Chapter Four
Consolidation
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 inform his first lecture in Freiburg. Philosophy is 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 is not a mere object of study but an activity of the mind (p. 4). We do philosophy “in our Dasein as it exists in the here and now” (p. 6). It is an “act that has been grasped in freedom” p. (5). Philosophy allows us to pose “the question concerning the subjectivity of the subject in a real and radical way” (p. 11), enabling us to make contact with the “uniqueness of our Dasein” (p. 8), in the spirit of the motto of the Classical Greek philosophers: “erkenne dich selbst” (“gnothi sauton”, “know thyself”) (p. 11).
Heidegger was appealing to the idealism of German youth. Our “profession” is a calling not a mere occupation: it is an “inner task” (p. 6), and he dismissed the world of careers, social status and “exam grades” (p. 7) in words meant to console a generation of youth unsure about its professional and material future. To these, he offered his inspirational philosophy and philosophical “Führerschaft” (“leadership”), which he defined as a pathway to a “coming into the possession of higher and richer possibilities of human existence” (p. 8). Before we get to philosophising, however, we need “Vorverständnisse” (p. 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, posed the following questions: “is philosophy a science or a world-view? Or is philosophy both science and world-view? Or is philosophy neither science nor world-view?” p. (9). Heidegger was quick to answer his questions. “Philosophy is not a science” (p. 14). It is something that is “ursprünglicher” (“more original”) (p. 17), “ursprünglich” in both senses of the word: temporal and metaphysical, because philosophy is not only “the first science” but it is also “the purest” (p. 18), the deepest, something that reaches into the plenitude of the mind. Philosophy possesses “an essential superfluidity” (p. 17), whereas “science is methodological, exact and a universally ‘valid’ knowledge” (p. 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. The scientific conception of truth is 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” (Sein und Zeit p. 45.) 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]
In his lecture,Heidegger then moved his focus from the mechanical sciences to the intellectual sciences of the “Geisteswissenschaften”, and in particular to their use of “world-views”. 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. The world-view approach has hardened into an academic orthodoxy, and Heidegger 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 focussed on the latter, which 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” (p. 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” (p. 353). Dilthey talks about the “inner structure” of the world-view, but we must ask the fundamental question: “what is the originary structure in which the inner possibility of the world-view justifies itself?” It is a question that Dilthey does not, indeed, according to Heidegger, cannot answer.
His second target in these lectures was the intellectual historian Ernst Cassirer, who was soon in March to become Heidegger’s sparring partner in the 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” (p. 359). But, as Heidegger observed, “ ‘pantheism’ and the like are all bad names and concepts, theologically but not ontologically-metaphysically enlightening” (p. 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” (p. 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 world-view as comportment [‘Haltung‘] is philosophy possible” (p. 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” (p. 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” (p. 214).
This is philosophising’s “ontological design” (p. 214), which Heidegger envisioned (and his tone reflects the inspirational sentiments of his opening lecture) as a “primal act by Dasein; indeed, the happening of the space of freedom for Dasein itself”, and 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” (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, such as Emmanuel Lévinas (the pupil of Husserl). The topic of the conference was “Humankind and Generation” (“Mensch und Generation”), but for most of the participants the main interest centred on the lectures that Heidegger and Cassirer (representing two completely diverging modes of philosophy) each gave on Kantian notions 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)a s the development of the debate would show, intellectually. The conference consisted of a variety of speakers, but their debate formed its focus. It lasted a week, with Cassirer speaking in the morning, and Heidegger responding in the afternoon. The 26-year-old Otto Friedrich Bollnow (a postgraduate student of philosophy and pedagogy in Berlin) left a detailed eyewitness account. “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]
A further contemporary tells us, 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”, promoting 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 Elfride suggest that Heidegger tolerated rather than enjoyed the papers of the other delegates. But there were benefits. 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 flexibility, my handling of people and a certain outward assurance do benefit”. And in an earlier letter of 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 target were 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 a Laying of the Ground for Metaphysics”.[17] Contrary to neo-Kantianism, 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 Heidegger 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. Heidegger’s tone throughout was assertive and clear; 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 noted later in a letter 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, and explicitly distanced himself from it.[23] He rejected both the idealism of Cassirer’s approach 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]
There was no meeting of minds, however much Cassirer may have wanted this. At one point, a 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 quite young ones was particularly refreshing and productive. In my lectures, I succeeded in reaching just the right freedom of expression and breadth, to be able to do justice the entirety of my subject”.[28] This was a benign relationship, however, that would not last. 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”.
In May, Heidegger gave a lecture course in Freiburg 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 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 wished to set up a dialectic of engagement between his students and their object of study, and this could only be achieved through a critical engagement with the texts, through reading. “But can we still read? Do will still have the inner strength and willingness to allow something to speak to us?” [31] To achieve proper reading and allow the philosophic work to come to voice, “we must bring the essential within us to the task”. To read philosophy requires an 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] 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 (paradoxical as it may seem) only be answered by turning to the future: “Only out of the future can we therefore understand active being [‘Geschichte’]. Only in this way does it come to a voice, in which our studying is no longer a mere comparison but a dialogue that we must set in motion – a dialogue but 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] It is a highly personal, almost existential experience, for any confrontation with philosophy must start with a confrontation with oneself: “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 the 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]
On 20 June, Jaspers wrote to Heidegger, asking if he would be prepared to provide a reference for Hannah Arendt who, after completing her Ph.D., “The Concept of Love in Augustine: Towards a Philosophical Interpretation”, was applying for a grant to proceed to post-doctoral work. In the opinion of Jaspers, who was Arendt’s supervisor in Heidelberg, the final draft of her doctoral dissertation did not live up to the brilliant achievement of the opening chapters. Heidegger wrote back to Jaspers on 25 June, in a letter that included a positive reference for Arendt.
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 the growing political and economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic. “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. He wished to see the former undone, “indeed 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 this activity. Has 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?” (p. 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’] science is not helpful; neither is viewing it as a worldview. Perhaps philosophy cannot be determined as 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” (p. 2). But this is purely the formal structure of philosophy. What is its content? Heidegger offered an existential answer to this question, drawing upon an unlikely source: the German Romantic poet, Novalis, who regarded philosophy as a “homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere” (p. 5). Heidegger elaborated this further: homesickness is “the fundamental attunement of philosophising, and of questions concerning world, finitude and individuation” (5), and these concepts were systematically explicated in terms of their formation of individual Being In the ensuing body of his lecture course.
On 6 December, Heidegger gave a 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 the pure air of incessant transcending. What I heard in your words, at times strange to me (but as identical to my own and 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 lecture at Freiburg University. From its 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” (p. 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: “the nothing itself nothings” (“das Nichts selbst nichtet”) (p. 102). To explain this particular type of 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” (101). 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” (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” (101). Anxiety is a particular inflection of 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” (108).
The academic year resumed after the Christmas break. Heidegger’s enthusiasm for his students, as expressed on 12 April the previous year in a letter to Blochmann, had not lasted. As he wrote to Bultmann on 15 January 1930, “I live very 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”.
On 28 March, Heidegger was offered the Chair of Philosophy at Berlin University. 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. As he wrote on 6 April to Elfride, “to the city and everything I really am quite indifferent at the moment. The sheer groundlessness of the place is dreadful and yet in the end it is still no genuine abyss for philosophy”. These are anti-urban, anti-modernity sentiments and supported a self-image that was intimately connected to rural Germany and to one part of rural Germany in particular: Swabia and his beloved hut in Todtnauberg. Indeed, he seemed 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. 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 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] As Safranski notes, “he had thereby confronted philosophy and himself with a big task – they must demonstrate time-diagnostic and prognostic force and, moreover, recommend certain definite decisions, and not merely decidedness. There must be philosophical insights of politicisable precision; alternative courses of action must become visible and, if possible, philosophically decidable. All this Heidegger expects of philosophy if it is to be ‘in control’ of time”.[38] Safranski’s words may be overly pragmatic, and his real-politic extrapolation from Heidegger’s statement “in control of time” too extensive, but he is correct in assuming that Heidegger’s mindset during this period was becoming increasingly political and moving in one particular direction: towards that of National Socialism.
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, he 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”). As he told the students in the preamble, “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 can 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 strike-power of philosophising rests precisely in this: that it reveals the whole only in properly grasped particular problems.” Once again, he 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, Heidegger 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 suggested a work in progress rather than a finished entity. Indeed, in his discussion of Aristotle and Kant, he 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.
On 2 September, Heidegger wrote to Bultmann telling him that in the coming winter semester he would offer a lecture course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, but only “privatissime” – only for selected students. And now a significant event takes place. On 2 October, he wrote to Elfride telling her that he had visited her parents in Wiesbaden. Elfride’s father was very interested in the copy of the Nazi newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter, that Heidegger had brought with him, and in a letter written on 17 August 1931, he told 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 seems to suggest that his politics (and those of Elfride) had by this time noticeably veered towards the Right.
On 19 October, he wrote to Elfride from Beuron where, over a ten-day period, he went through the rigours of a monastic regime. “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”. In the same letter, he talked about his dismay over the “rootlessness and superficiality of our contemporary Dasein”.
In the winter semester between November 1930 and March 1931, Heidegger gave a lecture course (to a select group of students) on “Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit”, where he distanced himself from a common reading of his work. “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 answer, 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 lecture 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 were analysed 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 section 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 his course 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?”
On 8 April, 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 the 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, is 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 around my name is, 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.
In the summer semester, between May and July, Heidegger gave a lecture 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”]. He retranslated 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 Heidegger, 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 in his lectures 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 1 August, Heidegger travelled to Holland to run a workshop on Being and Time. During his time there, he encountered the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. This was to be a formative experience, an experience that paved the way for his later “turning” (“Kehre”), where art and increasingly poetry allowed him to expand the parameters of his philosophy. As he 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 an essay written in 1935, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (revised in 1936), 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] Heidegger’s language elides into the poetical as the shoes take on an allegorical significance, in which the peasant woman, the earth and the shoes are 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 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 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 Blochmann. He had 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 him 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 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. He never wrote about such matters in such a way to his wife, Elfride.
On 14 November, 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 his reference to “this rootless age” suggests, Heidegger was equating the 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 in a letter to Blochmann on 20 December, is that “we must learnt to find silence again” in order (and the paradox is central to his 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 current”.
In December 1931, Rudolf Carnap, exponent of 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 gave a passage from Heidegger’s lecture “What is Metaphysics?” (“Was ist die Metaphysik?”), which included the phrase “nothing nothings” (“das Nichts nichtet”) (p. 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 ‘to nothing’, which has no dictionary status”. Such statements are neither true nor false, and hence tell us nothing 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, Heidegger wrote to 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. At the same time, Jaspers published the three volumes of his Philosophie. This publication was not philosophy (as Heidegger understood it), but a writing about “philosophy” and closer to the intellectual history and cultural philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. Nevertheless, Heidegger wrote positive words to Jaspers’ work (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”].
As so often in Heidegger’s lectures, before we get to the content we are enlightened about his radical methodology. As he asserted 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 traversed 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 these competing epistemologies (originally scholastic, but foundational for later empiricist philosophies) acted as the necessary backdrop to the substantive part of his 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 Die Aufgabe unserer Zeit (the German translation of La rebelión de las masas, 1930). Heidegger’s thinking is showing increasing signs of radical non-democratic politics. 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. It is clear, however that he feels a moment of truth is coming, both for the nation and for the individual.
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: Anaximander and Parmenides. 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: “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. What the often cryptic fragments of Anaximander and Parmenides allow him to do is not to close down the question of Being (to say once and for all what it is) but, on the contrary, to keep that question open. As he observed in his brief conclusion: “we have the question of being 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; it has its own. What we pose for ourselves there is a matter purely for us.”[62]
On 20 June, Heidegger told Elfride that he was “ever more certain that we will rebuild things anew”, and he continued his letter in introspective tones that suggested that he was in the midst of a personal crisis: “the clearer it becomes to me where I belong and what I must still demand from 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, 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. But 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”. On 18 September he contacted Blochmann explaining that he had reached an impasse in his writing: “I often debate within myself whether or not it would be better to suspend my own attempts at philosophy and instead try to make it possible for us not just merely to read the world of the Greeks but to bring them before our eyes in all their challenging greatness and exemplariness”.
On 6 October, he wrote to Elfride from the cabin. Elfride had asked him in a previous letter a question (a question that many Heidegger readers have continued to ask): what do you actually do in this cabin for weeks on end (a cabin that is only six metres long and five metres wide)? He replied, “I gather and clarify my actual intentions 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 is more than and different from what has hitherto been thought to be, the form and receptacle of things and their dimensions; it is that as well – wholly with respect to what is most outward and passable – but it is something else. 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 style of this passage is as important as the content. Heidegger describes his process of composition through structural metaphors taken from nature. Heidegger’s use of language, in fact, from Being and Time onwards became increasingly figurative, where new ideas are increasingly cast in often non-discursive language. The poetic idiom was becoming a medium for his philosophising, a tendency already apparent in the same letter where he described the arrival of autumn: “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 is 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. This was an increasing theme in his correspondence. 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. On 9 June, he wrote to Elfride, expressing his concern for the deteriorating condition of German politics. Communism was 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 comesalong 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 rumours 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, 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) p. 286.
[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] Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Gespräche in Davos”. In Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger. Edited by Günther Neske. Pfullingen: Verlag Gunther Neske, 1977. 25-29 (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 of 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), p.77.
[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.
Martin Heidegger Biography 