Heidegger’s Way of Thought

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Citation preview

Heidegger's Way of Thought THEODORE KISIEL

continuum

Heidegger's Way of Thought Critical and Interpretative Signposts

THEODORE KISIEL edited by Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz

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II ... T"wl" IIlIildint\' 11 York Road, London SEI 7NX \!II I "'"'g'o" Awnue, New York, NY 10017-6503 www .•:uncinuumbooks.com

h",

I'"hlislol'll 2002

1'1,,, ",1I'T,i"n (C) Theodore Ki,iel

2002

l'di'ori,oI matter © Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz 2002 All ,i~l"s re.served. No part of this publication may he reproduced or II,II,smitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical. i""llIdin[\ photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval ,ys,,'m, without prior permission in wriring from the publisher.

Ilritish Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A c"alogue record record for rhis book is available from the Brirish Library ISBN 0-8264-5727-4 (hardback) 0-8264-5736-3 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kisiel, Theodore ). Heidegger's way of thought: critical and interpretarive signposrs / Theodore Kisiel; edited by Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz. p. em.

Indudes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8264-5727-4 - ISBN 0-8264-5736-3 (pbk.) I. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. I. Denker, Alfred, 1960 - [I. Heinz, Marion. III. Title. B3279.H49 KS.3 2001 193-dc21 2001037098

Tyl'l'.,," hy Aa,on,Ylll' Limited, Faston, Bristol l',ill,,,,1 alld hOllnd in (;'l'ilt Britain hy MI'(; Iloob l.,d, lIodmin, (:ornw,,11

Contents

Editors' foreword Acknowledgements Abbreviations

V1

Xli XU1

Heidegger's Apology: Biography as Philosophy and Ideology 2

On the Way to Being and Time; Introduction to the Translation of Heidegger's Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegrijfi

36

3

The New Translation of Sein und Zeit: A Grammatological Lexicographer's Commentary

64

4

Heidegger (I907-27): The Transformation of the Categorial

84

5

Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask

101

6

Heidegger's Early Lecture Courses

137

7

Existenz in Incubation Underway Toward Being and Time

149

8

From Intuition to Understanding: On Heidegger's Transposition of Husserl's Phenomenology

174

9

The Mathematical and the Hermeneutical: On Heidegger's Notion of the Apriori

187

Notes Appendix I Appendix II

Int1t'x

200 Bilingual Index The Writings of Theodore Kisiel

218 241 247

Editors' foreword

This collection of papers on Heidegger's philosophy by Theodore Kisiel honours an extraordinary scholar whose research has contributed much to a better understanding of Heidegger's work. He published the first of more than 60 papers on Heidegger in 1964. With the publication of the English translation of Volume 20 of the collected edition (Gesamtausgabe) of Heidegger's writings, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, he established his reputation as a first-rate translator. His magnum opus, The Genesis of Heideggers 'Being and Time', was published in 1993. This work has found world-wide critical acclaim as one of the outstanding works on Heidegger's philosophy in any language and earned its place among the few 'classic' works on Heidegger's philosophy, most notably William ]. Richardson's Heideggn-: Through Phenomenology to Thought and Otto Poggeler's Martin Heideggers Path of Thinking. Kisiel's decade-long research has been of fundamental importance to Heidegger scholarship. He reintroduced the traditional principles of hermeneutics to his research. The lack of these principles, biography, chronology and doxography (cf. Genesis 7-8), has hampered the study of Heidegger's work in last fifteen years or so. They are the signposts that determine his appropriation and critique of Heidegger's works, and enable him to explain Heidegger's philosophy in relation to the context from which it emerged.

Biography As the old Heidegger tells us, it was his 'theological provenance' which put him on the path of thinking (US 96/10). His early 'hermeneutics of facticity' is also a testimony to his own sense of the biographical element in the 'hermeneutic situation' from which each philosopher speak~. However high philosophical thought may float above the empirical reality of everyday life. every philosopher remains a child of his own time. Philosophy does not take place in limbo, but is influenced by the philosophical discourse of its lillie and its rclation to the history of ideas as such and philosophy in pari kular.

Editors' foreword

VII

Chronology Heidegger has always stressed that his philosophy is a way of thought (genitivus objectivus and subjectivus). It is not a subjective projection of the meaning of being; it is a meditative listening to the voice of being that expresses itself in the intelligibility of the world as such and most clearly in human existence. As Heidegger loved to say: 'It thinks in me!' His thought is never finished but always on the way. In order to follow the development of Heidegger's tracing of the meaning of being, it is of the utmost impor-tance to get the record of his writings, lectures and courses right. Without a reliable record we simply cannot understand the development of the key-concepts of Heidegger's thought.

Doxography After having brought together the biographical and chronological evidence, the ancient art of establishing what a philosopher actually says comes into play. As the papers in this volume show, Kisiel has an outstanding grasp of the subtlety, complexity and chronological relations of Heidegger's thought. He has excelled in bringing to light forgotten and obscure sources. Contrary to the traditionally dominant interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy, which remains immanent to the text by treating his thought as sui generis and unrelated to the world from which it emerged and often degenerates into sheer paraphrase, Kisiel evokes the background of history and the history of philosophy to interpret Heidegger's thinking in the context of his life, time, and history of ideas. This kind of careful research of the determining facts is often disqualified as a kind of non-philosophical positivism for which the philosophical substance of Heidegger's thought in its originality and subtlety must remain a closed book. The results of Kisiel's research clearly show in many ways how short-sighted such criticism really is: 1. The philological exactness of his transcriptions of Heidegger's manuscripts lays the foundation for his constructive and leading critique of the edition of Heidegger's works as they are published in the Collected Edition (Gesamtausgabe) by Klostermann. 2. His sensitive and subtle awareness of the particularities of the German language in its terminological use by Heidegger not only enables him to comment in a careful way on the English translations of Being and Time, but also to suggest alternative translations for key-terms. 3. These corrections of the basic means of research and teaching are not the only benefits of Kisiel's research. An inestimable merit of his year-long research in the leading archives is the first presentation and interpretation of many documents that are of essential significance for Heidegger's path

VIII

Editors' foreword of'hinking. Kisiel's research enables us today to understand the genesis of Ill·idl·ggds philosophy in its continuity and transitions from its original starling-point in the famous lecture course of the war emergency semester of 1919, The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews, to the pllhlil:ation of his main work Being and Time.

Thl' selection of the papers in this volume is based upon Kisiel's own hl'rllll'neutical principles (biography, chronology, doxography). The papers show both the complete range and the development of his research. We have 110' ordered them chronologically but in such a way that they follow IIt·idegger's path of thinking. The last essay in this volume, for instance, that discusses mostly Heidegger's later philosophy is in fact the one that Kisiel wrote first. The first paper, 'Heidegger's Apology: Biography as Philosophy and Ideology', is Kisiel's main contribution to the Heidegger scandal caused by Farias' book on Heidegger and Nazism and Ott's attempt at a Heidegger biography. This careful essay typifies Kisiel's hermeneutical approach. Contrary to many other philosophers he does not take the statements of the two camps, Farias and Ott on the one hand and Heidegger's orthodox defenders on the other, at face value but critically weighs the evidence put forward by both sides. He rejects the tendency to separate Heidegger?s life from his thought because it is ideological and as such irreconcilable with the hermeneutics of facticity in Being and Time. It was not the politically naive simpleton from MeSkirch who joined the Nazi party and became rector of Freiburg University in 1933, but the university professor and worldfamous author of Being and Time. Heidegger's own methodological postulate is in his attention to the hermeneutic situation's inherent demand to clarify the ontic-foctic suppositions of the ontological analysis and formation of concepts. Kisiel makes consistent use of this postulate and at times uses it against Heidegger himself and especially against the cover-ups of his thinking by his apologists. However, a fair weighing of the evidence is predicated upon full disclosure of all the available evidence, contrary to the fragmentation of the evidence by both sides due to arbitrary and thus suspiciously vested barriers. In this sense Heidegger's biography needs to be written as an apology, although it is still unclear whether it would end in an acquittal or disgrace. The second essay, 'On the Way to Being and Time; Introduction to the Translation of Heidegger's Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffi', was originally intended as an introduction to Kisiel's translation but was deleted at the behest of the literary executor of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. Since he found several errors in the German edition, he decided to check the l'Olllplcte text against the manuscripts on which the edition is based. Thus he disowned that the existentialist vocabulary of this summer semester 192') WurSl' was introducl'd by Heideggcr into the manllsnipl when hl' later IISl'lI

Editors' foreword

IX

it to prepare his main work, Being and Time, for publication. In his essay Kisiel interprets the main strands of thought of the course with special focus on Husserl's influence on Heidegger's philosophy. Husser! had made the still unpublished manuscript of his Ideas II available to his former assistant Heidegger and there are many indications that he studied this text intensively while preparing the course. We include Kisiel's section-for-section comparison of the lecture course and Being and Time. In Appendix I we publish his bilingual index of key terms and persons. In his commentary on the new translation of Being and Time by Joan Stambaugh, Kisiel comes to the conclusion that the new translation is not better than the old one by Macquarrie and Robinson. They complement each other and need to be studied side by side. Stambaugh started working on her translation in 1976 and completed it in the late 1970s. It is therefore hard to explain how in 1996 she could claim to have taken the full measure in her translation of Heidegger scholarship of the past thirty years. Kisiel discusses the translation of many key-concepts in Being and Time and compares them to the 'old' translations. He often explains their meaning in great detail and thus interprets fundamental conceptual structures of Being and Time. In this conceptual interpretation resides the great importance of this grammatologicallexicographer's commentary. The fourth paper, 'Heidegger (1907-27): The Transformation of the Categorial', is in many ways the zero-point of the genesis of Kisiel's Genesis book. In his own words we could call it 'the first draft'. It is astonishing to what extent his interpretation of the development of Heidegger's thought in this period was later substantiated by the publication of the lecture courses. Here, he first proves the importance of Lask's work for Heidegger. He shows the different steps toward Heidegger's shift from language to that which comes to language and to the process of disclosure which precedes and supports speech. In other words, the transformation from neo-Kantianism (Rickert, Lask) by way of Dilthey' s categories oflife (hermeneutics) and Husserl's doctrines of intentionality and categorial intuition (phenomenology). In 'Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask', Kisiel meticulously follows the trace of this important and underestimated philosopher in Heidegger's early thought from the qualifYing dissertation on Duns Scotus' Doctrine of Categories and Meaning to the early Freiburg courses. This article was written in 1988 but never published in its originally intended vehicle. It was finally published in 1995 in an updated and abbreviated form, deleting especially those portions that found their way relatively intact into the Genesis book. However, this essay is not just a more comprehensive discussion of Heidegger's earliest thought, for a new theme surfaces in this paper which has been pursued by Kisiel since: the influence of Johann (;ottlieb Fichte. Not only is the neo-Kantianism of Lask and Rickert, who supervised his qualifYing dissertation, cast in a Fichtean mould, but

x

Editors' foreword

I h·idl'J.~gcr also studied Fichte's writings as a student and announced a course his philosophy for winter semester 1916-17. The course was finally cann·lbl hecause Heidegger was drafted into the army. Fichte coined facticity as a philosophical term and it is precisely this term that is so essential to I kidegger's early hermeneutics of facticity. The sixth essay, 'Heidegger's Early Lecture Courses', was written before allY of the early Freiburg lecture courses were published. It is a tribute to Kisiel's BCD-approach that his interpretation has been confirmed by the \;Hcr publication of the courses. He focuses on the most important ideas which began to surface in these courses and which later became the core of Heing and Time: the first conception of a hermeneutics of facticity and the first tentative response to the question whether the return to the origins of philosophy should be scientific or historical. Of all the papers in this volume this article most clearly proves the fruitfulness of the impulse and method of Kisiel's research. Kisiel wrote 'Existenz in Incubation Underway Toward Being and Time' in honour of his esteemed and inspirational colleague, William J. Richardson. It is a retelling of the Genesis story with special focus on the key-term Existenz. But to get this chronological story right, from the first use as indicator of the factic 'I am' in 1920 to that of the pure possibility of ecstatic temporality in 1926, Kisiel once again returns to the manuscripts and transcripts of the lecture courses and corrects the published texts in the different volumes of the Gesamtausgabe. In this respect his work is of enormous value. He has brought to light important sources that are not and in many cases will not be available in any other form. In the eighth paper, 'From Intuition to Understanding: On Heidegger's Transposition of Husserl's Phenomenology', Kisiel follows Heidegger's relation to Husserl from his youthful fascination with the Logical Investigatiom to the fundamental critique in summer semester 1925. In his careful interpretation of this complex philosophical relationship Kisiel shows how Heidegger moved from the Husserlian primacy of inner and outer perception to being-in-the-world, from intentionality to ecstasis and from oriented selfconsciousness to situated and exposed existence. The final essay in this volume was written in the early 1970s and predates the concept of the Genesis story. It focuses on a remarkable and often forgotten theme in Heidegger's thought: the mathematical. After abandoning his theological study in 1911 Heidegger enrolled in the department of mathematics and physics and took more courses in these subjects than in philosophy. Also in another respect it tells a different story than the other papers in this volume. It centers on Heidegger's later interpretation of Kant, the course of winter semester 1935/36, which was published in 1962 and looks back to Being and Time and forward to Heidegger's later works. Ill'idegger discovers in Kant's transcendental reRcction on the apriori, which

1111

Editors' foreword

XI

first found its locus in the movement of thought to its object, the movement of reciprocal grounding between the subjectivity of the subject and the objectivity of the object. This 'between' suggests the ground of a more original unity as the essence of transcendence. Heidegger assumes as his own task a going back to this ground, which he identifies as the hermeneutic relation. It is precisely this relation that makes all human understanding possible. The stage is thus set for a transformation of the mathematical into the hermeneutical. This volume brings together for the first time a representative selection of Kisiel's papers on Heidegger's philosophy that uncovers new ground and supplements his Genesis book. In these nine essays Kisiel not only analyses Heidegger's productive appropriation of the philosophical tradition, most notably Kant, Lask, Dilthey and Husser!, and makes the immanent development of his path of thinking visible. He also destroys the myth of Heidegger as a solipsistic genius and situates Heidegger's thinking in the context of his life and time. His genealogical approach, however, does not lessen his estimation of Heidegger's philosophical worth, but on the contrary describes the genuine profile and specific intention of his thought. The editors would like to thank the different publishers for their kind permission to reproduce Kisiel's papers in this volume and Petra Lohmann and Kerin Michael for their bibliographical and editorial help.

Acknowledgements Tit" essays in this volume fim appeared in the following books and journals: 'I kidcgger's Apology: Biography as Philosophy and Ideology'. In Graduate Faculty Philosophy .Jllurnal, 14(2) and 15(1), 1991: 363-404. Reproduced by permission of Graduate Faculty

Philosophy Journal. the Way to Being and Time; Introduction to the Translation of Heidegger's Prolegomena Zllr Geschichte des Zeitbegriffi'. In Research in Phenomenology, 15, 1985: 193-226. Reproduced by permission of Research in Phenomenology. The New Translation of Sein und Zeit: A Grammatological Lexicographer's Commentary'. In Man and World, 30, 1997 (239-58). Reproduced by permission of Kluwer Academic

'()n

Publishers. 'Heidegger (I 907-1927): The Transformation of the Categorial'. In H. J. Silvermann, J. Sallis and T. M. Seebohm (eds.), Continent41 Philosophy in America. Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1983, pp. 165-85. Reproduced by permission of Dusquesne University Press. 'Why Students of Heidegger Will Have To Read Emil Lask'. In Man and World, 28, 1995: 197-240. Reproduced by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. 'Heidegger's Early Lecture Courses'. In Joseph J. Kockelmans (ed.), A Companion to Martin Heidegger's 'Being and Time: Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986, pp. 22-39. Reproduced by permission of University Press of America. 'Existenz in Incubation Underway Toward Being and Time'. In: R. E. Babich (ed.), From Phenomenology to Thought, E"ancy, and Desire (Festschrift for William J. Richardson). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, pp. 89-114. Reproduced by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. 'From Intuition ro Understanding: On Heidegger's Transposition of Husser/'s Phenomenology'. In Etudes phenomenologiques, 22, 1995, 31-50. Reproduced by permission of Editions Ousia. 'The Mathematical and the Hermeneutical: On Heidegger's Notion of the Apriori'. In E. G. Ballard and Ch. E. Scon (eds.), Heidegger in Europe and America. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973, pp. 109-20. Reproduced by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Abbreviations

Note: the page numbers after the abbreviation refer to the German original, the page numbers after the semi-colon refer to the English translation if such is available. KNS = Kriegsnotsemester (war emergency semester) SS = summer semester WS = winter semester

Heidegger's Writings GA = Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann (1975-). GA Bd. 1, 1978 = Martin Heidegger, Friihe Schriften. GA Bd. 1, 1978, pp. 189-411 = Martin Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungsiehre des Duns Scotus. GA Bd. 2, 1977 = Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. GABd.3, 1991 = Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik.lKant and the Problem ofMetaphysics. (Trans!' by James S. Churchill). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. GABd.5, 1977, pp. 1-74 = Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.lThe Origin of the Work of Art (trans!' by Albert Hofstadter). In: Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row 1971. GA Bd. 9, 1976 = Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken.l Pathmarks. Ed. by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. GA Bd. 15, 1977, pp. 271-407 = Martin Heidegger, Vier Seminare. French Original: Questions IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. GA Bd. 16, 2000 = Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. GA Bd. 16, pp. 652-83 = Martin Heidegger, 'Nur ein Gott kann uns retten'. Interview. In: Spiegel ]h.30 Nr.29, 1966, 193-204/'Only a God Can Save Us': The Spiegel Interview. In: HMTh. (;A Bd. 16, pp. 107-17 and pp. 372-94 = Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitiit, respectively Das Rektorat 1933134: Tatsachen und Gedanken. Frankfurt: Klostermann 1983/The Rectorate 1933134: Facts and Thoughts (trans!' by Karsten Harries). In: Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering (eds), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: QIU'Stions and Answers. New York: Paragon House, 1990. (;A Btl. 20, 1979 = Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffi.l History ofthe (.'Ol/('('/,/ n(Time. Prolegomena (trans!' by Theodore Kisiel). Bloomington: Indiana University I'n'ss, I ']H).

XIV

Abbreviations

GA Bd. 21, 1976 = Martin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. GA Bd. 25, 1977 = Martin Heidegger, Phiinomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft.l Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (cransl. by Parvis Emad & Kennech Maly). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1997. GA Bd. 26, 1978 = Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgrnnde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz.lThe Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (cransl. by Michael Heim). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984. GA Bd. 29/30, 1983 = Marrin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffi der Metaphysik. Welt - Endlichkeit -EimamkeitlFundamental Concepts ofMetaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (cransl. by William McNeill and Neil Walker). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1995. GA Bd.40, 1983 = Marrin Heidegger, Einfohrung in die Metaphysik.lAn Introduction to Metaphysics (cransl. by Ralph Manheim). New Haven: Yale University Press 1959. GA Bd. 24 = Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie.lThe Basic Problems of P~enomenology (cransl. by Alberc Hofscadcer). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1982. GA Bd. 56/57, 1987 = Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie.lTowards the Definition of Philosophy (cransl. by Ted Sadler). London: Achone Press 2001. GA Bd. 58, 1993 = Marcin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie. GA Bd. 60, 1995, pp. 1-156 = Marcin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Phiinomenologie der

Religion. GA Bd. 61, 1994 = Martin Heidegger, Phiinomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles.

Einfohrung in die phiinomenologische Forschung. GA Bd. 63, 1988 = Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermmeutik tier Faktizitiit).I0ntology (The Hermeneutics ofofFacticity) (transl.by John van Buren). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999. GA Bd. 65, 1989 = Martin Heidegger, Beitriige zur Philosophic. (Vom Ereignis).1 Contributions to Philosophy. (From Enowning) (transl. by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999. BZ = Marcin Heidegger, Der Begriff tier Zeit. TUbingen: Niemeyer 1989.1Thc Concept of Time (transl. by William McNeill). Oxford: Blackwell 1992. ED = Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfohrung des Denkens. Pfullingen: Neske 1954.1(Transl. by Albert Hofstadcer). In: Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language. Thought. New York: Harper & Row 1971. FD = Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding. TUbingen: Niemeyer 1962.1What Is a Thing? (transl. by W. B. Barton and Vera Deutsch). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company 1967. GMM = Bernd Martin & Gottfried Schramm. Ein Gesprach mit Max Muller. In: Freiburger Universitatsblatter 92, Juni 1986, pp. 13-31. HRB = Martin Heidegger - Elisabeth Blochmann. Briefwechsel 1918-1969. Joachim W. Storck (ed.) Marbach: Deutsche Schiller-Gesellschaft 1989. HJR = Martin Heidegger - KarlJaspers Briefwechsel: 1920-1963. Hrsg. von Walcer Biemel & Hans Saner. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann/MUnchen-ZUrich: Piper 1990. IS .,.,. Heinl( and Time: A Translation ofSein und Zeit (transl. by Joan Stambaugh). New York: SUNY 1996. N Martin Heidcgger. Nietzsche. Band /-11. Pfullingen 1961.1 Nietzsche Vol. I-IV (rransl. hy I lavid F. Krell). New York: Harper & Row 1979-19R4.

Abbreviatiom

xv

PhIA = Martin Heidegger, Phiinomenolgische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation). In: Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Dilthey Jahrbuch 6, 1989,235-274.1 Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle (Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation) (trans!' by Michael Baur). In: Man and Word 25, 1992. SD = Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens. Tiibingen: Niemeyer 1969.10n Time and Being (trans!' by Joan Stambaugh). New York: Harper & Row 1972. SG = Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund. Pfullingen: Neske 1963.1The Principle of Reason (trans!' by R. Lilly). Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1977. SZ=Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Tiibingen: Niemeyer 1927,81957, 16 1986.1BT= Being and Time (trans!' by John Macquarrie and Eward Robinson). New York: Harper & Row 1962. US = Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske 1959.10n the Way to Language (trans!' by Peter Hertz). New York: Harper & Row 1971. WD = Martin Heidegger, Was heijt Denken? Tiibingen: Niemeyer 1954.1What Is Called Thinking? (trans!' by Fred D. Wieck and John Glenn Gray). New York: Harper & Row 1968.

Sonstige Schriften: CPR = Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans!' by. Norman Kemp Smith). New York: St. Martin's Press 1965. DW = Otto Poggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers. pfullingen: Neske 2 1983.1 HeUkgger's Path of Thinking (trans!' by Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber) Adantic Highlands: Humanities Press 1987. Genesis = Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's 'Being and Time: Berkeley, London: University of California Press 1993. Farias = Farias, Victor, Heidegger and Nazism (trans!' by Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci). Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1989. HMTh = Thomas Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Chicago: Precedent 1981. HN = Karl LOwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Ziirich: Europa Verlag 19411From Hegel to Nietzsche. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1964. HpPh = Otto Poggeler, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (ed.) , Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1988. Ideen I = Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Halle: Niemeyer 19131General introduction to a pure phenomenology: first book [ofl ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (trans!' by F. Kerston). The Hague, Boston: Kluwer 1980. Ideen II = Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phiinomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. by Marly Biemel, Husserliana IV. La Hague: Nijhoff 1952.1Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, 2nd book: Studies in the phenomenology of constitution (trans!' by Richard RojcewiC2 and Andre Schuwer). Dordrecht: Kluwer 1989. 1,( ~S = Emil Lask, Gesammelte Schriften Band I-III. Ed. by Eugen Herrige!. Tiibingen: J. c. B. Mohr (Paul Sicbeck) 1923.

Abbreviations

XVI

bllllllnd Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Band I-II. Halle: Niemeyer 1900/01/ Im,estigations (trans\. by John N. Findlay). London: Routledge 1970. ME (>skar Becker, Mathematische Existenz: Untersuchungen zur Logik und Ontologie mathe1I/,lIiJ.-!Jrr Phiinomene. Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung, Bd.8. Ilalll': Niemeyer 1927. ( )11 I III go On, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie. Frankfurt a.M/New York: Campus 1988/ Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (trans\. by A. Blunden). New York: Basic Books 1993. I'N Paul Natorp, Deutscher Weltberu! Geschichtsphilosophische Richtlinien. Erstes Buch: Die W('ltalter des Geistes. Zweites Buch: Die Seele des Deutschen. Jena: Diederichs 1918. 1'1' Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (ed.), Philosophie und Poesie: Otto POggeler zum 60. (,rburtstag. Band Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog 1988. I'W = Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. Munchen-Zurich: Piper 1985 (pap'erback edition duplicating the pagination of the 4th, 5th and 6th editions) RE = Jacques Taminiaux, Le Regard et l'excedent. La Haye: Nijhoff 1977. ST = Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Aufeinen Stern zugehen: Begegnungen und Gesprache mit Marlin Heidegger 1929-1976. Frankfurt a.Main 1976.1Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929-1976 (trans\. by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly). Chicago: Chicago University Press 1993. TPT = William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Nijhoff 1963. WM = Hans-Georg Gadarner, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1965.1 Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. (trans\. revised by Jod Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall). New York: Crossroad 1989. ZAH = Dietrich Papenfuss, Otto Poggder (eds.), Zur philosophischen Aktuautiit Heideggers. Bd. 1. Philosophie und Poutik. - Bd. 2. 1m Gespriich tier Zeit. - Bd. 3 1m Spiegel tier Welt: Sprache. Ubersetzung, Auseinandersetzung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1991-1992.

!.IJ

/'{/.~i("(t!

n.

CHAPTER 1

Heidegger's Apology: Biography as Philosophy and Ideology Every decade since the post-war 1940s has had its public airing of 'der Fall Heidegger,' 'Ie cas Heidegger,' 'il caso Heidegger,' 'the Heidegger case,' an international convention referring specifically to the philosopher's notorious public involvement with Nazism in the 1930s. The Bibliography in this issue [not reproduced] records the decennial pulse of this discussion in some detail. The first round belongs to Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Temps modernes, as the case was first aired under the French occupation immediately after the war, resulting in Heidegger's forced temporary retirement from teaching at the University of Freiburg. The first real, albeit brief, airing in the German press occurred in 1953 with the publication of Heidegger's lecture course of 1935, in which a post-war generation of German students like Jiirgen Habermas found themselves abruptly plunged back into the thick of the 1930s through a single sentence lauding 'the inner truth and greatness of this movement [i.e. of National Socialism].' The 1960s began with Guido Schneeberger's privately published collections of Heidegger's statements and publicly reported activities around the time of his rectorate which, along with several other 'attacks,' kept the case before the public eye throughout the decade. One result of this sporadic and somewhat repressed discussion was Heidegger's interview with the Spiegel editors in 1966 which, published posthumously upon Heidegger's death in 1976, formed the piece de resistance for discussion in the 1970s, albeit muted in view of the solemn occasion. The next wave of discussion was also triggered by Heidegger's self-vindictive statements, with the posthumous publication in 1983 of his 'Facts and Thoughts' on his rectorate. Then the dam broke in 1987 and the world was inundated by the deluge bursting out of France caused by Victor Farias' book, Heidegger et Ie nazisme. 1 Now that the public storm generated by this defamatory 'inquisitorial' book has subsided, with the help of more solidly founded researches like Hugo Ott's full-length biography of Heidegger, we might now safely take stock of the situation from a firmer ground and define a few future tasks. Not that all is now quiet on the journalistic front. As I write these lines, I am also busy collecting the new set of newspaper clippings - that portfolio alone has expanded exponentially in the last two

2

Heidegger's Way of Thought

Yl'ars - prompted by the recent discovery in the Baden government archives of a 1929 letter by Heidegger in which he complains of the 'Jewification' of till' (;l'rman mind. 2 But it is precisely this ongoing process of archival dismvl'ry which has been fuelling the discussion all along, and it is the projl'ction of this process into the near future which I wish to attempt in the f\lllowing essay. Taken together, therefore, this attempt might have been subtitled, to distinguish it from other assessments of the ongoing debate, ';\ view from the archives.' Such a view looks to the supplementation and correction of current biographies of the Heidegger case, like those of Farias and Ott, through the available evidence which is on the verge of publication. The chosen subtitle points instead to the need to eliminate an even greater hurdle to the full discussion of the most crucial question in the debate. It has virtually become a truism accepted by defenders and detractors alike, formulated in one form or another, that Heidegger's thought, which has become so much a part of the twentieth century mind and letters, must be kept separate from his life, in short, that his philosophy must be kept distinct from his biography. This bit of ideology, ultimately operating as a form of intimidation, was reportedly propagated by the Old Heidegger himself, is now being perpetuated by his literary heirs, and is even conceded by many of his detractors. This position, however, flies in the face of the most unique features of Heidegger's own philosophy both in theory and in practice. For Heidegger himself resorted at times to philosophical biography by applying his own 'hermeneutics of facticity' to himself, to his own situation, to 'what he himself called his 'hermeneutic situation,' precisely in order to clarify and advance his own thought. This procedure should therefore also be applicable to the one situation to which he never adequately applied it, namely, to his rectorate of 1933-4 and the ensuing events. The procedure involves the specification of an 'ontic ideal of authentic existence' to guide one's ontological analysis. In the same vein, I have selected the well-known story of Socrates' Apology as my guide in the following analysis. Contrary to the usual rules of argument before the Athenian court, the core of Socrates' self-defence was a 'narrative argument' in which he outlined the essential facts of his life. It is a Wisdom Story, the story of how he came to the search for wisdom and of the context and conditions in which this search was and is to be pursued, thus a story in which autobiography itself becomes philosophy. The story of Socrates' trial in effect provides us with a striking parallel to the ongoing story of the Heidegger case in more ways than one, beginning with the continuing resistance from some quarters to accept the approach of philosophical biography as a way of resolving the most crucial issue in that case: Do Heidegger's political engagements mean that his thought is at bottom an expression of one of the most destructive ideologies of this century?

Heideggers Apology

3

Bringing the evidence together The current debate over the Heidegger case in fact dates back not to Farias he merely added journalistic ebullience to a heated but polite discussion among scholars 3 - but to the earlier appearance of Heidegger's 'Facts and Thoughts' (published in 1983, written in 1945) on the rectorate. This along with the Spiegel interview (1966) is apparently all that we can ever expect from Heidegger himself by way of an apologia pro vita sua. 4 In contrast to Socrates' Apology, they appear at this point to have been an utter failure. But the grand jury is still out, busy gathering more facts and thus arriving at some new thoughts that perhaps did not occur to Heidegger on those two occasions. Heidegger must now be tried in absentia and judged posthumously, not quite yet 'by history' but before that by way of a complete historical reconstruction of the case on the basis of all extant evidence. Farias' 'police blotter' of evidence, by his own admission, does not even approach this, and he is still bus~ gathering new evidence to support his case with an eye to rounding it out. His partiality of viewpoint can in part be attributed to the partial character of the evidence available to him. The lack of complete evidence is in like fashion reflected in the subtitle of Hugo Ott's book, Martin Heidegger: On the Way toward his Biography. The fragmentation of the evidence, the ongoing discovery of new pieces of evidence and their concomitant instantaneous interpretation, and from this the battle lines drawn between Heidegger's defenders and detractors, ultimately stem from a polarization that separates, in view of certain barriers and restrictions, two basically different sets of evidence. On the one hand, there is the wealth of evidence of the Martin Heidegger Archive (Nachlass) deposited mainly in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach6 but also retained in the private possession of the Heidegger family. On the other, there is the evidence of Heidegger's activities and literary output scattered throughout East and West Germany, and beyond, in archives both public and private. Neither side has the full story of Heidegger's complicity with National Socialism and, for that matter, the rest of Heidegger's life and thought, which is now irretrievably also drawn into the debate. Each is being exposed piecemeal, but for different reasons: 1. Ott and Farias exemplify the slow and painstaking resourcefulness required to locate and gather materials from the widely scattered 'unofficial' Nachlass (government and university archives, newspaper files, Heidegger's private correspondents, diaries, etc.). Ott's researches from 1983 on, from which Farias then draws, are in fact driven by the repeated discovery of facts from such sources which suggested a 'counter-reading' (Ott 8) to Heidegger's 'Facts and Thoughts.' But the success of Ott's efforts was assured when he managed to bridge the gap between bodies of evidence through the

4

Heidegger's Way of Thought

premature publication of large portions of Heidegger's correspondence with Karl Jaspers, which constitutes the guiding thread of Ott's book. The extent of the unofficial Nachlass cannot be underestimated, in spite of the ravages of World War II and its aftermath. Heidegger was a prolific letter writer, with numerous correspondents scattered all over the world. Some of this correspondence is even surprising in its extent and depth, as his recently published correspondence with the relatively unknown Elisabeth Blochmann indicates (HBB). As a thinker, Heidegger was extremely productive; Gadamer aptly calls him a 'dynamo,' especially in the years which preceded Being and Time. Moreover, he was generous with the manuscripts thus produced, lending them out to students and later distributing them as gifts within the intimate circle of his friends. His phenomenal popularity as a teacher resulted in numerous student transcripts of his courses, which were then passed from hand to hand in a traffic that spanned the globe. For example, the very first 34 entries in the Herbert Marcuse Archive in Frankfurt are all typescripts of Heidegger's courses and seminars! The very magnitude of the duplication and dispersal of such documents stemming directly from Heidegger's hand or voice has therefore fortunately frustrated the initial attempts made by the overseers of Heidegger's literary estate to gain total control over all such papers and seal them from public perusal. Add to this the fact that Heidegger was a legend long before Being and Time and so a figure in the public eye long before his involvement with Nazism, and we come to the no less important circumstantial evidence of accounts about Heidegger throughout his life. As Farias' work has shown, the bureaucratic thoroughness of the Nazi regime served to preserve much such evidence, such as Heidegger's payment of party dues until 1945 (which of course must be interpreted within that context of bureaucratic terrorism). Within that same context, and thus belonging automatically in the public domain, we also get some additional important documents directly from Heidegger's hand, like the philosophically revealing plan for an academy to prepare young docents for university careers in the Third Reich, drafted by Heidegger in August 1934 (Farias 197). Farias has in addition located perhaps the earliest second-hand account of significance about the public Heidegger, concerning the talented 19-year-old high school graduate and theology student already speaking out publicly on September 10, 1909, on Catholicism's argument with modernism, in remarks duly recorded in the hometown press (Farias 34). These remarks provide a convenient zero-point in tracing the Young Heidegger's intellectual development in his writings for the Catholic Der Akademiker (first discovered by Ott), through his avid reading of more avant-garde Catholic journals like Der Brenner (not noted by dther Ott or Farias) to his clear-cut break with conservative Catholicism's ami-modernism hy 1914 (in a letter to Engelhert Krl'hs made puhlic hy ()II). The ~athering of such independent l"vidl"IKl" llIotTOVl'" b .. in~s an

Heidegger's Apology

5

added dimension of completion and depth, and at times even correction, to Heidegger's own autobiographical statements, as we shall amply see in what follows. 2. Our present zero-point is Heidegger's major autobiographical statement regarding the 'Facts and Thoughts' on his rectorate (GABd. 16). Written in 1945, he left it to his son, Hermann Heidegger, with instructions 'to publish it at the proper time, when the occasion arises.' It was published along with Heidegger's rectoral address, also from the fateful year of 1933. The Preface by Hermann Heidegger presents a brief defence of his father who, 'like many who later became resistance fighters, was at first caught up in the mood of national revolution of the day, which promised a fresh start for the nation.' Hermann Heidegger goes on to explain that his father 'was neither an uncritical fellow traveller nor an active party member and, from the very beginning, kept a clear distance from the party leadership.' Similar statements of apology (in the Socratic sense?) are added, but no attempt is made to justifY and support these statements from the vast documentation available to him as literary executor of the Heidegger estate. In fact, he resisted the advice from many quarters to proceed with deliberate speed to make such pertinent documentation public. It is only after the storm broke in 1987 that plans were implemented to publish some of this material. Accordingly, we now have Heidegger's correspondence with Elisabeth Blochmann, a Jewish friend of the family who spent the Nazi years in England, and with Karl Jaspers, who likewise was caught up in the mood of 1933 before becoming a 'resistance fighter.' We still lack the crucial correspondence with Rudolf Bultmann as well as other correspondence (with Karl Lowith, Dietrich Mahnke, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Rothacker, etc.), all of which are in various ways pertinent to the Heidegger case. The courses of this period are also critical. As of this date, for example, no plans have been announced to publish the course on logic in the summer of 1934, which is known to contain a number of statements bearing on that year's political events. Otto Poggeler reports that 'Heidegger himself, in referring to his political involvement, stressed that it must be depicted and represented exactly as it happened' (OW 343; 278). In view of an editorial policy that makes a public fetish of fulfilling the 'wishes' of Martin Heidegger, it is to be hoped that this wish for full disclosure might soon be fulfilled by Heidegger's literary executors. There should be no reason to hold back, since Heidegger obviously expressed this wish in the firm conviction that such a depiction would in the end speak in his favor. And in a related matter, Heidegger writes to Poggeler in 1961, 'With regard to the relation of my thought to Ilusserl, some gross errors have cropped up which can only be removed hy careful philological work' (OW 353; 286). This concern for careful philological work belies the scorn heaped upon philology by the executors of

Heidegger's Way of Thought Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, an attitude which has resulted in a number of l'ditions of poor scholarly quality and a record of misinformation on the t;\ctual context of the texts. It is to be hoped that future editions will be equipped with at least a minimum of the traditional philological aids of biography, chronology and doxography required by the reader to place a text in context. The contempt for philology expressed by the overseers of Heidegger's literary estate reflects a larger contempt for the painstaking scholarship required to put a reliable edition together, once again in a misplaced imitation of the Master who, in one of his more poetic moods, once distinguished an 'object of scholarship' from a 'matter for thought' to the detriment of the former. Heidegger's motto for the Gesamtausgabe, 'Ways - not Works,' is accordingly being interpreted in this 'thoughtful' way in defence of the editorial policy of the Gesamtausgabe without also observing that one must get to these Ways through Works as cleared as possible of the obstacles posed to the unsuspecting reader by often hilarious errors in reading the doxographic record, as well as by chronological distortions, biographical misinformation and other forms of bad scholarship? Accordingly, there is reason to fear that the blatantly amateurish and biased scholarship of Farias would be answered in kind by the witnesses for the defence. It is therefore fortunate for us that one of the more competent workers of the Gesamtausgabe, Hartmut Tietjen, has been nominated to bring the vast resources of the Martin Heidegger Archive to bear on the 'Heidegger case,' to wit, on his 'Involvement and Resistance' (Tietjen's guiding title for his brief) in the Nazi 19305. Tietjen seems to be sensitive to the philological problems involved, is prepared, for example, to muster the evidence to show that the parenthetical inclusion in the notorious sentence in the 1935 course on 'the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between planetary technology and modern man)' does not constitute a chronological falsification of Heidegger's development drawn from a later period, but can be 'documented in the unpublished notes around 1935 and is worked out in the portions of the Beitriige zur Philosophie written in 1936.'8 Moreover, early in his project, Tietjen the philosopher was challenged by the Freiburg historian Bernd Martin regarding the authenticity of the documents he utilized in questioning the standard historians' thesis that Heidegger had played an active role in the summer of 1933 in changing the university constitution to bring it in line with the 'Fuhrer principle,' and came off creditably in an archival dispute which is yet to be resolved. 9 It is too early to tell whether Tietjen's full-length study will provide the definitive 'revised standard' version supplementing the somewhat sketchy official version provided by Heidegger himself in the Spiegel interview and in 'Facts and Thoughts.' But the advance notice of themes to be treated promises philosophical depth as well as political relevance: value-philosophy and biological life-philosophy as the core of the Nazi world view, the distinction between

Heidegger's Apology

7

world view and philosophy, Heidegger's phenomenology of freedom as a refutation of National Socialism, Heidegger's sense of the national, the folk and the homeland, how this sense of what is most one's own (Jemeinigkeit) has nothing to do with linguistic chauvinism regarded as a refinement of biological racism (Rainer Marten's thesis), Heidegger's critique of the Nazi sense of science and its concomitant university reform, his fundamental misunderstanding of National Socialism and how this was related to his 'conspiratorial concept' of action, etc. Tietjen's sketch of 'another documentation' of the facts of the Heidegger case stops with the two 'persecutions' of Heidegger during the post-rectoral period and the denazification proceedings. But it does not seem to address the last and most difficult question of the post-war period, which outstrips even the fundamental deconstruction of the concept of race operative in the above theses: Why did Heidegger remain silent until the end of his life about the bearing of his political complicity upon the Holocaust, which was the most gruesome issue of the regime he helped to install in power in its critical first year? Did he ever really face the full magnitude of his contribution to this later issue, albeit unintended? In the end, then, Tietjen's treatise may not be the Socratic apology that the world still awaits from Heidegger and his defenders. Heidegger's silence, whether this was due to some mental block or ambivalence over the core issues involved, must perhaps be left ultimately to the psychoanalysts, social analysts and ideology critics of twentieth-century German history. Tietjen may not be the Plato that Heidegger now needs, capable of finding a vehicle by which to justify the philosopher's thought, his raison d'etre, in its relation to his life and to defend him by rebutting the charges, both old and new, brought against him by the court of public opinion. F rom life to thought: deconstructing autobiography It is by no means unusual to find that Heidegger's autobiographical statements cannot be taken at face value, that they require independent verification, supplementation, contextual qualification and correction. This is becoming more evident with almost every new transposition of material from the archives into print. Take the long-standing footnote dating the first beginnings of Being and Time, in which Heidegger remarks 'that he has repeatedly presented this analysis of the environing world and in general the "hermeneutics of the facti city" of Dasein in his lecture courses since Winter Semester 1919-20' (SZ 72n; 490). We now know that both themes were first hroached two semesters earlier in the extraordinary Kriegsnotsemester 1919, and that there is no analysis of the world to speak of in Winter 1919. The recently published correspondence with Jaspers and Blochmann dates the first appearance of Being and Time in late April or early May and not in Fdmlary 1927. as the Old Heidegger later recalls. They also present a

Heidegger's Way of Thought different sequence of stages in the actual composition of Being and Time than the one provided in the most recent prospectus of the Gesamtausgabe. This is only the most recent example of the misinformation we have almost come to expect from the overseers of the Gesamtausgabe, who after all these years still have not mastered and truly 'overseen' their holdings to the degree needed to manage the publication of an archive with some degree of scholarly competence. Thus we read in the recently published prospectus for the second edition of Volume 24 that Heidegger 'completed the manuscript of the Introduction as well as the First and Second Division of Being and Time at the beginning of the year 1926.' But Heidegger's correspondence with Jaspers in 1926 sketches a different story, virtually galley by galley, of the composition of Being and Time that has the galleys of the First Division printed in April, the hand-written Second Division reworked for delivery to the printer in November 1926, along with the revised galleys of the Introduction and First Division, etc., etc. The clean manuscripts of the First and Second Divisions are thus finalized seven months apart. Within the accelerated timeframe of composing Being and Time, they can be considered worlds apart, resulting in numerous discrepancies between the two Divisions, despite last-minute alterations to the First Division already set in galleys. The full facts of the story are thus not without their importance in interpreting the structure of Being and Time, especially in view of all that the Later Heidegger has had to say about Being and Time as a failed work, and all that has been written about the structure of the work. This reduction to the factual level, to the full contingency of the historical accidents of the year 1926, moreover generates a movement of demystification which contributes to our philosophical understanding of a book rendered almost sacred by being frozen in time, as Great Books are wont to be. Especially this detailed tale of composition renders Being and Time into a non-book, into a way rather than a work, and thus promotes the motto which the dying Heidegger affixed to his Gesamtausgabe. It provides one more example of the significance of the connection between 'Facts and Thoughts', and so serves as a stepping stone to the main concern of this section, the connection between the life and the thought of Heidegger, to begin with (1) as Heidegger himself understood this connection, and then (2) the exploitation of this connection by detractors like Farias and Ott who have written on the Heidegger case. The former is the topic of this section, and the latter that of the following section. There is a tendency among would-be purist Heideggerians to insist on a rigid separation between Heidegger's thought and Heidegger's life, his philosophy and his biography, and so to dismiss the biographical element as ti)ftuitous and irrelevant, perhaps even claiming the Master himself as the source tlU this attitude. The same attitude is reflected in the editorial policy of the (,'esamtausgabe. Under the present circumstances, such a dismissal mUSl he vieweu with suspicion and even regarded as a tilrlll of ideological

Heidegger's Apology

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cover-up, a thinly veiled attempt to insulate the purity of the thought from the 'impure' events that are being dredged up from its vital infrastructure. The one verifiable context in which Heidegger himself underscored this separation confirms this suspicion, a conversation with Heinrich Petzet over the very first of the vitriolic Nazi-baiting books against Heidegger - the paradigm for the future Farias! - written by Paul Hiihnerfeld, which had just appeared (it was 1959): 'Look here, Petzet, this Hiihnerfeld wrote me a half a year ago and described a series of small monographs, Geniuses of the Twentieth Century - Stravinsky, Picasso - commissioned by a respectable Berlin publisher, and asked whether I would see him and give him some biographical material. I wrote back that, as far as I was concerned, it is finally time to charge the reader less with interesting biographical titbits as to have him concern himself finally with the matter and to ponder that to which I have devoted 40 years of long labor. My life is totally uninteresting.' Petzet goes on to note that 'Hiihnerfeld had then written a vulgar letter full of barefaced threats: he would get even! And so here we have his "revenge", written in a matter of four months.'lO And yet, when this conversation took place, Heidegger, several months away from his seventieth birthday, had to know that he had already prepared two very different kinds of autobiographical sketches that were to appear in print within months. And each in its own way serves to bridge the very separation between life and thought which this conversation wishes to sanction. Taken together, therefore, these documents show that Heidegger the thinker was not so much indifferent as he was ambivalent toward his curriculum vitae. Indeed, the earliest of these, the quasi-fictional 'Dialogue on Language' written in 1953-4, is accompanied by a note seeking 'to counter widely circulated allegations' that he was responsible for the deletion of the dedication to Husserl from the fifth edition of Sein und Zeit which appeared in 1942 (US 269; 199). Clearly, Heidegger at this time felt himself to be under siege. The second autobiographical statement, the inaugural speech to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in 1957, delivered in the presence of his first two habilitation students who were now professors at the university, Karl Lowith and Hans-Georg Gadamer, was accordingly an occasion for reunion, reminiscence ... and reconciliation. Lowith, recently hack in Germany after decades of forced emigration as a Jew, and one of the first to find a link between Heidegger's political involvement and his philosophy, found many an occasion in his late years to recall his time with Heidegger in the early 1920s by excerpting from their correspondence from that era. Heidegger on that evening in 1957 dwelt on his Catholic past and concluded his reminiscence with 'the exciting years between 1910 and 1914.'11 The following years brought two other accounts by Heidegger of his 'path of thought' in which hiography and philosophy are explicitly intercalated:

10

Heidegger's Way of Thought

the letter to William J. Richardson, S.J., in 1962 and the article on 'My Way to Phenomenology' in 1963. The latter was dedicated to Hermann Niemeyer and, in a brief allusion to the Nazi 1930s, describes how in this decade 'every major publication was suppressed until Niemeyer took the risk of printing my interpretation of Holderlin's "As When on a Holiday" in 1941 without stating the year of publication'(SD 89; 81). In 1966, all such facts are thoroughly aired in the Spiegel interview. In a note prefacing his translation, William Richardson observes that 'the interview takes on the quality of a last will and testament' (HMTh 45). The old Heidegger had made his peace with the journalistic world and turned his attention to the more scholarly aspects of the impending 'grave stillness of God's little acre' (so in the now notorious Abraham speech of 1964). For the old Heidegger unlike Socrates, who never wrote anything - now had to prepare his wealth of writings, published and unpublished, for posterity. It would be too vast an undertaking here to analyse and assess, as well as to supplement and correct, these five major autobiographical statements. Each has its unique purpose and all are coursed by common threads. The 65 to 75-year-old Heidegger's repeated emphasis of his Catholic past in all five recalls the fact that Heidegger had remained a Catholic on the tax rolls all his life and in the end received a 'Catholic' burial. One is hard put to find the slight allusions to his turn to a Protestant 'free Christianity' in 1917, let alone to atheism in 1929 and to a national folk religion of his own Holderlinized invention in the 1930s. Yet these 'world views' are perhaps more influential on his turns of thought than his original Catholicism. As a result of this autobiographical slanting, for example, we have a veritable industry among Heidegger scholars of analyses of Brentano's dissertation on 'The Manifold Sense of Being in Aristotle,' Father Grober's gift to the hometown boy in 1907, but almost nothing on Schleiermacher's Second Speech on Religion, which sparked the breakthrough of 1919 that brought the young Heidegger onto the central path of his lifelong way. Certainly the most interesting and challenging of the five statements of this decade (1954-66) is the first, the quasi-fictional 'A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer.' The literary vehicle alone is noteworthy for our purposes. Looking over that decade, we thus find a reminiscence before old students, a letter to an American Jesuit (Heidegger's first career goal!) and a 'birthday present' (Festgabe) for his old publisher framed by two dialogs, the first cross-cultural and somewhat poetic and the last prosaic and journalistic, addressed to begin with to the German nation: two very different kinds of conversation. The first is based on an actual conversation of March 1954 with Tomio Tezuka, a Japanese Germanist. Dominated accordingly by aesthetic and cultural concerns common to the two former Axis powers as well as by more sweeping East-West comparisons, the dialog begins with a rcminiscl'lH.'l' (by way of pil'!lIres of his

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grave) on Baron Shuzo Kuki, Heidegger's student in the 1920s who played a major role in introducing Heidegger's thought into Japan in the 1930s. The reminiscence provides Heidegger (The Inquirer') with an opening to trace his biographical-philosophical development in the 1910s and 1920s culminating in Being and Time. This extended biographical excursus, which (judging by Tezuka's independent account) was not a part of their actual conversation, yields the central fictionalized 'fact' which introduces the central concepts that govern the entire dialog. When first introduced, this 'fact' also allows Heidegger to parody the student traffic in his course transcripts which literally circulated around the globe. But in point of actual fact, this involves a new fiction: The transcript in question never reached Japan; it is nowhere to be found in the Japanese archives among an otherwise abundant supply of Heidegger-transcripts. The fiction begins when the Japanese visitor tentatively recalls a course given by Heidegger in 1921 entitled 'Expression and Appearance' which was attended by his Japanese predecessors. They took a transcript of it to Japan, where it evoked considerable interest and intense discussion of Heidegger's 'hermeneutics.' Heidegger interjects a note of caution since a transcript, a 'murky source,' is involved and since the course itself belongs to his imperfect juvenilia. But later, he is inclined to tolerate this interest in his juvenilia, whereby one nevertheless can 'easily be unfairly judged,' just as the old Husserl had 'generously tolerated' the young Heidegger's penchant for the Logical Investigations at a time when Husserl himself no longer held this early work 'in very high esteem.' Indeed, this allusion to Husserl's attitude to his own work prefaces the entire discussion of transcripts in the dialog. And when the conversation later returns to the course on 'Expression and App,earance,' Heidegger first wonders whether the title after all was not 'Expression and Meaning' ... the same as Husserl's First Logical Investigation (US 90f, 128; 51, 34f)! But this is immediately followed by an in-depth analysis of the 'metaphysical' nature of each of the terms in the title 'Expression and Appearance' in conjunction with the hidden central theme of the course, hermeneutics, even though that term was explicitly used by Hcidegger (as he recalls) first in his course of Summer 1923. We now know that the term 'hermeneutics' in actual fact first surfaces in the breakthrough course of Kriegsnotsemester 1919, such that Heidegger's breakthrough here to his lifelong topic richly deserves to be called his 'hermeneutic breakthrough'; and that the 1921 course on 'Expression and Appearance' whose title is analysed so meticulously in the dialog was in point of fact held in Summer Semester 1920 and entitled 'Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression.' Clearly then, Heidegger is construing his own hiographical facts in order to guide the line of thought he wishes to pursue in this dialogue. Call it what you will - irony, poetic licence or whimsical playfulness - this play between fact and fiction, this creative use of

12

Heidegger's Way of Thought

biography to promote thought, suggests a whole host of structural parallels, oppositions and exchanges (Germany/Japan, West/East, Husserl/Heidegger, Heidegger/Kuki, old/young, teacher (grown old)/student (died young), word/picture, word/gesture, author/interpreter, original/facsimile, thought/ life, philosophy/biography, intui tion/ expression, expression/ appearance, meaning/appearance, etc.) which opens hitherto unsuspected dimensions to Heidegger-interpretation. To carry the play over to our own imagined front, one wonders what Heidegger would have done if he were his own Plato and had had free play on the original transcript of the Spiegel interview, free of the constraints of journalistic accuracy, assuming that it would have remained under the contractual and quasi-existential stipulation of life/death; as it were, his life story in return for his death (Socrates?). Farias (297) already has grounds to complain that he was not granted access to the copy heavily corrected by Heidegger which is deposited in the archives of Der Spiegel, and notes the 'differance' in the published interview of questions asked/questions answered, interview answers/published answers; also that 'the most important and embarrassing question' was left in the dark. What if Farias had been the interviewer? And what questions would we 'journalists' have wanted to have asked? What answers expected? Tomio Tezuka's real concern was the 'present state of the Japanese mind'; in this connection, he was especially eager to hear from Heidegger about the 'present significance of Christianity in Europe.' 12 It might have been this line of questioning which Heidegger translated into perhaps the most philosophically telling autobiographical statement in the entire 'Dialogue.' It occurs in the context of showing that the use of the term 'hermeneutics' in his early Freiburg courses was no mere accident, but rather stemmed from the fact that he was still quite 'at home in theology' due to his earlier studies as a Catholic seminarian in 1909-11. The upshot of the story: 'Without this theological provenance I would never have come onto the path of thinking' (US 96; 10). This most telling of the Old Heidegger's lifelthought statements may now be supplemented and further qualified contextually by two key statements from the more immediate milieu of the Young Heidegger, statements which have recently surfaced from the archives. In Heidegger's letter to Engelbert Krebs in January of 1919, we read: 'Epistemological insights bearing upon the theory of historical cognition have made the System of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me - but not Christianity and metaphysics (these however in a new sense).' By exploring the immediate doxographical background to this letter, we discover that what Heidegger really means are the 'hermeneutic insights bearing on the theory of historical cognition' that he gleaned from Schleiermacher's and Dilthey's return to the immediacy of lived experience, which to begin with is religious experience. Such a return parallels the similar return to experiential roots pursucd by radical phl·nol11cnology.I.\

Heideggers Apology

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But the most telling document by far, since it yields not only our third autobiographical statement but also the reason why biography is indispensable to philosophy as Heidegger himself understood it, is his personal letter to Karl Lowith on August 19, 1921. In view of its importance, we shall dwell on this letter at some length. Lowith had just finished his second year of study with Heidegger and took the occasion to assess his relationship to Heidegger in contrast to Oskar Becker's, then also an advanced student: While Becker especially appreciated Heidegger's emphasis on science and method in phenomenological conceptformation, Lowith preferred the 'existentiell pathos'; in short, the 'subjective' side of Heidegger rather than the 'objective' aspects. Heidegger responded by noting that each takes something from him which is not of the essence, since the two aspects belong together in a deeper motivation of his factic existence which neither sees or would ever accept: I work concretely and factically out of my 'I am,' out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live .... To this facticity of mine belongs what I would in brief call the fact that I am a 'Christian theologian.' This involves a particular radical personal concern, a particular radical scientificity, a strict objectivity in the focticity; in it is to be found the historical consciousness, the consciousness of 'intellectual and cultural history.' And I am all this in the life-context of the university. Heidegger a 'Christian theo-logian'? The underscoring of '-logian' in fact shifts the focus to the philosophical foundations of theology in the fundamental experiences which phenomenology aims to explore. Whence the importance of the phenomenology of religious life and consciousness at this stage of Heidegger's development. This involves not only the 'personal concern' brought to its extremity in his personal crisis and break with the religion of his youth during the war years, or the 'radical scientificity' of phenomenology's return to origins. Both are closely linked to the consciousness of an 'intellectual and cultural history' in which philosophy and theology have been deeply intertwined, in which philosophy (Greek, scholastic, modern) had contributed to a degeneration of the original Christian experience while at the same time nourishing itself from that experience. His reading of Dilthey, Schleiermacher, Augustine, Eckhart, Luther and Kierkegaard had taught Heidegger how deep the interchanges between philosophy (especially German idealism) and theology really were up to his day in their mutual concern for the 'problem ofChristianity,'14 in particular in its relationship to history and the historical consciousness. With his special hackground, Heidegger must have felt uniquely drawn to a history of philosophy that just happened to be thoroughly permeated by Christianity ;Jnd. in Nictzschc's words, 'corrupted by theologians' blood.'

Heidegger's Way of Thought 'I am a "Christian theologian'" (1921); 'hermeneutic insights bearing on the theory of historical cognition' which yield a new sense of Christianity and metaphysics (1919): This pair of self-interpretative statements from the Young Heidegger provides the historical specificity and factic articulation to the Old Heidegger's confession that his 'theological provenance' is the key to his philosophical beginnings. The three statements taken together reflect his biographical beginnings as a Catholic seminarian and a student of German philosophy/theology from Eckhart to Dilthey who underwent a crisis of conversion in the shadow of the front lines of World War I. Aside from this religious substance, there is the Young Heidegger's formal admission that his thoughts stem directly from the deepest motivations of his own and quite unique factic situation, in short, that his thought stems from his life; accordingly, one cannot in principle dismiss the biographical element as fortuitous and so irrelevant, contrary to the pronouncements of our purist Heideggerians. The entire letter to Lowith, with topics ranging from university life to an an-archic sense of the philosophical community, is in fact an exercise in the application of Heidegger's own philosophical 'hermeneutics of facticity' to himself, to his own Da-sein and historical situation. It is therefore the very hermeneutic philosophy which he is busy developing that justifies the Young Heidegger's self-interpretive autobiographical statements. Heidegger's own reductive philosophy has discovered a level at which autobiography is philosophy, and it is these biographical facts internal to his philosophical development which Heidegger the philosopher feels compelled to confess about Heidegger the person. And what are these pertinent biographical facts? They are the facts that pertain to the jeweiligkeit (temporal particularity) of the autochthonous 'hermeneutic situation' of inherited presuppositions and interrogative motivations out of which a philosopher speaks. They might be called 'situation facts' or 'world facts' or even 'topical facts', if we understand T01ro