Ponderings II–VI

Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz

Description

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Ponderings II–VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger's "Black Notebooks." In a series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in this volume were written between 1931 and 1938 and thus chronicle Heidegger's year as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the Nazi era. Published in German as volume 94 of the Complete Works, these challenging and fascinating journal entries shed light on Heidegger's philosophical development regarding his central question of what it means to be, but also on his relation to National Socialism and the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s in Germany. Readers previously familiar only with excerpts taken out of context may now determine for themselves whether the controversy and censure the "Black Notebooks" have received are deserved or not. This faithful translation by Richard Rojcewicz opens the texts in a way that captures their philosophical and political content while disentangling Heidegger's notoriously difficult language.

Translator's Introduction
Intimations x Ponderings (II) and Directives
Ponderings and Intimations III
Ponderings IV
Ponderings V
Ponderings VI
Editor's Afterword

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology
• Martin Heidegger

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253020741
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ponderings II-VI
Studies in Continental Thought
EDITOR
JOHN SALLIS
CONSULTING EDITORS
Robert Bernasconi
John D. Caputo
David Carr
Edward S. Casey
David Farrell Krell
Lenore Langsdorf
James Risser
Dennis J. Schmidt
Calvin O. Schrag
Charles E. Scott
Daniela Vallega-Neu
David Wood
Martin Heidegger
Ponderings II-VI
Black Notebooks 1931-1938
Translated by
Richard Rojcewicz
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Published in German as Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 94: berlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938) , edited by Peter Trawny
2014 by Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
English translation 2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02067-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02074-1 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
CONTENTS
Translator s Introduction
Intimations x Ponderings (II) and Directives
Ponderings and Intimations III
Ponderings IV
Ponderings V
Ponderings VI
Editor s Afterword
Translator s Introduction
This is a translation of volume 94 of Martin Heidegger s Gesamtausgabe ( Complete Works ). The German original appeared posthumously in 2014.
The volume inaugurated the publication of Heidegger s Black Notebooks. These are small (ca. 5 7 in.) notebooks with black covers to which the philosopher confided sundry ideas and observations over the course of more than forty years, from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. The notebooks are being published in chronological order, and the five herein correspond to the years 1931-1938. In all, thirty-three of the thirty-four Black Notebooks are extant and will fill up nine volumes of the Gesamtausgabe .
Heidegger gave a title to each of the notebooks (these first five to be published are Ponderings ) and referred to them collectively as the black notebooks. The published series begins with Ponderings II ; Ponderings I is the lost notebook.
As can be imagined regarding any notes to self, these journal entries often lack polished diction and at times are even cryptic. Nevertheless, the style and vocabulary are mostly formal, not to say stilted, and are seldom colloquial. This translation is meant to convey to an English-speaking audience the same effect the original would have on a German one, with the degree of formality varying pari passu with Heidegger s own. A prominent stylistic peculiarity I was unable to render in full, however, is the extensive use of dashes. Heidegger often employs dashes not merely for parenthetical remarks but for any change in the direction of thought. Sometimes dashes separate subjects and predicates, and some dashes even occur at the end of paragraphs. Due to differences in English and German syntax, I could not include all the dashes without making for needless confusion and could not place them all at the exact points that would correspond to the original text. This admission is of course not meant to imply I did capture the varied styles of the notebooks in all other respects.
The pagination of the notebooks themselves is reproduced here in the outer margins. All of Heidegger s cross-references are to these marginal numbers. The running heads indicate the pagination of the Gesamtausgabe edition. I have inserted myself into the text only to alert the reader to the original German where I thought it might be helpful (for example, as indicating a play on words I could not carry over into English) and to translate any Latin or Greek expressions Heidegger leaves untranslated. I have used brackets ([ ]) for these interpolations and have reserved braces ({ }) for insertions by the editor. All the footnotes in the book stem either from me, and these few are marked as such, or from the editor and are then placed within braces.
I am indebted to Charles Bambach for an insightful review of an earlier version of this entire translation; the changes he recommended have substantially improved the final text.
Richard Rojcewicz

Ponderings II-VI

The entries in the black notebooks
are at their core attempts at simple designation- not statements or even sketches for a planned system.
INTIMATIONS X PONDERINGS (II) AND DIRECTIVES
October 1931
M. H.
1
Cf. pp. 19 and 132. 2

What should we do?
1
Who are we?
Why should we be ?
What are beings?
Why does being happen?
Philosophizing proceeds out of these questions upward into unity.
* * *
1
What we extol as blessing depends on what afflicts us as plight.
And on whether plight truly urges us on, i.e., urges us away from staring at the situation and talking it over.
Greatest plight-that we must finally turn our backs on ourselves and on our situation and actually seek ourselves.
Away from detours, which merely lead back to the same beaten paths; sheer evasions -remote and desultory-before the ineluctable.
The human being should come to himself!
2
Why? Because a human being is a self-yet is in such a way as to lose or indeed never win himself and to sit somewhere otherwise captivated and transported-we still scarcely see all this great being and potential for being as we gaze at wretched imitations and dried up and incomprehensible exemplars-proffered types.
But: how does a human being come to his self?
Through what are his self and its selfness determined?
Is that not already subordinated to a first choice!
Insofar as the human being does not choose and instead creates a substitute for choosing, he sees his self
1. through reflection in the usual sense;
2. through dialogue with the thou;
3. through meditation on the situation;
4. through some idolatry.
3
Supposing, however, that the human being had chosen and that the choice actually struck back into his self and burst it open -
i.e., supposing that the human being had chosen the disclosability of the being of beings and by this choice was placed back into Dasein, 3 must he then not proceed far into the stillness of the happening of being, a happening which possesses its own time and its own silence?
Must he not have long been silent in order to find again the power and might of language and to be borne by them?
Must not all frameworks and specialties be shattered here and all worn-down paths be devastated?
Must not a courage, one which reaches very far back, attune the disposition here?
4 Someone who sticks fast to the foot of the mountain-how will he ever even see the mountain?
Only more and more rock faces.
But how to come upon the mountain?
Only through a leap from another mountain; but how to come upon that one?
Already to have been there; to be someone placed on the mountain and ordered to be there.
Who was already so? And is it still because no others can drive him away?
Beginning and re-beginning of philosophy!
2
5 We stand before nothingness * -to be sure, but in such a way that we do not put nothingness and this standing into effect, do not know how to put them into effect-cowardice and blindness before the opening of the being that bears us into beings.
* Indeed not before nothingness-instead, before each and every thing, but as nonbeings (cf. p. 50).
3
Must the great lone path be ventured, silently-into Da-sein, where beings become more fully beings? Untroubled by all situations?
Has it not long been folly and confusion and groundlessness to run after the situation ?
Situation -at the beach and in the sand, small mussels are splashed about, into them we wriggle and see only wrigglers but never the waves and the upsurge of beings!
4
6
Nothingness -which is higher and deeper than nonbeings -too great and worthy for any individual or all together to stand before it.
Nonbeings-which are less than nothingness-because expelled from the being that negates all beings.
Less-because undecided, neither amid beings, since these latter are more fully, nor amid nothingness.
5
A disregarding of the situation is to be set in motion, but out of the positive aspect of the ineluctable-the disregarding of the situation and the justification for doing so.
We first are our situation when we no longer ask after it.
Back into the unconscious -i.e., not into complexes but into the truly happening and necessary spirit.
This devilish-or rather deified-farming of the situation! The semblance of seriousness.
6
7
Mankind no longer knows what to do with itself-and consequently conjectures everything in the end.
7
Mankind believes it must do something with itself-and does not understand that Da-sein has already done something with it (beginning of philosophy)-from which mankind fled long ago.
This-the fact that in Dasein beings have being-i.e., become more fully beings and more fully nullified-is the mission [ Auftrag ] of humanity in this happening.
8
Being and Time I 4 a very imperfect attempt to enter into the temporality of Dasein in order to ask the question of being for the first time since Parmenides, cf. p. 24.
9
Objection to the book: I have even today still not enough enemies-it has not brought me a Great 5 enemy.
10
8
Thoughtlessness toward the tradition and disdain of the contemporary belong to the keen-hearing diffidence b