Content area
Full Text
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. viii + 388 pp. Cloth, $60.00-Heidegger forced scholars to wait eighty years for the publication of his surviving notebooks from the Nazi era. Just two years later, there is an able translation of the historically crucial first volume, thanks to the remarkably swift work of Richard Rojcewicz and Indiana University Press. Aside from his translation of Überlegungen as "ponderings" rather than "reflections" or even the literal "superpositions," Rojcewicz's valuable and timely translation provides English readers a lucid path into the thicket of the Heidegger controversy in the 1930s. The sensational reception of the German publication of the first three volumes of the Black Notebooks, bd. 94-96, in 2014 has focused on three pages of anti-Semitic remarks and the growing enthusiasm with which he received the rise of the National Socialist regime to power. However, the Black Notebooks are a valuable resource to Heidegger scholars for many reasons. For one, the text is remarkably clear about what he thought was wrong with Being and Time, why he did not revise it, and how his focus has always been on the questioning, rather than the answering, of being. Written in an aphoristic style that at its best rivals that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, two of his primary referents here, the Black Notebooks return repeatedly to the perceived failure of Being and Time to present adequately a radical questioning of being. Heidegger writes that instead of revising or completing the work, he will continually turn again to the questioning of being. He also criticizes the existentialist, situationist, and ontological readings of Being and Time. Now, it is within the context of his repeated restatements of the problem of being that we begin to see his problematic forays into social-political critique. These are among the few passages in his entire work that speak directly to how he interprets the political and personal ramifications of the question of being. Thus, despite his repeated invocations of the value of silence, of leaving unsaid what cannot be said, a theme addressed most famously in Being and Time, he gradually turns in the opening pages from discussion of the uprooting of being to a specifically nationalist screed on the dangers of an uprooting of the German soil and blood. When his criticisms of uprooting, calculative thinking, science, and machinations or the mechanic destruction of the earth are joined with his direct identification of Jews with each of these modes of concealing being, he provides the key to translating the silent undercurrents of his critiques of technological uprooting throughout his career into the language of anti-Semitism. Although sporadic remarks in his published lecture courses had already outlined this connection, this text provides the most explicit evidence in his corpus for an anti-Semitic political interpretation of his fundamental ontology.