history” (GA 16: 326). And here Heidegger gave full vent to the missionary rhetoric that had accompanied his appropriation of the politics of the new state, and within which, and its predictable rhetoric (he is still trapped, in one sense a victim of his own language). What he tells his audience is that we must recognise that “the past is the power of the mission; the future is the power of the commission. Only when we, feeling this power of the mission, draw our commission to us, are we able to be truly of the present” (“die Gewesenheit ist die der Sendung, die Zukunft ist die Macht des Aufrags. Nur wenn wir, unsere Sendung ahnend, unserm Auftrag uns zu-ringen, vermögen wir wahrhaft gegenwärtig zu sein”) (“Die gegenwartige Lage“, page 324). The only entity that guaranteed this coming to presence of this historical mission is the state, which makes possible “the release to inner freedom of all the essential energies of the People in accordance with the law of its inner order” (“Die gegenwartige Lage’, page 333). And yet, for all its statist rhetoric the paper was remarkable on one account: of all the major pronouncements that Heidegger made in this period, there is no mention of Hitler or National Socialism.

On 21 December, Heidegger wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann, who was now a resident in England, tutoring in German at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. The triumphalist tone of his earlier writing has gone as has the previous grandiose investments in politics. His style in this letter is more modest and sober in its ambit. He has returned to working on Hölderlin, but he does not think that the quality of what he has written so far is good enough to justify publication. He can and will do better as he anticipates what the future will hold: “but all of that [his recent lecture courses and seminar on Hegel] is only a preparation, clarification and mental attunement for the real task, which is quietly growing. Otherwise with the university, I have no contact at all”. As he later wrote, looking back at this critical turn in his life “after April 1934, I lived beyond the university, in so far as I took no interest in the ‘developments’ there, but only sought to carry out my basic duties of teaching to the best of my ability. But also teaching became in the years that followed more of purely a self-conversation in my essential thinking with myself (“Das Rektorat 1933/34, page 38). A form of inner emigration has begun.

[1] See Mary Fullbrook, A History of Germany: 1918–1990 (Oxford: OUP, 1992), 66–73.

[2] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, translated by Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 233-234.

[3] Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, translated by Allan Blunden (London, Basic Books, 1993), p. 203.

[4] Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany before and after 1933. Translated by Elizabeth King (University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 34.

[5] See Geier, p. 83.

[6] A.E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 9.

[7] See Manfred Geier, Martin Heidegger (Rowohlt, 2005), p. 89.

[8] In Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 184.

[9] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001), p. 4.

[10] Sein und Wahrheit, p. 4.

[11] Oliver, “The Psychological Dimension in Jasper’s Relationship with Heidegger” In Heidegger and Jaspers, edited by Alan M Olson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), p. 1.

[12] Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, edited by Hans Saner (Munich: Piper Verlag), p. 181.

[13] Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), p. 85.

[14] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, p. 238

[15] See Martin Heidegger, “In neue Aufgaben hineingestellt (Brief an den Bruder)” In Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 93.

[16] Martin Heidegger, “An die Deutschen Studenten” in Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken, edited by Guido Schneeberger (Bern, 1962), p. 13.

[17] Martin Heidegger, Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken in Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), pp. 21-43, p. 23.

[18] Martin Heidegger, “Zur Immatrikulation (6 May 1933)” in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 95.

[19] See Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 105.

[20] See Hans-Joachim Gamm, Der braune Kult. Dast Dritte Reich und seine Ersatzreligion (Hamburg, 1962). p. 24.

[21] Victor Farías, Heidegger and the Nazis, p. 89.

[22] Quoted in Manfred Geier, Martin Heidegger, p. 87.

[23] See Bernd Martin, “Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus”, in Martin Heidegger und das “Dritte Reich”, edited by Bernd Martin (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), pp. 26 and 35.

[24] Karl Löwith, My Life, p. 34.

[25] Martin Heidegger, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, pp. 107-117, p. 108.

[26] Manfred Geier, Martin Heidegger, p. 88.

[27] Harder in Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus, edited by Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski in Heidegger Jahrbuch 4, 2010, p. 140.

[28] Bernd Martin, “Einführung”, in Martin Heidegger und das Dritte Reich, edited by Martin, p. 4.

[29] Martin Heidegger, “Zum Minister nicht vorgedrungen”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 122.

[30] Martin Heidegger, “Stellungsnahme zur Beurlaubung der Kollegen v. Hevesy und Fraenkel”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), pp. 140-141.

[31] See Bernd Martin: “Martin Heidegger”, pp. 27-28; Hugo Ott, pp. 207-208; Alfred Denker, p.107; Manfred Geier,  p. 90).

[32] Martin Heidegger, “Hier ist es leider sehr trostlos”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 156.

[33] Quoted in Bernd Martin, p. 33. See also Farías, p. 162.

[34] Pino Arlacchi, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Verso Books, 1986), p. 12.

[35] Martin Heidegger, “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?”, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 9-13, p. 11.

[36] Martin Heidegger, “Zur Eröffnung der Schulungskurse für die Notstandsarbeiter der Stadt an der Universität”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 234.

[37] See Ernst Krieck, “Vom Deutsch des deutschen Sprachvereins”, in Volk im Werden (1934), p. 183.

[38] Martin Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2020), p. 8.

[39] See Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), pp. 176 and 162.

[40] Martin Heidegger, “Die gegenwartige Lage und die kunftige Aufgabe der deutschen Philosophie”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, 316-334, p. 318.

Chapter Six. The Way Within

1935-1945

(22 June 2024)

Was Heidegger a changed man after April 1934? He would have (and did) say, yes. Others, however, have answered no. It depends on the time frame; on what “after” means. It has been argued that following his resignation as rector in April, “Heidegger’s engagement with Führer and Volk remained for the meantime unbroken (see Bernd Martin, Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus, Darmstadt, 1989, page 36). This is true, but only on a theoretical-ideological not on a practical level. It was certainly the case that Heidegger gave talks such as “25 years after our graduation” in May extolling patriotic-nationalist values, and allowed himself to be co-opted onto occasional committees such as the “Board for Philosophy of Law of the Academy for German Law”, but his involvement and proselytizing for the new state had effectively ceased. Heidegger still believed in National Socialism but not (pace Guillaume Payen, Martin Heidegger’s Changing Destinies: Catholicism, Revolutions, Nazism, Yale UP, 2023, page 371) in the Nazism that had come to political power. As he asserted in his lecture “Introduction to Metaphysics” (“Einführung in die Metaphysik”, given in the summer semester of 1935), “what is entirely bandied around today as the philosophy of National Socialism has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement (see Einführung in die Metaphysik, Max Niemeyer, 1966, page 152). As Heidegger wrote to Kurt Bauch on 9 August 1935, the [Nazi] movement had become increasingly “kleinbürgerlich”, petit bourgeois, bereft of ideals and bogged down in bureaucracy, and he added “what I have been suffering under for a long time, and in recent years more than ever, is the sheer formlessness of our intellectual Dasein. What we need, albeit in an essentially changed form, are the cloisters of Jesuits and not the transference of semi-military forms into our ‘intellectual’ schooling”. Similar sentiments were uttered to Karl Löwith in April 1936, “there has never been such irresponsibility in matters of government and everywhere mediocrity has won the day” (Heidegger / Löwith Briefwechsel, page 200).

What followed Heidegger’s resignation of his rectorship was an attempt to find (as he wrote to Elfride on 11 October 1934), a regained focus for his life and work. This would be a return to philosophy, which would ultimately involve a rethinking of the function of language and a reappraisal of the legacy of the Greeks, notably the pre-Socratics Parmenides and Heraclitus. It was a significant shift from his previous philosophy, a “Kehre”, a conscious turning away from the descriptive analytic and grandiose system of Being and Time (see Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, Max Niemeyer, 1988, page 2). As Heidegger opined in his “Letter on Humanism” (“Brief über den Humanismus”, 1947), in Being and Time, he had remained largely within the language of metaphysics, simply explicating the conditions under which Being could be said to exist rather than allowing Being to manifest itself. Everything had been mediated by a need for systematic and categorial exactitude (almost in the fashion of Aristotle’s systems of classification) and had sought to find ever more precise inflexions for being-in-the-world. Such a methodology had been a mistake, because “all ‘contents’, ‘opinions’ and ‘itineraries’ within particulars must necessarily take us away from the heart of the “matter (GA 9: 328).

Heidegger must find a new direction. It is not, however, with political-pedagogical initiatives that he will begin, but with poetry. In the winter semester between November 1934 and March 1935, he lectured on “Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ ” (“Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘der Rhein’ “). What drew Heidegger to Hölderlin was both the poet’s epically figurative language and his elemental cosmography, in which the beliefs and myths of the Greeks continued as living realities into the present, and which Hölderlin celebrated in the sanctified ceremonies and customs depicted in poems such as “Bread and Wine”, “As on a holy day … “, “To the Fates”, and the poems discussed in Heidegger’s lecture course. All commemorate nature, the simple flowing of night into day, death and regeneration. Heidegger felt that Hölderlin looked forward to what poetry and thought, thought as poetry, might become through an eventual unity in a “new time”, a future of the mythic mind that would link “the time of the gods who have fled with the god who is coming (GA 4: 47). 

Heidegger began by stressing the relevance of Hölderlin to the present age. To appreciate this relevance, however, “we must go to him, the poet, and not bring him to us: we have no desire to align Hölderlin in any crudely relevant way with our times” (Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘der Rhein’ (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), page 4.). Before engaging with specific poems, however, Heidegger explained what was necessary for a true reading of a poem in general. “We should not ‘talk’ about the ‘poetic’. That is always an error, since of necessity a poem surely says on its own [‘selbst’] whatever it has to say” (page 5). But how do we reach this “selbst”? Certainly, not by cultivating the “nice feelings” of impressionistic poetic response (page 5). This just skims the surface of the text. But (and perhaps surprisingly) Heidegger also rejects intellectual and philosophical interpretations that seek to extract ideas from the poem, for “in place of the danger of talking the poem to death [‘Zerredens’] comes the danger of thinking it to death [‘Zerdenkens’]” (page 5).

This is not to deny that Hölderlin was an important thinker. On the contrary, “Hölderlin is one of our greatest; that is, one of our greatest thinkers for future generations because he is our greatest poet. A poetic turning to his poetry is, however, only possible as a thoughtful encounter with the revelation of Be-yng [‘Seyn’] that is achieved in his poetry, which emanated from a unity of poeticizing, thinking and Saying” (‘Sagen’, the word turned ontology). These are the “three powers of our foundational [‘ursprünglichen’] historical Dasein.  This Dasein lies at the centre of Hölderlin’s poetry but can only be reached through an empathetic immersion in his language and in the mythic totality of his texts, in a process of reading where analysis and intuition mutually support one another, as if in the mode of a hermeneutic circle. This is the only approach that is productive. “The most industrious compiling and assessing of circumstances, influences, precedents and conventions that contribute to the genesis of a poetic work are of no help to us unless we have thoroughly brought into ourselves the poetic work itself and the poetic Dasein of the poet within that work. And this is the point of our undertaking [in these lectures]” (page 7).

Heidegger now turned to the poems themselves, beginning with “Germania”.  What he deemed to be important was the “immediate tactile meaningfulness of its words (‘temple’, ‘funeral flames’, ‘valley’ and ‘rivers’, the Alps)” (page 14). For Heidegger, such words (athough simple substantives) were the building blocks of a mythic-epic construction of a world that made possible a substantiation of the ethos of homeland (“Heimat”), where culture was enjoined with nature. Such words acted both on a denotative level (they refer to physical actualities); but they also have an effect that is conative (they symbolise something).  Combining the two modes provides them with an “overarching-resonance”, a (“Schwingungsgefüge”), which grows out of the “particular metaphysical locale of the poetry in question” (page 7).

Although Heidegger saw this metaphysical locale as lying in the power of the poetic word, his readings of “Germania” and “Der Rhine” were not without their own covert politics. Although there is no explicit reference to National Socialism or to the Nazi state, the terminology of national (and arguably nationalist) sentiment is evident throughout, ranging from the introduction of the thematic core of “Germania” (“das Vaterland, unser Vaterland, Germanien”), where Heidegger outlined the substantive direction of the course, through to expressions of patriotic feeling and the appeal to the mission of post-war German youth (pages 9 and 11). And the entire lecture course culminated in a quotation from Hölderlin, “wir lernen nicht schwerer als das Nationelle frei zu gebrauchen” (“we learn nothing with greater difficulty than how to freely use the national”), words that were strategically placed to make the greatest impact at the end of the section of “The Rhine” poem.

Heidegger’s subtle politics emerge, above all, in his persistent references to the redolent tropes of “Heimat” and “Volk”, as in Section 9, which is an extended meditation on the theme on the former. By “Heimat”, Heidegger simply may have meant the conceptual and textual place of poetic achievement, where poetry returns to itself, but long before 1934 “Heimat” had become a key term in the rhetoric of nationalist politics and in the anti-modernity movement of the conservative revolution, representing the living space of the race and the cultural and ethnic origins of that race in rural as opposed to urban Germany. Similar connotations are possessed by the concept of “Volk”. In the section on “Poetry as the taking up of the gesture of the gods and the further gesture of the Volk “, Heidegger observes that Being is built into “the foundational walls of the language of the “Volk” by the poet, without the “Volk” perhaps having any intimation of this” (page 33). The Volk are the idealised recipients of the poetry, without which the latter cannot exist. These recurring tropes of “Heimat” and “Volk” in Heidegger’s discourse would have had distinct and easily recognizable overtones for his audience. 

In July 1935, Heidegger wrote his first letter for two years to Karl Jaspers. Heidegger had been prompted to write because he had just read Jaspers’ book Reason and Existence, in which he was acknowledged. The letter was a highly personal testimony and a revelation of his personal turmoil. Heidegger talked of his “strenuous groping” in his philosophy, carried out in an environment of solitude, “for my loneliness is almost total”.  he also spoke of his struggle with the past, his “confrontation with what I believed in and the disaster of the rectorship”. He included in his letter a translation of lines from Sophocles’ Antigone. It took Jaspers an entire year to reply, and when he did it was simply a terse thank you for the translation. The subtext was palpable. No further communication was necessary.

In the summer semester of 1935, Heidegger gave an “Introduction to Metaphysics” (“Einführung in die Metaphysik”). The course began with a challenging question: “why are there beings at all rather than just nothing?”. Heidegger uses this question to branch out into a series of further questions regarding philosophy and its purpose. His interest is primarily in the process of questioning itself, for “philosophy never makes things easier but only more difficult” (Einführung in die Metaphysik, Max Niemeyer, 1966, page 1). As he observes (quoting Nietzsche), “a philosopher: that is a human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams, extraordinary things” (page 10). To which Heidegger adds, “philosophising is questioning about the extraordinary. Yet as we said just earlier in an indicative way, this questioning rebounds upon itself, but not only what is asked about in terms of the extraordinary but also the very asking itself” (page 10).

To achieve this, however, we must look at the medium in which questioning must necessarily takes place: language. We should seek in ourselves to return to the “undestroyed naming power of language”, “undestroyed” because words have lost in their current usage the depth of meaning that they originally had. As he wrote to Imma von Bodmershof on 12 April 1964 (Briefwechsel 1959-1976: Vittorio KLosterman, page 57), language in the modern period was subject to an “increasing impoverishment and levelling-out”.  For example, in ancient Greek “phusis” meant “the abiding-energising sway of Being” Einführung in die Metaphysik, page11). That word has now degenerated into “physics”, a calculating methodology in modern science. The same is true with other concepts of the inceptive mind, such as “techne”. As Heidegger observed elsewhere, “for the Greeks, ‘techne’ meant neither art nor handicraft, but rather that which made things appear within what was present, as this or that or something else” (GA 7: 161). We have lost this sense of plenitude. Our present formulation “technology” reflects the imposition of a mechanical mindset that was foreign to that culture. Identifying, defining, rethinking the sway of Being now became the focus of the lecture course, and Heidegger returned to a number of questions that he had broached in the opening words of his lecture. Here we learn that “questioning first creates history”, “because it defines who we are, and it is only this questioning-confrontation that brings humanity back to Being that it itself is and has to be” (pages 109-110). Questioning con-figures the notion of humanity as a thinking experience. It is our active intellectual content with the mind. 

In late September 1935, Heidegger withdrew to his cabin to write the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Urspung des Kunstwerkes”). It is significant that the paper was never given in a conventional university venue. It was first given as a talk on 13 November to the Freiburg Aesthetics Society, and then in an expanded version in Zurich in January 1936 and later that year in Frankfurt. The title of the essay is, in fact, a homophone. “Ursprung” means in standard German “origin”, but if the prefix “Ur” is disengaged from the stem word “sprung”, the title can be read as “primal” or “originary” “leap”. As Heidegger’s explains, “art lets truth originate. Art, founding-preserving is the spring that leaps to the truth of what is in the work. To originate something through a leap, to bring something into Being from out of the source of its nature in a founding leap – that is what the word ‘origin’ (literally ‘primal leap’) means” (see “The Origin of the Work of Art”, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper, 1975, pages 77-78).

That “leap” is reflected in the conceptual structure of Heidegger’s text, which is crisscrossed by a plethora of terms that fall over one another in a density of statement. Subsequent to Being and Time, Heidegger was laying a new terminological basis for his philosophy, introducing concepts that will only be fully developed later. These included “Anwesenheit” (“presence of being”), “Unverborgenheit” (unconcealedness”, a term that Heidegger characteristically gives in its Greek form as “aletheia”, which first appeared in Being and Time but only now starts to acquire a centrality in his writing), “Lichtung” (“clearing” or “lighting”) and “das Offene” (the “Open”). Indeed, Heidegger found it necessary to add an addendum to the final version of his essay, in which he stressed its exploratory nature. He wrote: “in referring to this self-establishing of openness in the Open, thinking touches on a sphere that cannot be explicated here. The whole essay deliberately yet tacitly moves on the path of the question of the nature of Being” (page 86). Alfred Denker summarises Heidegger’s exposition as it emerges in the Origin essay thus: “putting into the truth of Being is the essence of art; truth means here the revelation of the conflict between world and earth; art, particularly poetry, opens up the world to a people and with that its history; it forms a system of meanings; the earth that is opened up is the earth in which mankind finds its living based; the relationship between world and earth is a contest in which the observer participates, and hence must learn to hear the language of the art work; the essence of the truth of disclosure consists in a conflict between light and obscurity (see Denker, Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit, Klett-Cotta, 2011, pages 161-162).

Art is a quite specific way of disclosing the Being of the object world, the world of things, and it is here that Heidegger begins his discussion. Art “grants the thing, as it were, a free field to display its thingly character directly” (page 25), and he gives as an example the painting of a pair of shoes by Van Gogh. Here nothing is peripheral to the shoes; even the presence of the human is missing. The shoes shine forth alone, in their singularity, in their full tangibility, “in truth” (page 35). Van Gogh’s shoes precede interpretation; indeed, they resist interpretation. It is this self-sufficient integrity that the Greeks had already reached in their art and architecture, and Heidegger focuses on one particular example: a Greek temple. He does not tell us which one because it is an archetype: a tangible reality representing the work of Greek art. Heidegger asks, what is the “thinglyness” of such a temple? His answer is succinct and summative. “A Greek temple portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley” (page 41), its elemental simplicity being a part of a spiritual radiance that encompasses all. “The temple in its standing-there first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. The view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. It is the same with the sculpture of the god, the votive offering of the victor in the athletic games. It is not a portrait whose purpose it is to make it easier to see what the god looks like; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself” (page 43). To think through these qualities of the work of art: the elemental self-sufficiency of Van Gogh’s shoes, the temple that “opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force” (page 44), is to reach a point where we can see that “the world worlds” (page 44). The latter term is a neo-logistic tautology, which precisely because of its self-referential form makes it apparent that neither artwork nor the world, when viewed correctly, need anything beyond it.

The art-work essay seems to spring from a new idiom in Heidegger’s philosophy, in which Heidegger i starting to seek for an ontology in and through art, but his official lecturing duties must continue. In the winter semester, between November 1935 and March 1936, he lectured on “The Question of the Thing: On Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Principles” (“Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendtalen Grundsätze”). As Heidegger explained in his introduction, what we shall ask here is this one question: what is a thing? The question is quite old. What remains ever new about it is simply that it must be asked again and again” (What is a Thing? South Bendt, 1967, page 1). Indeed, the notion of “a” or “the” “thing” occupied a privileged space in Heidegger’s philosophy, ranging from his explication of tactile phenomenology in Being and Time to his later essay “The Thing” (“Das Ding”), which was the first of his series of Bremen lectures, “Insight into that which is” (1950). In the latter essay, Heidegger explained that even the simplest of objects draws its unique presence, its internal selfhood, out of the four components of the “Geviert”, the “fourfold”, the elemental components of the world,. The Fourfold represented a counter vision to the techno-rationality that Heidegger saw dominating the modern mind. It was a form of spiritualized nature, an emanation of the godhead in the physical world. Its four elements were the earth, sky, the immortal and the mortal (GA 7: 178-180). It was Heidegger’s refashioning of pantheism. 

The “thing” in Heidegger’s lecture course has none of the latent spiritualism that it possesses in “The Fourfold”. On the contrary Heidegger’s modus operandi is entirely pragmatic. He began with a short introductory survey. “We understand the term ‘thing’ in both a narrow and broad sense. The narrow or limited meaning of ‘thing’ is that which can be touched, reached or seen i.e. what is present at hand (‘das Vorhandene’). In the wider meaning of the term, ‘thing’ is every affair or transaction, something that is in this or that condition, the things that happen in the world – occurrences, events” (page 5). Heidegger is only concerned with the former usage because this is where philosophy has traditionally engaged with the term. Consequently. he devotes the first part of the course to “The Various Ways of questioning about the Thing”, beginning with construing “the thing as a bearer of properties” (perhaps reflecting the “zu den Sachen selbst” imperative of the early phenomenologists) through to “truth – proposition (assertion) – thing” (pages 32-48) before finally arriving at the second part of the course and the philosophy of Kant.

By 1935, the Nazi movement had ossified into a state apparatus, bringing to the fore functionaries with little or no cultural knowledge. In matters of art, what mattered was adherence to a rigid party line. On 23 December 1935, Kurt Bauch, historian and colleague at Freiburg, with whom Heidegger had been corresponding since 1933, wrote about a recent scholarly paper he had given: “my talk in Karlsruhe [on the fifteenth century engraver, Martin Schongauer] was pulled to pieces in the Nazi press because it did not demonstrate a commitment to the new spirit”. And he added (ironically), “we are heading towards nice times ahead”. Bauch (who like Heidegger was also a member of the Nazi Party) did not say exactly what was missing from his paper, but it was possibly his apolitical scholarship and, above all, his lack of reference to the race of his subject: his failure to specify the Arian origins of Schongauer. Heidegger replied three days later: “it is not worth it anymore, all of that. What remains for us is dissimulating stupidity and within ourselves miming a monumental laughter – and beyond that, and that means for the next hundred years, to continue working”. As he wrote to Bauch once again, on Easter Saturday, it is essential to find a “counter poise to this worldless world”.

And yet, Heidegger would not give up on the idea that National Socialism, in some form or other, was or could be a cause for the good, as a fusion of nationalism, which would promote the commonwealth of the German people, and socialism, which would bring about a classless society. His disenchantment was with how National Socialism had been put into practice by the current Nazi state, with its increasing bureaucracy and its internal struggles between power-hungry mediocre aspirants.  As he wrote once again to Bauch on 7 June 1936, “I have the feeling that at some level things are coming to an end; National Socialism would be attractive but only as a barbarian principle – it shouldn’t be so petit bourgeois”, “barbarian” in the sense that National Socialism needed to regain the primitive energy that it once had, initially in its early days as a “movement” and then later in its first year in power.

On 2 March, Heidegger wrote to his wife from the cabin where he was working on his paper “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (“Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung”), which he was to give the following month in Rome at the Italian Institute for German Studies. Heidegger travelled there with the entire family (presumably as an overseas cultural experience for the latter) and duly gave his talk. This would be a rare venture beyond Germany. During this visit, he met up with his former pupil, Karl Löwith, who as a Jew had been expelled from Germany and was now living and working in Italy. He was present at Heidegger’s paper, which he judged favourably: it was “masterly, artistically constructed and not without significance” (see Heidegger / Löwith Briefwechsel, page 200). The man, however, he saw in a less positive light. In his “Italian Diary” (included in the Briefwechsel volume), Löwith tells of his meetings with Heidegger and of his impression of him. On the surface, Heidegger looked entirely self-confident and purposeful, but beneath this patina lay a different self: “in spite of all his radicalism and critical penetration, there was in his nature much uncertainty, blindness and also lack of clarity in his thinking”. And Löwith, thinking about Heidegger’s career, found the fact that he had had no secure publisher revealing. “The inner insecurity, which his developing dictatorial style poorly hid, manifested itself in the random circumambulation from one publisher to another” (Briefwechsel, page 201).

Such comments, however, show an insensitivity to the problems that Heidegger had faced from the very beginning of his publishing career, with Being and Time, in finding a publisher for a radically ground-breaking work. And perhaps the “inner insecurity” that Löwith discerned in Heidegger was due to what Löwith himself terms Heidegger’s “willful isolation”, the fact that he was (or saw himself as) misunderstood, an outsider without pupils or friends. Löwith was also perplexed by Heidegger’s attitude to National Socialism and the Nazi state. On the one hand, Heidegger distanced himself from its bureaucratic and homogenized apparatus. On the other hand, he continued to wear the Nazi Party badge in the buttonhole of his jacket. As Löwith wrote elsewhere, “Heidegger remained convinced that National Socialism was the best path for Germany. One just had to persevere [‘durchhalten’]” (quoted in Heidegger Handbuch, edited by Dieter Thomä, Stuttgart, 2013, page 556).

Löwith made light of what he termed Heidegger’s “willful isolation”, but we must set his words against Heidegger’s own account of his plight at this time, which he later gave in his autobiographical Rektorat 1933/34. Although we must bear in mind that he was presenting himself in the best possible light for his post-war readers, the detail that he adduces to support his account of events cannot be pure fiction. We have already documented the attacks on Heidegger’s use of language in Being and Time made by Ernst Krieck, and that similar ones were made by Alfred Baeumler seems likely. That Heidegger was subject to surveillance by the Security Service is also possible. According to his account, he was joined in the summer semester of 1937 by a certain Dr. Hancke, who had come from Berlin to study with him. Hancke (he later revealed) had been sent by the Security Service to monitor Heidegger’s political sympathies and particularly his involvement with the Order of Jesuits, members of who were attending his classes. Heidegger’s claim that he was being subject to a witch hunt may be an exaggeration, but certainly he and his work were marginalized. No further editions of his two major works, Being and Time and the book on Kant, were republished during this period, and as a public figure he ceased to exist.

On 27 June 1936, Heidegger wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann, saying that he thought his visit to Italy had been a success, as had been his talk on Hölderlin. Within himself, he felt duty bound to keep alive the great poetic and philosophical achievements of the past such as those of Hölderlin, but this came at a price. “It seems that the struggle to preserve the past uses us up. To produce one’s own work and to preserve the great of the past – both at the same time – exceeds human capacity. And that act of preservation will not be effective if it does not come out of new appropriations in our own philosophy. There is no way out of this circle, so that it often quickly happens that my own work seems to me to be quite indifferent and clumsy. But as long as a propulsion remains as an inner drive then the whole business still has a purpose that transcends one’s feelings”. 

Heidegger’s transvaluation of the great German philosophers continued in the summer semester, between May and July 1936, when he offered a course on “Schelling: The Essence of Freedom (1809)” (“Schelling: Vom Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809) )”. Heidegger set himself three tasks. To explicate “1. the essence of human freedom and that means at the same time to understand the question of freedom. By doing that, the centre of philosophy will be elevated. 2. It is also a matter of bringing ourselves in this fashion to the totality of Schelling’s philosophy. 3. We will reach in this way an understanding of the moving energies of German Idealism in its entirety, for Schelling is actually the most creative and by far the most wide-ranging thinker of this age of German philosophy. And he is this to such an extent that he drives German Idealism from its centre over and beyond its actual basic positions” (Heidegger, Schelling. Vom Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809), Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988, page 8).

The frame of reference seems purely philosophical. Heidegger addresses in detail the notions of theodicy, pantheism and what he terms Schelling’s “higher realism”. Even in this apparently neutral philosophical exposition, however, covert politics are at play. Heidegger began his first lecture by placing Schelling’s book within its historical context. He writes, “1809: Napolean rules, i.e. he oppresses and reviles Germany. From 1806, the Reich did not exist even as a name” And Napolean could boast: “Prussia is no more” (page 1). Napolean, however, was wrong. “Soon in the north Prussia came to acquire again ‘a firm and decisive spirit (Fichte)’. Reich Freiherr von Stein presided over a restructuring of the civil service; Scharnhorst introduced spirit and form to a new army; and Fichte gave his speech ‘To the German Nation’ at the Berlin Academy” (page 2). What Heidegger was doing was no more than stating a series of historical facts, and yet within the context of 1936 they possess a clear political symbolism and message: out of military defeat, a new, stronger Prussia arose, one based on “a firm decisive spirit”. To establish the relevance of these past events to the present state of Germany Heidegger added the following rejoinder: “these prophets of national renewal “simply accomplished, each according to their own rules, a shaping of the German spirit, whose transformation into a historical power has not as yet been completed” (page 4).

Heidegger seems at this time to be leading two lives., both personally and intellectually. He would teach in Freiburg and then, as soon as he could, he would decamp to the cabin in Todtnauberg. On 11 August 1936, Heidegger wrote to Elfride from the cabin. He was, once again, alone. He described in the letter the phenomenological experience that intense philosophical work brought to him: “working is exactly the way I create the right opportunity for it [the life of the mind] to flood towards me – and sometimes it really is an almost uncanny flood – from which I can hardly escape – so I always have to hold on tight. And that is the way this loneliness has to be, although it isn’t always easy to bear. The simple things all around me, however, provide for continuity, steadiness of work and its broad direction”. During this period, Heidegger was moving increasingly away from his earlier political stance.  On 30 October, he signed off a letter to Kurt Bauch for the last time with the valediction “Heil Hitler”, replacing it with “mit einem herzlichen  Grüss” (“with cordial greetings”). In December, Heidegger published “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry (“Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung”) in the literary and cultural journal Das Innere Reich (The Inner Realm). It was a significant symbolic moment in his publishing history, for Das innere Reich was a conservative publication that held itself apart from the Nazi promotion of Party literature. Even the very title of the journal, founded in 1934 by Paul Alverdes and Karl Benno von Mechow, suggests a mental and cultural space distinct from (and, indeed, perhaps rejecting) the external realm of the Third Reich. Heidegger’s essay was indicative of this. Unlike his lecture course on “Germania” and “The Rhine”, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” contains no politics, overt or covert. Indeed, in its consistent invocation of the gods with their essential affinity with poetry the essay seems to explicitly exclude the external world. In the secondary literature on Heidegger’s “Turning”, it is conventional to allocate the latter to the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie), completed in 1938. That, indeed, was a seminal text in the new idiom of Heidegger’s philosophy, but if we read, so to speak, backwards from the work that Heidegger published after 1945, such as the essays On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache, 1959), it becomes clear that the key premises of that Turning, most notably its stress upon the agency of language and the valorisation of poetry as the Saying of truth, had already been anticipated in the Hölderlin essay.

Heidegger took as his starting point five poems by Hölderlin, quoting the for him most relevant sections that were often just a line or two. Each poem represented a different quality of Hölderlin’s thinking, but all converge on a celebration of the ceremonial nature of poetry and the poetic. Heidegger started his analysis by proffering his views on language, breaking with approaches to language that viewed it either as a medium of purely individual expression or as a means of describing the external world. For “language is not merely a tool that mankind possesses alongside many other tools, but rather, language first grants the possibility of standing in the midst of the openness of beings” (pages 37-38). Language is not a medium for something else, as if the world exists here and language exists there. On the contrary, the two are intertwined in an intransitive way as the self-articulating provenance of Being. We do not use language; in one sense, it uses us. Its presence within us determines the quality and extent of our self-understanding and our cognitive and conceptual engagement with reality.

Language enables a dialogue with the self, a dialogue that Heidegger describes (quoting a line from Hölderlin) as a “conversation” (Gespräch). As he explains, “the unity of a conversation consists in the fact that in the essential word there is always manifest as One and the Same, on the basis of which we are united authentically with ourselves” (page 39). “But the question at once arises: how does this conversation, which we are, begin? Who takes hold of something enduring in this raging time and brings it to stand in the world through the word?”. The answer is poetry and the poet. “By speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates beings as what they are. In that way, they become known as beings” (page 41). “The’ now’ names the coming of the holy. That coming alone specifies ‘the age’ in which it is time for history to confront its essential decisions. And this is the achievement of Hölderlin: “he holds firm in the Nothingness of the Night” (page 48). “By providing anew the essence of poetry, Hölderlin first determines s new time. It is a time of the gods who have fled and of the god that is coming” (page 47).

“Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry” projects a radically different view of history as to that advanced in Heidegger’s writings in the early years of the Third Reich. In talks such as “The Contemporary Situation and the Future Task of German Philosophy” (1934), he had argued that the only agency that guarantees the coming to presence of our historical mission was the state, which makes possible “the release to inner freedom of all the essential energies of the ‘Volk’ in accordance with the law of its inner order” (GA 16: 333). Such triumphalist readings are no more, as “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry” demonstrates. Heidegger’s view of history has become eschatological. In Hölderlin’s poetry, “by providing anew the essence of poetry, Hölderlin first determines a new time. It is the time of need because it stands in a double lack and a double not, in the no-longer of the gods who have fled and in the not-yet of the god who is coming” (page 47). What remains, now that history has entered its darkest period, is the word alone. Hölderlin and his poetry frame and redeem the nihilism that surrounds us (page 48).

Hölderlin was a poet who saw deeply into the darkness of his times, but his looking was also a light. Here, he anticipated (indeed, made possible) the vision of Rainer Maria Rilke. As Heidegger attested in the 1936 essay, “What are Poets for?” (“Wozu die Dichter?”), “the evening of the world’s age has been declining towards its night. The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive” (See “What are Poets for?” in Poetry, Language, Thought. Harper Row. 1971, page 91). And then Heidegger asked the following questions: “is Rainer Maria Rilke a poet in a destitute time? How is his poetry related to the destitution of the time? How deeply does it reach into the abyss? Where does the poet get to, assuming he can go where he can go?” (page 96). Heidegger answered in the affirmative to all of these questions, seeing in Rilke’s work a recognition of and an attempt to overcome the travails of modernity. Rilke embodies counter values, one of which is his projection of the “Open”, an expansive concept that reappears through his work underscoring its symbolic base. For Rilke, the “Open” designated “the whole draft to which all beings, as ventured beings, are given over to” (page 106). In the face of the corrosive and delimiting (in its techno-rationality) force of modernity, “the Open “does not set bounds because it is within itself without all bounds”. It is the “unconcealedness of beings that lets beings as such be present” (Page 106). And that unconcealedness is made evident through “song” (elsewhere in Heidegger also called “Sagen”, the potency of language to unveil the world). “To sing the song means to be present in what is present itself. It means: Dasein, existence” (page 138).

Heidegger’s distance from his immediate world grew during this time. As he wrote to Bauch 0n 29 December 1936, “should we abide in increasing decline and severance from our roots? Must we simply tolerate all of this?” It is a note of alienation whose stoical tones will reappear with increasing frequency. Or should we, perhaps, at least in our minds, construct an alternative world? This is what Heidegger subsequently does in his Contributions to Philosophy. Whilst “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” was a seminal work in Heidegger’s Turning, the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosphie) is the magnum opus of that Turning. Written between 1936 and 1938 (but only published in 1989), the text in its episodic structure gives the appearance of an accumulation of notes rather than a finished work, as if Heidegger is moving towards the resolution of an impasse but has not as yet arrived there. The guiding light of the Contributions is the concept of “Ereignis”, which is “the self-establishing and self-mediating centre, which all of the coming into presence of the truth of Be-ing must in advance be thought back into” (see Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis), Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003, page 73). It is called “Ereignis” because as the happening of Be-ing it both appropriates and is appropriated. In Er-eignis, thinking does not see in the object an otherness to be clinically analyzed, because thinking, the thinker and the thought are one. Er-eignis defines and empowers, being grasped by those who have opened themselves to the task of renewal, the “future-ones” capable of walking the path of the “other-beginning”. “Ereignis” is the seminal point in this “other beginning”, which is made possible by the renewal of philosophic thinking through the opening upof semantic reverberations and the possibilities of the non-logical in language. “Er-eignis” is an eruption of knowledge that we can possess, make our own (“eigen”). As such, it seeks to undo the dominance of the “animal rationale” and its sterile acceptance of the confining boundaries and restrictions of the modern technologised mind (page 78).

Heidegger felt, as he wrote to Bauch on 30 October 1936, that “with my Frankfurt lectures [on “The Origin of the Work of Art”] he had gone beyond the purely necessary” and was now able to reach out to a new philosophy. In the meantime, his teaching continued. In the winter semester 1936 to 1937, he lectured on “Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art (“Nietzsche: der Wille zur Macht als Kunst”). Nietzsche was a submerged giant in Heidegger’s thinking. He was the only philosopher quoted in the rectorate speech of 1933, and he received frequent references in the “introduction to Metaphysics” lecture of 1935, but prior to that date there is little mention of him. And yet this course would be the first of five on Nietzsche that Heidegger would give over a period of six years. In this course, he outlined the essential problematic of Nietzsche’s philosophy, what Heidegger termed the “foundational structure of Nietzsche’s metaphysics”. adumbrating the key components of the latter’s approach to metaphysics, focusing on “1. The Will to Power (the projection of Being as such as it is); 2. The Eternal Return of the Same (as projection of Being into the totality); 3. The Essence of Truth as ‘Justice’; 4. Nihilism as Transvaluation (the Value-Thinking;) and in each of these four concerns always in view 5. The Übermensch” (see Heidegger, Nietzsche: der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985, pages 289-290). 

Nietzsche both attracted and repelled Heidegger. As he wrote to Bauch on 19 January 1939, “with Nietzsche, the cryptic is taken to extreme”. Irony and the aphoristic prevent serious philosophy, while his “Bürgerschreck” idiom was designed simply to provoke. The peremptory manner of his modus operandi and his “unbridled will” encouraged a promiscuous thinking. His style of writing should “only be a necessary foreground and thoroughfare” to his ideas, but it has become the main focus for many who now read him. Indeed, Nietzsche has been reduced to a caricature by his disciples and popularizers, but he himself is largely to blame for this. And yet, Heidegger also had positive words to say about the philosopher. As he had written to Elisabeth  Blochmann in a letter of 27 June 1937, reading Nietzsche was not only an entirely new way of approaching philosophy; it was also the medium in which Heidegger could make contact with what was alien and disturbing in his own work, “for that is clearly the source of that which succeeds in reaching the essential”.

The first of the series of Nietzsche lectures was “The Will to Power as Art”. Nietzsche’s The Will to Power was largely a compilation of notes and aphorisms, written between 1883 and 1888, but not published until 1901 in a volume edited by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who was responsible for the thematic organization of the book and its divisions into  four sections: “European Nihilism”, “Critique of the Highest Values”, “Principles of a new Evaluation”, and “Discipline and Breeding”. In his prefatory remarks, Heidegger stressed the epochal significance of Nietzsche, adumbrating his controversial place in the history of philosophy. In the standard approaches to the philosopher, Nietzsche was either idolized or denigrated, but neither approach discloses what is essential in his work. The person and reputation of the man must be ignored. What is required is a confrontation (“Auseinandersetzung”) with his philosophy (page 6). We do this not just for the sake of understanding Nietzsche but for our own sake, so that “we become free for the highest demands of thinking” (page 6). These are exuberant words, and Heidegger supports them with a quotation from Nietzsche: “abstract thinking for many is a chore – for me, on good days, it is a festivity [‘Fest’] and a source of rapture [‘Rausch’]” (page 7).

The lecture series was divided into two parts. Part One was called “The Will to Power: the Shape of Nietzsche’s fundamental intellectual Position and its Origin in traditional Metaphysics”, in which Heidegger sought to demonstrate the unity of the central concepts of Nietzsche’s Will to Power: the principle of the Eternal Return, the Transvaluation of all Values, and the Will to Power itself, arguing against critics such as Karl Jaspers  (who had just published a book on the philosopher), who claimed that such concepts did not possess such a unity (see pages 24-27). Heidegger had never accepted the humanist-existential framework of Jaspers’ ideas, but here it was the latter’s intellectual-historicist approach that was targeted. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return was of no significance for Jaspers because “for Jaspers, all philosophy is impossible. Philosophy is ultimately an allusion put into the service of the ethical illumination of the human personality. Philosophical concepts lack the power of truth. In so far as in the final analysis Jaspers does not take philosophical knowledge seriously, there is therefore no longer any genuine questioning in his work” (page 26). (It is a slur in which it is possible to hear the pique of a terminated friendship).

Throughout Heidegger’s exposition, Nietzsche’s transvaluation of notions of knowledge is framed against various engagements with the interpenetration of the aesthetic and the philosophical in Kant and, in the concluding lectures, in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, most notably the Phaedrus (see pages 201-248). The latter connection is further elaborated in Part Two, which is called “Art and Truth: Nietzsche’s Aesthetics and the Platonic Tradition”. Starting from Nietzsche’s noted dictum (first stated in The Birth of Tragedy) that the world can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, Heidegger sets out to elaborate Nietzsche’s exposition of the relationship between art and truth, for “art is the counter movement against nihilism” (page 109).The two principles of “Rausch” and Form may seem antithetical, indeed, disabingly contradictory (as Jaspers saw them), but they will seem so only to those who have not seen deeply enough into Nietzsche’s version of truth which, as with Heidegger’s notion of “un-concealedness”, is something that is formed through and combines diverging even contradictory modes of thinking.

For Nietzsche, the aesthetic thrived on the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (page 13) (two concepts also from The Birth of Tragedy), symbolising balance and structuration and unrestrained energy respectively. As Nietzsche had written, the word Dionysian expresses “a passionate and painful swelling over into more obscure, more full, more lingering states: an enraptured yes-saying to the overall character of life as that which is the same, of the same, of the same power, of the same bliss in the midst of all change; the grand pantheistic shared joyfulness and compassion that approves and sanctifies even the most frightful and questionable aspects of life; the eternal will to creation, to fruitfulness, to return; the feeling of unity in the necessity of creating and destroying”. As its antithesis, “the word Apollonian expresses the urge for complete being-for-oneself, for the typical ‘individual’, for everything that simplifies, sets in relief, makes things strong, clear unambiguous and typical: freedom under the law”. (Nietzsche in The Will to Power as quoted by Heidegger in Fundamental Concepts in Metaphysics, Indiana UP, 1995, page 73). The Dionysian embodies the transforming elation of “Rausch”. The latter would seem to entail dissolution and a flight into the subjective, but the aesthetic can absorb this through the agency of form, and “form, ‘forma’ corresponds to the Greek ‘mythos’ ” (page 138). The two principles of “form” and “Rausch” seem antithetical, indeed inherently incompatible but this is only the case to those who have not seen deeply enough into Nietzsche’s notion of truth which, posits the Apollonian and the Dionysian as a dialectic of mutually informing and energising principles.

Heidegger had left politics, but he had not left political thinking, and in his correspondence he frequently speculated on the state of the nation and its likely future. He had not abandoned hope that an intellectual-spiritual (“geistig”) transformation of the German mind (and hence character) was still possible. As he writes to Bauch on 29 December 1936, ” I ask myself daily: is it sufficient to say that the possibility of building a ‘geistig’ world has been taken from us forever? No, but this world will not come into existence in the immediate future”. Our task is “to make it a possibility – and to wait”. It is a matter of character and disposition, and Heidegger gave much thought to what was required. As he concluded in a subsequent letter to Bauch sent on 13 May the following year 1937: “he who is able to hold on to himself can only do so if he has something within himself that has been tested and hardened through fire – until one day it becomes history-worthy and, as a pure event of restraint, will act as the basis for the construction of Dasein”.

Heidegger was choosing his words carefully. In a written communication that could fall into the wrong hands, he does not specify why it is necessary for the individual to build up a reservoir of values within himself. But that an intellectual resistance against an unspecified other was necessary, he repeatedly made clear at this time, as in a further letter to Bauch (which is indicative of his increasing introspection during these years) sent on 16 June 1937: “resistance is gathering momentum today ever more clearly in a quite definite intellectual – not at all dogmatic and not apologetic – Catholicism that offers exactly what is required – a ‘Weltanschauung’, organisation, leadership, order. In this semester, the self-image of the university has developed even more pointedly than before in the direction of this tendency”.

In the summer semester between May and July 1937, Heidegger lectured on “Nietzsche’s Fundamental Position in Western Thought: The Eternal Return of the Same”. Heidegger saw these lectures as a supplement to and an extension of his earlier course on “Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art”, given the previous winter semester. In that course, Nietzsche’s Eternal Return was just a single concept in a matrix of concepts adumbrating the cyclical structuration of history and the mind in history. This later course, however, was entirely devoted to that doctrine. As a theory, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same has been regarded by many as trivial and irrelevant (because its central proposition of the endless repetition of all things is either self-evident or simply false), but the concept lay, nevertheless, at the center of his philosophy, as a formulation that engaged with what Being was as a temporal identity (page 3). Heidegger approaches the doctrine in terms of four tasks, to explicate “1 The provisional depiction of the doctrine of the eternal return of the same in its origins. 2 The existence of a metaphysical fundamental position and its earlier possibility in the overall history of Western philosophy. 3. The interpretation of the doctrine of the return as the final metaphysical position in Western thought. 4 The end of Western philosophy and its Other Beginning” (page 4).

Dealing with the fourth task, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the End of Western Metaphysics” (pages 225-233) concluded the lecture series. Nietzsche’s Philosophy is the “End” because “it encloses the entirety of the earlier history of Western philosophy in a circle” (page 226). Like Heidegger, Nietzsche returned throughout his work to the inception of philosophy amongst the Greeks (although they are not always specifically named). In particular, he brought together the philosophical impetus of the two great pre-Socratic thinkers: Parmenides and Heraclitus. As with the former, Nietzsche saw what “is” as consisting of “permanence and presence; the eternally present” “something made fast” (page 227). Heraclitus, however, posited “Being” as something that “becomes” [‘wird’], is something that is in a continual process of creating and destroying”. “Being is Being as continual becoming, as self-unfolding and as destroying dissolution” (page 227). This is not a question of Nietzsche taking from or being influenced by these philosophers. Rather, Heidegger was suggesting an essential convergence within the inceptual and culminative moment of metaphysics as embodied in Nietzsche, which constituted for Heidegger its “End”. Unlike Kant or Hegel before him, Nietzsche did not elaborate a system. That was his strength (and the affinities with Heidegger are clear). Then Heidegger asks the necessary question: “in what way is Nietzsche now the End, i.e. the backward-movement [zurück-schwingende’] merging of these two founding determinations of Being? Inso far as Nietzsche says: Being is something made fast and is in a continual process of creating and destroying” (page 227). The Other Beginning must absorb this and move beyond.

On 27 June 1937, Heidegger wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann, apologising for his late birthday greetings (her birthday was on 14 April). It was due to “the productive pull of work that has for months been with me like never before. During such periods, my thinking is rich in a quiet magic”. These were positive words but finding a new idiom for his philosophy would be an arduous process. Heidegger was in the midst of writing Contributions to Philosophy. This was a work that possessed a radically new style, in which concepts emerge gradually through spaces within the text, moving, developing, mutating and acquiring fresh associations through realignments in ways that resist any clear classification or mode of appropriation, but which impart a sense that Being is emerging on its own terms. It was a process of conceptual revaluation that took its physical toll. In a letter to Elfride on 2 July 1937, Heidegger talked about this critical moment in his philosophy and the pressures of developing this new idiom. But it is a crisis that he has to undergo – even though it may be so severe that it will impact upon him physically.

With his continuing work on The Contributions, Heidegger was increasingly coming to practice, he felt, philosophy in itis own right, progressing beyond purely academic lecturing needs. In his letter to Blochmann of 27 June 1937, he had referred to “external matters’ that he had to deal with but did not say what these matters were. They almost certainly involved a withdrawal from the public sphere, as evident, for example, in his cancellation on 24 July of his participation in a conference on Descartes due to be held in Paris. He cited poor health, but the real reasons may have been his disengagement from the other German delegates and the simple reluctance to once again assume a professional public profile. in the same period, he declined invitations from a number of European countries to visit and give papers. In particular, he wished to have nothing to do with colleagues with whom he had once been close because of his Nazi affiliations. Early in 1943, he was contacted by Alfred Baeumler, who had invited him to participate in a joint venture. As Heidegger wrote to his wife on 12 April, he conjectured that this may have been a “sign of retraction”, even an apology, from his erstwhile enemy about the way he had treated Heidegger, but as he told Elfride, “I have no intention of getting mixed up in anything or indeed getting controls lifted on my banned writings at the expense of cooperation”.

Heidegger’s relationship with Elfride had become increasingly complex and fraught. The very fact that he chose to spend all his vacation time by himself in his cabin put a strain on their marriage. Heidegger was aware of this and made repeated (written) attempts to win Elfrida over. But Elfrida was (it seems, because we do not have her correspondence) not always convinced at Heidegger’s gestures of conciliation. On 2 July 1937, he wrote to her from the cabin to wish her a happy birthday. He used the letter as an occasion to reflect on his wayward past (his affairs with other women, although he does not explicitly mention this), and to offer her an apology: “you know that I’ll never be fully able to make good the early suffering that came your way because of me, and my pained awareness of this grows greater by the year. Nevertheless, I can endeavor with what remains of me to do things right and thank you every day for your kindness and love”. Are these words sincere? Heidegger was a master of rhetoric and knew how to impress his listening public. Elfride would have been aware of this. Elfride, it seems, had asked certain pertinent questions in previous correspondence about Heidegger’s philosophical work and perhaps about its relationship to him as a man. for Heidegger wrote “the question about the relationship between truth and genuineness [‘Echtheit’] has suddenly opened up quite new perspectives for me, and things that had hitherto lay apart have come together”. We must read back from these words to conjecture what Elfride’s question might have been, but the reference to “Echtheit”, made to a husband who was concerned in his work with authenticity, seems to indicate that she was querying whether it was possible for a philosopher to get to the truth in his philosophy when he was living out lies in his private life.

Heidegger’s words may have been sincere but nevertheless they would not stop him from straying in the future. In 1942, he met and began a relationship with Princess Margot von Sachsen-Meiningen (1911-1998). She was studying medicine at Freiburg University, but she was also interested in literature and had attended Heidegger’s lecture course on Hölderlin’s “Ister”, given in the summer semester of 1942. Heidegger was fifty-three; Margot was thirty-one. Her title came from her husband, Bernhard Friedrich Julius Heinrich von Sachsen-Meiningen, whom she had married in 1931. They had two children. Heidegger visited, with Elfride’s full knowledge, the princess frequently, who now estranged from her husband (they were divorced in 1947) was living with her children in a forester’s lodge on the estate of Ludwig Friedrich Morton Graf Douglas, near the ruin of Hausen Castle in the Danube valley. Heidegger went to see her over a period of four years while he was living in Messkirch working on the transcription into type written form of his lecture notes. When on 30 December 1944, Heidegger wrote to Elfride from Hausen inviting her to join him for Christmas in Messkirch, she declined. It seems that they were now de facto separated.

In the winter semester between November 1937 and March 1938, Heidegger lectured on “Fundamental Questions in Philosophy: Selected ‘Problems in Logic’ “. This course was contemporaneous with his Nietzsche lectures, but whereas the latter introduced new material these lectures largely reworked ideas that went as far back as Being and Time. The first section “The Essence of Philosophy and the Question of Truth” established the premises of the entire course: the importance of “truth” and its relationship to “Sein”. This prefatory material was followed by a series of sections adumbrating the historical formation of the concept of truth from the Greeks to the modern period. It was not until Heidegger reached his final lecture, the fifth, “The Need for and Necessity of ‘Another Beginning’ and Questioning” that a new direction becomes evident, as he addresses “Openness as the Lighting of Self-revealing”. These were terms (“Lichtung” and “Sichverbergens”) that will inform his later work, such as the lectures on Parmenides, given between 1942 and 1943. There, an entirely new conceptual terrain takes shape, as Heidegger moved further into his “Turning” and into his venture to find a language that would suggest that Being was manifesting itself on its own terms, without the historical baggage of metaphysical philosophy and in language alive to the modulations of the un-concealedness of alethia.

In these years immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, although Heidegger was worried about the turn in military events, his greater worry was with what he termed in a letter to Bauch on 22 December 1938 the “ever increasing emptiness” that was spreading around them. Once again, he advises Bauch to step away from the public realm of “effect” and build up human resources within himself, for “it is good to know the simple, to be simple in the truth that everything that is genuine can never preserve itself through ‘effect’ but only through the fact that it is, beyond power and impotence”. Similar sentiments were expressed to Elisabeth Blochmann. On 12 April 1938, he wrote that it appeared to him that “we were entering an age in which in a different and more severe way than ever before everything that is essential has to survive loneliness”. And he added, almost as if he is returning to the ontological-existential idiom of Being and Time, “loneliness rises from and consists certainly not in the removal from what belongs to us but in the immanence of a different truth, in the assault of the plenitude of the only alienating [‘Nur-Befremdlichen’], where we must confront the fact that alienation has historically become the dominant mode of Being”.

On 27 Apri 1938, Edmund Husserl died and was buried two days later. The relationship between Husserl and Heidegger had always been a fraught and complex one. There were, certainly, positive moments. In April 1929, Heidegger had presented a paper on “The Essence of Reason” to the Festschrift for Husserl in Freiburg to commemorate the latter’s seventieth birthday. According to Roman Ingarden, “in his reply Husserl was noticeably touched, and he responded to Heidegger simply and succinctly and thanked him in moving words that included a declaration that his philosophy had emerged out of the intellectual self-affirmation of his existence in a period of utter confusion” (see Karl Schumann (ed), Husserl Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserl, Den Haag, 1977, page 87). And yet, although Husserl had been Heidegger’s colleague and mentor at Freiburg and, as founder of the phenomenological movement, had exerted a major influence on the philosophy of the young Heidegger, the latter did not attend his funeral because he was (or later claimed to be) confined to bed due to an ailment. He also did not send his condolences to Frau Husserl, writing later that he regretted not doing so but giving no reasons for his oversight. it was the final episode in a problematic relationship. Heidegger had initially been impressed by Husserl and his Logical Investigations (published in two volumes in 1900 and 1901), regarding them as decisive for his intellectual development. But as his own version of phenomenology started to take shape, the differences between the two men became increasingly sharper and soon became personal, fueled by animosity. For Heidegger to have attended Husserl’s funeral would have been a mark of respect, but it would have been a disingenuous act. Heidegger would also have been reluctant to appear in public in memory of a colleague who was Jewish. Gerhard Ritter, from the History Department, was the only member of Freiburg University to attend the funeral.

Heidegger’s preoccupation with Nietzsche continued. It was as if his most notable and influential predecessor had to be overcome to make a space for the future Heidegger. In the winter semester 1938 to 1939, Heidegger gave “An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thoughts out of Season”. In his opening comments, he outlined the goals of the course: “in the broadest terms, the work that we have before us can be divided into three parts: 1. Introduction to the Formation of philosophical concepts. This, however, as 2. the reading and interpretation of a specific text, ‘The Value and the Disadvantages of Historie for Life’, and by dealing with both questions we arrive at 3. An engagement with the philosophy of Nietzsche” (see Heidegger, Zur Auslegung von Nietzsches II Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003, page 3). The aims of the course were stated in words that were apodictic and conservatively academic, and Heidegger immediately proceeded to qualify them: “instead of an introduction to the formation of philosophical concepts, one could say: a guide to learning how to think“(page 3). Once again, Heidegger stressed, as he has done in previous lectures, that philosophy was not a question of acquiring knowledge as a static body, but was a self-interrogative intellectual process, a “Denken-lernen”, echoing perhaps Nietzsche’s designation of The Will to Power as “a book for thinking, nothing else. It belongs to those for whom thinking is a delight, nothing else” (see Nietzsche, The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufmann, London, 1968, page xxii).

Consequently, Heidegger also modified the pedantic tones of the second goal: “the reading and interpretation of a specific text. Here we wish to learn that thinking of the thinker by thinking with [‘mitdenken’] him and mentally follow his pathway” (page 5). The goal is a cognitive dialectic between philosopher and philosopher (in this case Nietzsche), in which the original philosopher exhorts (indeed, in Nietzsche’s case exhorts and demands) that we understand him, but we in turn reserve the right to confront those demands, to dissent from and possibly even, in an interpretative way, to reframe his philosophy. It is a process of mutual confrontation that Heidegger terms an “interrogating dialogue” (“fragende Wechselgespräch”) (page 5), an act of empathetic understanding that he will later rename as “Ent-sprechung”, a communion with what is said and what is not said by a poet or philosopher. And Heidegger summarises this approach, “generalising about the task ‘provisionally’: to learn thinking, reading and questioning, or in brief [to embrace] the first directive to mindfulness [‘Besinnung’]” (page 7).

This communion with Nietzsche and his Thoughts out of Season will only be possible if we are able to understand his often idiosyncratic language, and Heidegger concludes his introduction in a section titled “The Appearance of all our Efforts” by specifying three tasks for the reader: “a preoccupation with the meaning of words, concentration of the matter at hand and its relevance, no standardisation or use of clichés, only clarity, because this will reveal the original play of the hidden multivarious meanings of his language” (page 11). The lecture course itself possesses a form unique in Heidegger’s writing style. In place of a coherent unified structure that would allow for an extended discussion of material, there comes a mosaic of fragments, listed “A” to “T”. These are one hundred and eighty short sections (“Abschnitte”), many only a paragraph long. Some are purely definitional in content, as in the semantic play around distinctions between “historisch”, “unhistorisch”, “Geschichte” and “Historie”. Typography and syntax are conspicuous, often foregrounding an argument or drawing attention to relationships between definitional or conceptual points.

The course was subtitled “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Historie for our lives”, which is the third essay in Nietzsche’s Thoughts out of Season. By “historie”, Nietzsche meant not “Geschichte”, history as it factually happened in the past and is happening in the here and now in the present, but history writing, the transformation of the former into a discourse of retrospection, which is a sterile backward-looking process of recollection that serves to keep us away from life because it roots us in passive contemplation. “Historie” is an “affected excess of knowledge” (Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben”, in Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen I-III, Berlin, 1971, page 241). “Historie” was the vehicle of unhappy consciousness: “when we learn the words ‘it was’, these watchwords permit struggle, suffering, weariness to come to the human race to remind it what its existence really is – a never to be perfected ‘imperfectum;’ ” (page 245).

This was, however, Heidegger argued, an unnecessarily negative philosophy, for “mankind is historical; the animal unhistorical” (page 91). Consequently, Heidegger advanced contra Nietzsche a positive definition of “historie”, one that did not stand in opposition to life. He divided his version into three parts, which correspond to three types of human life: the intensification of life, the preservation of life, and the liberation of life (page 91). “What is ‘historie’? It is applied knowledge of the past coveted by life (human) and put into the service of the future and the present” (page 91). Time and temporality are the crucial factors here, making possible the linking of individual consciousness to the past, present and future. As Heidegger argues, “the trinity of the essential forms of behaviour of human life grounds in itself and, in accordance with its unity and possible reciprocity, in the temporality of the human” (page 91).

In the summer semester, between May and July 1939, Heidegger gave a further lecture course on Nietzsche: “Nietzsche’s Doctrine of the Will to Power as Knowledge”. Of all the lectures that Heidegger gave on Nietzsche, this one was the most concerned with the unique identity of the philosopher: “who Nietzsche is and, above all, who he will become, we shall get to know as soon as we are able to think through the thoughts that belong to the verbal structure of The Will to Power” (see Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1989, page 1). As Heidegger asserts, Nietzsche was one of the most individualistic of all philosophers, one who projected a distinct image of himself in his writing, the product of “unbridled self-promotion and immeasurable narcissism” (page 1). We should not, however, look to these self-projections as a key to his identity. Nietzsche and his work must be placed within a wider context: “what should solely concern us is the trace of his conceptual path towards The Will to Power in the history of Being, i.e. in those areas that have as yet not been traversed in the deliberations of the future” (page 3). The opening set of lectures seeks thus to establish the “metaphysical ambit of The Will to Power“, and draws upon material from Heidegger’s previous lectures, explicating notions such as “the revaluation of all values” (page 23), “art as the higher value” (page 36),”truth as illusion” (pages 37-45), “lived life as the area of the essential grounding of truth” (pages 55-57), and “the opposition of the ‘true’ world to the world of appearances” (page 112). , Heidegger concludes his lecture course by advancing from the metaphysical to the epistemological, interrogating Nietzsche’s views on “knowing” and “knowledge”.

Running in tandem with the Nietzsche lecture course was a weekly two-hour seminar that Heidegger gave titled “The Word and Language” (“Das Wort und die Sprache”). What Heidegger has to say here about language anticipates much of the theoretical initiative of the later post-structuralist movement regarding the indeterminacy of the sign, the disjunction between signifier and signified and (in certain modes) the self-referentiality of language. Heidegger’s exposition (at least in the written version that has come down to us – his verbal presentation may have had a different form) is cryptic, gnomic and gestural, with key motifs often simply stated in a “pauschal”, unmediated way. Heidegger begins by emphasising what we don’t know about language: “we still hardly suspect how foundational the word is and bears and preserves our history. We know almost nothing about the hidden connections of language” (see Martin Heidegger, Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst, Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 2010, page 69). Heidegger’s wishes to understand language in its widest valence but to do this he must break with mechanical (he calls them “metaphysical”) approaches where “the spoken word is reduced to a technical motivation device for willing something and ceases to exist when that willing dissolves itself in achievement” (Page 69). Heidegger seeks to move entirely away from any mechanical appropriation of language that views it as a stable and predictable entity. Are words, he asks, only a “new snare [‘Fangnetze’] for thoughts?”. “But what are thoughts without thinking of the unsaid and unsayable?” (page 73). Such questions relativise the rational intentionalist model of langauge.

Heidegger has no intention of offering any “theory of the sign” (page 82). Rather, he wishes to uncover the relationship between language and what he terms “Seyn”. In this context, “showing [‘Zeigen’, signifying] becomes self-signifying – the lighting of the self-concealment of the truth of ‘Seyn’ ” (page 83). The essential characteristic of the sign is that “it reveals and conceals and reveals not only for itself the showing but also what is shown, as it conceals not only the object of its showing, but also itself as the showing” (page 86). “Showing is a directing lettting-encounter of lighted being” (page 88), whose polysemic qualities are foremost manifest in “the symbol”, where “”the thing, image and the depicted fall together” (page 88). In other words, the sign possesses a materiality that does not (or should not) allow us to make a distinction “between the sensual and non-sensual” (page 96). Moving towards language in this direction leads to what Heidegger calls the “Sage”, literally just “saying”, but a distinctive form of saying in which Being is experienced as “Ereignis”, a sudden opening of light (“Lichtung”). It is an experience that liberates. “The language of the ‘Sage’ of ‘Seyns’ is the interstice [‘Fuge’] of the enabling, guarding-dwelling composure in freedom” (page 163).

The war and its brutal contact also made an impact on Heidegger’s philosophical writing. In 1939, he completed Besinnung (Mindfulness), which he had been writing over a three-year period since 1936. Mindfulness followed directly on Contributions to Philosophy and possesses much of its episodic structure. As Heidegger wrote, “coming from the overcoming of ‘metaphysics’, mindfulness must nevertheless touch upon the hitherto and cannot become inflexible as a finished product of a usable presentation either in a ‘doctrine’ or in a ‘system’ or as ‘exhortation’ or ‘edification’ ” (see Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, page 17). Mindfulness consists of twenty-eight sections made up from a hundred and thirty-one shorter passages, which range from half a page (section 9) to sixteen pages (section 14). The manuscript did not appear in book form until 1997, as volume 66 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe.

Of all of Heidegger’s writing at this time, Mindfulness possesses the greatest degree of Zeitkritik. War is mentioned on the very first page of the main narrative as “the uncontrolled machination [‘Machenschaft’] of beings” (page 11). As he later wrote, “as the highest will to power of the predator, the military thinking that comes from the World War and the unconditionality of armament always indicate the completion of the metaphysical epoch”. In war, “man is simultaneously always the powerful and the indifferent, the leader and the melted down” (page 21). War is a form of anti-mindfulness, and exploits those that are drawn to action rather than thought, “that is why all dictators eagerly exploit the youth that suits them because youth brings along the required ignorance which guarantees that lack of respect and the incapability for admiration that are necessary for carrying out, under the guise of a new awakening, planned destruction and thereby evading of all decisions” (page 14). With the exercise of machination, the truth is (and Heidegger quotes directly from Hitler) to be judged according to usefulness and “there is no attitude that cannot ultimately be justified by the ensuing usefulness for the totality”. Indeed, politics in general offers us no way out of the impasse of modernity and the spirit of machination. As he will observe later in his book, ” politics, in its part, and specially in its total claim to domination, means merely turning culture over to modern man’s completed technical-historical-machinational ownmost” (page 140).

Machination, together with its twin props, “technicity” and “producubility, does not only lead to the annihilation (page 12) of the body; it also leads to the annihilation of the mind, and this is Heidegger’s main focus in his book. “Machination takes possession of thinking ad arranges in a machine-like way the thinking of the beingness of beings” (page 15). It is the force behind “the general apathy of thinking” (page 101) that guides the “dis-humanisation of man” (page 125), who cannot get beyond “the mere represented” (page 17). In philosophical terms, the vehicle for this destitution is metaphysics. In Heidegger’s reading of the term, it etymologically becomes “meta-physics” as a thinking beyond “phusis”, This the Greek word for “nature” but, as read by Heidegger, “phusis” means an allowing of the world to emerge into a wholeness that is immediately (hence the “meta-” becomes redundant) present to us if we are able to grasp “being” as “be-ing” (where “sein” becomes “seyn”). Mindfulness is the means to this ontological-conceptual transition.

But what is mindfulness? The original German title is “Besinnung”, which normally is translated as “consciousness”, but the “be-” prefix lends the word a distinctly active even totalising inflexion, and hence intensfies the meaning of “sinnen”, “to reflect” or “ponder”. This expansion is caught in the translation of “full” in Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a disposition rather than a methodology. It does not seek “truth” but rather looks at the process at which truth, not as a final product but as an emerging, might take place. It is an “enquiring-musing” (Page 37), which involves an uncovering rather than a placement, where walking the path, whilst looking, is more important than reaching the end of the path (often without looking). The terms (“looking”, “enquiring”) are epistemological, but there is something behind this (although Heidegger rejects all references to an “I” or a “we”). Mindfulness occupies a space between subject and object. Or more accurately, there is no space between subject and object. The truth of Be-ing “grounds itself in the ‘nowhere’ and ‘never’ of beings, grounds itself in the siteless place and the hourless time of a struggle” (page 16). As such, Be-ing links up with the “hidden exuberance of Da-Sein”, who possesses a “belonginess to revealing” (page 315), and is content to live with “ambiguity” page 292). Da-sein is a “questioner” (pages 128 and 291), who is able to counter the “forgottenness of Be-ing” page 185), which is the defining trait of his age.

In the second trimester of 1940 (the unusual time frame dictated by war circumstances), Heidegger returned to Nietzsche and to the latter’s critique of “European nihilism”. Heidegger’s disillusionment with university life and his increasing investment of his energies in the ordering of his lecture notes with a view to their future publication is reflected in the indifferent quality of this course. which was almost entirely written from earlier lectures. A small number of concepts are worked and reworked and the paucity of material is stretched over as many weeks as possible. After an introduction that explicates the historical task of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, part one focused on the concept of value in The Will to Power seen against the concealed existence of nihilism; part two engaged with Nietzsche’s metaphysical understanding of “the question of the origin of the concept of value out of its early original metaphysical understanding with a view to the connection of the human to Being”. The third and final part of the course sought to explain “the transformation of the essence of truth and Being as the concealed reason behind the predominance of subjectivity and its development”, a theme framed against “Nietzsche’s metaphysics thought out of subjectivity in The Will to Power in the context of value as the culmination of Western metaphysics”. A further lecture course on Nietzsche was announced for the winter semester 1941-1942, but it was not given due to wartime circumstances.

From 1940, Heidegger spent his vacations in Messkirch. Heidegger had effectively disengaged his philosophy from the medium of academic presentation. He was continuing to teach, but he doubted whether what he was teaching was understood by his cohort of largely female students. In a letter to Bauch in1 May 1942, he complained about the “decline in quality and related matters” at the university. he now found teaching an “unworthy activity”. Attendance was good (the auditorium was normally three-quarters full) but academic standards were low. Bauch believed that it would be good for Heidegger to continue teaching. Heidegger replied in a letter of 16 January 1945 disagreeing: “is it more important to mimic a fake heroism through a presence [at the university] than being here [in Messkirch] to save for the future the work of a lifetime? But I will leave up to those responsible to make the decision”. And he added in a letter of 12 March 1945, “university business has always been the source of much intellectual woe, vanity and emptiness”.

On 19 January 1939, Heidegger wrote to Elfride, who was visiting her widowed mother in Wiesbaden. Heidegger had observed “the growing of their children into independence and into a world of their own”, but he judged their path to maturity largely on the basis of their developing attitude to philosophy: “Jörg’s self-confidence is reassuring, and I have the impression that he is now also beginning, entirely in his own way, to think more deeply about certain things that go beyond a future profession. Hermann makes me very happy – he has now, I think, in the end, kindled an interest in philosophy – at any rate, he understands that it involves something that cannot be equated with ‘science’ and ‘worldview’ “. Heidegger was soon to have greater concerns than the philosophical advancement of his sons. As the war grew in intensity, both were drafted to Russia for the offensive there, and both were captured and held in captivity. News about and from them was scarce, with no sign of their release imminent. Herman was finally released in September 1947, and went on to become a high school teacher, but Jörg was not set free until December 1949, when he returned to Germany to finish his engineering degree in Karlsruhe.

Heidegger produced his philosophy out of an inner compulsion that seemed, as he was writing in his cabin in Todtnauberg, to eschew any matters relating to reception. Yet there are recurring moments during this period when Heidegger becomes introspective about himself and his work. One such brief moment comes in a letter to Elfride of 22 May 1940, where he speculated on the possible impact that his philosophy might have in the future: “there is no knowing when the time may come for my work to have an ‘effect’. I believe, however, that in the step that it is taking and in the realms that it is entering, it will – one day in the future when ‘philosophy’ is essential again – have an effect, simply in the way that ‘philosophy’ does have an effect, invisibly and indirectly”.

Although Heidegger was immersed in his writing, he was nonetheless capable of recognising and reacting to what was happening on the stage of world history, most notably in the form of the Sudetenland crisis of September 1938, when Germany mobilized and threatened the invasion and annexation of the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. On the same day, Heidegger wrote to Elfride. The tone was alarmist: “the situation is getting worse and worse, and in such a way that we have no idea what is going on. France, England and Russia have all declared their positions and regard our intervention as an act of war. I still can’t believe that the worst will come to the worse”. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland bringing about the Second World War. Heidegger was aware of what was happening, but he seemed to be living beyond history. It is difficult to fully assess his attitude to the war. He begins by fearing the worst, but as news of Germany’s advances increases a discernible patriotism emerges. Then, as the war progresses, a note of fatalism can be heard and Heidegger proffers speculations on the world significance of what is happening. His tone becomes more metaphysical, and his logic more torturous until as it reaches its conclusion where in 1945 we learn, in a letter to Bauch on 28 February, that “catastrophe has a redeeming feature; indeed, is a necessity for Germany”.

Meanwhile he must teach and there are other distractions. As he wrote to Elfride on 6 November 1939, “semester and university life have turned into something unreal, less on account of current [historical] events than on the work in which I am involved”. The work in question was the ordering and typing up of his reservoir of lecture notes. it was a task that was supported by a simple lifestyle. As he wrote in a letter to Elfride on 5 December 1943, in Messkirch he enjoyed “a very basic and regular daily routine. From 8-1 o’clock and from 3-7, I work. In the evenings, we [with his brother, Fritz] go for our walk in the empty countryside”. It was a humble regime, and it drew from Heidegger a philosophical observation on the art of simple living. “At a time when everything is geared to utility and success, power and commerce, we should remember at every hour that life finds fulfilment sooner and more purely if we bestow our attention upon the actual essence of things. The inconspicuous guardianship of the essential in silent commemoration, escorted by those entrusted to us, is the origin to which everything returns”.

One week later, he sent Elfride a second letter, where he made a rare observation on contemporary politics. He begins with a piece of ill-founded gossip: “there is a lot of talk that Goebbels seems to have had it; in other areas a reshuffle is said to be imminent”, Heidegger was off the mark in his political observations (Goebbels was to remain a key figure within the Nazi hierarchy), but when Heidegger moves from particularities to generalisations he is closer to the truth: “what is the point any more with things like ‘customs and symbols’, in view of the actual realities and the inexorable dynamic of the military-technological organisation of the ‘Volk’ as a whole? The former are just a smokescreen”.

On 18 May 1940, Heidegger wrote to Elfride from Messkirch. News had just come through of the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Heidegger showed himself remarkably (and surprisingly) well informed on these military matters. He did not think the invasion of France would be a repeat of the invasion of that country in the First World War, which led to stagnation and the murderous loss of life of trench warfare. Today’s situation was entirely different, “because our enemies, even though they have similar aircraft and armoured cars, continue to think along the old lines and have to rethink matters from one day to the next. With us, however, the complete mastery of technology has in advance produced a quite different kind of strategic thought. In addition, the invasion has been sufficiently well rehearsed”. In other words, the Germans were prepared for war; the French were not. And Heidegger added (seemingly approvingly) “the ruthless ‘operation’ is in itself also an unconditional commitment to the inner lawfulness of the unconditional mechanisation of warfare. The single person disappears as an individual”.

The war continued, and Heidegger wrote to Bauch on 4 November 1941 with comments on its broader significance, historical and metaphysical: “the inner consistency and inexorability in which the direction of the planet unfolds is an event that could confirm the essence of the history of Being, should that still require confirmation. We unfold with it, and yet I know from all of this that I am already standing on a different star”. On 1 May 1942, Heidegger wrote to Bauch once again, voicing the opinion that the war represented a crucial turning point in world history, whose critical juncture Heidegger attempted to capture in startlingly figurative (if obscure) language: “we will become the land of the evening for a night of the morning”. “The very Being of the West is in the process of transformation, and the agents of this transformation will be Germans”, Heidegger asserted returning to a trope that he had first voiced in his rector’s speech of 1933, “because in them [the Germans] the original character of the ancient Greeks has been preserved”. The Offensive against Russia, “operation Barbarossa”, what Heidegger was later to call in a letter to Bauch of 9 October 1942 Germany’s “world-historical test, had begun, with disturbing rumours about how it was being conducted. The nationalistic optimism of his earlier letter to Bauch regarding the war had now gone. Heidegger felt that he was living “in the age of an unqualified destitution of Being”, and he pointed to the “capacity for brutality” of what was taking place (without directly referring to specific military atrocities). “Compared to that, what Nietzsche understood by nihilism is purely a children’s game)”.

The normalcy of university life had beenseverely interrupted by the war, but it had not been brought to cessation. Continuing to teach and learn was a matter of morale as much as education. In the summer semester, between May and July 1941, Heidegger lectured on “The Metaphysics of German Idealism” (“Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus”), which was a revised version of his earlier course on Schelling. In the same semester, he offered “Basic Concepts” (“Grund-Begriffe”) As he explained in his opening remarks, it was not his intention to map out the philosophical base for entities such as “nature”, “history”, “the state” or “humankind” (see Grundbegrffe, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981, page 1), but to explicate the conceptual core that lies within them all: Being (page 4). This is the “indispensable” that brings us into “simplicity” and “clarity” (page 5). To regain these qualities, we must return (although Heidegger makes it clear that this is not going backwards but forwards, into the future) to the Greeks, and their grasp of the world through their “originary” work (page 7).

Was it the brutality of war that prompted Heidegger to return to his spiritual-literary mentor, the author who saw darkness around him but nevertheless found light within it? In the summer semester 1942, between May and July, Heidegger gave a lecture course on “Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ “, a text, perhaps, for Heidegger, that speaks of pastoral continuity amongst historical carnage. Heidegger divided his course into three sections: “poetising the Essence of Rivers: The Ister Hymn”; “The Greek Interpretation of Human Beings in Sophocles’ Antigone” (where Heidegger saw Hölderlin entering into a debate of the mind with the Greek dramatist); and finally, he spoke on “Holderlin’s Poetising of the Essence of Poetry as Demigod”. Hölderlin’s poem is a mythic celebration of the course of the Danube (the “Ister”, the Greek name for a river that begins in the Black Forest in Germany and flows into the Black Sea, south of Odessa). Its opening stanza is structured around the elemental forces of fire (“now come, fire”), a reference to the sun), water (the Indus), earth (the arable land), and air (perhaps the “forest’s cry” and the song from the Indus). We are told it is sunrise and “we are to see the day”, but there is no indication of who “we” are here; as a subject, the latter remains an anonymous epic collective. The river itself does not appear until the second stanza, surrounded by “the forest of firs” and the “resinous trees”, as a water course that draws to itself the vegetation around it. The third stanza offers the most extended personification of the Ister (now called a “he”), whose movement is idiosyncratic, with the river at one point appearing to be moving backwards (Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister“, Indiana UP, 1996, page 3).

The river finds its Being in what is a form of language, gesturing towards sun and moon, and it acts as a signifier producing signs (“a sign is needed”), This, as Heidegger tells us, is something understood by poets, “who must know this in order to be acquainted with rivers and to belong in a visionary faithfulness to river’s concealed essence” (page 47). The fourth stanza offers the most extended personification of the river. At daybreak, “he” is a “youth”, and later fully developed as capable of experiencing emotions (“he is saddened” (page 5). This final stanza voices an animistic vision of the union of the animate and the inanimate, of the human, animal and mineral. In spite of this symbiosis (or perhaps because of it), the river ultimately remains “a mystery” (page 6).

For Hölderlin, the Ister demarcated the place of dwelling, and Heidegger quotes a line from the hymn, “here, however, we wish to build”, which he glosses in the following way: “the river is the locality that pervades the abode of human beings upon the earth, determines where they belong and where they are at home [‘heimisch’]. The river thus brings human beings into their own and maintains them in what is their own” (page 21). To achieve this, the Ister draws from within itself a distinctive power, elevating qualities such as the “heimisch”, but opposing qualities such as the “Unheimliche” (the uncanny), and “dainon” (connoting “the powerful”). The latter is a quality “that the Greeks otherwise call ‘orni’ – that which forcibly erupts and bursts forth out of itself -the ‘violent’ in the broadest sense of the word” (page 70). Heidegger was thinking of the elemental forces unleashed in Greek tragedy (he had already invoked Sophocles in his analysis), but he gives us an example of these forces from contemporary history. For in his review to Section 10, “the Human Being: the uncanniest of the uncanny”, we are told “we know today [with America’s entry into the war] that the Anglo-Saxon world has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is the homeland [‘Heimat’]” (page 54). This act, however, is simply one further instance of the dictatorship of the “world order” (page 41) and the growing power of technology. At such points in Heidegger’s discourse, history displaces poetry.

Heidegger’s Turning found inspiration in the chthonic spirituality of Hölderlin, with his elevated sense (as in the Ister poem) of homeland. The second source of inspiration for Heidegger at this Ime (and it was already there in Hölderlin) came from the Greeks, the integrity of whose original culture Heidegger had extolled in his writings of the 1930s (and perhaps even earlier). Particularly the pre-Socratics offered a purity (almost, we might, say an innocence of thought) that Heidegger wished to build upon for his developing idiom of inceptual thinking. In the winter semester between November 1942 and February 1943, he gave a lecture course on the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, analysing the latter’s “On Nature” (“Peri phusis”), the only fragment from that philosopher’s work that has survived. Composed between 470 and 460 BC, it consists of nineteen stanzas in three disconnected sections, written in dactylic hexameters. The poem has been read as an allegory of an “ontological education”. “The youth is to learn how to think properly according to the divine; his thinking will be removed from mortal thinking and brought to think ‘to eon’ [‘Being’]” (See David Jacobs in The Presocratics after Heidegger, edited by Jacobs. Albany, 1999, page 188). He will achieve this by learning from the goddess, Aletheia, what truth, “aletheia”, means.

Consequently, Heidegger explores during the course of his lecture series the nature of that concept, explicating its past usages, literary and philosophical, in an attempt to establish its foundational centrality to “inceptual thinking”. The first lecture, a discussion of the goddess Aletheia is followed by an enquiry into the conditions required to regain contact with the originary meaning of truth as “aleatheia”, and a disquisition on how methods of conventional translation are insufficient to achieve this. In his second and third lectures, Heidegger discusses the various forms of “alethiea” as “un-concealedness” (“Unverborgenheit”), and how these manifest themselves in “forgetting” [“letthe]. This is followed by an analysis of conflicting notions of truth in Greek and Latin, and critique of the historical dominance of the latter in Western culture. The fourth and fifth lectures focus on the multiplicity of the opposites of un-concealedness. In the lecture that follows, Heidegger exhorts us to be prepared to make contact with “aletheia” through hand and eye, as we open ourselves, as the Greeks did in their art and literature, to the experience of the “uncanny” (“Ungeheuer”).

Parmenides has been described as a “lecture course [that] proceeds in circles” (See Agnes Heller, “Parmenides and the Battle of Stalingrad”, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19, 1997, page 247). Circularity, however, is the essential medium for inceptual thinking because, as Heidegger had already made clear in Contributions to Philosophy, inceptual thinking does not move along the sequential lines of analytic philosophy, where hypothesis is followed by logical demonstration in the mode of a linear exposition. It emerges through exploration and confrontation, wresting significance from what may otherwise have remained impervious to logical analysis or explication. For “truth is never ‘in itself’ available by itself, but must be gained by struggle. Un-concealment is wrested from concealment in a conflict with it. The task is to experience properly that conflict occurring within the essence of truth” (page 25).

Heidegger’s goal was to trace “aletheia” back to its originary articulation, “for essential thinking must always say only the same, the old, the oldest, the inceptual, and must say it inceptually” (page 114). This is not, however, a case of a mere retrospective rapprochement, as if the thought of the present is simply recouping the thought of the past. Such temporal divisions are illusionary. Chronology may belong to the formation of thought (we cannot deny that Parmenides wrote before Heidegger), but it tells us nothing about the Being of thought. The beginning does not lie in the past; the beginning is now and in the future. In his lectures, Heidegger was not seeking to provide an account of the thought of Parmenides in the manner of a scholarly study. Heidegger must follow the track of the unspoken, which leads out of Parmenides and then back again to him. This cannot imply involve an interpretation of Parmenides’ words. In accordance with his project of philosophic renewal, Heidegger must himself think the “originary” presence of thinking. Heidegger thus is not thinking about Parmenides; he is attempting to think through him. It is a task of reconstruction and expansion: a creative re-reading of the past for a creative philosophy for the future.

Hölderlin, however, has not been forgotten (indeed, in one sense he belonged to the Greeks). In 1942, Heidegger contributed an essay, “Remembrance” (“Andenken”) to a volume commemorating the 100th anniversary of Hölderlin’s death. As he wrote to Bauch, here was “an opportunity to make manifest Hölderlin’s poetry as a ‘thinking’ where it nevertheless remains poetry”. The essay formed the basis of a lecture course given contemporaneously in the winter semester 1941-1942. The poem “Remembrance” is a commemoration of Hölderlin’s sojourn in France between 1801 and 1802, but Heidegger looks for a deeper meaning, arguing that the “humanity of southern France had made him more familiar with the authentic essence of the Greeks” (Heidegger, Elucidations to Hölderlin’s Poetry, Humanity Books, 2000, page 107). This dual vision and dual time scale are captured in the very word “Andenken”, for if we separate the “An” from the “denken” we arrive at a process of a “thinking of” or “thinking back” (page 108). And Heidegger adds, “this ‘thinking of’ [‘Denkend an’] what is yet to come can only be thinking of that which has been [but still is] (in distinction to what is simply the past), which we understand as what is still coming into presence from afar” (page 109). In a line-by-line reading of the poem, Heidegger weaves elemental tropes from a Greek past into a German future, which is “the place of origin in thinking of the journey of the voyage through the foreign” (page 181).

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Heidegger was observing the events of the Second World War at a distance. As he told Bauch on 1 May 1942, he was fully aware of the death and destruction that the war was causing, but he looked on at these events “quite independent from what is happening in the ‘world’. I have found the beginning where the inner law of its formation is being delivered to me clearly and simply”. That beginning was both a philosophical regeneration but also something that revealed a potentiality in him that would increasingly become an actuality: a poetic one. In 1942, Heidegger published with a local press near Messkirch a volume of poetry, which was intended to be read only by family and friends, titled Winke (“gestures” or “signals”). As he told Bauch in this letter, “what the gestures {“Winke’] are even I don’t know; perhaps hints of a mood of a style in which attempts at thinking are sheltered”, The poems do indeed read like fragments from the larger discourse of a newly developing philosophy, as in “Harvest”(“Ernte”), which expresses the conviction that truth can emerge only through a gradual self-revelation:

“Only when your thinking

Is this letting-be:

letting-be of Be-ing, namely Be-ing

in whose shine

thought has been brought,

from where it once had been thought.

is thinking a harvest,

that removes you from yourself,

is your thought

no longer yours,

is pure

offering. Is …

a thinking-recall

which is a forgetting of itself”.

[Erst wenn Dein Denken

dieses Lassen ist: Seyn-lassen, naemlich: Seyn

in dessen eigenen Schrein,

ist Denken dorthin eingebracht,

woher es einstig zugedacht,

ist Denken Ernst,

die Dich von Die selbst entfernte,

ist dein Denkenicht mehr Deines,

ist es reines

Opfer. Ist …

Andenken,

das sich selbst vergisst] (GA 81: 81).

“It “Harvest” consists of a single fourteen-line stanza: a preamble followed by an extended qualified statement, which in turn is followed by a flowing set of conclusions. In spite of what looks like careful, almost fastidious punctuation, conventional syntax is eschewed, as the poem strains to articulate the consciousness of the lyrical subject, possibly the poet himself addressing himself as an Other – “yours”. The exertion evident in this process of enquiry is reflected in the structure of the poem, in its irregular metre, its uneven line lengths and unusual rhyming scheme. Its forward momentum reaches a climax in line 12, where an “is” is left suspended through an elision, the emphasis given to the word forcing the reader to look again at its employment in the preceding lines, and to see “is” not as a simple copula but as an attempt to capture the presence of Be-ing. As Heidegger had already written regarding the Aristotle’s position on this, “the guiding meaning of the ‘is’ is ‘meaning-in-addition’. It is not an independent meaning, such as the naming of something. Rather in its meaningful function a such, the meaning of being and ‘is’ is already related to something that is. In that which means-in-addition, the ‘is’ means ‘synthesis’, ‘connectedness’, ‘unity’.” (See Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Indiana UP, 1995, page 325).

During this period, the Greek mind becomes almost the sole focus of Heidegger’s thinking, as he attempts to return to distant, “originary”, fundamentals, perhaps out of inner intellectual compulsion or as a way of evading the carnage of war (and the lost war for Germany) that surrounds him. In the summer semester, between May and July 1943, Heidegger lectured on “Heraclitus: The Beginning of Western Thought”. This was the first of two lecture courses that Heidegger would offer on this philosopher, the second being “Logic: Heraclitus’ Doctrine of Logos”, given in the summer semester 1944. Heraclitus regarded fire as the source of all elements, saw the movement of time as eternal flux, where Being is Becoming, and believed that unity finds itself in opposites. What we know of his philosophy comes entirely from a collection of fragments. A number of them, such as “we can never step into the same river twice” (no. 12), and “a man’s character is his fate” (no. 119), have become popular sayings. Others such as “concerning the size of the sun: [it is] the width of a human foot” (no. 3), “the death of fire is the birth of air, and the death of air is the birth of water” (no, 76), “the sun is new everyday” (no. 6), and “what opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions, and all things come about by strife” (no. 8), reflect the primal symbolic thinking of the pre-Socratics and the source of that thinking in their animistic grasp of the universe that saw the cosmos caught in a state of flux made up from conflicting but ultimately reciprocated elemental energies.

Of greater significance for Heidegger were those fragments that contained statements on “logos”, most notably nos. 1, 2, 50, 72 and 108. The last celebrates the universal meaning of “logos”, and Heidegger here and elsewhere charts its historical-philosophical decline into mere “logic”. As he had explained in Parmenides, “through the Roman re-interpretation of the Greek experience of the essence of man, ‘logos’, the word became ‘ratio’ ” (GA 54: 101). “The essence of the word was thus banished from its ground and from its essential locus”. The decline of “logos’ into “logic” formed a central focus within Heidegger’s de-constructionist critique of Western metaphysics. Logic, as in formal logic, may appear to be a neutral descriptive model that is simply providing a system for appropriate forms of reasoning, but in its broader effectivity this model is supported by normative ideas of “rigorous” or “proper”, in a thinking that judges all statements according to criteria such as consistency, coherence and completeness. It dismisses pronouncements that fail to meet these criteria as forms of falsehood and distortion. It cannot accommodate the ambiguous, the paradoxical and the non-rational (GA 26: 3).

The war was nearing its end but the destruction and loss of life continued. Freiburg had been bombed on 27 November 1944, resulting in almost two thousand deaths. Then on 22 February 1945, there was an air raid over Messkirch that killed thirty-five people. The bank in which Fritz Heidegger worked was also destroyed, but the manuscripts of his brother, which had been deposited in a bank safe, remained unscathed. Heidegger attempted to come to terms with these events. As he wrote to Elfride on 17 February 1945, “what is now taking place throughout the planet is of such a kind that some essential event must be concealed in it, even if we cannot yet see or speak of it. For this reason, however, we must always remain close in our thinking to what is concealed, without wanting to force anything”. Heidegger felt that the war had brought about a loss of “inner values”, as he explained to Elfride on 2 March. These sentiments were general (perhaps too general), but he continued in a more specific way (in terms that at least connote a critique of Hitler’s Germany): “I often now think of Grillparzer’s words on the modern age: ‘from humanity to nationality and bestiality’. But the process as a whole is already unfolding in subjectivity, in that man has lost the proper relationship to the unnecessary [i.e. Being] Indeed perhaps never attained it. To be sure, this is difficult or even impossible for a world of [material] achievement and work, power and success, which is why this must vanish too, but it won’t have vanished by the day after tomorrow or in the foreseeable future”. The impending defeat of Germany prompted a further thoughtful musing in letter of 23 March to Elfride: “the Easter greeting is full of sorrow. And yet we mustn’t yield to it. The fate of the fatherland is so mysterious in the midst of everything else that is happening that it must harbour within it something that towers far beyond our knowledge”. Germany had lost the war, and Heidegger attempted to find philosophical consolation in that loss. As he wrote to Bauch (with tortuous logic) on 15 February, “this war can only be won by those who are capable of losing it and in that loss hear the call to a unique transformation of human becoming and hold themselves ready for the latter”.

By 1945, Heidegger felt that he had reached a critical point in his university career. As he wrote to Elfride on 8 May, “although the future is dark and forbidding, I am confident that there are opportunities to be realized, even if teaching is denied me in the future”. These are intriguing words. What does “denied” (“versagt”) mean here? “Denied” by material conditions, as in the decline of the university environment, or denied because of his political past? The denial, however, also came from within, for as he wrote to Elfride on 14 June, teaching had always been a duty rather than a pleasure: valuable though my earlier teaching activity was, it never really let the authentic heart of my thinking to become entirely free”.

In the winter semester between November 1944 and February 1945, Heidegger gave an “Introduction to Philosophy”, which would be the final lecture course (although he had no way of knowing this) that Heidegger would give as an official professor at Freiburg University. His lectures were now becoming increasingly formulaic: even the title reproduced that of a previous lecture course. The reasons for the indifferent quality of his war time lectures were twofold: the changed demography of the student body (almost all of his students were female and according to Heidegger had little interest in philosophy), and the transference of his energies to the typewritten transcription of his work. Such exertions were, however, taking a physical toll on his health. Throughout the correspondence of this period, he repeatedly refers (as in a letter to Elfride on 2 February 1945) to his “ongoing insomnia and to spells of fainting, headaches and depressions”. Heidegger’s academic work was also suffering. The physical strain of putting his papers in order was making writing lectures difficult. Heidegger’s private life had reached a new low. On 30 December 1944, Heidegger wrote to Elfride from Hausen. She had declined to join him in Messkirch for Christmas. It seems that they now were de facto separated because of his on-going affair with the princess. Due to the worsening military situation, on 31 January 1945, the senate of Freiburg university decided to move its teaching staff and those students who wanted to continue to study to Wildenstein Castle in Leibertingen in the Upper Danube. The castle possessed a youth hostel, and this is where most of the philosophy faculty were housed. Teaching resumed in April and lasted until the end of June, when the community returned to Freiburg after the end of the war,

Heidegger, however, lived in a forester’s lodge ten kilometres away, inhabited by the princess and her children. We know little about his activities at this time, other than that he gave the farewell address to his colleagues and students on the 27 June. It was titled “On Poverty” (“Die Armut”). Heidegger took as his starting point a short quotation from a poem by Hölderlin: “with us everything is concentrated on the spiritual. We have become poor in order to become rich” (“es konzentrirt sich bei uns alles auf’s Geistige, wir sind arm geworden, um reich zu werden” (see Martin Heidegger, “Die Armut”, in Heidegger Studies, 1994, page 5). Behind these words lie Heidegger’s awareness of the catastrophic end of the war for Germany, although he makes no comment on specific military or historical developments. His focus is on “what is taking place in the hidden centre of Western history, which cannot be read off from historically ascertainable events” (page 5).

His immediate concern in his talk, however, is with the notion of “Geist” (a multivalent term and one difficult to translate in any univocal way in English). He begins by tracing the historical etymology of the term, as it appears in Greek as “pneuma”, which is cognate with the Latin word “spiritus” and the French “l’esprit”. It is the “immaterial”, which means (in Greek once again) “the spirit is the enabling power of illumination and wisdom, ‘sophia’ ” (page 6). “Geist” is autotelic, “the essence of ‘Geist’ is its primal will, which only wills itself” (page 6). As Heidegger goes on to argue in his talk, if an individual is rich in spirit than the poverty of its material condition (and for that read the destruction of Germany) counts for little. The main part of the talk was, in fact, a disquisition on the value of “Not” (“want”, “need”, poverty”). Heidegger did not ignore the material devastation that faces Germany, but he argued that the real danger facing us was the misrecognition of the true nature of “Not”, and in our attempts to flee it. The essence of “Not” must be fully understood and the possibilities that it offers for spiritual transformation embraced (page 10). And Heidegger concludes: the European nations “must come to learn the essence of poverty, so that they can become poor” (page 10).

Heidegger would soon, in his personal and professional life, a good opportunity to practice this philosophy of inversion. In May 1945, his house in Freiburg, along with his library, was confiscated by the occupying French military authorities, who had taken over control of the administration of Freiburg on 22 April. On 10 June, Elfride lodged a protest. Heidegger returned soon after in late June from his retreat in the Upper Danube valley to Freiburg to find that he was persona non grata in the university. On 16 July, he sent a letter to the mayor challenging the legality of the action. It read: “I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms against this attack on my person and on my work. Why should I have been singled out for punishment and defamation before the eyes of the whole city – indeed, before the eyes of the world – not only by having my home requisitioned in this manner, but also by being stripped of my employment? I never held office of any kind within the Party and was never active in the Party or in any of its organisations. If there are those who regard my rectorship as politically compromising, then I must insist on being given an opportunity to defend myself against any charges or accusations, made by whomsoever – which means being told, first and foremost, what specifically has been alleged against me and my official activities” (quoted in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, page 315).

Heidegger’s memory is faulty here: he was one of the first members of “The Cultural-Political Work Community of German University Teachers” a National Socialist group founded in early 1933 in order to actively develop Nazi educational policy and the politics of the new state within the German Academics’ Association, a policy that Heidegger promoted through lectures and speeches. Rather than go on the offensive by adopting a semi martyrdom role, Heidegger should have done what he was later to do in his retrospective, “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts” (1945) and admitted that he had played a leading role in the promotion of Nazi policies in 1933, but he did so out of patriotic duty fearing that Germany was on the point of anarchy or a Communist takeover. He could also have pointed out that the Nazi Party was by 1933 the second largest party in Germany, its status achieved through democratic elections.

Heidegger’s protest fell on deaf ears, and he and Elfride were compelled to share their house with a French military family (although the library was not confiscated). It was, however, something more than his material possessions that were at stake; his future as a university professor was also in jeopardy. On 23 July, Heidegger appeared before a de-Nazification committee formed by the university under the direction of the French occupying authorities. The committee consisted of the historians and philosophers Constatin von Dietze, Gerhard Ritter, Adolf Lampe, the theologian Arthur Allgeier and the botanist Friedrich Oehlkers. They interviewed Heidegger on 23 July and prepared a report, which was presented on 1 Auguat. The paper focused on Heidegger’s occupancy of the rectorship in 1933-1934, which it condemned as preparing the way for the Nazification of the university. His promotion of the Führer principle amongst staff and students represented, according to Lampe “a painful restriction of the independence to be expected from and to be preserved for a university teacher” (quoted in Safranski, page 33). Heidegger’s international reputation only served to make the severity of his mistakes more substantial. The committee did, however, absolve Heidegger from further guilt after 1934. It recommended that he be forced into early retirement but granted the status of emeritus, which would allow him to continue teaching.

Heidegger was pleased with the outcome, but his pleasure was short lived. His punishment was regarded as too lenient by one influential member of the committee, Adolf Lampe who, in conjunction with other colleagues, including the Vice-Rector, Franz Böhm, brought about a revision of judgement of the original committee, arguing that Heidegger was being treated far more leniently than other cases in the de-Nazification process. Lampe was also outraged that Heidegger had showed no remorse for his actions. As Heidegger wrote to Jaspers much later on 8 April 1950, he did feel ashamed of what he did in 1933, but it was the “shame” of having made a mistake, of having been “deluded”. What he had hoped for – a new beginning, renewal – never took place in reality. The fact that after 1934 he had separated the realms of politics and philosophy now seemed to him that he had recaptured the purity of his mind. As Safranski summarises, “he believed that the road of his thinking, which he professed in public, had rehabilitated him. Hence, he felt no guilt, neither in a legal sense nor probably in a moral one” (page 338).

Fearing the worst, Heidegger wrote in 1945 to two people with whom he had been friends in the past and who were influential figures: Conrad Groeber (Archbishop of Freiburg) and Karl Jaspers (professor in Heidelberg), seeking their support and their written testimonies of his character that he could send to the committee. Heidegger received a positive testimony from the former (after a tearful meeting in which he confessed his political sins), but from the latter (and much to Heidegger’s surprise and dismay) a negative testimony. Jaspers made six points in his letter of 22 December, and he set them out in numerical sequence. Firstly, he stressed the personal dimension and difficulty of writing about someone who had once been a close friend and colleague but who had through his actions greatly disappointed Jaspers in recent years. Jaspers then considered Heidegger’s complex attitude to his Jewish colleagues. Jaspers remembers Heidegger typifying someone as “a Jew”, but there were other times when he was supportive and avoided such classifications, and Jaspers concludes: “I must assume, anti-Semitism went against his conscience and his inclinations” (see Heidegger / Jaspers Briefwechsel, page 271). Jaspers emphasized in his third statement that whilst Heidegger pursued a destructionist methodology in his philosophy, he was nevertheless at the very center of the renewal of contemporary thinking like no one else. Jaspers’ final three points, however, were all damning. Jaspers recommended that Heidegger be allowed to continue to publish but not teach. He wrote: “Heidegger’s way of thinking appears in its very essence to be unfree, dictatorial and incommunicative, and would have ominous consequences in the teaching situation today”. This was a strange assertion: Heidegger had attracted a generation of students precisely on account of his teaching, as Hannah Arendt would affirm in her later testimony published on Heidegger’s eightieth birthday. But it was his support for National Socialism that proved the most telling. Heidegger was one of the few university professors who had come out in support of Hitler and although he later stepped away from active politics, he had nowhere retracted his views in public (Heidegger / Jaspers Briefwechsel, pages 272-273). Jaspers did believe, however, that Heidegger’s National Socialism had little in common with what was practiced at the time in the Nazi state (see Jaspers’ letter, reproduced in Heidegger / Jaspers Briefwechsel, page 272). Jaspers concluded his report by repeating his recommendation that Heidegger should be removed from his teaching role but be allowed to publish. Jaspers may not have been entirely objective in his report. The two men had fallen out over Heidegger’s embrace of National Socialism as early as 1933, and Jaspers was to suffer personally under the regime: he was banned from teaching in 1937 and lost his right to publish a year later. He and his Jewish wife lived in fear of a threat of incarceration through the period of the Third Reich.

On 19 January 1946, the definitive judgement was taken: Heidegger was to be forced into retirement and deprived of his right to teach. The de-Nazification process that he had undertaken in 1934 was now complete.

Chapter Seven: 1946-1950

Persona non grata

In February 1946, Heidegger suffered a mental breakdown, brought about by the crisis in his university career and by the marital complications ensuing from his affair with Princess Margot von Sachsen-Meiningen. He sought treatment with the noted psychiatrist, Viktor Emil Freiherr von Gebsattel, in his sanitorium in Schloss Hausbaden in Badenweiler, Baden Württemberg, where Heidegger remained until May. The period of convalescence was a necessary but depressing experience. As Heidegger wrote to Elfride on 17 February, “all this week, I have really only been ‘vegetating’; in the first few days the exhaustion finally hit me. It wasn’t anything special, but I was tired and lacked the drive to do anything. I then also suddenly felt depressed by being surrounded by invalids”. His personal association (which became a friendship) with Gebsattel was, however, a compensation: “he is sixty-three years old. He has experienced much, has a background in philosophy and remains within it despite his theological orientation, which is by no means narrow. He knows my work in great detail and tells me how much he and his friends have been pinning their hopes on my thinking”.

Gebsattel practiced “Daseinanalysis”, a method first developed by Ludwig Binswanger, and which had been expounded most recently in 1942 in the latter’s Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human Existence. This was a mode of existential psychoanalysis that encouraged the individual to accept its isolation from other individuals and from the social sphere, in general. Gebsattel gave Heidegger advice that was prescient: “he believes that I should leave the university immediately, whatever happens”, Heidegger wrote in the same letter to Elfride, “for what is essential is my thinking and this (he sees very clearly) will be constantly diverted and held back by pedagogic restraints”. Indeed, as Heidegger wrote to his brother Fritz on 21 February, “my own work is so important to me that I no longer attach any value to teaching” (although he did attach, as we shall see, importance to his status as professor). But this was all not loss. Heidegger’s suspension from Freiburg University may have initially caused him distress but now it came as a relief, for as he wrote to Fritz one week later “through this, the obstacles to my final embracing of the courage to pursue an ineffable daring-thinking have been removed”.

On 15 March 1946, Heidegger wrote to Elfride to discuss his relationship with the princess. He had been quite open about his affair, and Elfride may have possibly been suspecting that he was considering separation. In the letter that he now sent, Heidegger said that he had been carefully considering his position and had come to a final decision: “in my thinking, I constantly reflect upon all that has happened and is to come. The one thing that has become clear to me is that in no way shall I be living together with Margot. If I decide on Messkirch or somewhere else in my own home area, I’d like you to be there with me”. And yet, Margot was not to be abandoned. As Heidegger added in this lengthy and convoluted letter (written all in one piece without paragraphs, which perhaps indicates an obsessive mind not quite sure about itself and that clearly reflects the fact that he had reached a critical point in his personal life), “and then Margot’s relation to Messkirch would also have to be defined and clarified in such a way that everything might resolve itself amicably and for the better”. We can only conjecture what Elfride would have made of this rambling and inconclusive communication, and of the final remarks: “in what is essential, I must probably tread the path alone, without making anything special of this solitude”, which is a conclusion that seems to exclude both the princess and Elfride.

Heidegger remained in the sanatorium throughout March and April 1946, mentally confused and trying to come to terms with where he had reached in his life. He seems to have entered a world of his own, a world, as he noted to Elfride on 20 March, “that has stood still in time and no longer ‘is’ at all”. “Whereas there the typewriters chatter away, here the hand with the pen [Heidegger’s pen] falters in the face of everything dark and painful and unfathomable. And yet, at the same time, it is great and uncanny, where thought hardly dares turn itself to word”.

Heidegger, adrift from the world, had few visitors while he was in the sanatorium, but one visitor (who came from an entirely unexpected source) would be instrumental in furthering his career. On 31 March 1946, he received a visit from Frédéric de Towarnicki, a young officer serving in the cultural office of the French army occupying southwest Germany, who had been impressed by Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? He was a journalist based in Paris, with connections to various philosophical groups. He brought with him greetings from Jean-Paul Sartre and a copy of the latter’s Being and Nothingness. Towarnicki left an account of this visit in the article “Visite à Martin Heidegger”, which was published in the influential philosophy journal, Les temps Modernes, edited by Sartre, and which effectively formed Heidegger’s introduction to the French reading public. The meeting itself, however, was not unproblematic. On 4 April, Heidegger wrote to Elfride, describing his encounter with his French colleague. It was a meeting that “gave rise to fairly long exchanges: “the misunderstandings were really very great; his interest is in the activist element [of my thinking – in other words, its effect on others] rather than in its genuinely philosophical moment”. As is clear from Heidegger’s account of the meeting, he was being treated as a cultural figure, as a new fashion in philosophy.

During his period in the sanatorium, Heidegger reviewed his past and the life of the mind that had supported it. In a letter to Elfride of 8 April, he made the following observation: “the path of my thinking has passed through much that was erring and unfathomable, through much forgetting and neglecting, and yet at the same time has been searching and liberating, and the more truly it finds its way on its own, the less it belongs to me or anyone”. Heidegger also thanked Elfride for her continuing support (in words that were of a familiar rhetoric): “I thank you for helping, and we should ensure that we now help ourselves in the open in unison, each of us giving the other what is one’s own and receiving it from the other – so that henceforth everything may belong to us again”. These were words that were meant to reassure Elfride that they were still a couple. She would not, however, have been reassured by the constant allusions in the latter to the princess (referred to throughout by the familiar “M”). Indeed, there is just a sense that Heidegger had come to see the three of them as forming a virtual menage à trois. So much seems borne out by comments such as the following: “and so I trust that the depth of your and M’s hearts, each in its own underlying tone, will help the Saying [the ‘Sagen of truth] and relate it anew and joyfully tend it”.

Heidegger left the sanatorium in May 1946 and returned home to Freiburg. In the meantime, in spite of his growing alienation from his immediate environment in Germany, his reputation in France was growing. On 12 September, Heidegger received his first visit from a young French philosopher and academic, Jean Beaufret. Correspondence must have been exchanged between the two before that date, but we have no access to it. They met where Heidegger liked to meet all his guests, when an intellectual affinity was in the making, in the cabin in Todtnauberg. Their intellectual symbiosis would soon take shape in the form of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. In a letter of 10 November, Beaufret had asked Heidegger a number of questions: “how can some sense be restored to the word ‘humanism’? What I have been attempting for a long time is to make precise the relationship between ontology and a possible ethics. How can we salvage that element of an adventure that animate all research, without turning philosophy into a mere adventuress?” (quoted from Alfred Denker, Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit, Klett-Cotta, 2011, page 194). Heidegger replied (addressing only the first question) in his letter, “your question not only presupposes a desire to retain the word ‘humanism’, but it also contains an admission that this word has lost its meaning” (see “Brief über den Humanismus”, in Wegmarken, Klostermann Seminar, 2004, pages 344-345). Beaufret’s question had been prompted by the publication of Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism the previous year, in which Sartre coined the adage, “existence precedes essence” (meaning that human beings do not have a residual self but only one that is made through active choice). Heidegger was impressed by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and wrote to Sartre on 28 October 1945, hoping to arrange a meeting. That meeting, because of logistical obstacles in immediate post-war Europe, did not take place until much later.

In spite of Sartre’s admiration for Heidegger’s work, the differences between the two philosophers were great. Through his version of Existentialism, Sartre promoted an activism that was coterminous with a humanist engagement with the practical world, an engagement that would increasingly involve politics. For Heidegger, such activism removed the human subject from the “belongingness to Being”, which is to be found only in the interiority of thinking. And then Heidegger posed the question: “in what relation does the thinking of Being stand to theoretical and practical behaviour?”. His self-reply was that “thinking attends to the clearing of being in that it puts its Saying of Being into language as the home of ek-stasis. Thus, thinking is a deed that also surpasses all praxis. Thinking towers above action and production” (Brief, page 361). And he added: “thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It eventuates before this distinction” (Brief, page 358). In other words, Heidegger’s position is that the existential act of self-definition presupposes ultimately a preceding cognitive self.

At some point between April and July 1947, Herbert Marcuse, whilst on a three-month trip to Germany and Austria, paid a visit to Heidegger in Todtnauberg. Marcuse had known Heidegger since 1928, when he had come to Freiburg to study with the philosopher, writing his Habilitation dissertation, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, under his guidance. On 28 August, after returning to America where he lived, Marcuse wrote to Heidegger saying how dismayed he had been during his visit with Heidegger’s account of his Nazi past. Marcuse accepted that Heidegger had undergone a change of heart after 1934, but then asked why he did not emigrate after that year (although the answer was simple: Heidegger believed in the values of the “Heimat” and could not have continued to write without his rural base in Todtnauberg). Marcuse went on in his letter to make a number of criticisms that have subsequently been made by a cohort of Heidegger antagonists, from Emmanuel Faye to Richard Wolin and including biographers such as Hugo Ott and moist recently Guillaume Payen. Marcuse’s main argument was not that Heidegger had supported the Nazi regime in 1933, but that in the postwar period he had failed to retract his earlier political views. Most damning of all for Marcuse was Heidegger’s silence regarding the Holocaust.

Six months later on 20 January 1948, Heidegger replied. He began by justifying his short-lived support for the Nazi government, which he saw at the time as the sole opportunity for a reconciliation of social differences and a defense against communism, and he had stated his support in writing and speeches. He then added a comment that was as close as it would ever be to the public retraction that Marcuse was calling for: “today, I regard a few of these statements as misleading” (see Martin Heidegger, “Zu 1933-1945. Brief an Marcuse 20 Januar 1948”, in Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000, pages 344-345). Marcuse may or may not have been placated by these words, but where his dismay persisted was in Heidegger’s response to the Holocaust, which Heidegger passes over in silence, talking instead about the native ethnic east Germans who were victimised by the Russians after the war. In his reply sent on 12 May, an outraged Marcuse asked: how could it be possible to equate the torture, the maiming and annihilation of millions of Jews with the forcible relocation of population groups who suffered none of these crimes? The magnitude of the Holocaust was unsurpassable. Heidegger had argued that in 1933 it was impossible to predict later developments. Not so, replied Marcuse. As an event, it was there in the ideology of the Nazi Party right from the start. “We knew, and I myself saw it too, that the beginning already contained the end”. Marcuse’s damning critique was total. The implication of what he is saying is: you cannot sperate Heidegger the philosopher from Heidegger the man.

Such sentiments should have excluded further synergy between the two philosophers, but this was not the case. In 1954, Heidegger published “The Question concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”), a critical explication of the mechanistic mindset of the modern period. It was an influential work, and it influenced no other than Herbert Marcuse. In his One Dimensional Man, published ten years later, Marcuse drew extensively on Heidegger’s central arguments, developing them into a full-blown critique of industrial society “in which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it”. Such a system produces a mental culture in which “the elements of autonomy, discovery, demonstration and critique recede before designation, assertion and imitation” (See Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, London, 1964, pages xv and 85). The philosopher can, after all, be separated from the man.

On 6 February 1949, Heidegger received after a long period of silence, a letter from Karl Jaspers, who wrote: “there was once a bond between us. I cannot believe that this bond has been entirely broken”. Jaspers went on to explain why he had penned the report to the de-Nazification university committee in Freiburg and why it was so negative. When he replied to Jaspers on 22 June, Heidegger reciprocated the positive tones of Jaspers’ initial sentiments, but he ignored the matter of the report. He wrote: “through all the confusions, mistakes and temporary bad feeling, my connection with you and with our shared paths, which commenced at the beginning of the 1920s, has remained unaffected”. Heidegger’s letter has been described as “falsely ingenuous” (Payen, page 448), but there is no evidence to suggest that he was being insincere. In fact, throughout the years of the Third Reich, Heidegger had sent Jaspers a copy of all his new publications, with a personal dedication. If anyone was being ingenious, it was Jaspers, for his positive words did not reflect his true disposition. Jaspers real feelings were disclosed in his private notebooks, the so-called Notizen, which he wrote between 1928 and 1964, where doubt and uncertainty reigned in his attitude to Heidegger. What Jaspers ultimately brought to his relationship with Heidegger, he later concluded, was a mixture of “rejection and homage” (See Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, edited by Hans Saner, Piper Verlag, 1978, page 143) and the recognition that he does not fully understand the person he is dealing with. Here in the same year as his letter, we read: “one does not know with whom one is communicating. There is something singularly alien about him, which I have tried to communicate and will continue to do so, if that is at all possible. The most self-evident integrity is not present with Heidegger. What appears is not comprehensible to me” (Notizen, page 46).

In the earlier letter, Heidegger had referred to his earlier “mistakes” and “confusions. This was as close to a confession that Jaspers could have expected. Heidegger also mentioned his own fate and his marginalisation from public institutions, including the university. His words were sparse and sober and without self-pity: “one should not talk too much about solitude, but it remains the only place in which thinkers and poets, as far as it is humanly possible, can stand by Being”. Jaspers wrote back immediately on 25 June, thanking Heidegger for his letter, and including the lost letter from February and the report to the de-Nazification committee that went with it. Heidegger’s reply was also swift. He wrote on 5 July, regretting that he had been unable to find a way to a dialogue with Jaspers before now: “this [dialogue] became even more difficult after the Spring of 1934, when I went into opposition and internally dissolved all ties with university life: then my helplessness [‘Ratlosigkeit’] started to increase”. The initial part of this explanation seems too easy, and we do not know whether Jaspers would have accepted it, but he might have felt that the confession of “Ratlosigkeit” was nearer the truth. Heidegger then directly referred to the report that Jaspers had enclosed with his letter but did not feel that the time was right to discuss it: “if I do not go into explanations concerning the points you make in your first letter, this is not because I wish to ignore them but merely explaining them will go awry into the indeterminable. Confronting the German disaster and its entanglements with world history and the present age will take us the rest of our lives”. In the same letter, he told Jaspers that his philosophy was going “backwards”, although this seems to have been to be a positive rather than a negative step. “I have a feeling that I am now growing in the roots and no longer in the branches”. The regained contact with Heidegger gave rise in Jaspers to a new sense of identification with his old friend. As he wrote on 10 July, “out of your last letter, there speaks to me something that I have not heard since our separation, something that touches me in its inconceivability [‘Unbegreifbarkeit’]. This was the way things once were between us, but now they possess a slightly modified tone and a more conscious perspective on to what is most expansive”.

In 1949, the war had been over for four years, and the Nazi past had started to recede. We have now also entered a period of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The authorities find that it is time to take stock of Heidegger and his past. In March 1949, Heidegger had been contacted by the Baden State Commissioner for Political Cleansing and informed that he had been reclassified as simply a “fellow traveler” of the Nazi movement. As Heidegger wrote to his brother on 21 September, the reasons for his reclassification were threefold. The decision was taken “because of my international reputation, because dignitaries from the world of letters have spoken out in my favour, and because since1945 I have absolutely withdrawn from public matters”. But, as Heidegger went on to say in this letter, he was still compelled to live on a reduced pension and his position in the university, where he was still no longer able to teach or lecture, was dismal. Heidegger was unaware of this, but the reversal of his status was almost certainly the result of a letter that Karl Jaspers (who had become, as his 1947 book, Guilt, testifies something of the moral conscience of the nation regarding its Nazi past) sent to the relevant authorities in the Heidegger case. According to Safranski, “at the beginning of 1949, he had written to Gerd Tellenbach, the rector of Freiburg University: ‘Professor Martin Heidegger is recognized throughout the world for his achievement as one of the most important philosophers of the present. There is no one in Germany to surpass him. His almost concealed philosophy, which is in touch with the most profound questions, and which is only indirectly revealed in his writings, possibly makes him today a unique figure in a philosophically poor world’ “. Steps should be taken, Jaspers said, “to ensure that Heidegger could work in peace and, should he so desire, also to teach” (Jaspers quoted in Safranski, pages 372-373).

On Ascension Day, 26 May, Heidegger wrote to Elfride, thanking her for proofreading his work. His words, however, suggest that a deeper gratitude was being expressed. “I am forever grateful to you for bearing everything so courageously and unassumingly”. Is this “everything” simply his work or is it possible that he was referring to his personal life? On 28 May, Heidegger wrote to Elfride again, clarifying his feelings towards the university and expressing his marginalisation from the same: “there is no course of action left for me other than to break with the university milieu and keep my mind on the task to hand”. The task at hand was the completion of a collection of essays that originally had been delivered as academic or public lectures but where now to be published as a book: Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege). It was Heidegger’s first book since his work on Kant in 1929. In its short preface, he described the significance of the title:

” ‘Wood’ [‘Holz’] is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, which come to an abrupt end where the wood is untrodden. They are called ‘Holzwege’. Each goes its own way but remains in the forest. It often seems that each one is the same as the other, but it only looks that way. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a forest path”.

Forest paths follow a logic of their own: “sie gehen in der Irre. / Aber sie verirren sich nicht” (“they go into unknown areas. / But they always know where they are going [literally, they never get lost]”. The allegory is clear: thinking is a process that holds all in abeyance, including its own processional momentum, which may or may not move forward; it may even return to where it began. That circularity is reflected in the thematic structure of Heidegger’s book. Written between 1936 and 1946, the essays range from the aesthetic deliberations of “The Origin of the Work of Art”, the delineation of the conceptual parameters that inform contemporary philosophy in “The Time of the Worldview”, through to “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead’ “, which a discourse on the relationship between metaphysics and nihilism. The volume also included “What are Poets For?”, originally a talk given in memory of Rilke (although it is Hölderlin who is largely quoted throughout), and finally “The Saying of Anaximander”, a testimony to Heidegger’s increasing identification with and inspiration from the thinking of the pre-Socratics. It was, however, technology that would soon dominate his thinking.

Heidegger could make much out of the trivial. This may have been a matter of temperament or his humble upbringing, or the result of his phenomenological training where the detail of the object world is brought into the center of focus. This fascination for minutiae seems to increase during his final Turning. On 5 June 1949, Heidegger wrote to Elfride from Messkirch, saying that he had just been listening to a concert on the radio: “it is uncanny how radio and film are eating away at everything. I am pleased that you enjoyed listening to two concerts at Whitsun, but for me the radio is no substitute [for attending a live concert]. I have had enough of listening to that box”. Heidegger wrote all his lecture notes with a pen; it was his brother, Fritz, who produced the typewritten versions. Heidegger was a technophobe (who could not drive; Elfride did all the driving) and elevated that phobia into a philosophy that was soon to be given expression in December of that year in a series of lectures delivered in Bremen and titled “Insight into That Which is”, broaching a subject that would receive further treatment in “The Question concerning Technology”.

Although Heidegger and Jaspers were back in regular communication, this was far from being a vehicle for the convergence of minds. Their correspondence came increasingly to bring to light major philosophical differences between them and their differing attitudes to philosophy. Jaspers was fully aware of their differences and in one of his “Notizen” from 1950 listed these differences: “1. he claims to be doing something completely new and envisages in a gnostic way an historical process for Being – I live in the appropriation of a philosophia perennis, and attach no value to innovation, going forwards step by step. 2. Heidegger negates. I seek in meaning forever the essential, to preserve and renew fundamental positions, fundamental insights, and fundamental knowledge, in which unintentionally an historical transformation of appearance takes place. 3. Heidegger misjudges the sciences, is compelled to speak in a demonic way about technology (like Ernst Jünger). I would like to employ the sciences in the service of human dignity. 4. Heidegger is swept along by what he discerns for the future – I live with inherited content” (Notizen, page 72).

Philosophical differences soon degenerated into intellectual animosity. On 6 August, Jaspers wrote to Heidegger complaining about the “virulent”, “argumentative” tone of the latter’s communications. And he added, “I am still continuing to stumble over your sentences. The intellectual content of your philosophizing, when I grasp it in the immediacy of your sentences, I often find unacceptable. Many of your key words, I don’t understand at all”. Indeed, Jaspers’ Notizen are replete with criticisms of the abstruse content of Heidegger’s philosophy, and he complains about “the diversion of this philosophy from the responsibility of engaging with everyday life experiences [‘Lebenspraxis’] and politics; its distance from existential realities; its promotion of knowledgeable matters that cannot be researched; and its unpreparedness for practical-reasonable activity”, all of which sustain the gnomic in Heidegger, the unconsciously mendacious, the insidious, the errant and the lack of integrity (Notizen, page 197). Behind this assessment lay Jaspers’ general feelings that in Heidegger’s way of doing philosophy the mystique of totalitarianism could be discerned. Heidegger’s philosophy was undemocratic. “Heidegger thinks polemically, but not in a way that engages with others [‘nicht diskutierend’] – he thinks in evocative terms, not actually providing evidence – just makes pronouncements” (Notizen, page 77).

These are penetrating words, although Jaspers gives no examples from Heidegger’s work of what he meant, but he is honest about why this may be the case: “I have never responded to Heidegger’s writings in any personal way. Even his review of my ‘Psychology of Worldviews’, I never read to the end. It didn’t interest me. I found it boring. And this was also my experience with Being and Time. I only read bits of it. It simply didn’t say anything to me” (Notizen, page 225). There was one particular point where Jaspers took issue with Heidegger: the latter’s essentialist identification of language with Being, with “language as the house of Being”. Jaspers could not accept this: “all language it seems to me is only a bridge”, the medium of communication. For some, this may be self-evident, but for Heidegger this was a mechanistic, functional view of language that relied on a simplistic binary opposition (language is here; the world is there), a model that Heidegger could not possibly have accepted.

Indeed, in his next letter of 17 August, Jaspers retracted his position: “I agree with you that the authentic, the essential, always lies beyond communication and non-communication, beyond the subject and object divide, being and thinking”. It is a sudden volte face that reflects perhaps something of an inferiority complex within Jaspers. At one point in his Notizen, he commented on the greater public profile enjoyed by Heidegger, describing himself as an “unbegabter”, as someone lacking the talent of his more illustrious colleague (Notizen, page 89). He later explained how this had come about. “Heidegger had turned to philosophy early in his life, studied philosophy, had had Rickert and Husserl as teachers in philosophy (dedicating to the former his book on Duns Scotus and to the latter his Being and Time). I had indeed from early on philosophised, but I never studied philosophy, never had a teacher of philosophy, had never been connected with any school of philosophy. On the contrary, it was not until my fortieth year that, driven by my own power, I started to study the subject and chose the teaching of philosophy as my career. I only became aware quite late that philosophy was my task, but it never became essential for me” (Notizen, pages 139-140).

In general, Jaspers was reluctant to confront Heidegger, hence the existence of a number of “letters” that Jaspers composed but did not send. This the case of his extensive review of Heidegger’s essay “The Thing” (“Das Ding”, 1951). Jaspers went through the entire piece, identifying passages where he thought that Heidegger had got matters entirely wrong (Notizen, pages 79-81). It was an insightful and instructive piece of criticism, but one that Jaspers never sent. Even when it was a matter of confronting Heidegger with his actions in the Third Reich, Jaspers left his letters unposted, preferring instead to record them as “Notizen”. One such “letter” was composed in 1952, in which he condemns Heidegger for his fanatical support for Hitler and Nazism in 1933 (Notizen, pages 86-88). His words were detailed and incisive, but they never reached Heidegger. Jaspers kept his real feelings about Heidegger to himself, confiding them only to the pages of his notebooks. The last entry, written shortly before his death, offers his final words on his erstwhile friend and colleague: “searching in vain for men who would attach importance to eternal speculations, I thought I had found one. There was no one else. But this man was my perfectly polite enemy, for the powers that we served were irreconcilable. It soon appeared that we could no longer speak to one another. Joy had turned to sorrow, a distinctly hopeless sorrow, as if we had been unable to seize an opportunity that had been so close. Such was my encounter with Heidegger” (Notizen, page 264).

Jaspers was a man of the times and believed that the modern philosopher should use all means possible to reach his reading public, including technology such as the radio and journalism. But for Heidegger, technology was not simply a neutral medium for mechanical achievement. As he explained in a letter to Jaspers on 21 September 1949, technology possesses an “Angriffscharakter” (the “character of an assault”). With technology, the medium is the message, and the message it brings is that it reifies and commodifies not only the object of its use but also those who use it. “Beings are ordered; that means brought to give an account before the court of calculation”. These were sentiments that underscored the four lectures that he gave on 1 and 2 December 1949 to the select Bremen Club, in (as he recounted to Jaspers in a letter of 10 December) an environment that was “cosmopolitan” and quite different from the “musty” atmosphere of academic Freiburg. (and the upper-middle class milieu of Bremen was a milieu similar to that he encountered in his guest lectures in the elite hotel in Bühlerhöhe in Baden). His friend and confidant, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, who had been a student of Heidegger, was a member of the association that organised the lectures and he later described the almost ceremonial atmosphere that preceded them, where music by Bach and Bruckner was played (see Heinrich Wiesend Petztet, Auf einen Stern zugehen: Begegnungen und Gespräche mit Martin Heidegger, Societäts Verlag, 1983, page 17).

The lectures were “The Thing” (“Das Ding”), “En-framing” (“Das Ge-stell”), “The Danger” (“Die Gefahr”), and “The Turning” (“Die Kehre”), and were brought together under the rubric “Einblick in Das Was Ist” (“Insight into That Which Is”, the “is” referring to the new “Being” of the age: technology). In “The Danger”, Heidegger had written in almost apocalyptic tones of the “immeasurable woes raging and spreading through the world. The tide of suffering continues to rise”, and he had lamented the dreadful impoverishment that was the result of ever-increasing industrial growth and the exploitation of raw nature (see “die Gefahr”, in Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005, page 57). In the modern period, everything has become raw material (“Bestand”). Even the river Rhine, once celebrated by poets such as Hölderlin as the fountainhead of life, has degenerated into a mere store for hydraulic pressure used to produce electricity for power stations. (the sentiments seem romantic, but they will soon possess a dire geopolitical relevance for later generations).

Technology, however, was not a mere “instrumentum”, simply the means of achieving technological goals: technology was an underlying principle that determines, organises and defines our perception and engagement with the revealing of the world through a mechanism that Heidegger called “enframing” (“Das Gestell”). ” ‘Enframing’ means that the real should be revealed as a mode of ordering” (see “Die Frage nach der Technik”, in Vorträge und Aufätze, Klett-Cotta, 2009, page 21). It is in “enframing” that mechanical reason celebrates its dominance of the modern mind: as techno-rationality. Here, causality no longer reveals itself as a process; it has been homogenised into a facticity that knows no past nor future, and the present never arrives but is continually absorbed into its ultimate destination: the product.

On 11 June 1949, Heidegger was contacted by Ernst Jünger, who was seeking to involve him in the creation of a new political-literary journal, Pallas. Jünger had been a notable figure in radical conservative circles in the Weimar Republic and had seen active service as an officer in the First World War, where he had distinguished himself in military combat and received the Pour le Mérite medal. During the war, Jünger had observed the increasing mechanisation of modern warfare, and had written about this phenomenon in a series of war narratives, beginning with Into the Storm of Steel (1920). This was followed by War as inner Experience (1922) and Fire and Blood (1925), both of which dramatise the existentially intense experience, for those living in an environment of permanent danger that war brings.

In his The Worker (Der Arbeiter, 1932), Jünger moved into a different realm, attempting to delineate the political-social physiography of the future. Although Jünger was a key figure after the war in the neo-nationalist movement in the Weimar Republic, he was never a Nazi supporter, and in 1939 he published On the Marble Cliffs, which became a key text in the literature of the inner emigration. The novella tells of the disruption of a peaceful fishing community by the intrusion of less civilized neighbours who, led by a dictatorial figure, attempt to destroy the community through intimidation and violence. Heidegger had read the novella carefully and annotated his copy of the book, highlighting its major concepts (see Zu Ernst Jünger. GA 90: 9-10 and 29), and had discussed the novella with his friend and colleague, Kurt Bauch, in correspondence in 1945, clearly seeing in Jünger a member of the conservative secret Germany that Heidegger believed in.

The book by Jünger that most impressed Heidegger, however, was The Worker. As Jünger made clear in chapter 10 of that book, his goal was to anticipate the historical inevitability of “the replacement of the bourgeois individual with the typus of the Worker” (see The Worker, Northwestern UP, 2017, pages 75-85). The latter is an idealised (although, for its part, it lacks ideals – that is precisely one of its defining qualities) “Gestalt” (“figure” or “form”) that has internalised the technologised functionalism of the modern period. The Worker (in the words of the two translators of the book, Bogdan Costea and Laurence Paul Hemming) “is the metaphysical expression of power” (page xvii). It is the Dasein of the future (although its presence is already evident in the present), which inhabits “a realm beyond human control and command, a realm of primeval force, unbounded and infinite, which irrupts into, and decides for, the human world, from beyond and outside human reckoning” (page xvii). As Jünger had already made clear in his essay, “Total Mobilisation” (1930), the Worker represents the complete domination of the mechanical spirit in which the individual is helpless: “total mobilisation is far less something to be carried out, than something which carries itself out; it is, in war and peace, the expression of the mysterious and inescapable demand to which life in this age of the masses and machines subjects us” (quoted in The Worker, page x). This was an impersonal force that Heidegger would later typify as “en-framing” (“Ge-stell”).

Heidegger was impressed by Jünger’s philosophy. In his essay, “On the Question of Being” (“Zur Seinsfrage”, 1955), written as a contribution to a Festschrift for Jünger, he addressed his colleague directly: “your book, The Worker, has succeeded in describing European nihilism in its phase after the First World War. It developed out of your treatise, ‘Total Mobilisation’ (1930)”. The Worker belongs to that phase of ‘active nihilism’ (Nietzsche) [Jünger himself termed it ‘heroic realism’]. The action of the work consisted – and in a transformed function still consists – in “making the ‘total work character’ of all that is fully actual visible through the figure of the Worker” (see Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, Seminar Klostermann, 2004, page 389).

The plans for a new journal, which first brought Heidegger and Jünger together, came to nothing. Right from the beginning, Heidegger had expressed his misgivings to the putative publisher, Ernst Klett, as to whether the launching of a neo-conservative journal was appropriate in the new postwar swiftly democratising Germany, and Klett passed on these misgivings to Jünger. The Pallas project foundered, but Jünger’s initial letter, in which he agreed about Heidegger’s concerns, initiated a contact and a substantial body of correspondence that lasted until Heidegger’s death in 1976. The content of the letters was highly eclectic. It ranged over the years from an initial act of authorial bonding between two conservative intellectuals equally determined to avoid “the dictatorship” of the public (June 1949), through to a debate about nihilism (December 1950), what should be the appropriate disposition to adopt in an apparently directionless age (March 1955 to January 1956), an exchange of opinions on the maxims of the French essayist, Antoine Riverol (January 1956), Heidegger’s reception in France (August 1966), the unpacking of certain concepts in Heidegger’s philosophy such as “Lichtung” (“clearing”) (August 1968), the airing of Heidegger’s delight at the positive review of his work made by the obscure school teacher, Leonhard Fischer (February 1969), their mutual support for regional dialects (November 1969), and Heidegger’s failing health (July 1970). Jünger was also the recipient of a small collection of Hölderlin poems that Heidegger wished his family and friends to receive after his death.

Jünger met up with Heidegger on frequent occasions, sometimes in Freiburg; sometimes elsewhere. But it was the visits to the cabin (the first was made at the end of 1948) that meant most to him. One such visit was made on 16 September 1948. Jünger was deeply affected by the physical and mental depth of Heidegger’s comportment and presentation of self: “from the very first, there was something there – not only stronger than word and thought but stronger than the person himself. Simple as a peasant, but a fairy-tale peasant, capable of metamorphizing himself at will […] He was the one who knows, the one whom knowledge does not simply enrich but to whom it brings joy […] It was a direct impression of strength” (Jünger quoted in Payen, page 441).

Heidegger’s failure after the war to openly recant his earlier Nazi sympathies and, even worse, his passing over of the events of the Holocaust in silence, has frequently been cited against him. There was, however, one remarkable letter that he sent to Jaspers on 7 March 1950, where he sought to rectify matters. There is no context or background for the letter. Unlike the contact with Herbert Marcuse a few years earlier, Jaspers had not been probing into Heidegger’s past. It is a confessional letter, in which Heidegger admitted that he had not visited his household after 1933 not because Jaspers’ wife was Jewish but because he had felt “simply ashamed” of his actions at the time. Heidegger underlined the words to indicate their personal significance. Is it possible that his renewal of his relationship with the Jewish Hannah Arendt (which took place in the same year) had pricked his conscience? This was an admission of guilt and a confession of the moral weaknesses that he had displayed between 1933 and 1934. It was, as Jaspers wrote back on 19 March, a “candid explanation” that meant much to him. Heidegger’s sentiments had brought, Jaspers felt, Heidegger into the community of shame that belonged to all Germans.

On 13 July, Heidegger was pensioned off, his retirement backdated to 1 April. He was made an emeritus professor on 26 September 1951, but he continued to teach only on an informal basis, offering private classes for small groups of students. There was no official engagement with the university. As he had already explained to Jaspers in a letter of 23 November 1949, lecturing (“lesen”) is “finally over for me”. University lectures may well have been a thing of the past, but not public speaking. On 5 August 1951, Heidegger gave a talk on “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (“Bauen Wohnen, Denken”) in Darmstadt. Here, he attempted to answer two apparently simple questions: “what is it to dwell?” and “how does building belong to dwelling?” (see Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, Routledge, 1993, page 347). The answers depend on how we define the key terms. “Bauen” (“building”), in Heidegger’s creative etymological reading, means “to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for” (page 347). Ontologically, building and dwelling belong together. As Heidegger explains: “building is really dwelling. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on earth. Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects building” (page 350). It is a vision of the integrity of the elemental world, a “primeval oneness” that Heidegger encapsulates in his concept of the “Fourfold” (“Geviert”), in which “earth and sky, divinities and mortals belong together as one” (page 351). The Fourfold allows all physical space (however far it may be) to be seen not as a distance but as presence. It is a philosophy of immanence made possible by the third term in Heidegger’s equation: “thinking”, and he gives an example from his personal experience: “when I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all, if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it” (Page 359).

In June, Heidegger had given a paper to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and had become acquainted with its secretary-general, Clemens Graf von Podwils and his wife, Sophie Dorothee, who was a writer and a translator. A close friendship with the latter followed. In October 1951, Heidegger went with her to Beuron, staying at the monastery. Heidegger and his companion were moved by the liturgy, which was performed on a daily basis. It was a deeply stirring experience but (and Heidegger was intent on registering this), it was not enough. As he explained to Elfride in a letter of 25 October, “neither in the Catholic nor the Protestant Church can a creative or history-making piety be enforced by a liturgical movement – unless God speaks himself”. It is a remarkable declaration from a philosopher who had lost his faith a quarter of a century earlier.

Chapter Eight: 1950-1975

Stranger from an Other Land: Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt

On 8 February 1950, Heidegger received a letter from Hannah Arendt. It was their first contact in twenty years. It came about following her arrival in Freiburg, where she had travelled in her capacity as executive director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Mission, an initiative of the recently formed Federal Republic of Germany (BRD). The task of the mission was to locate Jewish property that had been stolen by the Nazis and to return it to its rightful owners. Arendt sent Heidegger a letter (his address had been provided by Hugo Friedrich, Professor of Romance Language at Freiburg University, with whom she had been a fellow doctoral student at Heidelberg). Arendt notified Heidegger of her arrival and gave him her hotel address.

This would initiate the second encounter between the couple. They had been lovers between 1924 and 1926, when Arendt had studied under Heidegger at Marburg University. After which time, she had taken her doctorate at Heidelberg, where Karl Jaspers (with whom she also maintained a lifelong friendship) had been her supervisor. In 1929, she had married Günther Stern, only to be divorced in1937, after living separately for a number of years. In 1936, Arendt met, and married in 1940, poet and Marxist philosopher, Heinrich Blüchner. By now, Arendt, who had fled Germany in 1933, was working for a number of refugee organisations. Following the outbreak of war and the swift German advance, Arendt emigrated to America from France in 1941. After working as a journalist for the German language Jewish publication, Aufbau, she became an editor at Schocken Books. In 1950, she began her most famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published the following year.

Arendt’s decision to contact Heidegger was a surprising one. On 25 October 1946, she had written to Karl Jaspers, in a letter that included the following critical character study: “this living in Todtnauberg, grumbling about civilisation and writing Sein with a ‘y’, is really a kind of mouse hole that he has crawled into, because he rightly assumes that the only people that he will have to see there are the pilgrims who come full of admiration for him”. And she added, “he probably thought that this way he could buy himself loose from the world at the least cost, fast talk himself out of everything unpleasant and do nothing but philosophise”. But as Hans-George Gadamer pointed out in his autobiography, after his expulsion from the university in 1946, Heidegger had little taste for Freiburg and its people. Those who wanted to meet him (and there many who came from abroad, including from France) had to make the “pilgrimage” to his little mouse hole (see Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997, page 210). Arendt’s low opinion of Heidegger would have been later reinforced in 1949 by a visit to Jaspers, who showed her a number of letters he had received from Heidegger. They contained (according to Jaspers, who seemed both attracted to and repelled by Heidegger; attracted to his achievement of the mind but alienated by his character) “a mixture of genuineness and mendacity or, better still, cowardice in which both qualities prevail”.

Jaspers’ words did not deter Arendt, however, just one year later, from seeking Heidegger out in Freiburg to initiate a renewal of their relationship (hence Heidegger’s “seduction” of her, Payen page 462, is not an accurate description). What had changed in that intervening year? Why did Arendt decide to contact Heidegger? We lack the necessary documentation to give a definitive answer, but the fact that, as she told Heidegger in her letter, a copy of his volume of recently published essays, Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege), was on her bedside table suggests that she may have been impressed by his continuing philosophical productivity and the quality of his work. It is possible that Jaspers’ decision to regain contact with Heidegger in early 1950 was also a factor. She sent Heidegger a letter the day after she arrived in Freiburg, on 8 February. On receiving it, he wrote her a letter and delivered it by hand to Arendt in her hotel, extending an invitation to visit him that evening in his home. Being told by the hotel manager that she was in the restaurant, he asked the waiter to announce his arrival. Arendt later gave her response to his arrival, “when the waiter announced your name (I hadn’t really expected you since I hadn’t received your latter) it was as though suddenly time stopped. Then, in a flash, I became aware – I have never before admitted it, not to myself and not to you and not to anyone else – that the force of my impulse, after [Hugo] Friedrich gave me your address, had mercifully saved me from committing the only truly unforgiveable disloyalty, from mishandling my life. But you must know one thing (since we have not communicated much or very often) that had I done so, it would have been out of pride only – that is out of pure, plain, crazy stupidity. Not for any reason” (quoted in Ettinger, pages 70-71). And, as Ettinger adds, that “reason” would have been an allusion to Heidegger’s earlier Nazi affiliation.

Arendt accepted the invitation and came to Heidegger’s home that evening (that was without the presence of Elfride) and she also came the following day, where Elfride was present and a trialogue ensued. In a letter sent immediately after the meeting, on 8 February, Heidegger waxed poetically about their encounter: ” ‘Bright is beautiful’. This phrase from Jaspers that you quoted last night has continued to move me, as the discussion between my wife and you grew from misunderstanding and scrutiny to the harmony of troubled hearts”. As a result of this mutual exchange of views, there is now a “conscious trust amongst us three”. And he added: “in no way did my wife want to infringe on the fate of our love. All she wanted was to free this gift of the taint that had necessarily marked it because of my silence”. Love, in other words, does not need possession. Heidegger enclosed with his letter a leaf from a plant, as token of their eternal love (see Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters, 1925-1975, Harcourt, 2004, page 58).

It was, once again, a case of Heidegger seeing what he wanted to see. In the letter that Arendt wrote the following day to Heidegger, she gave a different account of the meeting. She had sat there largely in silence, not because she had nothing to say (on the contrary, she had much to say) but out of consideration for the feelings of all involved. As she wrote to Heidegger: “I did not, of course, remain silent just as a matter of discretion, but also as a matter of pride. Also, as a matter of my love for you – not wanting to mention anything that would make things more difficult than they had to be”. She also told Heidegger that she would be back in Freiburg between 4-5 March.

Both letters were, however, overly positive. In fact, as Arendt wrote to her husband immediately after the meeting, “I had an argument with his wife. For twenty-five years now, or from the time she somehow wormed the truth about us out of him, she has clearly made his life a hell on earth. And he who always at every opportunity has been a notorious liar, evidently (as was obvious from the aggravating conversation that the three of us had) never in those twenty-five years has denied that I had been the passion of his life. The following day, Arendt added the following note as a postscript to her letter before sending it: “and the past, which again is no past. One must not overestimate time. The Freiburg matter was spectral: the scene with that woman, which might have hit the mark twenty-five years ago, was conducted as if time didn’t exist”.

On 10 February 1950, Arendt wrote to Elfride to explain her position in a situation what was threatening to become effectively a ménage à trois: “there is guilt that comes from reserve; it has little to do with lack of trust. In this sense, it seems to me that Martin and I have probably sinned just as much against each other as against you. This is not an excuse. You did not, after all, expect one. You broke the spell, and I thank you for that with all my heart”. It is difficult to know what Elfride would have made of the tortuous logic of this communication. Hannah and Martin are a couple seems to be the subtext. Arendt then adds a statement that in these circumstances is totally mysterious: “please believe one thing: what was and surely still is between us was never personal”. “Personal” can only mean physical intimacy, because Heidegger and Arendt were conducting a relationship that was in all regards highly personal.

Arendt’s vacillating and complex attitude to Heidegger and his wife remained until the final years of Heidegger’s life, when he was old and close to death. As Ettinger observes, “what truly mattered to Arendt was not erotic attraction, which may or may not have existed – she was sensual without being strongly sexual – but the special role that she believed she played in his life, the spiritual kinship that she believed he shared with no one else, was central” (Ettinger, Hannah Arendt / Martin Heidegger, Yale UP, 1997, page 87). The latter point seems borne out by the fact that Heidegger now started to send Arendt poems that he had specifically written for her. In mid-February (the communication is undated precisely), he sent her five poems in honour of their refound friendship. They are not love poems in any conventional sense, and not all of them have Arendt or her relationship with Heidegger as their subject matter. There is one poem, however, that is effectively a paean to his loved one and to the wonderful mystery of her personality. It is called :” The Girl from Another Land” (“Das Mädchen aus der Fremde”). In her initial letter to Heidegger, of 9 February, Arendt had written, “I have never considered myself a German woman, and I have long since stopped thinking of myself as a Jewish woman. I feel just what I am now, after all, the girl from another land”. Heidegger took the phrase as the cue for a poem:

“The stranger,

even to youself,

she is:

mountain of joy,

sea of sorrow,

desert of desire. dawn of arrival.

Stranger: at home of the one gaze

where world begins.

Beginning is sacrifice. Sacrifice is loyalty’s hearth

stll outgrowing all the fires’

anshes and –

igniting:

embers of charity,

shine of silence.

Stanger from abroad, you –

May you live in beginning”.

{Die Fremde,

Die Dir selber fremd,

Sie ist:

Gebirg der Wonne,

Meer des Leids,

die Wüste des Verlangens

Frühlicht einer Ankunft.

Fremde: Heimat jenes Blicks,

der Welt beginnt.

Beginn ist Opfer.

Opfer ist der Herd der Treue,

die noch aller Brände

Asche überglimmt und

zündet:

Glut der Milde.

Schein der Stille.

Fremdlingin der Ferne, Du –

Wohne im Beginn.]

Throughout the course of her life, Hannah Arendt had experienced constant feelings of displacement and homelessness. Just weeks before her reunion with Heidegger, she had written to her husband, Heinrich Blüher, fearful that she was losing his affection, and confiding that she could not live “without any contact with a home, with something upon which I might depend” (Arendt / Blüher, Briefe 1936-1968, Piper Verlag, 2013, page 9). Composed in unrhymed free verse of eighteen lines of paratactic intensity, “The Girl from another Land” gives voice to tropes of alienation and isolation. The sentiments expressed employ no active verbs (the simple copula “is” is used three times). A situation, a being-in-the-world (in Heidegger’s terms) is being addressed in stark philosophical language. Heidegger had read Arendt’s letter to him as a cri de coeur, and he now offered her council and guidance (at least, indirectly). Seeking to belong, the poem seems to be saying, can only lead to heartbreak and pain: it is a “desert of desire”. The foreign or strange must be embraced; it entails both departure and arrival, an end but also a beginning. Hannah Arendt was a stranger, even to herself, the embodiment of elemental contradictions, holding within herself the “sea of sorrow” and the “mountain of joy”. She experienced life between the poles of sacrifice, “ashes”, and the beginning of the fire of new experience (possibly new experiences in her personal life) (“igniting”).

The initial series of poems was followed by several more written and sent over a period of almost two years (the final set, sent in July 1951, consisted of a single poem: “On a Drawing by Henri Matisse”). These were not love poems ,but there were exceptions, such as “Off the beaten Track” (“Holzwege”):

May the names

you and I

be one jewel here:

to grasp the late

maturity

of early seeds

we never attained –

it will come soon:

a glimmer of good” (Letters, page 73)

{Lass hier den Namen

Dir und mir

Nur einen Zier:

dass früher Samen

späte Reife

sie Begreife.

der wir verkamen,

die erst kommt: als Glut, die frommt].

With its short lines and compact rhyming scheme “Holzweg” succinctly charts the unity of two minds. This symbiosis is evident from the opening stanza, the “dir” and “mir” (“you” and “me”) being almost homophonic. That this process of unification has taken place through time is made explicit in the temporal markers of the poem: the “early” has become “late”, but this lies, as the gestational imagery suggests (and we must note the intimate connotations of “seeds”), in the organic nature of their relationship.

Arendt returned to her permanent abode in New York. On 19 March 1950, Heidegger wrote to her with his assessment of the significance of their recent meeting in Freiburg: “the gift of and the taking-stock of twenty-five years keep intruding on my thoughts, in which, far across the sea, you are near and present”. Arendt brought back with her for her husband to read Heidegger’s Off the Beaten Track, a work that she now had mixed feelings about. As she had written to Heinrich earlier on 19 February from Germany: “much of it is amazing, and much of its so wrong and crazy that one can’t believe it”. These were sentiments that she elaborated on 2 March: “as far as I am concerned, the last essay, about Parmenides, is really too much. It has a touch of madness about it. Yet I am sure that Heidegger is perfectly normal. I guess he is at the mercy of his own thoughts”.

In a letter of 19 March, Heidegger had written (in words that hover between philosophised affection and romantic fabulation): “in recent days, every passing hour has carried you further away to the city but, across the distance brought what is most yours closer to me. For you will not avert your gaze; you will awaken intimacy from afar. Time is oddly mysterious: how it can return like this and transform everything. Everything is given to us anew. We will never come to the end of it: with gratitude for what has become of us”.

The text moves between the past, the present and the future; indeed, it seeks to coalesce all three-time scales. Love knows no distinctions of time. The gaze that will “awaken intimacy from afar” is, as Hannah Arendt would have immediately understood, was the gaze that she first directed to Heidegger as he lectured in Marburg in 1924. That seminal gaze has remained as the point of almost mystical contact (the recognition of the Other as self) between the two lovers. In a letter of 4 May 1950, Heidegger went into greater detail regarding this gaze. Arend had just sent a framed photograph of herself. Heidegger wrote back: “I often wish that I could run a five-fingered comb through your fizzy hair, especially when your loving picture looks straight into my heart. You do not realise that it is the same gaze that leapt toward me on the lectern – oh, it was and is and will remain eternity, from afar into intimacy. Everything had to lie for a quarter of a century like a seed in a deep field, germinate into a ripeness of the absolute; for all suffering and manifold experience have gathered into the same gaze, yours, whose light shines back from your countenance, letting the woman appear”.

In the concluding lines, the personal (as so often in this correspondence) meets the philosophical, drawing out the implications of what has been said so far, onto a statement on time and its protean ability to change both person and situation. In a letter written the following month, 12 April 1950, Heidegger deepened this comment on time: “the length of duration is no measure for the presence of essence, that an instant of rupture [he is referring to the twenty years that came between their last contact in Marburg in 1930 and the present reunion in 1950] can be ‘more Being; that man must prepare for this ‘Being’ and learn a different form of remembrance”.

Heidegger was given to bouts of introspection regarding himself, his values and his amorous behaviour. In a letter to Elfride of 14 February 1950, he subjected himself to critical self-scrutiny. He wrote, “my disposition and the manner of my early upbringing, my instability and cowardice in my capacity to trust and then again inconsiderateness in the abuse of trust, these are the poles between which I spring and thus only too easily and only too often misjudge and overstep the measure with regard to Hera and Eros”. This is a remarkable letter, where Heidegger deliberates on his erotic behavior and its impact on his wife. Heidegger feels driven by two gods, Hera and Eros. The former is the goddess of marriage and childbirth; Eros, the god of sexual lust and desire. Heidegger, in effect, is asking Elfride to recognise that there are two sides to his male sexuality: one of domestic containment and one of excess, and to accept this duality within him.

The university imbroglio continued. In July 1950, Heidegger was made an emeritus at Freiburg University. He was now entitled to teach, although he had permanently lost his status as professor. In advance of the academic year that began in November, he speculated to Arendt on 15 September on what his teaching format should be: a class with more than twenty people would be pointless, because presumably two hundred would sign up for it. It was equally impossible to accept, after a few queries, only those older students that the current professors would now recommend as the best”. At the very beginning of the winter semester on 2 November, he wrote once more to Arendt: “during the semester, I will try to give a class at home of the smallest possible group, chosen more or less at random. But I suspect that ultimately, I will not be able to find my way back to teaching”. With this new teaching format, Heidegger had to revise his pedagogic ambitions. As he wrote to Arendt on 18 December, “with the students that I have taken on beginners, I am working only on first steps: that they learn to see how thinking the most ordinary things is also the most essential, and there is no need to talk portentously about great problems”. Heidegger was a celebrity, and when he moved from just giving seminars to giving lectures, he was faced with serious logistical issues. As he explained to Arendt on 14 December 1951, ” I have been lecturing again on Fridays from 5 to 6 pm on ‘What is called Thinking?” The main hall is already occupied by 1pm, and by 4 o’clock no one else can get in – even I barely can. The lecture is even broadcast to two other lecture halls.

The lecture series in question was titled “What is called Thinking?” (“Was heisst Denken?”) and was given in two parts: part 1 in the winter semester 1951-1952, and part 2 in the summer semester 1952. Heidegger began part 1 with a characteristically apodictic statement: “we reach into that which is called thinking when we ourselves think. For such a venture to succeed, we must be prepared to learn thinking” (Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002, page 5). We learn to think not by doing “philosophy” but by confronting the “Bedenkliche”: (and this must be given in German) “nennen wir jetzt das, was in sich zu-Bedenkende ist: das Bedenkliche” (page, 6) (“we now call ‘thought-provoking’ what in itself is to be thought about”) (see What is called Thinking? translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, Harper Row, 1968, page 4). Within this rubric, we should be considering the “Bedenklichste”, and “das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dass wir noch nicht denken” (page 7) (“most thought provoking in our thought-provoked time is that we are still not thinking”, page 4).

Is this a mere play on words? In his lecture course “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” (1929-1930), Heidegger had written, regarding his manifold and polysemic use of the word “world-formation”, “we are playing along with the play of language. The play of language here is not merely playful but arises from a lawfulness that precedes all ‘logic’ and demands a deeper binding character than the observance of rules for the correct formation of definitions” (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Indiana UP, 1995, page 286). As has been observed, “What is called Thinking?” is not an exercise in logic: “it reads like a long poem, repeating themes, drawing new themes out of old, tying them together in increasing complexity” (Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Friendship and Forgiveness, New York, 2012, pages 216-217). The lectures certainly involve a play on words, but they are not a “mere” play on words. As a verb “bedenken” means “to consider”, “to think over” something, with the “be” prefix bestowing an active quality. “Bedenken” also means “to bear in mind”, denoting a contemplative mind-set. Used as the adjective, however, “bedenklich” means “dubious”, “suspicious”. “Bedenken” also has an association with the adverb “bedenkenlos”, “without hesitating”, and the noun “Bedenkenlosigkeit”, “unscrupulous” but also “unthinkingness”. Heidegger’s audience would have picked up on these associations.

Through the wide semantic ambit of “bedenken”, this play on and with words precisely opens up a space for the movement of thought. Heidegger devoted time in the later lectures to Kant and Nietzsche and how their work related to Heidegger’s enquiry into thinking but, as he pointed out throughout, he was not engaging with the history of philosophy for its own sake. His aim was to unfold the complex dynamics of thinking, which is a matter of unveiling its “Mehrdeutigkeit” (page 75), its plurality of meaning, the fact that meaning is very rarely singular as an object of knowledge. Indeed, the word “denken” itself possesses (in Heidegger’s creative reading of its etymology) a broad range of cognates, although they exist on the level of connotation rather than denotation. And he lists them: “Gedachtes”, “Gedanke”, “Dank”, “Gedächtnis” (“that which has been thought”, “thought”, “thank”, “memory”) (page 143). Recognising the affinities between these cognates of “denken” requires a particular capacity that Heidegger calls “Vor-stellen” (page 59), the capacity not only “to imagine” (the normal meaning of the word without the hyphen), but to bring perception forward into the leeway of knowing in the process of “Hörenkönnen”, “being able to hear” (page 60).

Heidegger was now in his sixties, and his energy levels were dropping. As he wrote to Arendt on 17 February 1952, less than two years after he had resumed teaching, he felt that the demands on him were too much: “I would probably have to lecture for four hours then hold two classes to really get anything going again. That is no longer possible with my strength”. By 1954, Heidegger’s university teaching days were over. We do not know to what extent Hannah Arendt sympathised with Heidegger during this period. Her share of the correspondence was slight. Her letters were either fewer in number or have been misplaced. And when she did write, her letters were often curiously impersonal. “You write little about yourself”, Heidegger complained in letter of 2 November 1950. Nor was she always responsive to his work. “I wanted to ask you about my writings in the previous letter, because I was surprised that you had not mentioned any of them”, he wrote on 2 April 1951. The reason for the latter, according to one commentator, was obvious: “she had had reservations, always, about Heidegger’s thought, and she always felt that Being and Time, not the later work, was his greatest contribution” (See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale UP, 2004, page 304).

Indeed, Hannah Arendt was of great help in supervising the conversion of Being and Time into English, which was being translated by Edward Robinson, who was soon to be joined by Jon Macquarrie, and Arendt was in regular contact with them. As she wrote to Heidegger on 29 April 1954, “I have read one of the chapters (pp. 52-63) quite carefully and have responded to Robinson in detail. As he himself knows, and quite explicitly emphasizes in his letter to me, the translation cannot be published as it stands. It contains several errors and, it seems to me, unnecessarily awkward passages”. And she added, “I have taken the liberty of pointing out a few inconsistencies to him; and I think you will agree with me on this score” Her voice is authoritative and solicitous; she is overseeing an important project. The translation was eventually published in 1962.

Arendt paid her second visit to Freiburg in May 1952. It seems to have been an intellectual and personal success, but their written contact was soon to cease. If we follow their correspondence, there seems to have been a disjunction at this time at the center of their relationship. It is possible that Elfride had finally got her way, and that she was now the dominant partner in the marriage and had insisted on a termination of contact with Arendt. As Hannah wrote to her husband in 1952, “with Martin, things are for the time being not really horrible just sad. Nothing has changed, and nothing will. I just feel unhappy at times that I can’t change anything. Out of desperation and sheer inability to write a single letter, he lets his wife take care of everything and simply signs his name”. On 5 June 1952, she received a letter from Heidegger, in which he wrote, “it is best if you do not write now and do not come to visit either. Everything is painful and difficult, but we must bear it”.

No letters were exchanged between 1954 and 1959, and only one between 1959 and 1965. According to one biographer, “Heidegger was no longer willing to meet with Arendt – either because of his wife, because of Arendt’s fame or her friendship with Jaspers (whom Heidegger was estranged from)” (Ettinger, page 109). The differences between them were as much intellectual and philosophical as they were emotional or dispositional. The fact is that they were heading in two entirely different directions in their work. When Arendt finally got round to answering Heidegger’s request that she should tell him what she was working on, she replied with a three-page letter, written on 8 May 1954, in which she detailed her various projects. The focus of her research ranged over a varied array of philosophical figures, from Montesquieu, Marx and Hobbes to Plato and Aristotle, and focused on their concepts of authority in politics and work, and their views on active as opposed to contemplative life. Arendt eventually published a comparative study of these figures in her book, The Human Condition (1958). Heidegger made no comment on her eclectic framework, in which intellectual history meets social science: both disciplines that he despised.

On her next visit to Germany in 1955, Arendt decided not to visit Heidegger. Perhaps in the time between then and when they had first met, Heidegger had had the opportunity to read Arendt’s best-known book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In which case, he might well have come across the following passage: “the self-willed immersion in the suprahuman forces of destruction seemed to be a salvation for many from the automatic identification with pre-established functions in society and their utter banality, and at the same time help destroy the functioning itself. These people felt attracted to the pronounced activism of the totalitarian movements, to their curious and only seemingly contradictory insistence on both the primacy of sheer action and the overwhelming force of sheer necessity”. If Heidegger did not recognise himself in this trahison des clercs, references to those who made a “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite” would have made matters clear (quoted in Safranski, page 384).

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In spite of their intellectual and scholarly schism, the bond between Arendt and Heidegger continued to exist. Quite out of the blue, Heidegger wrote to her on 6 October 1966 to wish her a happy sixtieth birthday and included details of his work and his recent trip to Greece. Arendt was “overjoyed” and wrote back on the 19th, thanking him for his words. The bond had been reestablished and Arendt celebrated this in poetic words: “those whose hearts were brought and broken by Spring will have their hearts made whole again by Autumn”. On 26 July 1967, Arendt was able to demonstrate a rare testimony to this regained wholeness of affection. She was in Freiburg at the university to give a lecture on Walter Benjamin, and Heidegger was in the audience. This was the first time that he had seen her since 1952. Arendt began her lecture with the words, “dear Martin Heidegger, Ladies and Gentlemen”. As he later told her, he had feared a negative reception to these words, but none came. As for the lecture itself: “for the insightful, your lecture was highly effective simply because of its level and its structure. Such work is increasingly vanishing from our universities, along with even the courage to describe things as they really are”, Heidegger told Arendt on 10 August. The lecture initiated further meetings throughout August, with Arendt travelling to Freiburg from Basel, where she was staying with the Jaspers.

The philosophical debates between them continued in these years, during which time seventy-five letters were exchanged, with Arendt paying an annual visit to Freiburg. Arendt had praised the essays collected in Pathmarks (Wegmarken), which had appeared in 1967. Heidegger responded, summarizing what he had hoped to achieve in that book, playing with paradox and the gnomically cryptic: “Pathmarks was an experiment; only those who already know the text can read them as you do. There are very few such people. But these few would be enough. The essays are capable of waiting. This is entirely different from hoping. Hope is part of the realm of manipulation and the production of ‘bliss’ “.

On 20 April 1969, Arendt received a letter from Elfride. Her husband had turned eighty and was in poor health and mobility. They had decided to build a one-story cottage in the back garden, with a ground-level door to the yard. The house was eventually built and the Heideggers moved in at the end of August 1971. In order to fund the project, Heidegger had decided to sell the manuscript of Being and Time, and Elfride was writing to Arendt for her advice on the best way of doing this. On 25 April, Arendt wrote back, saying that she was no expert in these matters, but she recommended an auction house in Marburg. She also offered to contact a number of people. including the director of the Manuscripts Department at the Library of Congress. This would be the first of a series of attempts made by Heidegger to put his publications in order. There is a sense in which he seemed to have recognized that he had reached the final phase in his creative life.

Hannah Arendt also seems to have recognised this. On 26 September 1969, she gave a radio talk to celebrate Heidegger’s eightieth birthday. The talk was not only a testimony to his published work but also to him as a teacher, when back in the 1920s he introduced into the “abysmal boredom” of stale academia “a vitally new way of doing philosophy, indeed, of thinking per se. With Heidegger, ‘thinking’ was a pure activity – that is, one driven neither by a thirst for knowledge nor by a desire for results – and could become a passion that not so much acts and organises, but acts through all other abilities and talents” (see Heidegger / Arendt, Letters, page 153). Arendt was not blind to where such purity of thinking might lead, and in the final section of her talk she drew attention to Heidegger’s brief dalliance with National Socialism in 1933. And she concluded, “the outcome of the whole thing for him was the discovery of the will as the will to willing and thus as the will to power” (Letters, page 161). Arendt sent a copy of the script to Heidegger immediately afterwards, and he replied the following month on 27 November. He greatly appreciated the testimony: “more than anyone, you have recognised the inner movement of my work as teacher, which has remained the same since the Sophist lectures [of 1924-1925]”. Heidegger made no mention of Arendt’s discussion of his politics or of the will to power.

Heidegger’s health was deteriorating. On 27 April 1970, Hannah Arendt received a letter from Heidegger’s brother, Fritz, telling her that Martin had experienced a minor stroke. The following month, on 16 May, Elfride wrote to Arendt, informing her that her husband’s medical condition had improved, although he still did not have full movement in his right hand. Whatever tensions may have existed in the past between Arendt and Elfride now seemed to have gone. Elfride’s letter is warm in tone and expresses a shared solicitation between the two women for Heidegger. Such health issues did not, however, divert Heidegger from philosophy. As he explained to Arendt on 9 July 1973, he was still asking the perennial questions: “I am in conversation with Parmenides again, and the philosophical secondary literature seems superfluous, despite its results. But how is one to lead people today to simple questions? All the prerequisites for working out the preparation for the step back before, ‘the same thing is there for thinking and for being’ [Parmenides] are still lacking. Every day, in this situation, I say to myself: ‘do what you have to do’ – everything else, and everything greater, has its own that is hidden from us”. As he wrote again on 19 November, in a retrospective mode, “one must grow old to see a few things clearly in this field [of philosophy]. Looking back over the whole path, it becomes possible to see that the walk through the field paths was guided by an invisible hand, and that essentially one added little to it”.

That invisible hand was directing Heidegger to the completion of his life’s work. He eventually found a buyer for the manuscript of Being and Time in the form of the German Literary Archive in Marbach am Neckar. He now came to see that institution as a possible location for all his work, which would be collected under the rubric of a Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe). As he explained to Arendt on 20 June 1974, Heidegger was entering the second phase of the organisation of all his papers (with the assistance of Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, an ex-student of Wilhelm Frick, now teaching at Freiburg), completing a process that he had begun thirty years earlier with his brother, Fritz. This was, as he wrote to Arendt on 17 October, a “momentous decision”. Hannah Arendt had already been drawn into the project, meeting up with Heidegger in Freiburg in June 1975. Old age had not been kind to Heidegger’s body and his physical appearance. Arendt was quite shocked by the changes that had taken place since their last meeting. As she wrote to Mary McCarthy soon after, “Heidegger is now suddenly really very old, very changed from last year, very deaf and remote, unapproachable as I never saw him before” (quoted in Payen, page 481).

But Heidegger was still alive and capable of communicating. He pushed on with the Collected Works project. Arendt wrote to him on 27 July, suggesting people who might be able to help, including the Heidegger scholar, David Krell. Heidegger almost certainly would have wished to discuss his intentions further with Hannah Arendt when they next met. But this would not be possible. “A higher fate has prevailed over human plans. Only grief and remembrance are left for us”, he wrote to Hans Jonas on 27 December 1975. On 4 December Hannah Arendt had died of a heart attack in her New York apartment. She was 69.

Chapter Nine: 1955-1976

Final Turning

In September 1955, Heidegger was invited by the French philosopher, Jean Beaufret, to speak on the subject of “What is Philosophy?” at a symposium held in the Chateau de Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, France. This was the first of many visits to that country that Heidegger would make in the post-war period, where he participated in a number of seminars, most notably those held in Le Thor (Provence) in 1966, 1968, 1969 and 1973.

These were important moments in the final “Turning” in Heidegger’s philosophy, where he attempted to lay a new conceptual grid for his work. The Turning moved essentially in two directions: firstly, towards a rediscovery of the revelatory notion of truth as “Alethia”, formulated by pre-Socratics such as Parmenides, truth as the visible that exists within the hidden, and secondly towards an exploration of the structuring and liberating agency of language, particularly as it found expression in the poetic word.

Heidegger’s lecture in Cersey-la-Salle was not intended to provide a definition of philosophy. On the contrary, as the title of the original German indicates, “Was ist das – die Philosophie?” (“What is that – philosophy?”), Heidegger puts a juncture between the “that” and the “philosophy”, between philosophy as it is practiced in academic circles (as a closed system, a fixed discipline) and philosophy as Heidegger wishes us to see it, as a practice of thinking that explores openness. To hold his quest for philosophy open, Heidegger began his talk not with statements but with questions. Philosophy has often been aligned with reason, but “what is reason? Where and through whom has it been decided what reason is? Has reason constituted itself to be the rules of philosophy? If so, by what right? If not, where does it obtain its mission and its goal?” (Heidegger, What is Philosophy? bilingual edition, Harper Row, 1968, page 24). Such questions were prompted by the historical location of philosophy, the latter traditionally being seen as involving a quest for knowledge as a conceptual object (for the “truth”). Heidegger, however, saw philosophy as a disposition and as an activity of the mind, as a particular way of grasping, of construing the world that did not necessarily require or lead to a finalised object.

This was something that the pre-Socratics understood. For them, philosophy was ” ‘episteme tis’, a form of competence, ‘theoretike’, which was capable’ theorein’ [‘speculating’], that is being on the lookout for something and of seizing and holding it in its glance for what it is on the outlook for” (page 56). This is why we return to the Greeks. “Reading Parmenides and Heraclitus, the ‘arche’ of this philosophy, allows philosophy to be seen as pathos” (page 80). ” ‘Pathos’ in Greek is connected with ‘pathschein’, to suffer, to endure, to undergo, to be borne along by, to be determined by” (page 82), but pathos also means being “astonished about Being and that is and what it is” (page 82). And Heidegger adds, “it is always problematic to translate ‘pathos with ‘turning’, by which we mean dis-position and determination, but we must risk this translation” (page 82). With “pathos” as a philosophical principle, “we step back, as it were, into Being, from the fact that it is and not otherwise (page 84).

Immediately after the symposium, Heidegger met the poet René Char at Jean Beaufret’s house in Paris. With volumes such as The Hammer without a Master (1934) and The Leaflets of Hypnos (1945), Char had established himself as one of the most prominent Surrealist writers of his generation. Heidegger and Char were unlikely associates; Heidegger had lent vociferous support to the Nazi regime in 1933, whilst Char had been a member of the French Resistance during the German occupation. But what they had in common transcended their erstwhile politics: a commitment to the primal nature of words, a rejection of logic and mechanical rationality, a promotion of the creative listening to the world, and a view of language as gesturing to the indefinable Other. Although we should not talk about direct influence here, there was certainly a convergence of minds, reflecting a shared aesthetic founded on an awareness of locality, on regional space, near space, as the habitude of selfhood. In 1963, Heidegger published seven poems dedicated to Char in his volume of poetry, That which has been Thought (Gedachtes). The fourth poem in the series, “The Place” (“Ortschaft”), reads like a programmatic statement on the sentiment that joined the two men. Conventional poetic form is replaced by vers libre, and Heidegger meets here the idiom of Char’s verse both in the self-reflexivity of the poem (it brings to the surface of the text thinking about the conditions of that thinking) and in its use of loci, metaphors of place. Thematically, the poem articulates a quest, a journey, but it is a gesturing at a destination that withholds itself:

“To think the Same

in the riches of the selfsame,

walking the demandingly long path into the forever more simple, more immediate

of the inaccessibility of its

self-refusing locality”.

[“Die das Seilbe denken

im Reichtum seiner Selbigkeit,

gehen die mühsam langen Wege

in das immer Einfachere, Einfältige

seiner im Unzugangbaren

sich versagenden Ortschaft” (See Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, page 223).

Heidegger’s strongly developed sense for the physical presence and the mystery of localities led him to the work of artists such as Braque and Cézanne, who were capable of reproducing the aura of such localities in their paintings. Heidegger wrote three poems celebrating Cézanne, whose depictions of the landscape of Provence seemingly allows the latter to emerge on its own terms. Heidegger had already anticipated this capacity to register the self-disclosing quality of the external world in his promotion of the Greek notion of “aletheia” and had committed himself to a philosophical process that would allow that notion to find expression. It is this process, which Heidegger found in his encounters with the enigmatic pathways in the countryside around Todtnauberg, for which he attempted to find words in the second poem of the “Gedachtes” series, (“Ways” or “Paths”) “Wege”:

“Paths,

paths of thinking. going their own way,

fleeing away. When will they return?

Perspectives bringing – onto what?

Paths of thinking, going their own way,

once open. abruptly closed,

later, the earlier showing”.

[ “Wege,

Wege des Denkens, gehende selber,

entrinnende. Wann wieder kehrend,

Ausblicke bringend worauf?

Wege, gehende selber,

ehedem offene, jaeh die verschlossenen,

spätere; Früheres zeigend”] (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, page 223).

The analogy is clear. The paths upon which the thinkers tread seem to have their own sense of (mis)direction. They are without “outlook”, offering no clear view of the environment or or a sense of where they may possibly end. Past experience does not help. Such paths were once open, but for future travelers they are closed. Thinking is not something that resolves; clear destinations are not a part of the journey.

Heidegger was highly regarded as a public speaker and it is here, in view of dwindling university lecturing, that he engaged most with others, On 30 October 1955, he delivered a talk, “Gelassenheit”, as a memorial address in Messkirch for the composer, Conradin Keutzer (1780-1849), who, like Heidegger, was born in Messkirch. To off set or perhaps balance the growing French cosmopolitanism in his work, Heidegger’s hometown grows in importance in these years as his “Heimat, a location where the personal and the personal in the local has meaning. The title of the talk is conventionally translated as “Discourse on Thinking”, but “Gelassenheit” is a particular way of thinking, reflecting a mental state, a disposition that involves a certain attitude to the world, whose root stem is “gelassen”, meaning “composed” or “unperturbed”. The point of Heidegger’s talk (in which Kreutzer is rarely mentioned) was to promote the values of detachment in a modern world that has surrendered itself to mechanised thinking, where “when we plan, do research, undertake an action, we are forever considering given circumstances. We place them in a reckoning out of a reckoned intention of calculated goals. We reckon from the very start on calculated success” (see Martin Heidegger, “Gelassenheit”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000, page 519). Such practices have produced pervasive mental culture that is over-rationated and sterile, and in which people are bereft of a sense of belonging, of having a “Heimat”, a homeland (page 521). What is required to redress this crisis is “Gelassenheit”, a distance from the calculating mindset (“die Technik”) of the modern period, one that has retained a feeling for community and place and sustains itself through an openness to the mystery of the natural world, refusing to look at things purely in terms of their use value, so that we may “reach a way that leads to new ground and land” (page 529).

In the winter semester 1955-1956, Heidegger lectured on “The Principle of Reason” (“Der Satz vom Grund”), his final lecture course at the university. The lectures represented a continuation of, and Heidegger’s last word, in a debate with philosophical notions of rationality that he had begun in Being and Time and had further developed in his subsequent writings and was to culminate in “The Question concerning Technology” (1954). Heidegger began almost each of the thirteen lectures with the same Latin words: “nihil et sine ratione” (“nothing is without reason”), whose frequent repetition suggests the sterility of a philosophical tradition that has hardened into an orthodoxy, a philosophy that resolves and terminates where in thinking-it should remain open. The lectures might well be seen as a summation of Heidegger’s previous philosophical works, with their phenomenological insistence upon the importance of the immediate physical world (see page 46), their ontological quest for “Sein” (page 85) and “logos” (page 177), their rejection of logic (page 65) and the subject-object division (page 177), of metaphysics, in general (page 89) and the relativizing of the same through poetry (page 68), the viewing of truth as “aletheia” and “phusis”, a self-disclosing and emerging of the world (page 175), the promotion of philosophy as a way of thinking and the rejection of conventional academic “philosophy” (page 111), the insistence on the superiority of the ancient Greek language over Latin (page 143), the denigration of science (page 168) and modern technology (page 40). And all of these topics are positioned within the context of previous philosophies, notably that of Aristotle (page 29 and 121), Kant (page 123) and Nietzsche (page 43).

Heidegger began by demarcating the conventional use of the principle of reason within philosophy: “one will argue that observations about the form of principles rightly belong to grammar and logic. This position seems justified. It is particularly and universally true, when it is matter of deliberations, plans, negotiations and calculations” (page 19). Consequently, “the principle of reason states that there must be a reason for everything when such matters are at hand”. Indeed, as Heidegger observed in his third lecture, “the principle of reason without a reason – that is regarded as unimaginable”. But we are caught once again within the straight jacket of non originary logical thinking, a paradigm that restricts but does not expand. For “the unimaginable is in no way unthinkable” (page 39), because, as he argued in his sixth lecture, thinking has a “place for contradictions” (page 37), for the “sensuality of thought” (page 9), when it delves into those areas of thinking that are purportedly “irrational where, in fact, a reason may not possess a reason. If we are able to ‘hear’ this other mode of reasoning, then this through-thinking is a leap and indeed a broad jump that brings thought into play, in which Being as Being exists” (page 186).

Heidegger taught amidst continuing stressful complications in his personal life. In April 1956, he left Freiburg and went to stay in Messkirch. It was ostensibly to do further work on the organisation of his manuscripts, but there was another reason. As a letter that he sent to Elfride on 16 April testified, because of his continuing affair with Marielene Putscher, his marriage was in crisis. Elfride wrote to him while he was there. We do not have the contents of her letter, but in his reply, we are able to discern the pained and despairing mood that she was in. In his letter to her, he wrote: “today your sad note came – which really did make me sad, as if I’m not already sad enough […] Don’t harden your heart in brooding but let now be the beginning of a return of trust. For surely this is founded on a readiness for whatever may come, which can never bring down what has once been fated with regard our bond”. The sentiments are convoluted, and they become even more convoluted as Heidegger’s lengthy letter progresses: “there is no place for trust where one knows everything already and can imagine and can control this in advance. Trust is strength in the affirmation of what is concealed and what we leave unspoken in its hiddenness”. And now Heidegger delivers his coup: “thus was my yes back then – when you told me about Hermann [Elfride’s former lover and the father of her second child].”

Elfride may have felt that Heidegger’s involved utterance was insincere, specious, for she penned a letter on 28 June (which she never sent) that began, “in your first letter there were words from quite a shallow sphere”. And she continued in plaintive tones, “that all of this should be bound up not only with lies – no, but with the most inhuman abuse of my trust, this fills me with despair”. It is a despair that had a history: “and I am supposed to be able to endure it – not once – but again and again throughout four decades”. It is a cri de coeur that Heidegger never heard – at least not on an immediate, literal level. But he was aware of the fact and at some level of his mind he surely would have registered it.

Heidegger believed in the values of the “Heimat” and its culture, however modest it might appear to others. On 9 May 1955, he gave a talk on Johann Peter Hebel at the annual Hebel commemoration in Loerrach, Baden-Württemberg. Hebel (1760-1826) was a native of Swabia, a story writer, poet and evangelical theologian, the author of Alemannia Poems (1803) and The Treasure Chest of Rhenish Tales, published from 1803 onwards. He was popularly known as the “House Friend” because he took regional themes as his subject matter and wrote in the language of his home province. A sketch of Hebel was one of the few pictures that hung in Heidegger’s cabin. It is easy to dismiss Hebel as being purely a rustic writer and regional poet. In his talk, however, Heidegger stressed the universal and timeless quality of Hebel’s writing, which was (in Hebel’s words) simply “general observations on the natural structure of the world” (as quoted by Heidegger in “Rede auf Hebel”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000, pages 541-542). In his talk, Heidegger drew attention to the tropes that informed Hebel’s work and lent it a near mythic quality: “the most natural in nature is that rising and twilight of the sun, of the moon, of the stars, which speak immediately to all who dwell, as it promises them the secrets of the world (page 543). The provincial does not exclude the universal; indeed, in Heidegger’s thinking, it may be the path to it.

In May, Heidegger returned to Bremen to give a talk on “The Principle of Reason”, a lecture that he repeated in Vienna in October. Heidegger’s preferred domicile now seems to have been Freiburg rather than the cabin, and after years of travelling inwards, he is now travelling outwards (by train). Heidegger’s productivity in public speaking increased during this period. Heidegger’s peripatetic occasional talks seem to have fully compensated for his abandonment of university lecturing. In June, he spoke on “The Principle of Identity” at the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the founding of the University of Freiburg. The principle of identity was a central tenet in Aristotelian logic, the principle of A=A. As Heidegger argued, this simple equation tells us nothing. Heidegger attempts, thus, to move the principle beyond a sterile tautology by converting the equal sign (the =) of the axiom into its linguistic equivalent: “is”. But as Heidegger observes, “even in its improved formulation, ‘A is A’, it is the abstract quality of identity that alone appears. Does it even get this far? Does the principle of identity say anything about identity? No, not immediately”. What is required is a reshaping of the “is” component and highlighted as “is“. Now what do we hear? “With this ‘is‘, the principle tells us that what every being is, namely: it is the same as itself”. And Heidegger extrapolates from this to conclude: “as a law of thinking the principle is valid only in so far as it is a law of Being, which says: to every being as Being belongs identity, the unity with itself” (see “The Principle of Identity”, in Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, Chicago, 1969, page 23).

Heidegger’s public speaking continued. In particular, he was determined to cultivate further his connection with France, and the growing body of Heidegger aficionados there. On 28 March 1958, he talked on “Hegel and the Greeks” at the University of Aix-en-Provence. The lecture was repeated in Heidelberg in July. In the March rendition, Heidegger preceded his talk with a homily to Provence, which he called “A Declaration of Love”. Addressing his audience, he asked, “why am I giving this talk in Aix-en-Provence? Because I love the mildness of this land and its villages. I love the severity of its mountains; I love the harmony of the two; I love Aix, [ the village] Bibemus, the mountain range of Sainte-Victoire; I have found here the path to Paul Cézanne, with whom, from his beginning to his end, my own path of thinking almost exactly corresponds; I love the land with its sea coasts, because in them the nearness of Greece announces itself; I love all of this because I am convinced that there is no essential work of the spirit that does not have its roots in a foundational feeling for the soil [‘Bodenständigkeit’]” (See “Liebeserklärung an die Provence”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, page 551).

Heidegger’s extra-marital affairs were continuing, the latest being with the neurologist, Dr Andrea von Hartou, with whom Heidegger had been receiving frequent consultations. Elfride soon realised that the contact was more than simply medical and wrote to her husband (who was back in Messkirch working on his manuscripts) in April 1958. On 28 April, Heidegger replied, not denying his association with the doctor but explaining that the situation was complicated and that he was not entirely directing matters. His fame and charisma may be working against him. He wrote, “your grieving letter has just arrived. Dear Elfride, I wrote the enclosed letter in pencil yesterday evening, after which for a long time I couldn’t sleep. Now I will simply enclose it and tell you everything when I come [home] again. Stay there and help me, now that – knowing more and more resolute – I’d like to come out into the open and into responsibility”. These were words that Elfride had heard many times before, and she may have felt that they had hardened into a rhetoric. The sentiments behind them were also familiar: the confessional tone, the reaching out for help and support and the determination to make things better in the future. In the enclosed penciled letter, Heidegger claimed that he was being stalked by a Dr Harbou: “the woman is a difficult person, and her letters are passionate”. She follows Heidegger from place to place, including standing in front of his university department. Heidegger projects himself in this letter as the victim rather than perpetrator of this affair, and concludes, “but there is nothing sustaining or really significant about these encounters”. They may have been significant to Elfride, but we do not have her reply.

In January 1959, Heidegger gave a lecture “On the Way to Language” (“Unterwegs zur Sprache”) to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. It was an absolutely key text in his Turning, because here he delved as deeply as he could into the philosophy behind the Turning: language and the experience with language. The latter effectively comes to form a new ontology, centred on (in the words of Dieter Thomä) terms such as “Logik, logos, talk, speech., speaking, questioning, silence, naming, listening, thinking, poetry” (“Rede, Gerede, Fragen, Schweigen, Nennen, Hören, Heissen, Denken, Dichten” (Tomä in Heidegger Handbuch, Stuttgart, 2013, edited by Dieter Thomä, page 261). The title of this essay provided the rubric for a collection of essays that Heidegger published later that year, which engaged with the polysemic and enigmatic character of language (where what is not said, in a particular discourse, is often of greater import than what is said). The central essay was called “The Essence of Language (“Das Wesen der Sprache”). Heidegger’s argument was that a linguistically based analysis of language is one thing, whereas our actual experience with language is another. Heidegger was not dismissing the former approach; rather, he was attempting to reach an understanding of language that was prior to such an approach. Following the spirit of phenomenological reduction pursued in Being and Time, Heidegger was seeking to bring us face to face with the possibility of a living encounter with language and he was quite clear about what this entailed: “to have [‘machen’] an experience with something – be it with a thing, a person or a god – means that something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of ‘having’ in this phrase, we do not mean that we bring it about by ourselves, ‘having’ means undergoing, enduring and receiving that which has befallen us, in so far as we submit to it “(Unterwegs zur Sprache, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985, page 149). The experience of language is always something that is close to us, even though we may not have the words to describe it. In fact, we are often most aware of language when we cannot find the right words for what we want to say.

The space between finding the right words and not finding them is where poetry has its mission, and in his Turning Heidegger sought out poets who dwelt within this Janus idiom, the Austrian Expressionist Ernst Trakl (1887-1914, Sebestian in a Dream, 1913) being one of them. Heidegger was intrigued and mystified by the darkly evocative language of Trakl, and the latter’s cryptic poetry with its enigmatic imagery that seems to float free of any clear reference point. It is a Janus-faced world of bright shadows, where darkness possesses its own light. What happens in this realm is without apparent logic (although “apparent” is redundant here. because signifier and signified no longer belong together). The fact is that Trakl’s world, unlike that of Rilke, has no system, nothing to compare with Rilke’s concept of “the Open”, a conceptual space where perception and consciousness are linked in a creative retrieval of the world. Trakl knew of no such world, and no such links. As Heidegger noted in his essay, “Language in the Poem”, in Trakl’s verse tangible referents are dark in their ambit and lack a factual context. Here Trakl’s cosmogony exists in transitory stars, perpetual snow, trees of grace, bells that sound without reason, and pain that has become amorphized, all experienced by those who divine barely glimpsed meaning by an anonymous Wanderer who belongs everywhere and nowhere, and who is a subject without substance. Poetry as a purely symbolic language seems to foreground itself in poetry where language exists for itself (see Heidegger, “die Sprache im Gedicht” in Unterwegs zur Sprache, Neske Verlag, 1997, pages 37-82).

Heidegger’s public productivity was increasing. In May 1959, he spoke on the theme of “The Determination of the Arts in the present Age” in Baden-Baden, and in June he gave a paper on “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” at a symposium in Munich (a lecture he repeated in Stuttgart in July). In Munich, he met Imma von Bodmershof, the partner of the noted Hölderlin editor, Norbert von Hellingrath. A friendship developed. Whether out of discretion or the absence of correspondence, we know little about this relationship. We can only speculate about the degree of their intimacy. Perhaps it is not necessary to know more. Perhaps all Imma represented was the Other to Heidegger’s wife. A frisson nouveau. As with Heidegger’s many other female friends physical intimacy may or may not have played a part in their contact.

In September in Switzerland, the first of the Zollikon seminars took place. These were a series of seminars conducted between 1959 and 1972 at the home of the Swiss psychiatrist, Medard Boss. Boss had first contacted Heidegger in 1947, seeking clarification on certain concepts that Heidegger had used in Being and Time. Heidegger replied and a friendship arose that saw increasing philosophical contact and eventually the formation of a seminar series that Boss hosted in his home in Zollikon. Boss was a psychoanalytic psychiatrist, whose theoretical medical thinking drew heavily on the philosophy of Heidegger. The two men later met at Heidegger’s cabin in 1949, where Boss was overwhelmed by the charismatic presence of the philosopher, the “radiation of the power of thinking” that came from his near hypnotic eyes (see Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, edited by Medard Boss, North Western UP, 2001, pages 363-364).

The first Zollikon seminar was held on 8 September 1959 in the auditorium of the Burghoelzli Clinic at Zurich University. After the seminar, Boss felt that the modern, technological dimensions of the lecture hall were not in keeping with Heidegger’s mode of presentation and his way of thinking, and he moved all future seminars to his home. The three-hour long seminars normally took place over a period of four days, with a two-day break in between the first and the second seminars and were attended by fifty to seventy of Boss’ colleagues and students. As Boss made clear the intention was to give these people “a sound philosophical basis for their medical practices” (Zollikon Seminars, page xi). All the participants had received a training in the sciences, and with their logical mind-sets many sat in disbelief as Heidegger deconstructed one rational philosophical assumption after another. Many seemed shocked, even outraged that such questions [about the human being as a theoretical subject] would be permitted in the first place” (page xii). It was as if, Boss quips, someone from Mars had landed to talk to earthlings (page xii).

The topics of these seminars included “Kant: being as (‘is’) is not a real predicate” (1960), “Space as the Free and Open” (1964), “The Question of Being of Time” (1964), “The Question of what Time is” (1965), “The Problem of the Body and the Awareness of Method in the Sciences” (1965), “The basic Feature of Human Being” (1966), and “The Spatial Being of Dasein and the Being in Space of Use Objects” (1969). The topics in general (although a good deal of the material had already been aired by Heidegger) reflected his Turning, and his movement away from a closed system of thinking to individual moments within the formation of thought, particularly observations on categories of space and time. In his Turning, Heidegger abandoned the idea of Being as a single ontology. The pointed subject matter of the Zollikon seminars was like a window opened onto a greater space, whose totality we never see (possibly because it does not exist). In his retrospective account, Boss gives the following example from 1961 of one “Martian” exchange between his students and Heidegger. Everyone was sitting around a table, and Heidegger asked, “how does Herr Dr R. behave towards the table in front of him?”. “There is a gap (‘Zwischenraum’) between him and the table”, one participant observed. Heidegger’s response was: “what then is ‘Raum’ [‘space’?]” “The distance between Dr R. and the table”, came the reply. “What then is distance?”, Heidegger asked. “A determination of space”, someone said. “But what in general is space?”, was Heidegger’s retort. Boss tells us that there was then a “full ten minutes of lengthy embarrassed silence”. “We have never heard such questions asked before”, someone retorted. Heidegger finally concluded: “we must not let the spatial element between Dr R. and the table remain porous [empty of meaning], as that might appear to Dr R. This spatial element consists of porousness but also openness, expansion [‘Freie’]. Can one therefore say that the Open, the expansiveness that is thus revealed is itself the spatial?”. One further participant says: “now I no longer understand anything”. “Five minutes of silence” followed (quoted from Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, edited by Günther Neske, Pfullingen 1977, page 36).

In January 1960, Elfride showed signs of a severe depression that confined her to bed. Heidegger gave her a poem by Hölderlin in the way of recovery. Later that month, he visited Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg in advance of the latter’s sixtieth birthday in February, and contributed an essay to Gadamer’s Festschrift, The Presence of the Greeks in contemporary Thought. Greek philosophy, most notably that of the pre-Socratics, had come to occupy an increasing prominence in Heidegger’s thinking. Out of their writing, he drew a cluster of concepts that he regarded as essential for his (for all) philosophy: “logos”, the meaning of Being made possible through language; “phusis”, nature as the primal coming to presence of Being; and “Aletheia”, the uncovering of the play between the hidden and the hiddenness of truth. It was upon this modest foundation that Heidegger sought to affect a thinking-recall of the roots but also the future of philosophy (“An-denken”) and the grounds of Being.

Not only did Greek philosophy occupy a central place in Heidegger’s thinking, but the very idea of Greece, as the homeland of “originary” thought, had assumed near mythic proportions in his mind. As he had written to Elisabeth Blochmann on 19 January 1933, Germany can be saved but only if if it embraces the entire culture of the Greeks, “now and totally intact”. In April 1962, Heidegger and Elfride undertook their first visit to Greece, a two-week cruise to the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Aegean, with Athens as the final destination, before the ship returned to Venice from where it had begun. Heidegger had started the journey with trepidation, worried that his quest for the original Greece (the Greece in his mind) would be in vain. This was the third attempt to persuade him to undertake the journey. He had declined arrangements made for trips in 1953 and 1955, explaining to Erhart Kästner in a letter of 1960, “I will remain with the idea that a part of Greece is still thinkable, without actually having to look at it. I must at the present think that what stands in my inner vision can still be in a moderate way a part of my philosophy [‘Sagen’]” (see Martin Heidegger / Erhart Kästner, Briefwechsel 1953-1974, Insel Verlag 1988, page 43).

But this time, Heidegger did make the journey. He kept a journal. In one early entry, he asks: “can Greece still ‘speak’ what is proper to it, and claim us, the people of today, as listeners to its language?” (see Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece, State University of New York Press, 2005, pages 11-12). Before embarking on the cruise, Heidegger scrutinized Venice. He did not like what he saw. The city had lost contact with its historical glory; its past had been marginalized by the present. Venice had become (in Heidegger’s eyes) “an object of historiography, attractive scenery for confused novelists, the playground for international conferences and exhibitions, loot for the tourist industry to squander” (page 5).

What Heidegger was seeking in his journey was the “agnostic severity and articulation of the Greek mind” (page 13), but what he encountered, until one vital moment, were the encroachments of modernity: tasteless new housing and egregious tourists, the latter equipped with the latest technological gadget of the age: the camera. They don’t look at something in detail; they point for later consumption. Using it leads to a displacement of experience. For the tourist, reality is always tomorrow: “they abandon without clue the feast of thinking” (page 54). And when Heidegger visited the legendary Olympia, he found environmental neglect, its sacred grounds covered with “sludge and detritus” (page 12), a desecration through civic mismanagement of nature. “The Greek element must remain an expectation” (page 19), he concluded at one point in his journal, observing in a further entry: “again and again the question arises: where should we look for the proper character [of Greece]?” (page 22). Indeed, in the early stages of his visit, he could only keep that expectation alive by reciting the poetry of Pindar and the Greek inspired verse of Hölderlin. While his fellow passengers went off on sightseeing trips to view familiar tourist sites, Heidegger remained on the cruise liner, reading.

Then the situation changed, suddenly and dramatically. Midway through their journey, Heidegger and his wife arrived at Delos, an island in the Cyclades, and the legendary birthplace of Apollo. Delos is an island without habitation and, hence, without people to destroy it. As Heidegger later wrote in his journal, “only through the experience of Delos did the journey to Greece become a sojourn [‘Aufenthalt’]” (page 34). The island was scattered “with ruins of temples, buildings, statues and other miscellaneous structures” (page 30). “Through all of these things, a veiled beginning was expressed” (page 30). “Delos is the name of the island: the manifest, the visible, the one that gathers every thing into the Open, every thing to which she offers shelter through her appearing which she gathers into one present moment” (page 30). And Heidegger added, invoking a central term in his philosophical recovery of the Greeks: “what comes to presence is generally preserved by the fundamental characteristic of ‘aletheia’, of the uncovering of presence within the horizon of hiddenness” (page 33). Delos was Ur-Greece, where there was no distinction between past and present, where the beginning continued to exist as a simultaneity in the mind. Heidegger made further visits to Greece in 1964, 1966 and 1967, where he received official recognition from the Greek government for his contribution to philosophy and to his celebration of Greek philosophy.

Heidegger’s reputation in France continued to grow (although the controversy about his Nazi past continued). It was as if he represented (for some) a pure form of philosophy in contrast to the existential pragmatism that was now increasingly with the political turn of Sartre and his “model for worldly decision making” coming to the fore (see Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961, Cornell UP, 2006, page 182). For many, Heidegger offered through his celebration of the Greeks an avenue to a perennial source of philosophy beyond the insistence on contemporary relevance, “in a call to continue to rethink the established boundaries of philosophy” (Kleinberg, page 205).

In April 1964, Heidegger was invited to present a paper at a colloquium in Paris. Its title was provocative: “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”. It was one that foregrounded precisely the difference between him and his Sartre-based French colleagues. In it, he posed two questions: “to what extent has philosophy in the present age entered its end? What task is reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy?” This short paper represented in effect a summation of Heidegger’s thinking. He attempted to answer the first question by offering a short synopsis of metaphysical thinking, a thinking that was overturned in the nineteenth century by, amongst others, Nietzsche. The vacuum that was left has been filled in the modern period not by a new philosophy but by science: “the sciences will interpret everything in their structure that is still reminiscent of their provenance from philosophy” (see “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, Routledge, 1978, page 434). Heidegger then asked: “is there a first possibility for thinking apart from the last possibility?” (page 435). He answered in the affirmative, but certain conditions must be met: “thinking must learn what remains reserved and in store for it, what it is to get involved in. It prepares its own transformation in this learning” (page 436). Thinking must reach an openness that Heidegger called “Lichtung”, a “clearing”, a “letting appear” (page 441). That obtaining this clearing is possible we already know from the pre-Socratics and the concept of “aletheia”. “Alethia is a clearing for presence where technological rationality, which is the end of philosophy, is undone, because “perhaps there is thinking outside the distinction of rational and irrational” (page 449). By abolishing the distinction of the latter, we have entered the realm of the unthought. “The task of thinking would then be the surrender of previous thinking to the determination of the matter for thinking” (page 449).

In September 1966, Heidegger participated in his first seminar in Le Thor, where he met up with René Char, who had a house in the surrounding countryside outside the village of L’Isle sur la Sorgue, a short distance from Le Thor. Heidegger was impressed by Char, his personality, his poetic work, his lifestyle. As he wrote to Elfride on 5 September, “he lives in a simple country house with lovely old things”. “On Sunday afternoon beneath a great plane tree in Char’s garden, [François] Fédier [one of the first translators of Heidegger into French] read his translation of my Hölderlin lecture on ‘Greece’ – R, Char was very moved, and there was a stimulating conversation about the technological world of today and the need to save the countryside”. A rapport was consolidated between the two men, which led to mutual dedications of their work, such as Heidegger’s dedication on the frontispiece of the French translation of On the Way to Language, which read “for René Char, in gratitude for the nearness of dwelling”.

The seminar itself, conducted over a period of seven mornings, focused on a small number of Fragments from the work of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal. One of the participants in the 1969 seminar, Barbara Cassin, left a personal account of the event: ” I was twenty-two and had been invited to the seminar Heidegger was giving at Le Thor in René Char’s home. There were fewer than ten participants, and we were all staying at the Hotel du Chasselas, where we ate our meals together. Heidegger liked to hold his seminar in the morning, and there were sometimes hikes in the afternoon. I was lucky to be able to participate in the seminar. We all knew he had been a Nazi, rector of the university, but we were at the home of René Char, Captain Alexander in The Resistance. Heidegger taught us about the Greeks and poetry’s importance for thought” (quoted in Payen, page 466).

René Char effectively acted as the host for the entire proceedings. No formal transcription was made of the seminars, but informal notes were taken for three of the debates on Heraclitus. As the German translator of the protocols (which were written in French), Curd Ochwadt observes, the seminars were intended as an occasion “where thoughtful meditation was supplemented by the essence of language that is required for the performance of thinking within the dominance of the technological world” (see Martin Heidegger, Vier Seminare, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977, page 140).

The first seminar dealt with Heraclitus Fragment 1, which begins “concerning ‘logos’, concerning beings in their Being, this forever remains beyond all comprehension” (page 11). The theme is the disassociation of true knowledge from everyday comprehension. The light that glows here is an “alien light” that positions the thinking subject to one side of its object of perception (page 11). The second seminar, held three days later, was also concerned with ‘logos’. Before reaching the philosophy, however, Heidegger opened the discussion with a paean on the countryside of Provence where Le Thor was situated: “we are here amongst the olive trees, which nestle themselves on the slope in front of us and reach into the flatlands, in which the Rhône River, as yet out of sight, flows. Behind us stretches a Delphian mountain mass. That is the countryside of Rebanque. Whoever finds the way there becomes a guest of the gods” (page 13).

In the second Fragment, Heidegger pointed to the dialectical dimension of ‘logos’, and to illustrate this dimension he drew on the following analogy of “day and night”: “day ‘alone’ does not exist; there is no night ‘separate in itself’. Rather, the belonging together of day and night is in itself their Being. If I only say: day, then I know nothing about the Being of day. In order to think day, one has to think it through to night, and vice versa” (page 14). The third seminar, which was held in René Char’s house, debated the following fragment (no. 30): “this world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always was, is, and will be: an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and the measures going out”. The play on the sustainability of the “world” (“kosmos”) acted in the seminar as the basis for a meditation upon what finding a “home” (page 22) would entail in the present world, where technology makes us feel at home, everywhere and nowhere.

In the same month as the seminar in Le Thor, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel, on the condition that they should not publish it until after his death. It was a strange request because the interview, which focused on his actions in the early years of the Third Reich, largely reproduced material that Heidegger had already made public in his retrospective essay, “Das Rektorat, 1933-1934” from 1945. The interviewers began by asking Heidegger how he had become rector of Freiburg University in 1933. He replied that he had been simply responding to requests made by his colleagues that he should take over the office lest a Nazi Party hardliner be imposed on them. He had also believed then that the university system had an important role to play in the new Germany (see “Spiegel Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger”, in Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, pages 652-654.) And Heidegger’s support for the Nazi state? In the chaos and confusion of the muti-party Weimar Republic in its final years, there was a pressing need for political stability and shared national and social values. He had invested his hope in Adolf Hitler and expressed his commitment in a number of speeches, but these expressions of commitment contained sentiments that he would not express today. This would be as close that Heidegger would come to a retraction of his early National Socialist views. He also dealt with the accusations that he had not behaved appropriately with his Jewish colleagues, such as Edmund Husserl. Heidegger denied that this was the case and cited his support for his Jewish students, and he pointed out that he had fallen out with Husserl well before the arrival of Nazism. Heidegger was not asked about the Holocaust and did not proffer an opinion.

The second line of questioning centered on his systematic condemnation of technology. Heidegger was convinced that the latter was the new form of Being (the quintessential character) of the modern age and, as such, mankind had little to no control over it. Here Heidegger was repeating a stance that he had already expressed in a number of earlier publications. His main argument was that we should not see technology in a purely mechanical way, as if it were simply the means to a functional end (the production of a material object). Its ultimate effect is on the human spirit, which it regimentises and standardises. “The functioning propels everything more and more towards further functioning, and technology increasingly dislodges mankind and uproots it from the earth” (page 670), a literal earth but also an earth of the mind.

In the winter semester 1966-1967, Heidegger participated in a further seminar on Heraclitus with Eugen Fink at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had already devoted an earlier lecture course to Heraclitus in 1943, but now at the instigation of his younger colleague, a second engagement with the pre-Socratic philosopher, this time in the form of a seminar (for invited participants only), would be undertaken. Fink opened the proceedings by explaining that it was not their intention to explicate the “philological problematic” of Heraclitus and his Fragments, to view them as simply moments in the history of philosophy. Rather, “our seminar shall be an exercise in thinking, i.e. an after-thinking of the pre-thought thinking of Heraclitus” (see Martin Heidegger – Eugen Fink, Heraklit: Winter Semester 1966/67, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986. page 11). The aim was not to convert Heraclitus’ gnomic statements (such as Fragment 11, “every beast is driven to pasture with a blow”) into contemporary philosophical jargon, but to allow the resonance of his language to resound, for “the language has its own inner ambiguity and multi-dimensionality [‘Vieldeutigkeit’]” (page 12).

The series consisted of thirteen individual seminars, one per week, each one dedicated to a particular Fragment or combination of Fragments. The course was conducted by a point counter-point exchange between Fink and Heidegger, where mutual knowledge was exchanged, divergent readings debated and general observations made about the significance of Heraclitus. In the opening address, Fink had argued that “the Greeks represented for us an enormous challenge” (page 11). What, asked Heidegger at one point, in what had effectively become a mini debate, does the challenge consist of? Fink replied, “we are being challenged to reverse the entire direction of our thinking” (page 259). Heidegger queried how this might be possible. Fink replied – “by thinking the ‘unthought’ (‘Ungedachtes’)”, which we are compelled to do because we are now in what he termed a late “situation” (page 261). Heidegger wanted Fink to be more precise, and in his reply, which effectively brought the seminar series to an end, he put forward his own decisive reading of the of the path to the “unthought”. That path was called “aletheia”, or in German “Unverborgenheit”, the sudden revelation of hidden meaning, which involves a capacity of the trained mind to resist the need for “truth”, for closure, and grasp what lies in the space between light and darkness, between existence and non-existence (pages 261-262).

On 24 July 1967, Heidegger attended a poetry reading at the University of Freiburg given by the poet, Paul Celan. Heidegger’s initial interest in Celan may well have been the result of his increasing correspondence with his younger colleague, Otto Pöggeler, who had first written to Heidegger in 1957. Pöggeler had just attended a conference in Paris organised by Jean Wahl, where he had met Celan. The experience was transformative, and Pöggeler began to write a book on the poet. Pöggeler saw affinities between Celan’s poetry and Heidegger’s writing on language. As he wrote to Heidegger in July 1960, Celan’s poetry explores the relationship between “the mystery of Being and the word”, adding that his language was something that “reveals and conceals at the same time” (see Martin Heidegger / Otto Pöggeler Briefwechsel 1957-1976, Verlag Karl Alber, 2021, page 72).

Celan had been born in 1920 in Rumania as Paul Antschel but he changed his name to Celan when he moved to Paris after the war. He gained fame with his poem (written in his chosen language, German) “Fugue of Death” (“Todesfuge’, 1967), which confronted in quasi surrealist terms the grim fact of the Holocaust. The latter is not directly described, but Celan’s disjunctive imagery, the “black milk of the dawn” and the man who plays with snakes, and the absence of coherent rhyme or meter, communicate a sense of horror and human outrage that goes beyond the disconcerting effect what any Realist depiction might achieve (indeed, perhaps there can be no Realist depiction of the terror of the Holocaust). Heidegger and Celan had long known and admired each other’s work and they met after the reading. The following day Celan went with Heidegger up to his cabin in Todtnauberg, some fifteen kilometers from Freiburg. “Todtnauberg” means a “mountain with a meadow of the dead”, an appropriate designation for what the Jewish Celan thought would provide Heidegger with an opportunity for a confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past and the horror of the Holocaust. That confrontation did not take place. Shortly afterwards, Celan wrote the poem, “Todtnauberg”:

“Arnica, eyebright, the

draft from the well with the

star dice above.

in the

cabin,

written in the book

whose name did it record

before mine? –

the line about

a hope, today,

for a thinker’s

word

to come

into the heart,

forest sward, unlevelled,

orchids and orchids, apart

raw exchanges, later, while driving,

clearly,

he who drives us, mankind,

also hears it,

the half-

trod log-

trails on high moor,

humidity,

much”.

[in der

Hütte,

die in das Buch

-wessen Namen nahms auf

vor dem meinen? –

die in dies Buch

geschriebene Zeile

von einer Hoffnung, heute,

auf eines Denkenden

kommendes

Wort

im Herzen,

Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,

Orchis und Ochis, einzeln,

Krudes, später, im Fahren,

deutlich,

der uns fährt, der Mensch,

der’s mit anhört,

die halb-

beschrittenen Knüppel-

pfade im Hochmoor,

Feuchtes,

viel”]

The poem, written in eight short stanzas that form a single sentence, begins with an invocation of two flowers: the Arnica and Eyebright, both of which are medicinal plants (“in German “Heilpflanze”,”literally “plants of healing”). On arrival at the cabin, Celan had written in the visitors’ book: “in the cabin book, with a glimpse of the star at the fountain with, in my heart, the hope of a word to come” (quoted in Payen, page 472). The Jewish Celan was seeking from Heidegger an expression of regret for the Holocaust In which both his parents had died. It was a vain hope, as the poem proceeds to make clear (although its terms of reference are often cryptic). Celan refers to the draft of water they shared: “drawn from the well with the / star-die on top”. It was, however, a gesture of conciliation that remained empty and did nothing to bond Celan with Heidegger. The absence of personal contact between the two men is communicated in the poem by images such as the two orchids the exist beside one another, but “apart” (“einzeln”). The disjointed form of the poem, with its irregular line lengths, lack of rhyme and stanzaic noncontinuity and the obscurity of certain phrases, further consolidates a sense of rupture and non-convergence.

The long central stanza thematically states the impasse that has been reached. It begins: “written in the book / – whose names did it record / before mine?” Celan felt that he was simply one person in a procession of names of people who had visited the cabin, some of whom (he conjectures) may have belonged to Heidegger’s Nazi past. Celan was looking for a sign of remorse from Heidegger, a sign that must come from the heart (“Herzen’). No such sign was forthcoming, instead Heidegger did what he always did with his guests and took Celan for a walk in the forest around the cabin, along “the half- / trod log- / trails on the high moor”. For Heidegger, these paths were tangible symbols for the errant but creative philosophic mind (as reflected in the title of his volume of essays, Off the beaten Track (Holzwege), but for Celan such walkways were simply incomplete and led nowhere. The final words of the poem, “humidity / much”, describe the air around the cabin which, far from being the bracing presence that Heidegger had so often extolled, was oppressively humid, being perhaps the humidity of embarrassment or the fudging of ethical responsibility. That the visit ended acrimoniously is indicated by the “raw exchanges” described in the sixth stanza, as the two men are travelling by car back to Freiburg, driven by a third party, simply named here as “Mensch”, the “person” (but almost certainly the organiser of the conference, Gerhart Baumann). What was said is left unspecified, but simply because of that would seem to indicate that words were exchanged that cannot and should not be replicated. The words, perhaps, were unspeakable.

In March 1968, Heidegger was admitted to a sanatorium in Badenweiler, suffering from stress and anxiety. He was seventy-nine years old, and such medical complaints will now only increase to the point where constructive work will become impossible. In September, the second Le Thor seminar was held on the theme of “Hegel: The Differences between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling”. Heidegger’s goal was to fathom Hegel’s mode of thinking where “everything lies in the antagonism of a positing [‘setzenden’] activity – and consequently a counter-positing [‘entagegen-setzenden’] activity – Hegel exhibiting a force that is capable of holding the unity of the two together” (Vier Seminare, page 28). In the following seven sections of the seminar course (the final one was given on 8 September), Heidegger engaged with the central concepts of this “counter-positing activity”, such as “self-consciousness” (“Selbstbewusstsein”), “a term that designates, on the one hand, everyday consciousness in its non-thematic relation to the object world and , on the other hand, the problem of ego cogito, which has stood at the centre of modern thought since Descartes” (page 29). Heidegger progresses to discuss the subject-object rift of “Entzweiung” (pages 30-31) and explores the conceptual parameters of rubrics of knowledge such as “scientific thought” (page 33) and “philosophical systems” (page 36). Hegel spoke in an idiom of his own, and we must allow him “to speak for himself, and not to correct what Hegel has to say with what we know” from our post-Hegelian world of analysis and consequential thinking (page 24).

In short, Hegel must be read from within, because “in quite in general terms, his language is throughout to be understood as speculative and not as ‘normal language’ ” (page 63), because Hegel’s language is rich and polysemic, and not always easily accessible. In his analysis, Heidegger subjects terms such as “aufheben” to etymological analysis (page 55), spreading the latter’s linguistic valence over a number of registers to permit the concept to emerge in its apparently contradictory sense, as both an abolition of meaning and the preservation of the same on a higher level. The aim of the seminar was to see Hegel’s philosophy not as a closed system but as a sui generic practice of thinking.

After the seminar series, Heidegger visited the atelier of Paul Cézanne in Chemin des Lauves in Provence. If René Char provided a poetic inspiration for Heidegger, it was matched on a visual level by the paintings of Cézanne. As he told his friend and confidant, Heinrich Petzet: “I have found that the path that Cézanne trod, from beginning to end, corresponds in its own way to my own path of thinking” (quoted in Günter Seubold, “Der Pfad ins Selbe: Zur Cézanne-Interpretation von Martin Heidegger”, in Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 1987, 64-78, page 65). And he added to a further associate, Hans Buchner, “if only one could think in such an unmediated way as Cézanne paints” (page 73). In particular, it was the multivarious paintings that Cézanne made over a period of more than twenty years of the mountain range, Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Provence, that particularly drew Heidegger. In his volume of poetry, That Which has been Thought (Gedachtes), Heidegger wrote the following poem in celebration of the unique evocation of the presence of Being achieved by the painter:

“The reflective detachment, the urgently

still quality of the figure of the old gardener

Vallier, who cultivated the inconspicuous

on the Chemin des Lauves.

In the late work of the painter is twofoldness

where presence and the principle of the present have become one

‘realised’ and intertwined at the same time,

transformed into a mysterious identity.

Is there being shown here a path that leads

into the mutual belonging of poetry and thought?”

[” Das nachdenksam Gelassene, das inständig

Stille der Gestalt des alten Gärtner, der Unscheinbares pflegte am

Chemin des Lauves.

Im Spätwek des Malers ist die Zwiefalt

von Anwesendem und Anwesenheit einfältig

geworden ‘realisiert’ und verwunden zugleich

verwandelt in eine geheimnisvolle Identität.

Zeigt sich hier rein Pfad, der ein Zusammen-

gehören des Dichtens und des Denkens führt?”] (GA 13: 223).

Written in three short stanzas of vers libre, Heidegger’s poem is both a paean upon “Gelassenheit” (“serenity”, “tranquility”), and on the unity of the “principle of presence” with the actualised state of “being present”, a unity found here in the garden of Cézanne that was tended by his ageing gardener, Vallier. All of these qualities are achieved in the mysterious identity of the painter’s artwork. Cézanne’s paintings did not depict the world in any Realist way; they allow that world to emerge in a slow process of revealing (slow, as the viewing eye tries to make sense of multivarious colours and shapes, similar to the way that in his philosophy Heidegger’s “aletheia” allows emergence in the play between concealment and revelation). As Seubold explains, “for the viewer that means that the boundaries of the plains of colour dissolve, that contours vibrate and fluctuate, that the flat surfaces pulsate, and so the eye is compelled to wander; that the plans [Cézanne’s sections of bold brushwork] with cold colours are juxtaposed to the plans with warm colours and with these tones the plans lose their corresponding spatial values, so that the viewer is compelled to spring between foreground and background, and furthermore follow through this arrangement of colour the division of light and shade” (Seubold, page 70). As Julian Young further observes, “the salient feature of Cézanne’s late works is their progressively and ever more marked ‘dematerialisation’ of objects”, and he adds (relating this to Heidegger’s philosophy), “for it is in this transition that we experience the happening, the ‘Ereignis’ or ‘worlding’ of world through the gradual presence of presencing” (Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, Cambridge UP, 2001, pages 70 and 156).

Heidegger had discovered the affinities between his philosophy and art as early as the 1930s, when he had first come across the paintings of Van Gogh during a lecture tour of Holland, but it was only later in his life that pictorial art came increasingly to form a focus of his thinking. This is borne out by his writings on Cézanne but also, if more fleetingly, in his discovery of Paul Klee in the late 1950s. In his 1924 lecture “On Modern Art”, Klee had attempted to describe the new direction that his work was taking and, by extension, the direction that modern art was (or should be) taking, with its exploitation of perspective (Cubism), and the making visible of the process of composition and its often seemingly non-logical rearrangement of the object world (as in Surrealism). Klee placed “more value on the powers which do the forming than on the final forms themselves” (see On Modern Art, with an introduction by Herbert Read, London, 1948, page 45). As Klee further explains, “I do not wish to represent the man as he is, but only as he might be” (page 53). This was in terms of artistic representation, a move from “type to prototype”, “Vom Vorbildlichen zum Urbildlichen” (page 49), an unveiling of the “intermediate state” (page 35) of the recovered object world in pictures that possessed “tremendous fragments of meaning” (page 43).

Heidegger made extensive notes on Klee’s essay, although they were never published. They do exist, however, in his archive, and have been consulted by Günter Seubold. His conclusion is that “Heidegger considered Klee’s critique of the prefigural in traditional art to be analogous to his own critique of the forgottenness of Being in traditional philosophy” (see Seubold, “The ‘Protofigural’ and the ‘Event”: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Klee”, in Philosophy Today, 2017, 29-45, page 33). Above all, where the parallels exist between Klee and Heidegger is in their shared belief in the gradual perceived emergence of truth: “Heidegger now attempts [in his annotations of Klee’s essay] to think of the basic trait of Klee’s art – the showing of ‘glimpsed … formative powers’ as underlying the ‘visible … form’ – as, above all, a ‘bringing-forth’ of ‘plasticity of the world’. ‘Bringing-forth’ is understood by Heidegger as ‘forth’ from out of concealment and ‘forth’ into unconcealment. wherein the relation to concealment nevertheless always remains preserved” (Seubold page 34). These are words that fully accord with Heidegger’s notion of “aletheia”, that space between opening and non-opening in a thing, in which he wished us to see truth not as something that can always be defined but is nevertheless de-fineable in our attempts to grasp it. Truth in Heidegger (as the artistic text is in Kless) is a “letting-presence”, a “sphere of hovering, transition and transformation”, where “the ‘ontic’ is elevated into the ‘ontological’ ” (Seubold page 35), because we do not seek the appearance of a single finished object (the ontic), but the conditions under which, and the process in which, all appearances take place (the ontological).

Heidegger had always been shy of publicity and was reluctant to appear in the public realm, but in September 1969 he gave a television interview to Richard Wisser, professor of philosophy at Mainz. It was not held in a studio but in the study of Heidegger’s home in Freiburg. The interview is revealing not just on account of what Heidegger says but what he does not, indeed, refuses to say. It is also revealing of his character. Wisser made a personal record of the meeting, in which he sketched Heidegger’s personality and mental and physical response to his questions, down to Heidegger’s facial expressions.

The original five questions that Wisser had prepared were whittled down to two and a half. Heidegger would not countenance communicating on matters relating to his politics, but other issues that had a contemporary social or political relevance were aired. Early in the interview, Heidegger was asked “do you think that philosophy has a social mission?” (the year is 1969 and the influence of Adorno, Habermas and the Frankfurt School is at its height, so Wisser expected as reply in the affirmative). Heidegger’s retort was a resounding “No”, and he quickly queries “what is society?” (see “Martin Heidegger in Conversation with Richard Wisser”, in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, edited by Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, New York, 1990, pages 81 and 82). This does not mean that Heidegger ignores the human subject, but the latter must be approached through the manifestation of Being. (page 82). The concept of “the social” is an abstraction that does not allow us to do that. We live in a period of “Seinverlassenheit”, when Being has been displaced by science and technology. These are familiar targets, the curses of modernity, and Heidegger repeats his critical sentiments with polemical verve: “the sentence ‘science does not think’, which caused a lot of commotion when I said it in a lecture in Freiburg, means science does not move in the dimension of philosophy; but, without knowing it, it relies on that dimension. For example: physics moves in space and time and movement. What movement is, what space is, what time is cannot be decided by science as science. Therefore, science does not think. With its methods, it cannot think at all in this sense” (page 83). Heidegger’s comments on technology were also familiar: “in technology, namely in its essence, I see that human beings are subject to a power that challenges them and in the face of which they are no longer free” (page 84).

Had Wisser ended his account of the interview here, it would have been an unremarkable document, simply another rendition of the driving obsessions of the philosopher. But Wisser does not end there, but broadens his account to include the personal response of Heidegger to his questions in a piece called “Afterthoughts and Gratitude”. In many respects, this is the more interesting of the two documents, for here we see how Heidegger physically reacted to what was effectively his interrogation. Wisser’s setting of the scene is meticulous, from his description of the door to Heidegger’s house with its two doorbells and inscription from the Book of Proverbs to the precariously narrow stairway leading to Heidegger’s workplace. Heidegger is the perfect host, “measured, waiting, directing, letting me go ahead, offering a drink” (page 94). But when the questions start, “restraint and resistance can be felt, even a little unwillingness” (page 98). “He is fighting against experiences that burden him and that he hints at while speaking” (page 99). In particular, he will not discuss his political past (and Heidegger consistently refused to defend himself against critiques of his politics), and when the subject arises, in a reference to his Spiegel interview “two veins in his forehead become swollen. He is excited. Later, during the interview, it happens again. He is inwardly more moved than is meant to be outwardly visible” (page 102). This is a subterranean Heidegger, quite unlike the impassive guru depicted in the accounts given by Medard Boss and Ernst Jünger. This is a Heidegger whose very features betray “much wisdom in his look, sympathy but also disappointment” (page 103) and, above all, loneliness (page 106).

In the same month, September 1969, the third Le Thor seminar series took place, on “Kant: On the only possible Evidence for the Existence of God”. The ostensible theme was Kant, but Heidegger used the seminar as an opportunity to revisit a number of issues and concepts that he had been grappling with since Being and Time. One such concept was “Destruction”, which lay at the heart of Heidegger’s attempt to dismantle Western metaphysics. ” ‘Destruction’ must be understood in the strong sense as ‘de-struere’, ‘dismantling’ [‘Ab-bauen’], and not as devastation” (Vier Seminare, page 75). Throughout the four seminars, Heidegger drew (and, it must be said, sometimes repetitively) eclectically upon his already existing work. Thus, the 1969 Le Thor seminar included a return to the concept of time as “Ek-stasis”, first developed in Being and Time, where time is depicted not as a series of now-moments but as the horizon for the understanding of Being (page 77). precisely the terms that Heidegger had addressed in his earlier magnum opus.

In March 1970, Heidegger met (and for the last time) with Paul Celan in Freiburg. No record of the meeting was kept. I April, Celan committed suicide in his apartment in Paris. Later that month, Heidegger suffered a stroke in Augsburg where he was giving a talk, which paralyzed the right side of his body and affected his speech. He was brought back to Freiburg where he made a recovery.

In April 1971, Hannah Arendt visited Heidegger in Freiburg. In September, because of Heidegger’s failing health, he and Elfride moved into their retirement cottage at the rear of their house. From now on, time and space start to dissolve for Heidegger. The world seems, in one sense, to stop. One final visit to Thor is made, and the final Zollikon seminar takes place in Freiburg at Heidegger’s home. He rarely left the newly built cottage, even to go into Freiburg proper. The gaps between the contact and communication between Heidegger and Arendt were widening. It is almost as if both can feel that something more than just a personal relationship is coming to an end, but a life.

In March 1972, Heidegger wrote to Arendt, saying that had finally decided on a Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe). The decision constituted a major volte face in Heidegger’s attitude to his philosophy. He had always conceived of his philosophizing as a “way” or a “path” (and indeed, this serves as the motto for the initial volumes), where the mind was encouraged to undertake a process of critical contemplation that may or may not have had a fixed goal. But now the attraction of totality suspends that original intention. Perhaps it was the fear of losing the important writing of the past, or perhaps it was the desire for order or the welcoming of a final system. Organising the Collected Works would be his last project.

In September, Hannah Arendt visited Heidegger in Freiburg. On 2 March, he gave a Zollikon seminar in his home in Freiburg, which was followed by a second and final one the following day. Medard Boss decided to terminate the seminar series due to Heidegger’s declining health. A practicing doctor, Boss had observed this decline for a number of years: “the content of his letters that Martin sent to me after 1969 clearly indicated that my friend was increasingly starting to withdraw himself into death” (Zollikoner Seminare, page 363). This decline was also evident in the final Thor seminar series given in September 1973. The past was all that remained.

In August 1975, Hannah Arendt paid her final visit to Heidegger in Freiburg, and in the same year the first volume of his Collected Works was published by Vittorio Klostermann: Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. We do not know the causes of Heidegger’s death. But he did. In the winter of 1975, just six months before he died, he was visited by his close friend and confidant, Heinrich Wiegend Petzet, for the last time. Petztet recalls that visit: “as always, he made me tell him about everything: he asked with interest about people and things, experiences and work – with a clear and wide-ranging mind, as ever. When I was about to leave at an advanced hour and Frau Heidegger had already left the room, I turned once more at the door. The old man’s eyes followed me, he raised his hand, and I heard him say softly: ‘yes, Petzet, the end is drawing near’. For a last time, his eyes greeted me” (Petztet quoted by Safranski, page 432).

It is most likely that Heidegger died of a stroke. In a letter sent on 18 June 1976 to Imma von Bodmershof, Elfride talks of a “Schwächenanfall” that her husband experienced in his final days. It is a condition that left him without energy or the ability to move. Elfride describes how he could only arise from his bed late in the afternoon. She was able to relieve some of the symptoms through massaging, and they would then take a short walk around the garden. At a point in one of their walks, Heidegger, according Elfride, said, “it is the end”. On 26 May 1976, Martin Heidegger died in his sleep at his home in Freiburg. He was buried a few days later at the family burial plot in Messkirch.

Heidegger had once written in a short memorial piece on the death of the Austrian philosopher, Fridolin Wiplinger: “for his next of kin and his friends his sudden departure brought with it a pain that could hardly be borne. However, the pain slowly changed and grew milder as it moved towards a gratitude [for the life] of the departed one. Those who reached this gratitude experienced the mysterious power of making-present the memory of the person [‘Vergegenwärtigung’], which contains gratitude within it” (GA 13: 239).

Elfride Heidegger died in March 1992.

Conclusion: “With or Without Heidegger?”

It is my and your choice. We are not just textual readers (the seekers, for example, of literary or philosophical knowledge); we are also ethical readers. With the publication of the first of the so-called Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) in 2014, for many, criteria drawn from the second mode of reading came to entirely replace the former mode in our approach to Heidegger. Critical ethical judgements are normally applied to the authors who work within genres such as the moral or political sciences and not to philosophers whose concern is with epistemology (how we understand the world) or ontology (what the world is). The appearance of the Black Notebooks changed this. To say that they read like private musings gets us nowhere: Heidegger foresaw their future publication. And “musings” is not the right word for assertive statements, aggressively expressed opinions and definitively formed obiter dicta uttered ex cathedra. For many, the Black Notebooks confirmed the (long standing) conviction that Heidegger was a life-long Nazi and antisemite, a view held amongst others by Victor Farías, Tom Rockmore, Richard, Wolin, Emmanuel Faye and more recently Guillaume Payen.

Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi state after its founding in 1933 and his energetic promotion of its policies cannot be denied. He fully committed himself to the formation of a university pedagogy based on Nazi ideology, and saw himself in the role as the future leader in this area. That role has been thoroughly documented. And yet we must be careful about defining the exact nature of Heidegger’s Nazism and its temporal limits. Just typifying Heidegger as “a Nazi” is to advance a one-dimensional dismissal of a complex person whose relationship with politics was also complex (and sometimes confused). It is clear that Heidegger had Nazi sympathies from 1929 or 1930, when we know that he was reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When it became clear in early 1933 that Hitler would become chancellor after a succession of failed presidential governments, Heidegger greeted this with enthusiasm (a fuller account of events is given above in Chapter Five of this manuscript under the year 1933). Heidegger from the very start took an overly idealistic view of Hitler and what the new regime might achieve. His support for the Nazi Party was largely the result of wishful thinking: Heidegger imposed ideals of national renewal on a reality that he did not look closely at or consider in detail. Heidegger was in history, but curiously distanced from it. Rüdiger Safranski puts this paradox succinctly, “the events to which he reacted were political events, and his actions took place on the political stage – but it was the power of philosophical imagination that governed his reactions and actions. And this philosophical imagination transformed the political scene into an historical-philosophical stage on which a play from the repertoire of the history of Being was being enacted. Real history was scarcely recognisable in it”.[2] As even Hugo Ott (one of the philosopher’s harshest critics) observes: Heidegger’s “programme was built on high hopes and expectations”, which were soon to be overtaken by the reality.[3]

It is important to recognise that there were major differences between Heidegger and standard Nazi policy. In a private tête-à-tête following the talk that he gave as rector in May 1933, the Baden minister of culture, Otto Wacker, criticised Heidegger for his lack of reference to race. The views that Heidegger had expressed in his talk, Wacker concluded, represented a type of “private National Socialism” that, in the view of Wacker, as Heidegger later related, “evaded the perspective of the Party programme” and did not represent the political agenda of the new state (Das Rektorat 1933/34 in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, page 381). Heidegger, indeed, was fully aware of the importance of race as “Volk”, but for him the latter was not a concept based on genetics or biology but was something that adhered to the local regionality of selfhood. volk was the living reality of “Heimat”.

Heidegger soon came to realise that his personal vision of National Socialism and Nazism were not the same. On the level of ideology (its anti-Communism, the promotion of a völkisch state and Germanic fundamentalism) they looked the same, but beneath that ideology Nazism worked on a different level. Nazi party organisations were crisscrossed with petty contestations for power, with a sleezy modus operandi of personal preferment, exploitation of fear, the cultivation of insecurity, cronyism and sycophantic affiliations, and jockeying for positions within a hierarchy. It was as system of terror framed by the absence of humane ethical standards. It took Heidegger until 1934 to recognise the distinction, in Hannah Arendt’s words “between the mob and the elite” (Arendt quoted in Safranski page 231).

The mob were represented by careerists such as Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baumler. Although technically they were colleagues on the new Nazi teachers’ union, the relationship between Heidegger, Krieck and Baumler was complex and fraught. Through his encounter with them, Heidegger came to feel that, within the educational politics of the new Nazi Germany, he did not have the support from the higher echelons that Krieck and Baumler had, both of whom were confidants not only of the Minister for Education, Bernhard Rust, but also of Alfred Rosenberg, leader of the Party’s Foreign Policy Office and recognised as the leading theoretician in the Nazi Party. The subtleties of the power games were, as Heidegger confided to Blochmann on 19 September 1933, “bottomless”.

In addition, Heidegger was disapprovingly looked at because of his philosophy, many seeing his quest for a new philosophical style not as a vital matter in a developing methodology but as a willful and idiosyncratic expression of a peculiar mind. Both his person and philosophy, according to a former colleague in Marburg, the Professor of Psychology, Erich Jaensch, was “talmudic-rabulistic” (and, as the allusion to the Talmud suggests, being “Jewish” was no longer purely a matter of race but a way of thinking). Heidegger was a “dangerous schizophrenic”, the producer of “psycho-pathological documents” (quoted in Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, Temple UP, 1987, page 167). Krieck saw in Heidegger’s philosophy “a ferment of dissolution and subversion for the German People” (quoted in Manfred Geier, Heidegger, Rowohlt, 2005, page 93). Heidegger, in fact, pursued an “un-German” line of total mystification. Regarding the terminology Heidegger used in Being and Time, Krieck observed, “it is the goal of his philosophy to make the straightforward twisted, the elementary obscure, the simple confusing, the clear impenetrable, the sensible unsensible” [37].

My above account of Heidegger’s “Nazism” is not intended to exonerate him from his participation in promoting Nazi ideology in the early years of the Third Reich, but it attempts to put that participation into a broader and more nuanced context than it is normally encountered in the secondary literature, where “Heidegger was a Nazi” is standard format. As Jeff Malpas has argued (and as I have tried to show above) “neither Nazism nor [as we shall see below, MT] anti-Semitism are terms that carry a single, straightforward and unequivocal meaning” (quoted in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, edited by Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, The MIT Press, 2016, page 5). We need to remain alive in our reading to the complexities and variations within these concepts and look closely at the copula (“is”, “was”) in our description of Heidegger. Such simple words are more complex than they seem.

2014 saw the publication of the first volume of the Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) (“black” because of the colour of their binding, but the colour has been read symbolically to refer to the contents of the books). The entire series of the notebooks is voluminous and record Heidegger’s observations on himself, his philosophy, people, and developments in history over a period of twenty years or more. At certain moments in these texts, he refers to the pernicious influence of “world Jewry” and “international Jewry” (quoted from Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, page 91). Such comments have been seen as reflecting an endemic antisemitism on Heidegger’s part and have impacted negatively on many readers of his philosophy, such as Günther Fingal, the erstwhile President of the Heidegger Society, who consequently resigned his position.

It cannot be denied that such statements were made, but it is significant that they were usually attached to an international context, as in “the dangerous international alliance of Jews” (page 147), an alliance that included America and the British Empire. As Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann has argued “when Heidegger characterizes the spirit of ‘international Jewry’ he includes within it the modern spirit of the present age” (quoted in Farin and Malpas, page 91). In other words, it is modernity that is the villain, and Heidegger regarded international Jewry, in its cosmopolitan urbanism, as the prime exponent of the former. It was an abstract evil spirit that exploited high finance and technological mastery, and whose mission it was to destroy Germany and Germanic values, such as “Heimat”, and not just Germanic values “but the destiny of the West” (according to Donatella Di Cesare as quoted in Farin and Malpas, page 186). These comments were often made during the Second World War, when the war was starting to turn against Germany. Heidegger’s construction of “international Jewry” might best be seen as a paranoid reading of events or, in the words of Lawrence Paul Hemming, as the product of a mind that was at the very least “ill-prepared and naive” in all matters relating to politics (quoted in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, page 113. Indeed, Payen (page 467) reports him as confiding to a colleague this had been “the greatest stupidity of his life”. It is possible that Heidegger did not see that what he was saying in political terms at all. In one Black Notebook, he wrote “the question of the role of World Jewry is not a racial question, but a metaphysical question” (quoted in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, page 181).

Heidegger’s conjuring up of “World Jewry” was ultimately a conjuring up a bogeyman, a malignant explain-all mysticum, and had the same status in his mind as his vision of a “good” National Socialism that he held to for many years. And just as he had no personal contact with “good” National Socialists, he had no contact with those who belonged to “World Jewry”. On the contrary, the Jews that he knew personally he liked and helped in their careers, people such as Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt, with whom he conducted an intermittent relationship over a period of forty years. There were certainly tensions and differences of opinion, but there is no sense that he treated these people differently because they were Jewish. In fact, Heidegger was shunned by many Nazis precisely because he did not share their racist views

Some will see this reading as overly lenient. We are then left with the question: with or without Heidegger? We can allow the antisemitic remarks he made in his notebooks to stop us reading him at all, or we can agree that he made them, regret the fact, and continue reading. It is possible to accept that as a man he had many failings (particularly in his private life, and his conduct with women rarely figures in the standard Heidegger critiques) but as a thinker he produced some of the most original and stimulating philosophy in the twentieth century. Are we somehow as readers tainted by adopting the letter approach and open to the criticism that philosophical ideas, however good, cannot compensate for the unethical? How we answer such questions defines the person that one is, and that person will differ according to place and context (a German reader weighed down by the blight of history may feel that only one response is appropriate).

Perhaps the answer lies in the very complexity of the question. Heidegger was a chameleon thinker, inventing and reinventing his philosophies throughout his life. Perhaps we should not think of “Heidegger’ as a unified subject, which would lead us to avoid statements such as “Heidegger is” or “Heidegger was” and talk not about “Heidegger” but about “Heideggers”. This way, we might accept and continue to read certain Heideggers, admiring the quest to reach a factual understanding of the phenomenal world and invent a language to allow us to do this, to elaborate a counter “philosophy” based on ‘Er-eignis’ (the appropriation of happening), to appreciate the equation of time, place and identity elaborated in more than one text and admire the promotion of the liberating polysemic potential of language, particularly poetic language in the late work; while rejecting other Heideggers.

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