Ponderings XII–XV

Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz

Description

Ponderings XII–XV is third in a series of four "Black Notebooks" which Martin Heidegger composed in the early years of World War II. As always with Heidegger, the thoughts expressed here are not superficial reflections on current events, but instead penetrate deeply into them in order to contemplate their historical importance. Throughout his ponderings, Heidegger meditates on the call for an antidote to the rampant technological attitude which views all things with a dismissive consumer mentality. Although this volume caused quite a scandal when originally published in German due to references to World-Judaism, English readers with access to the full text can now judge for themselves what Heidegger means in his use of that term. In style, this notebook is less aphoristic and more sustained than the previous ones, but remains probing, challenging, and fascinating.

Translator's Introduction
Ponderings XII
Ponderings XIII
Ponderings XIV
Ponderings XV
Editor's Afterword

Sujets

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

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 07 août 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253029454
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ponderings XII-XV
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 XII-XV
Black Notebooks 1939-1941
Translated by Richard Rojcewicz
Indiana University Press
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 96: berlegungen XII-XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939-1941) , edited by Peter Trawny
2014 by Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
English translation 2017 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
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976, author.
Title: Ponderings : Black notebooks / Martin Heidegger ; translated by Richard Rojcewicz.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016- | Series: Studies in Continental thought | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035416| ISBN 9780253020673 (vol 1 cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253020741 (vol 1 ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976-Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
Classification: LCC B3279.H48 S36213 2016 | DDC 193-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015035416
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CONTENTS
Translator s Introduction
Ponderings XII
Ponderings XIII
Ponderings XIV
Ponderings XV
Editor s Afterword
Translator s Introduction
This is a translation of volume 96 of Martin Heidegger s Gesamtausgabe ( Complete Works ). The German original appeared posthumously in 2014.
The volume is the third in the series publishing Heidegger s Black Notebooks. These are small (ca. 5 7 in.) notebooks with black covers to which the thinker 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 four herein correspond to the years 1939-1941. 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 and referred to them collectively as the black notebooks. The first fifteen are all Ponderings. Their publication began in volume 94 with Ponderings II ( Ponderings I is the lost notebook). Volume 95 included the second five Ponderings, VII-XI. The present volume with its four notebooks concludes the publication of the extant Ponderings.
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, the degree of formality varying pari passu with Heidegger s own. A prominent peculiarity of the style 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 sentence. 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 grateful to an anonymous reviewer for a critique of an earlier version of this translation.
Richard Rojcewicz
Ponderings XII-XV
PONDERINGS XII
Any thinker who thinks toward a decision is moved, and consumed, by care over a plight which cannot at all be sensed in the historiologically reckoned lifetime of that thinker. The level of genuine understanding (genuine in the sense of contributing to the preparation of a decision) of the thoughts of such thinkers is measured according to the capacity for the necessary thinking out in advance to the strange and excessive demands radiating from what is unsaid in the words of those thinkers. The more essential the decision which is to be disclosively thought, all the more grows the distance between the thinker and a historiological explication by way of the tradition, and all the greater becomes the danger that the thinker will, at best, count as an exception. Yet this is the most insidious form in which something decisive is suppressed and becomes ordinary or, in other terms, becomes something already decided. Such suppression of what is decisive does in no way stem from human indolence; instead, it brings the despotism of beings qua beings to its appropriate effectivity.

Destruction is the precursor of a
concealed beginning, but devastation
is the aftereffect of an already decided
end. Does the age already stand
before the decision between destruction
and devastation? Yet we know
the other beginning-know it
in questioning -(cf. pp. 76-79 1 ).

As long as the human being enacts his essence in the sense of the rational animal, as long as he keeps thinking metaphysically in the form of the distinction between the sensible and the supersensible, then in such thought he persists in his flight from the question of the truth of beyng. 2 This flight does not stem from human impulses; instead, the human being flees-unaware of his flightiness -because beyng itself disappropriates him from the truth of being-but why is this? Who might know the reason? Perhaps-it is that the human being still scarcely surmises even the least of the historical domain of his essential occurrence, the domain wherein the self-refusal of beyng is the event in whose core intersect all the decisions of the things to be differentiated (God and human being, earth and world). Perhaps-it is that the human being no longer wants a beginning but, instead, merely takes refuge in what follows from one.

2 3
Come to meditate : these words must be uttered at the right moment-and not as a summons or a plan-but rather as an already carried out leap in advance that is now to be recovered. Yet the recovery has a peculiar relation to everything essential in that it projects the recovered even further in advance, i.e., places it back into history as unsurpassable beginning. The ways and the holding sway of beyng are strange-to want to approach them means primarily to renounce historiology and its habitual mode of representation.
Historiology seems to be overcome most radically when one abandons it, flees into the immediate present, and pursues what is most proximate and most pressing. In truth, however, that is merely a sham overcoming; the uncertainty with regard to historiology and the danger of tottering about in historicism do in fact increase thereby, because the present is always thoroughly historical and the pursuit of the present cannot at all resist historiological representation-except that now historiology is not as such | carried out and must remain external to a critical appraisal. Historicism then becomes indiscriminate, and all the distinctions between ages disappear, if these distinctions offer to the present only something of which the present believes itself to be in need.
How far back historicism reaches is not essential; it in fact uniformly beats all things from the past down to the one level of their current present moment; Greco-Roman columns and porticoes may be erected and operettas from 1900 may be staged like American revues-yet put forth in each case is the same emptiness of a mere facade which becomes a fleeting lived experience. To attribute such things merely to the decay of culture would again mean to be arrested in superficiality and to overlook the machinational signs. The indiscriminateness of historicism stems from a self-certain process by which the superficial interpretation of the age is slowly breached. At first, the natural right to life of the peoples asserts itself, the right to the Specific 4 unfolding of their motive powers.
Yet all of this is only the prelude to that power process by which the natural strength of the peoples powers is brought into play. Since, however, power is always an overpowering and self-surpassing | will to overpower, the naturalnes