HJb 11/17 / p. 148 / 11.10.2017 148 The fugue of Being. Heidegger’s critique to the Jewish-Christian tradition in the context of the Black Notebooks (1931–1948) By Francesca Brencio Freiburg im Breisgau “Das Zeitalter der Wahrheit-losigkeit muß aber zugleich den vollendeten Schein des unbedingten Wahrheitsbesitzes um sich legen, der es jederzeit als überflüssig und zudringlich erscheinen läßt, das Zeitalter selbst auf sein Wesen und seine Bestimmtheit innerhalb der Seynsgeschichte zu befragen”. 1 “Watchman, how far gone is the night?” The watchman says: “Morning comes but also night. If you would inquire, inquire. Come back again”. 2 1. Introduction Since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks have been published, the academic debate on these volumes seems to be focused only on accusations against Heidegger through his own words. The widespread interpretation of Heidegger’s antiSemitism – both ontological and metaphysical – has captured the attention of many eminent scholars, putting aside the complexity of those themes that characterize the notes pencilled between 1931 and 1948. The risk of this unidirectional massive attention is to forget the considerations in the Black Notebooks on Heidegger’s pathway of thinking and on his relation to the history of philosophy. Hegel’s motto “philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts” 3, is one of the tasks of Heidegger’s thinking in his philosophical engagement. Heidegger has been a thinker in constant dialogue with the western philosophical tradition: his meditation on the issue of Being is not separated from his study and interpretation of all the metaphysical tradition, from its very beginning till his time. Raised as a logical issue during the very early years of his philosophical 1 2 3 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI: Schwarze Hefte 1938/39, hrsg. von Peter Trawny (GA 95), Frankfurt am Main 2014, 385. Isaia 21.12 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, hrsg. von Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Band 7: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Frankfurt am Main 1979, 26. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 149 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 149 education and career 4, it assumed the guise of a phenomenology of living life 5 in its historical development till to the “Natorp-Bericht” 6, to move forward to the historical-ontological thinking soon after Sein und Zeit and the first “turn” in the early 1930’s. We could claim that the Seinsfrage itself is the result of this dialogical necessity: investigating the issue of Being means investigating one of the major themes of western philosophy and every interpretation given by Heidegger about each philosopher is inscribed into this necessity. The quote from Plato at the beginning of Being and Time is an evident sign of Heidegger’s will to confront the history of philosophy through an accurate philosophical dispute (Auseinandersetzung) that assumes the feature of the historical-ontological thinking soon after the interruption of Being and Time. If we step outside the anti-Semitism fog that seems to cover the Black Notebooks, perhaps we can see how the real main character of these volumes is thinking itself in its constant strive toward Being. In this perspective, the Schwarze Hefte can be useful tools to understand Heidegger’s attempts to answer to the question of Being. The aim of my paper is to show how and why the critique to Christianity raised in Black Notebooks is not only a matter of philosophical education or simply the result of Heidegger’s separation from his original faith, but it is rooted in this philosophical necessity, that is to answer to the question of Being and to dismantle the primacy of historical development of Christianity (Christentum) in philosophy, a primacy that “corrupted” and “altered” Greek 4 5 6 See Martin Heidegger, “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy,” in: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy IX (2009), 19–32. In the letter dated March 5th 1916 to his fiancé Elfride Petri, a young Martin Heidegger writes: “Ich weiß heute, daß es eine Philosophie des lebendigen Lebens geben darf – daß ich dem Rationalismus den Kampf bis aufs Messer erklären darf – ohne den Bannstrahl der Unwissenschaftlichkeit zu verfallen – ich darf es – ich muß es – und so steht heute vor mir die Notwendigkeit des Problems: wie ist Philosophie als lebendige Wahrheit zu schaffen und als Schöpfung der Persönlichkeit wert- und sinnvoll”, Martin Heidegger, “Mein liebes Seelchen!”. Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride 1915–1970, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Gertrud Heidegger, München 2005, 36–37. See Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, hrsg. von Bernd Heimbüchel (GA 56/57), Frankfurt am Main, 1999. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät (1922), hrsg. von Günther Neumann (GA 62), Frankfurt am Main 2004. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks: Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung, hrsg. von Claudius Strube (GA 59), Frankfurt am Main 1993. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. 1. Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion, hrsg. von Matthias Jung und Thomas Regehly / 2. Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus / 3. Die philosophischen Grundlagen der mittelalterlichen Mystik, hrsg. von Claudius Strube (GA 60), Frankfurt am Main 1995. Martin Heidegger, Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität, hrsg. v. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (GA 63), Frankfurt am Main 1988. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 24), Frankfurt am Main 1975. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 150 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 150 thought and that opened the pathway toward western metaphysics in terms of the oblivion of Being. The critique of Catholicism in particular is stratified on three levels (historical, speculative and political) and the polemic sentences against Jews could be inscribed into this necessity. Far from those interpretations that support some form of anti-Semitism at work in Heidegger’s thinking, my idea is that the Judenfrage is not the main theme of Black Notebooks and his critique toward Judaism should be considered into the broader framework of the critique to modernity, in which Jews are embedded. 2. Those not so “black” Notebooks “The entries in the black notebooks are at their core attempts at simple designation – not statements or even sketches for a planned system” 7. One can read these words at the very beginning of the first volume of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, those books that have been delivered by press and also by some scholars to the wide community of Heidegger’s readers as the “most scandalous” books of his entire production. However, as Heidegger states for three times in his notes 8, the materials penciled into these volumes are only attempts for a pathway of thinking (Gedankengang) 9. In the Appendix of Mindfulness, entitled Looking Back on My Career, we find some important indications on the meaning of these notebooks: “What is recorded in these notebooks, particularly in notebooks II, IV, V, reveals also, at least in part, the basic attunements of my questioning into and my indications of the most advanced horizons for my endeavors in thought. While these notebooks seem to be the product of circumstance, they display the unceasing endeavor concerning the one and only question” 10. Attempts, basic attunements, belated notes – these are perhaps the most adequate words to define what Black Notebooks are. The so-called Schwarze Hefte 11 are 34 notebooks in which Heidegger collected his thoughts and opi7 8 9 10 11 Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI: Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938, hrsg. von Peter Trawny (GA 94), Frankfurt am Main 2014, 1; Martin Heidegger, Ponderings, II–VI: Black Notebooks1931–1938, trans. by Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington 2016, 1. See Peter Trawny, Nachwort des Herausgebers, in Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI: Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938, 530. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (GA 95), 52. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 66), Frankfurt am Main 1997, 426; Mindfulness, trans. by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, London/ New York 2006, 376. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (GA 94); Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (GA 95); Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV: Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941, hrsg. von Peter Trawny (GA 96), Frankfurt am Main 2014; Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V: Schwarze Hefte: 1942–1948, hrsg. von Peter Trawny, Frankfurt am Main 2015. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 151 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 151 nions from 1931 to 1976. Only after having accepted the decision to create a collection of completed works in 1973, he decided to let the Hefte be published at the end of the Gesamtausgabe 12. Under this respect, it is correct to claim that the Schwarze Hefte were not written to be published: we can figure that they were for Heidegger a set of work files on which he penciled his ongoing thoughts. Ponderings (Überlegungen) and Remarks (Anmerkungen) are not a diary, neither a philosophical testament. They do not have an intimate tone like diaries usually do, and they don’t give any last disposition in political issues; rather, they join the stylistic form of notes or aphorisms embodying theoretical content and a few private ideas and remarks. In their stylistic form, they are similar to the writing of Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) because they recall the same tone, even though the contents are more complex. They are called by Heidegger himself “belated notes”. The Notebooks published by Klostermann Verlag are those written from 1931 to 1941 (Gesamtausgabe 94, 95, 96 – called Überlegungen) and from 1942 to 1948 (Gesamtausgabe 97 – called Anmerkungen). The name “Black Notebooks” is derived from the book cover: a black wax leather. Due to the nature of these books – written as personal belated notes – the reader is confronted with a new dimension of Heidegger’s thought, that is the dimension of thinking constantly in dialogue with itself. In these pages we experience Cato’s motto on the relationship between thinking and solitude: in our solitude we are never alone and the constant dialogue with ourselves is the first form of thinking. In reading the Black Notebooks we can see how deeply Heidegger is involved in his meditation; as his brother Fritz Heidegger will write in a letter to Hugo Friedrich during 1950, Heidegger is completely himself in his private notes (not in the teaching lectures or public conferences); these private notes are here almost untouched, only a few have been transcribed. In these notes that fundamental aptitude that should be the beginning and the aim of each philosophy shows itself; I have been calling it ‘humility’ for a long time. 13 From this perspective, the Notebooks are a precious tool to deepen some passages and movements of Heidegger’s thought, including some contradictions: they are a work in progress meditation that illuminates our understanding 12 13 Perhaps it is useful to recall that the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks happened in violation of Heidegger’s last will, according to which the Schwarze Hefte had to be published only at the end of the Gesamtausgabe. The administrators of Heidegger’s Nachlass, Dr. Hermann Heidegger and his son Arnulf Heidegger however, against the dispositions of Heidegger himself and his last assistant, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, have decided to anticipate the publication of these books in accordance with Vittorio Klostermann. See Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri, Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, Brescia 2016, 27. Letter conserved in the University’s Archive in Freiburg. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 152 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 152 of the true theme that crosscuts Heidegger’s philosophy as Ariadne’s thread, the issue of Being (Seinsfrage). The Black Notebooks show an amount of topics that can be observed from two levels: a hermeneutical one and an ideological one. Considering the hermeneutical level, it is necessary to ask ourselves what kind of writing the Schwarze Hefte are, in which context they need to be situated and how we can approach them. After two years of work on the Black Notebooks, I reached the idea that the Schwarze Wachstuchhefte have not an interpretative feature broader than other Heidegger works and that they need to be read and to be understood by comparing their topics with the other works (lecture courses, publications, letters, notes and so on) which Heidegger was working on during the same years 14. Moreover, they need to be read entirely and apart from the rumors that the press and some scholars have produced: extrapolating a few sensationalistic sentences from their original context, in particular those delicate and problematic passages in which Heidegger talked about Jews 15, putting them on the front pages of cultural magazines is a questionable operation that can compromise the understanding of these books and do not demonstrate anything, or better, only an assumption: Heidegger was a Nazis, now we have the “prove” of his anti-Semitism. The occasion to “square the circle” is a bit oversimplified to be philosophically acceptable. A consistent hermeneutical approach to these volumes is necessary to show how the relevance of these books is not only philosophical, because Heidegger reports also personal and private opinions in these pages. Philologically speaking, it would be remarkable to find that every definition of Heidegger’s ontological anti-Semitism has been evidenced throughout the entire Gesamtausgabe: in order to claim that anti-Semitism is relevant in Heidegger’s meditation and it could contaminate the ontological thinking involving all the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), it would be necessary to map the presence of anti-Semitic sentences or terms in the seven major works on the Seinsgeschichte 16. However, 14 15 16 See Francesca Brencio, “Heidegger. Una patata bollente”. L’antisemitismo fra cristianita’ e Seinsgeschichtlickeit”, in Francesca Brencio (ed.), La pieta’ del pensiero. Heidegger e i Quaderni Neri, Perugia 2015, 107–186. On Heidegger’s references to Jews and to the misinterpretations of some passages see Francesca Brencio, La fuga dell’essere. Dalle Überlegungen alle Anmerkungen, in Francesca Brencio (ed.), La pieta’ del pensiero, 369–387; Francesca Brencio, “Martin Heidegger and the thinking of evil: from the original ethics to the Black Notebooks“, in: Ius Fugit. Revista de cultura Jurìdica, Universidad de Zaragoza y Institución Fernando el Católico 19 (2016), 87–134; Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri, Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, 51–327. The major seven works on the history of Being are: Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie. Vom Ereignis (1936–1938), hrsg. von FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann (GA 65), Frankfurt am Main 1989. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung (1938), hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 66), Frankfurt am Main 1997. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 153 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 153 since this procedure has not been followed, the hermeneutical approach chosen by scholars who support anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s thinking presents some inaccuracies. It seems to me that some interpretations work as petitio principii: a circular argument, a fallacy in assuming a premise in the same meaning as the conclusion. What has been considered as evidence of anti-Semite thinking – such as the sentences in which Heidegger talks about the Jewish feature as “groundlessness”, “absence of history”, “absence of world”, “empty rationality”, “the forgetfulness of being”, “machination of beings”, “absence of bounds as such”, “the uprootedness of all beings from being” – is not what characterizes the spirit of “international Jewry” as such, but the modernity in itself with its connection to the oblivion of Being. It is hard not to agree with Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann when he claims: Everyone who has carefully worked through the onto-historical treatises […] sees […] that the concepts listed are just onto-historical concepts by means of which Heidegger characterizes the spirit of the newest new age and thus the present age, insofar as this age principally understands itself from out of the spirit of the mathematical natural science and modern technology. And this means that these concepts are not anti-Semitic as such (i. e., they do not refer to the Jewish spirit only but reflect the spirit of the present time). In other words, when Heidegger characterizes the spirit of ‘international Jewry’ he includes it within the modern spirit of the present age. 17 3. Ideological readings: risks and limits From an ideological point of view, the reduction ad Hitlerum of Heidegger’s works is not new to the philosophical scenario. Since the book written by Viktor Farias in 1987 Heidegger et le nazisme was circulated, the “Heidegger affair” has been reinforced. Gadamer perhaps has been the first to discover the risks of the tendency to read Heidegger in an ideological way: the conference of Heidelberg was aimed to clarify also this point 18 and the recent unpublished 17 18 Martin Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus (1938–1939), hrsg. von Hans-Joachim Friedrich (GA 67), Frankfurt am Main 1999. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938–1940), hrsg. von Peter Trawny (GA 69), Frankfurt am Main 2012. Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang (1941), hrsg. von Paola-Ludovika Coriando (GA 70), Frankfurt am M. 2005. Martin Heidegger, Das Ereignis (1941–1942), hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 71), Frankfurt am Main 2009. Martin Heidegger, Die Stege des Anfangs (1944), vorgesehen für GA 72. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, “The Role of Martin Heidegger’s Notebooks within the Context of His Oeuvre”, in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 2016, pp. 91–92. Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La conference de Heidel- Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 154 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 154 letters exchanged with von Herrmann illuminate the limits of these readings 19. The accusation of anti-Semitism is the higher point of this reductio – and perhaps is prone to feed doubts: that is, to understand philosophically (and not ideologically) the widespread interpretation on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. The Black Notebooks erroneously have been delivered into public discourse as the “hidden diary” or “philosophical last will” 20 of Martin Heidegger and, as such, they contain confessions on his anti-Semitism. The Black Notebooks “have been taken by many to provide the ‘smoking gun’ that definitively demonstrates Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism, and on this basis, also establishes the unacceptability of Heidegger’s work within the canon of respectable thinking” 21. This has allowed some scholars to draw a portrait of Heidegger in terms of a person involved with Nazism and also as a convinced anti-Semite 22. In the frame of the public reception, Überlegungen and Anmerkungen have been presented with different aims: some academics have stressed that the Judenfrage is the main theme of these 1900 pages, others have suggested how anti- 19 20 21 22 berg, textes réunis, présentés et annotés par Mireille Calle-Gruber, note de Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris 2014. “Verehrter Herr von Herrmann, Sie glauben gar nicht, wie mich die Angelegenheit Farias aufregt. Natürlich könnten wir uns in der überlegenen Haltung fühlen, daß dieses oberflächliche und miserable Buch für deutsche Leser im Grunde nichts Neues enthält, jedenfalls nichts, was man gegen Heidegger ausspielen kann. Aber die Wirklichkeit der Massenmedien nötigt einen, aus der bisher befolgten Reserve, soweit ich selbst in Frage komme, herauszutreten. Der Rieseneffekt, den das Buch von Farias in Frankreich macht, zeigt eben, daß man so oberflächlich in der Welt mit den Dingen umgeht. […] Aber ich bin skeptisch geworden. Die modernen Massenmedien sind unersättlich und wissen auch Bedürfnisse zu erzeugen, wo keine bestehen, und vollends, wenn das Ausland bereits in Rage ist. So habe ich nach dem Studium des Buches keinen anderen Weg mehr gesehen, als die Sache gründlicher anzupacken. Das ist nun freilich ein ebenso heikles wie schwieriges Unternehmen. Natürlich ist das alles Unsinn, wenn man etwa die Stilgebung von ‘Sein und Zeit’ als Pränazismus interpretiert. Leider hat uns aber die Weltgeschichte genau solche Schlüsse suggeriert. Die ebenso verzweifelte wie doch auch lebensvolle Zeit der zwanziger Jahre ist zugleich ein Stück Lebenszeit in der Entstehung der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung gewesen. Die enthusiastischen Erwartungen eines Teils der Jugend und der jüngeren Intelligenzschichten war damals nicht so gänzlich verschieden von dem, was Heidegger und seine Freiburger Freunde auf dem Gebiete des Universitätslebens sich erhofften. […] Meine einzige Hoffnung ist, daß sich der Fall Heidegger zum Anlaß ausweiten wird, das Phänomen des Nationalsozialismus nicht länger aus der Vulgärperspektive anzusehen […]. Die Fehler und Schwächen von Heidegger sind vermutlich keine anderen und keine größeren, als jeder andere Mensch in exponierten Lagen zu begehen in Gefahr ist. Davon reden zu müssen, ist immer etwas pharisäerhaft, und ich hasse das”, letter published in: Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri, Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, 347–352. See Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, Frankfurt am Main 2014, 14. Jeff Malpas, “On the Philosophical Reading of Heidegger: Situating the Black Notebooks”, in Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 4. See Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger e gli ebrei. I Quaderni Neri, Torino 2014, 97 and in general chapter 3. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 155 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 155 Semitism could be at work in Heidegger’s meditation, others have endorsed the naïve idea to take excerpts from the Schwarze Hefte – the ones that “prove” Heidegger’s anti-Semitism – as an interpretative lens with which to read the entire work of Heidegger 23; others have assumed that the mention of antiSemitism could also contaminate the ontological thinking of Heidegger seeing in Heidegger’s thinking clear implications towards the Holocaust 24; some other scholars have also proposed expelling Heidegger’s thought from the history of philosophy because of his Nazism and anti-Semitism 25. While working on Heidegger’s notebooks my pathway has been illuminated by Gadamer’s words: “When people claim to be ‘against’ Heidegger – or even ‘for’ him – then they make fools of themselves. One cannot circumvent thinking so easily”. 26 These words resonate in my mind as a compass among different interpretations. My work on Heidegger’s Überlegungen and Anmerkungen has been not an apology or a defense of Heidegger against his own words, neither a polemic with some scholars: rather, it has been – and still is – a simple attempt to investigate Heidegger’s thought philosophically. The widespread interpretation of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the use of media in their public reception have underlined that for some authors – and in particular for Heidegger – the boundary between philosophy and ideology is not so clear and their reception in public scenario risks to become a matter of ideology. I have noticed that some assumptions and interpretations have been considered “true” par excellence – but in philosophy we should know that the word true is extremely problematic, and it should not be overlapped with meaning. The most eye-catching element of the “Heidegger affair” – provoked by the Black Notebooks’ release – has been the fact that every scholar who has given another interpretation of these books has been labelled as “Heidegger’s guardian”: ter23 24 25 26 This is the position held by Richard Wolin, Emmanuel Faye, Sidonie Kellerer and Marion Heinz. See Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 12, 15–16, 65, 92–93; Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger & Sons, Torino 2015, 69–110. On the reading that promotes to ascribe philosophical responsibilities to Heidegger’s thinking toward the Holocaust, see Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 9–11; Peter Trawny, “Heidegger and the Shoah”, in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 169 and following Donatella Di Cesare, “Heidegger’s metaphysical anti-Semitism”, in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 185 and following; Jean-Luc Nancy, Banalite’ de Heidegger, Paris 2015, 18 and 32–33. See Richard Wolin, National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, in Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/993/ national-socialism-world-jewry-and-the-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/; Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Michael B. Smith, New Haven 2009; Emmanuel Faye, “Heidegger und das Judentum: Vom Aufruf zur ‘völligen Vernichtung’ zur Thematisierung der ‘Selbstvernichtung’”, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 63, Heft 5 (2015), 877–898. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s ways, trans. by John W. Staley, Albany 1994, 112. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 156 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 156 tium non datur. It is my conviction that this kind of division doesn’t help in understanding all the hermeneutical issues that are at the core of the Black Notebooks and moreover that the exercise of philosophy should not be confused with tendentious rewriting finalised to ideological readings. From my perspective, the interpretation of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is not philosophically sustainable due to contradictions and fallacies mainly based on inferences, conjectures and deductions some of them typical of petitio principii and some others based on cherry picking procedure. These elements characterise the circularity of anti-Semitism interpretation 27. Moreover, what has caught my attention is the usage of the adjective “ontological” – accompanied to anti-Semitism – but never clarified. Following Peter Trawny’s main argument, for example, Heidegger would have contaminated his historical-ontological thinking with the collections of stereotypes and prejudices circulated about the Jews during the 20s and 30s. This argument allows the German editor of the Black Notebooks to support the idea of contamination but does not provide the reader with a philosophical explanation of how this anti-Semitism influences the ontological aspect of Heidegger’s meditation. This last issue is left open even if some passages of his books seem to invite the reader to consider that there could be a kind of implication between Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and his philosophy. Discussing ontological anti-Semitism requires an accurate clarification of what “ontological” means, but it does not seem to be the main focus of Trawny’s interpretation 28. The missed clarification of the connection between Seinsgeschichte and the supposed anti-Semitism has as result only to stress the role played by Jews as Jewish and seperated from the critique of modernity, in which Jews are embedded 29. Furthermore, the notion of Anti-Semitism is used without any definition of what Semite means: it would have been remarkable to 27 28 29 See Francesca Brencio, “Martin Heidegger and the thinking of evil: from the original ethics to the Black Notebooks”, 102–109. “A proper companion book to the Überlegungen (Considerations) by the editor would have had to have a totally different conception and content. If such a book were to contain an explanation of the offending passages by the author, the explanation would have to work out and present the philosophical dimension of the Überlegungen (Considerations) and the sundry critical statements in this context (…). Only this would have done justice to the three volumes of the Black Notebooks. Instead, the editor leaves out the philosophical dimension of the Black Notebooks entirely, and pursues his purely ideological-political agenda by completely ignoring the philosophical content of the Überlegungen (Considerations) and their relation to other manuscripts featuring Heidegger’s onto-historical thinking. In this way he misleads readers” (Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, “The Role of Martin Heidegger’s Notebooks within the Context of His Oeuvre”, 92). Even if the third reprint of Trawny’s book Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung is different from the others, trying to adjust previous ideas with new critiques, the author is quite convinced of his interpretation and extends it to the role played by Heidegger’s thinking on the Holocaust. On the same pathway, we find Di Cesare’s works and Nancy’s last book, Banalite’ de Heidegger. Particularly interesting is the position of Françoise Dastur who emphasizes the need for an accurate historical contextualization of Heidegger’s ÜberleHeidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 157 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 157 provide the reader with a clarification of what the expression anti-Semitism means in relation to the history of being and maybe it would be more accurate to use the expression anti-Judaic to explain the passages in which Heidegger talks about Jews. It is in this conceptual scenario that the sentence in which Heidegger claims that the issue of Jews (Judenfrage) and their position in the world is not a racial one but a metaphysical one 30 should be considered carefully. With this sentence Heidegger is not claiming that Jews as Jewish have a particular metaphysical characterisation, rather they are part of the modernity that has lost the meaning of the Being and, for this reason, they are in the space of western metaphysics such as Christians, Russians, Americans, Communists and so on. In other words, the role played by Jews is the same role played by the mankind embedded into the metaphysical space of modernity, unable to understand the oblivion of Being and to deal with nihilism. In a passage in Remarks II (Anmerkungen II) Heidegger writes: “Prophecy” is the technique for fending off what is destinal in history. It is an instrument of the will to power. That the great prophets are Jews is a fact whose secret has not yet been thought through. (Note for jackasses: this comment has nothing to do with “antiSemitism,” which is as foolish and abominable as Christianity’s bloody and, above all, non-bloody attacks on “heathens.” The fact that Christianity even brands anti-Semitism as “un-Christian” is part of its highly developed and refined power technique). 31 30 31 gungen. See Françoise Dastur, “Y a-t-il une “essence” de l’antisémitisme?”, in: Peter Trawny / Andrew J. Mitchell (eds.) Heidegger, die Juden, noch einmal, Frankfurt am M. 2015, 96 ff. See Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV, (GA 96), 243. Donatella Di Cesare has considered this sentence as proof of Heidegger’s metaphysical anti-Semitism. I would stress that this kind of interpretation is the result only of a confirmation bias, because who considers Jews as Jewish in terms of a metaphysical subject is not Heidegger himself but the interpreter of this metaphysical anti-Semitism. The portrait of a metaphysical Jew is not at the core of Heidegger’s interest and writings. The crafting of this portrait has not simply been the result of a cutting and pasting of quotations from the Black Notebooks, but the logical and sentimental consequence of an image of Jews that the interpreter draws as metaphysical and that she ascribes to Heidegger. It has been the recent work of the Italian philosopher Leonardo Messinese to clarify this point with accuracy. Messinese claims that Di Cesare’s remarks on Heidegger’s consideration of Jews are the result of her portrait of the metaphysical Jew; Di Cesare – according Messinese – deepens this portrait building a series of metaphysical determinations, all of them characterising Jews as Jewish, in a metaphysical meaning until arriving, through a crescendo, to confirm her idea of a metaphysical anti-Semitism and to advance the hypothesis that Heidegger’s thought would be involved in the Holocaust. See Leonardo Messinese, La “questione ebraica” nei Quaderni Neri considerata alla luce della “critica alla metafisica”, in: Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri (eds.), Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, 386–391. On the same topic – the critique of the concept of Metaphysical antiSemitism – see also: Maurizio Borghi, “Antisemitismo metafisico? Nota su Heidegger e gli ebrei di Donatella Di Cesare”, in: Eudia, vol. 9 (2015), 1–14. “‘Prophetie’ ist die Technik der Abwehr des Geschicklichen der Geschichte. Sie ist ein Instrument des Willens zur Macht. Daß die großen Propheten Juden sind, ist eine Tatsache, deren Geheimes noch nicht gedacht worden (Anmerkung für Esel: mit ‘Antisemitismus’ hat die Be- Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 158 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 158 In this passage Heidegger is taking his distance from every form of antiSemitism, which is defined as vulgar, and he is claiming that the issues concerning the power and the machination need to be addressed from the point of view of metaphysics, and this occurs within the space of western metaphysics – in which the question of Being is forgotten – and the space of western technical rationality. In the more than 1900 pages of the published Black Notebooks, Heidegger uses the words Jude, jüdisch, Judentum 14 times 32; only 7 times are these words used with an anti-Judaic tone, the other times just in connection with the adjective “Christian”, creating a linguistic plexus that indicates the Jewish-Christian matrix (or tradition) of the western society which, according to Heidegger, is the beginning of the oblivion of Being and the beginning of nihilism, into which politics, secularism, society and institutions are called. My idea is to consider the framework of the anti-Judaism sentences not from an ontological point of view and neither from a metaphysical one, but rather in the context of critique of Christendom and Catholicism that Heidegger elaborates and, more in general, of modernity itself. This critique arises from volume 94 and proceeds until volume 97 of Black Notebooks in a crescendo 33. In this context we may assume that the critique concerning the historical development of Christianity and Catholicism is not merely a matter of education and distance from his original faith, but is an inner necessity of the history of being (Seinsgeschichtlichkeit). If these indications are not wrong, we may assume that theological readings of Heidegger’s thinking (and works) are not correct as well as the ideological or political ones. Since the Seinsfrage is the only theme to which Heidegger devotes efforts and attempts, every reading that stresses elements unable to answer to the original question (what is the Being?) are too far from Heidegger’s original intentions. Perhaps this is what makes of Heidegger’s meditation inconvenient: if we go carefully through his works we find that his thinking doesn’t bow to anything (or anyone), it is not useful to any cause – not a political one, not a 32 33 merkung nichts zu tun. Dieser ist so töricht und so verwerflich, wie das blutige und vor allem unblutige Vorgehen des Christentums gegen ‘die Heiden’. Daß auch das Christentum den Antisemitismus als ‘unchristlich’ brandmarkt, gehört zur hohen Ausbildung der Raffinesse seiner Machttechnik)”, M. Heidegger, Anmerkungen II, in GA 97, p. 159. For the English translation of this passage, Richard Polt, References to Jews and Judaism in Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 1938–1948 Gesamtausgabe vols. 94–96 (2014) and 97 (2015), in: https:// www.academia.edu/11943010/References_to_Jews_and_Judaism_in_Martin_Heidegger_s_Black_Notebooks_1938–1948 Even if the quantity is not philosophically important, however it shows the scarcity with whom Heidegger talks about Jews. In other words, the Judenfrage was not a priority for him and “let alone an essential part of his history of Being”, Jean Grondin, “The critique and Rethinking of Being and Time in the first Black Notebooks”, in: Jeff Malpas /Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 106. See Francesca Brencio, “Dalle Überlegungen alle Anmerkungen: la critica alla tradizione giudeo-cristiana nei Quaderni heideggeriani”, in: La Filosofia Futura, 4 (2015), 69–86. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 159 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 159 theological one, not a social one. His movement of thinking is aimed to sweep away any fundament that cannot answer to the Seinsfrage, overcoming the western metaphysics in direction of a new thinking. 4. Christianity, metaphysics and nihilism in the context of the Black Notebooks Only few scholars 34 have devoted their energies to stress the critique to Christianity in the context of the Black Notebooks and to show how it is rooted in the critique of modernity, within which anti-Judaism 35 is merely the most eye-catching element. The well-known distinction between Christentum (Christendom) and Christlichkeit (Christianity) – as it had been developed in the conference of 1927 held in Tübingen entitled Phenomenology and Theology – is deepened in the the Black Notebooks in the light of the difference between the kerygma and the political organization dominated by Christendom. It is in this context that Heidegger claims that “the modern systems of total dictatorship stem from Judeo-Christian monotheism” 36. However, this is not a novelty: those who are familiar with Heidegger’s meditation should remember that both in the Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowing) and in the written memories and reports of Heidegger’s students – such as Gadamer, Biemel 37, Müller 38 – he had in mind only one project during the period between 1930–1948, namely to dismantle the primacy of Christendom in philosophy, primacy that “corrupted” and “altered” Greek thought and that opened the pathway toward western metaphysics in terms of the oblivion of Being. The words Christianity (Christlichkeit), Christendom (Christentum), Catholicism are disseminated in all the 4 volumes, with a particular crescendo 34 35 36 37 38 See Ingo Farin, The Black Notebooks in their historical and political context, in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), 289–321, in particular 308–312; Silvio Vietta, “Etwas rast um den Erdball …”. Martin Heidegger: Ambivalente Existenz und Globalisierungskritik, Paderborn 2015; Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann / Francesco Alfieri (eds.), Martin Heidegger. La verità sui Quaderni Neri, 39–41 and 51–327; Holger Zaborowski, Metaphysics, Christianity and the “Death of God” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), in: Jeff Malpas / Ingo Farin (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1931–1941), pp. 195–204. See Jésus Adrián Escudero, “Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Question of Anti-Semitism”, in: Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, 5 (2015), 21–49. Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V(GA 97), 438. See Walter Biemel, Martin Heidegger, Hamburg 1973; Walter Biemel, “Heidegger und die Phänomenologie in der Marburger Zeit”, in: Phänomenologische Forschungen, Band 6/7: Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger in der Sicht neuer Quellen, Freiburg / München 1978, 141–223. See “Ein Gespräch mit Max Müller”, in:Freiburger Universitätsblätter, Heft 92 (1986), 13–31 und 16–17. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 160 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 160 in volume 96 and volume 97. The word Machenschaft is used more than 200 times and usually in connection with the question of Being. In the 7 anti-Judaic sentences of Black Notebooks, Jews are described according the stereotypes typical of the early 20th century, also described in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarism. From the third volume of the Black Notebooks (GA 96) to the last one (GA 97) we can observe a switch in Heidegger’s thought: he starts to use the word “Jew” in connection with Christentum and metaphysics. Heidegger stresses the link between Jews and Christendom as the ground of western society: both Jews and Christendom cannot grasp Being and both of them opened the path to nihilism and metaphysics, whose devastating effects are clear in the western society. The oblivion of Being, the development of Machenschaft, the concentration camps and the Holocaust are the more evident consequences of this matrix – the Jewish-Christian one – that opens the abyss of Nihilism, in which also secularism is embedded. Heidegger uses the words struggle or battle (Kampf) in relation to Christendom and to Catholicism with evident rancour; he writes that the battle against the Catholic Church is the battle against that kind of thinking that occupies western society 39, namely western metaphysics. This is the battle against a way of thinking that is without ground and that has not interrogated the issue of Being but only insisted on a mere anthropology: The Catholic Church – it alone “is” Christianity – as always, eager to have its opponents – in order to measure itself against them and to remain alert and strong. It takes the opponents seriously, plants itself in them, learns from them up to the semblant disavowal of itself – keeps itself in this way flexible and clever, and constantly makes itself more secure and richer in experience. This cautious knowing and questioning, this listening to the opponents that apparently is accepting of them, produces at the same time the attractive semblance of spiritual freedom for confrontation, the semblance of being current and modern, and entails the entire sophistry that basically is as rigid as ever in crouching over the already accomplished truth and fitting itself into the presently most beautiful recommendation within the sphere of what one in the precise sense values and desires. 40 The thinking derived from the Catholic Church is a metaphysical one and, as such, forgets the Seinsfrage: The Christian “Churches” have passed over – already long ago – into the service of a world Christianity that smacks of the Enlightenment and thus also of romanticism and 39 40 “The knowledge and indeed creation of these conditions require an excess of the surpassing of a people by itself, the liberation from all calculation of either particular or common usefulness. As pre-eminently necessary as this requirement is, so little does it touch upon the necessities of the proper Dasein of a people—necessities which are also not grasped by a mere appeal to the Christian Churches, but are thereby only distorted”, Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 246. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 133–134. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 161 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 161 that decks itself out with everything Hölderlin and Nietzsche (and their successors) creatively suffered in thinking and poetizing. The goal is the complete suppression of questioning, the repression of all the question-worthiness of beyng into the unknown and negligible. And all this still under the aegis of a struggle against Bolshevism and every sort of “totalizing” claim – the trivialization of nihilism – as its most dangerous form. 41 Quite evident are echoes that come from these reflections: Franz Overbeck’s and Luther’s influence hang in the background of specific sentences, even if Heidegger’s contribution proceeds in the direction of the history of Being. Through Overbeck’s meditation, Heidegger starts to be critic of contemporary theology and of the philosophy of religion due mainly to its “narrow confessionalism”. Theology, like historical consciousness, is a fugitive, inauthentic way of life. He rejects the “system of Catholicism” but not Christianity or metaphysics, as we can read in his letter to Prof. Krebs dated January 9th, 1919: “Epistemological insights extending 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)”. 42 Heidegger was committed to a kind of “free Christianity” found in “primitive Christianity,” i. e. the original or first generation Christian experience. Primitive Christianity was contrasted to a Hellenized Christianity promoted by the contemporary theologians 43. He distinguishes between the historical, secular-political phenomenon of the church and the Christian life of the New Testament faith maintaining that they are not the same. Influenced by Overbeck’s denunciation of historicizing Christianity and the transformation of Christianity into a social/ political movement within history, Heidegger employs eschatology as a regulative idea into the realm of phenomenological experience. It has been Gadamer once again to have underlined as the main focus of Heidegger’s research was to go back to Aristotle and to the Greek conceptuality through Luther. For Heidegger Luther and Aristotle show a reciprocal cohesiveness (Zusammengehörigkeit) 44. It was during the early twentieth-century “Luther Renaissance” that Heidegger finds in Luther important tools to destroy phenomenologically Scholasticism and its system; its most evident limit was to cover the meaning of living life through the insistence toward spiritual cares and inner life. As Heidegger himself pencilled, “companions in my searching were the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle, whom Luther hated. Impulses were given by Kierkegaard, and Husserl opened my eyes” 45. 41 42 43 44 45 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 330. Letter quoted in Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, London 1993, 74. Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins, Indiana University Press 2006, 113. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Religiöse Dimension”, in: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 3, Hegel Husserl Heidegger, Tübingen 1987, 399–390. Martin Heidegger, Ontology. The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. by J. van Buren, Bloomington 1999, 4. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 162 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 162 Another important element that needs to be recalled is the confrontation that Heidegger has with Nietzsche from the 1930s onwards. “God is dead” is not merely an aphorism in Heidegger’s interpretation of the last philosopher belonging to the history of metaphysics, but a matter of fact. The more immediate translation of this aphorism in terms of facts is that the nihilism crosscuts the western society. Nihilism is a historical movement […]. Nihilism moves history in the way of a scarcely recognized fundamental process in the destiny of the Western peoples. Hence nihilism is not just one historical phenomenon among others (…) its roots are so deep that its development can entail only world catastrophes. Nihilism is the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into modernity’s arena of power. 46 With the death of God the place of God’s vanished authority and the Church’s profession of teaching has been taken by the authority of conscience and, forcibly, by the authority of reason. (…) The goal of eternal bliss in the hereafter has been transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number. The diligent care that was the cultus of religion has been replaced by enthusiasm for creating a culture or for spreading civilization. Creation, once the prerogative of the biblical God, has become the mark of human activity, whose creative work becomes in the end business transactions 47. It is in this framework that Heidegger names the connection between nihilism and metaphysics with the Jewish-Christian tradition of our society: Whatever is thus going to be put in the place of the supersensory world will be variations of the Christian-ecclesiastical and theological interpretation of the world, an interpretation which adopted its schema of the ordo, the hierarchical order of beings, from the Hellenistic-Judaic world and whose fundamental structure was established through Plato at the outset of Western metaphysics. The realm for the essence and event of nihilism is metaphysics itself, always assuming that by “metaphysics” we are not thinking of a doctrine or only of a specialized discipline of philosophy but of the fundamental structure of beings in their entirety. […] Metaphysics is the space of history in which it becomes destiny for the supersensory world, ideas, God, moral law, the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the greatest number, culture, and civilization to forfeit their constructive power and to become void. We are calling this essential ruin of supersensory its putrefaction. Unbelief in the sense of apostasy from the Christian doctrine of faith is therefore never the essence or the ground of nihilism; rather, it is always only a consequence of nihilism: for it could be that Christianity itself represents a consequence and a form of nihilism. 48 This is not the right place to rebuild Heidegger’s theological education, his distance from the original Catholic faith, the influence of Luther in his philoso46 47 48 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’”, in: Martin Heidegger, Off the beaten track, trans. by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge 2002, 163 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’”, 165. Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’”, 165. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 163 / 11.10.2017 The fugue of Being 163 phical meditation and during the Marburg years (1923–1927) in the debate of theological society. However, what perhaps is important to remark is that his dialogue with the original faith remained a “thorn in the flesh” with which he struggled his whole life. Far from being a mere biographical fact, this metaphor in a letter to Jaspers 49 illuminates one theoretical component of Heidegger’s meditation and its connection to Seinsfrage. It is in this framework that the violent critique of Catholicism and of Christianity need to be considered and the Black Notebooks offer new elements that can illuminate the understanding of Heidegger’s problematic relationship with theology and with the political organization of Roman Church. In the Überlegungen Heidegger writes: Great corruptors of the spirit are lacking – all the more numerous are the mediocre ones (…) everything is only a very clever imitation of what the Church Fathers and apologists of the first Christian century already “practiced” in their own way. The current “spiritual life” is so lacking in direction and measure that it not only finds such pen-pushing satisfactory but even considers it something superior in comparison to what preceded 50. And a bit further: The confusion is so great that these “political” philosophies, ones “tied to the people,” are never recognized as wretched imitations of scholasticism. The grotesqueness is complete when all this confusion is joined by the “struggle” against the Catholic Church – a “struggle” which has still not at all found – and cannot find – its opponent as long as it thinks with too short a sight (and too narrow a mind) of that which constitutes the foundations of this Church: the adapted metaphysics of Western thinking in general, in which these “worldview strugglers” are so inextricably entangled that they do not surmise how much they themselves participate with their “opponent” in the same brittle foundations (unquestionability of being, groundlessness of truth, essential determination of the human being). 51 Heidegger sees into the political and historical development of Christianity one of the devastating effects of western metaphysics and the oblivion of Being. The historical development of Christianity is the more evident outcome of the metaphysical space: it is the obstinacy and the shelter of metaphysics of the Catholic German Church, in terms political organization of faith 52 that embodies the same organization of metaphysics. As he writes in Remarks I (Anmerkungen I): On this basis one must assess what it means, for thinking that enters the concealed, initial essence of the history of the Western, to meditate on the first beginning among the 49 50 51 52 Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel mit Karl Jaspers (1920–1963), hrsg. von Walter Biemel und Hans Saner, Frankfurt am Main 1990, 157. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 251 f. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 292–293. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (GA 94), 186. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11 HJb 11/17 / p. 164 / 11.10.2017 Francesca Brencio 164 Greeks, which remained outside the Jewish character and thus outside the Christian one. 53 The critique of Christianity is articulated mainly on three levels: first, it is a historical critique, due to its historical development in which, through the contamination with romanitas, the Christentum loses its own content (the faith – the Christianity), in order to become a political system; secondly, it is a speculative critique, because Christendom falsifies Christ’s message in the same way as metaphysics; finally, it is a political critique, because Christendom (in terms of Christentum) is an outcome of the hegemony of the Roman Church, and it is situated within the space of metaphysics. Soon after the Concordat between the Church and the Third Reich (1933) Heidegger notes: The impending concordat with the Catholic Church is supposed to be a victory, for it is to drive the priests out of ‘politics.’ That is an illusion; that incomparably well-coordinated organization will remain – and also the power of the priests; their power will merely be made more ‘sanctified’ and will be wielded more slyly. 54 It is in this philosophical scenario that overcoming metaphysics means to break away from the legacy of the historical development of Christianity and Jewish-Christian heritage. The fugue of Being seems to be from Jena to the Jonia – using Franz Rosenzweig’s words – jumping Rome and Jerusalem in a time that is still destitute. 53 54 “Von hier aus ist zu ermessen, was für das Denken in das verborgene anfängliche Wesen der Geschichte des Abendlandes das Andenken an den ersten Anfang im Griechentum bedeutet, das außerhalb des Judentums und d. h. des Christentums geblieben”, M. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V (GA 97), 20. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI, 86. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11