[March 15, 2017: This was formerly a blog posting, but was not spontaneous. It was part of a learning process, where I hoped to have my own misconceptions corrected.

Of course, Germany became fearsome before Kristallnacht. The following discussion is about a period of Heidegger’s notebooks, where a reader invalidly finds anti-Semitism. Yet, this is not about that reader; it’s about reading practices that were exemplified.]

I’ve been very engaged with tracking how Heidegger got framed, back in his time; and how he is now getting re-framed (scapegoated) by current readers.

I’m not going to provide tedious details now. But I have tedious details to provide, and that will eventually turn up as a section of my project on Heidegger and reading political times.

So, a few passages in Heidegger’s personal notebooks cause some readers to map their casual view of Heidegger into a new opportunity to rationalize not dwelling with Heidegger’s conceptual pathmaking.

Should I really care?

to a Heidegger scholar about bringing Heidegger into this century

I emailed an acquaintance tonight:

I suspect that a lot of readers of Heidegger would see him as somewhat of a luddite. I see a mid-20th century attitude (facing the M.A.D. years of the Cold War) whose grandchild could be Bill Joy of Wired, some years back. Ray Kurzweil’s ecstasis for "the Singularity" may cause prudent fears, but the "extended mind" of the Internet is a glorious thing, and I love it all. We do need to ensure that we control the Singularity-like tendencies in the evolution of intelligence, but I’m not worried. 

That involves ensuring that Our humanity governs our systems, and that our healthy lives sustain fulfilling fidelity to Our humanity. This is a proximal sense of the real question of being: making our lives truly worthwhile, yet realistic and in support of progressive globality. Philosophy matters, in at least that regard: holistic thinking for living mindfully, and Heidegger was prescient about importances of that reaching back into Our deep heritage of conceptualization. 

Yet, contemporary philosophy is more important for me now, not primarily 20th century studies. But my path into contemporary philosophy was so influenced by Heidegger (and others, decades ago) that it’s important to me that he not be framed and scapegoated.

nine kinds of reason to disagree in critical reading

One scapegoater interests me especially because his career seems to be premised on his reading of Heidegger.

He thinks that Heidegger is anti-Semitic, which is ridiculous. But it’s interesting to understand how his view is apparently intractable. I asked him to provide some detail about why he interpreted some notebook passages—passages from Heidegger’s Considerations—as he does. He provided some detail—very little. But over the course of many exchanges with him, I saw unthematized aspects of interpretation (implicature that he was presuming), which I grouped into theme areas. He was begging questions of interpretative method that were being decided by the way that he read.

Getting into details now would be indeed tedious. But what I wrote back to him makes a useful preface to thinking about the difficulties of discursive reading (which I eventually want to render far beyond improvisation from long ago). I’ll share here what I replied today—part of email between us that was shared with over 300 other mostly-silent subscribers to the group—as a matter of preface to what I need to write later.

In the following, references to “GA” are volume references from Heidegger’s Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe). [Bracketed indications below weren’t in my posting.] Later, I’ll quote everything, as part of dwelling with it all—the Heidegger passages and others’ misreadings. (I archive all of my online discussions, going back two decades).

Good. You’ve provided some explanation for your view of specific passages. Thanks. 

Preliminary to more-detailed reply to the specific passages: You touch on a range of issues in your earlier, general posting and in your specific posting today. 

What is one to do with touches on—i.e., mentions of—very difficult issues? 

1. background context. What is relevant?

2. generous (good faith) reading. Why not?

3. authorial stance. How does one establish that?

4. non-problematic meaning. How does it happen that "true meaning" is clearly evident?

5. inattentive reading. How does one know that it’s not becoming background context?

6. self-invested reading. How open can one afford to be to a different prima facie, let alone attention to what makes prima facie meaning be regarded as true meaning?

7. conflict of interpretations. What is good critical hermeneutical practice, and how is ambiguous meaning appropriately resolvable, in fairness toward the author?

8. problematic reading. What’s going on with presenting the trace (representation) of one’s own events of reading?

9. indirectly problematic passages. What’s the background effect of problematic passages not directly related to the ones in focus?

The three particular passages that you’ve drawn attention to can be usefully given shorthand names, deserving of consideration in non-chronological order, due to thematic priorities in Heidegger’s thinking. But one passage is actually two topics, because you draw out two kinds of themes:

A: the metaphysical note: GA 96: 46-47, first part

B: the original inception note : GA 96: 46-47, second part

C: the gigantic note: GA 95: 97

D: the geopolitical note: GA 96: 243

My basic stance, you know, is that there’s no anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s phenomenological notes [1938-1941] because there’s no anti-Semitism in his thinking prior to that, nor contemporaneous to that (in monographic work unpublished). 

His considerations of metaphysicalist power are about wanting a new inception (beyond the Dialectic [between Anglo-America and the Soviet Union] leading to catastrophe), of course; and the ideology of giganticism was symptomatic—at geopolitical scale—of the cultural difficulty everyone faced. This was his focus.

How much attention should be given to details of his notes? Why not read them into the works that are contemporaneous as supplements to that work, not hidden, spooky secrets that make casual readers shudder? 

Anyway, I have a better basis now for dwelling with your view [soon]. 

Readers [of the academic discussion list that I was posting to] may want to thank me for deleting discussion from this posting that was three times the length of what’s above. 

But I’ll include that discussion here:

working for progressive academics in an era of propaganda

I’m eager to dwell carefully with each of the problematic passages. But not now. The following is my background view, in case you might be interested. 

The German economy was booming. But prospects for university-led community development (the Self-Assertion ethos [i.e., Heidegger’s inaugural lecture as chancellor of Freiburg University, April 1933] were dim—no Greek-rich sense of the polis, which was trans-"political" (given healthy localities), seemed feasible.

Meanwhile, Heidegger is turning out masses of considerations that become named Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness, unpublished because the times outstrip his sense of audience? (Why else?)

Husserl was working on The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology when he died. It was published unfinished and was anyway considered to be Husserl’s effort to be politically relevant (and interpret Heidegger in Husserlian terms, e.g., explicating a sense of in-the-world-being as "lifeworld") Freud had recently (1937) published Moses and Monotheism: a view of the epochality of Judaism as guilt-ridden history. 

Many of Heidegger’s passing considerations turn up on the cutting room floor (figuratively, relative to what composes Contributions) as notebook passages—those that weren’t relevant to prevailing work of that time (which became Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness). Of primary importance is that he has courses to construct and teach, and there he considers what he deems most worth considering for his students (promotion of Hölderlin, deconstruction of philosophical tradition, etc.—not elaborating private notes that aren’t relevant to his work—not anticipating others’ reading a half century later). He knows very well what’s ephemeral and what’s not—what’s a consideration going around (ideology—"they self," common sense regime) or passingly interesting to consider (academic acquiescence to propaganda)—for whatever reason—and what belongs to his work.

What else is in Heidegger’s atmosphere besides his work, his family, his teaching, and his friends who had "ears to hear"? What is implicit to Heidegger’s musings in terms of recent news? Whom has he spoken with recently that implicitly backgrounds a comment, on the run between courses, home life, etc.? This is an inestimable venue, inaccessible to us. His notebooks were necessarily in an uncanny space between his most creative periods of work and coping with what was going on around him at the university. We must read in the best good faith that we can imagine, if that is indeed congruent with his work, which was deeply engaged in developing a sense of critique of ideology.
 
Yet, good philosophy appropriates legacies as latent potentials for presently actualizing potential futures, not setting up oppositional systems that have indiscernible constructive promise. Heidegger wanted to contribute to futures, in terms of living potentials. He had to trust that good faith hearing—in reading—would prevail. 

My story of that continues.