Lesson plan 1 for the first week

EINFU¨ HRUNG: INTRODUCTION

The 1930s are the years when Heidegger’s life and thought are most radically altered. They see his turn [ Kehre] around from the published Being and Time ;¹ the beginning of his lengthy encounters with Nietzsche and the poet Ho¨lderlin;

several important lecture courses and texts – some of which have only been recently published – and, certainly not least, his involvement with the Nazi movement. Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg University in April 1933 and resigned in early 1934. The facts of his tenure are now relatively well known (he himself called it his ‘greatest act of stupidity’ [ die gro¨sste Dummheit ]),² and in the last few years have occasioned a number of articles and books detailing the case against him. ³ The ‘Heidegger controversy’ has sometimes been used as a way of avoiding the difficult and important task of engaging with Heidegger. This is not to absolve Heidegger from blame, nor to suggest that his thought and his practice are sufficiently divorced that we can condemn the man and applaud his writings; far from it. As Janicaud suggests, to maintain our previous faith and admiration, on the one hand, or to dismiss Heidegger out of hand are false options. What must be done is to examine how the political intrudes in the thought. ⁴

For the purpose here, it is most important to see how Heidegger’s political thought relates to his ideas of history, and centrally, space. It has been suggested in the previous chapter that Heidegger’s attitude to space in Being and Time undergoes a fundamental change in his later thought. In situating that change it must be ascertained whether the change is in tandem with his political thought, entirely divorced from it, or a reaction to it. The place I choose to begin is the 1935 lecture course An Introduction to Metaphysics , published in 1953. Not only was this the first lecture course from this time to appear, but Heidegger also stresses its importance in the preface to the seventh edition of Being and Time (again, 1953), which was the first to drop the

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designation ‘First Half’. Heidegger suggests the basic problematic for him remains, even though the first half would have to be re-presented were the second now to follow. However, he refers the reader to An Introduction to Metaphysics, which provides an elucidation of the question of being. Its

importance is clear.

Three initial themes present themselves for consideration within this course:

Heidegger’s reaction to the use and abuse of Nietzsche at the time of the lectures, and to Nazi philosophy as a whole; the importance of the historical to the study of being, and not merely as a part within it; and the increasing importance of early Greek thought, with the implications this has for the understanding of space. I shall briefly sketch out the issues involved in each of these, before moving on to the central task of the chapter, Heidegger’s readings of Ho¨lderlin and Nietzsche.

It is within this course that Heidegger first starts to engage with Nietzsche’s thought at length. Heidegger was at this time following a common trend, as the philosopher of the ‘superman’ and the will to power appeared, on a cursory reading, to lend himself ideally to the National Socialist movement.⁵Heidegger was desperately keen to avoid being seen as part of the same trend. Indeed as shall be seen, he would later claim that his work on Nietzsche was a confron-tation with Nazism. Nietzsche was, for Heidegger, able to withstand the pressures of poor interpretation:

Even now [in 1935] this philosophy holds its ground against all the crude importunities of the scribblers who cluster round him more numerous with each passing day. And so far there seems to be no end in sight to this abuse of Nietzsche’s work. In speaking here of Nietzsche, we mean to have nothing to do with all that . . . (GA40, 39; IM 36; see GA43, 276)

This was written barely a year after Heidegger’s attempt den Fu¨hrer zu fu¨hren – to lead the leader, to head the philosophical movement heading National Socialism – had collapsed with his resignation as Rector. ⁶ We are surely not mistaken if we note the German title of this course – Einfu¨ hrung in die Metaphysik – certainly a leading into metaphysics, but is it a leading from

National Socialism or to its true heart?⁷

Heidegger’s own answer would appear to lie in the words that he speaks towards the end of the lecture course:

The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global

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technology and modern humans) – have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’. (GA40, 208; IM 199)

It would seem that Heidegger is claiming that Nazi philosophy is not merely flawed, but has gone away from the true core of what, he believes, the movement should be about. Perhaps this is merely Heidegger’s Angst at losing out in the battle for intellectual supremacy, or perhaps he genuinely believed that a movement was needed that would confront the problems and possi-bilities of the ‘encounter between global technology and modern humans’. To claim that the remainder of Heidegger’s work is an examination of this encounter would be an accurate description. On the other hand, this quotation is seized upon by some commentators because, if we follow Heidegger’s note (GA40, XI; IM xi), we see that ‘matter in parentheses was written while I was reworking the text’. It is only later (and not in 1935) that Heidegger clarifies what he means or, to put it less kindly, explains an incriminating remark. ⁸If one thing counts more against Heidegger than his actions 1933–4, it is his lies, evasions and reworkings of his own history after that date.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics there is the first clearly evident use of the historical approach I have argued is implicit in Being and Time . Whereas, there, history was a structure of Dasein, one that could be examined ontologically, now the question of being is itself historicized, becoming the history of being, or a historical ontology. National Socialism has proved to be not the solution to the problems facing humans but rather their culmination. The problematic of nihilism ‘manifests itself with increasing clarity under the political form of fascism’ (HC 65; see GA6.2, 33n). How did this happen? As Heidegger states,

‘we maintain that this preliminary question [about being] and with it the fundamental question of metaphysics are historical questions through and through’ (GA40, 46; IM 43).⁹He then suggests that even the human’s relation to history is itself historical: an example of the historicizing of the (in Being and Time) ahistorical structures of Dasein. With his regular references to the etymology of key terms, the historical references to the Greek beginnings, and the more oblique allusions to tracing a path of thought, Heidegger allows this historicizing to pervade this and practically all future work. Once again there is a reference to the concurrent nature of the dimensions of time, joining together in the study of history: ‘History as happening [ Geschichte als Gesche-hen] is an acting and being acted upon which pass through the present , which are determined from out of the future, and which take over the past’ (GA40, 48; IM 44). The importance of the historical for Heidegger’s purpose is shown when he sets out his aim of the present study: ‘1. The determination of the essence of the human is never an answer but essentially a question . . .

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2. The asking of this question is historical in the fundamental sense that this questioning first creates history’ (GA40, 149–52; IM 140–3). ¹⁰

In Being and Time Heidegger argues for the importance of presence. In this later work he sets up an opposition between being as presence and being as substance. The former is, he argues, the correct understanding of the Greek paroysi´a, which is usually translated as the latter. The German word for presence, An-wesen, ‘also designates an estate or homestead’ (GA40, 65; IM 61).¹¹What we have here is another break with the Cartesian and indeed the modern tradition. Heidegger consistently argues that the translation of Greek thought into Latin has had serious consequences for the understanding of what the ancients intended (for example GA40, 15–16; IM 13; GA5, 13; BW, 149;

VA 50ff; QCT 165ff; GA5, 303; EGT 19). ¹² Most European languages are, because of their descent from Latin, inextricably linked to this misunderstand-ing, which has coloured the entirety of modern philosophy. German, because it has non-Latinate resources, is however perhaps able to avoid the problems that other languages fall into: Heidegger believes it to be, along with the Greek, ‘at once the most powerful and spiritual of all languages’ (GA40, 61;

IM 57). We can see this in a number of places in Heidegger’s work: the distinction between Geschichte and Historie, or between Zeitlichkeit and Tempor-alita¨t . Heidegger even argues that ‘in the Greek language what is said is at the same time in an excellent way what it is called’, alone among languages it is lo´ goQ (WP, 44/5; GA5, 313; EGT 28). Throughout much of his later work, Heidegger will go back to original texts, often dispensing with accepted translations, seeking to think back to the Greek terms and to provide more fundamental renditions.

There are two interesting discussions related to this point in An Introduction to Metaphysics. In the first, Heidegger argues, through an examination of Plato’s Timaeus, that there has been a fundamental shift in notions of spatial location and place. Heidegger begins by suggesting that

the Greeks had no word for ‘space’. This is no accident; for they experi-enced the spatial on the basis not of extension but of place [ Ort ] (to´ poQ^);13 they experienced it as xv´ ra, which signifies neither place nor space but that which is occupied by what stands there. (GA40, 71; IM 66) ¹⁴

The whole Cartesian approach to space is founded upon this notion of bodies extended in space, but Heidegger here suggests that this concept was not found in early Greek thought: rather there was a conception of space that is far closer to the notions Heidegger suggested in Being and Time. The Greek understanding of place is far closer to experiential than mathematical. Heidegger goes on to suggest that the shift from to´ poQ ^and xv´ ra to a ‘space’ [ Raum] defined by

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extension was initiated by Platonic philosophy because of its interpretation of being as „ide´a (GA40, 71; IM 66; see GA55, 335–6; WHD 174; WCT 227). ¹⁵

The second important discussion of place occurs later, this time in an analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone. Heidegger focuses particularly on line 370, ‘ y¿ci´poliQ

‰apoliQ’, a line that hinges on the Greek word po´ liQ, which is translated in a standard English version as ‘city’.

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Heidegger suggests that this does not capture the full meaning: ‘ Po´ liQ means, rather, the site [ die Sta¨tte], the there [Da], wherein and as which historical Da-sein is. The po´ liQ is the historical site [Geschichtssta¨tte], the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens [Geschichte geschieht ]’ (GA40, 161; IM 151–2). These brief remarks are greatly developed in courses on Ho¨lderlin and Parmenides, and are discussed at length in Chapter Three.

This brief outline of this lecture course has therefore introduced us to, and led us into, several themes that will be important in our understanding of Heidegger’s later work. It has especially highlighted four important things:

Heidegger’s disenchantment with Nazism; his wish to save Nietzsche from his interpretation at the hands of this movement, in order to prepare the groun d for his own reading of him; his growing understanding of the importance of the historical approach he had developed for understanding Dasein’s historicity to his actual project; and a return to early Greek thought in order to see how and where things and ideas have changed. It is in this Greek thought that Heidegger finds much that suppo rts the way he wishes to go forward. For my purposes this is especially true concerning place/space, and this important notion of ‘historical site’. He is not alone in this. Two fundamentally important figures paved the way. As Heidegger himself says, Nietzsche ‘understood the great time of the beginning of the entire Greek Dasein in a way that was surpassed only by Ho¨lderlin’ (GA40, 135; IM 126; see GA45, 125–6).

I: HO¨ LDERLIN

In Heidegger’s lifetime, the principal outlet for his reading of Ho¨lderlin was the book Commentaries [Erla¨uterungen] on Ho¨lderlin’s Poetry, which was continually updated to include new pieces on the poet. Other essays appeared in the collections Holzwege, Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze, and Unterwegs zur Sprache. Heideg-ger also delivered three courses on Ho¨lderlin at the University of Freiburg which have appeared in the Gesamtausgabe posthumously. The first, given in the Winter Semester of 1934–5 was dedicated to the hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’; the second, given in the Winter Semester of 1941–2, looked at the

‘Remembrance’ hymn; and the final course, given in the Summer Semester of 1942, examined ‘The Ister’ hymn and Sophocles’ Antigone.

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A number of important aspects of Heidegger’s work become much clearer in the light of this reading, though the emphasis here is largely on the issue of space, or rather place.¹⁷Heidegger describes his Commentaries as having their place in the dialogue between thought [Denken] and poetry [ Dichten] (GA4, 7).

As is evident from his later work, he sees thought and poetry, thinkers and poets, as having a close and special relationship. Though Heidegger discusses other poets – George, Rilke, Trakl, Hebel – Ho¨lderlin is the only one he treats at such length, and the one in which he certainly takes the most interest.¹⁸

It would be amiss to neglect the political context of these lectures. Ho¨lderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ is one of the first courses delivered after the resignation from the Rectorship. All of the Ho¨lderlin lectures post-date the explicit political career, but they are all written by a card-carrying Nazi, as he remained in the Party until 1945. Various links become evident. The visit to Karl Lo¨with in Italy in 1936 was to deliver the lecture ‘Ho¨lderlin and the Essence of Poetry’, found in Commentaries, and criticized in the Hitler Youth magazine Wille und Macht (Will and Power ).¹⁹ As Lo¨with remarked to Karl Jaspers, ‘what the essential nature of this poetry has to do with the swastika is hard to see’. It seems that Lo¨with felt there was nothing in common, but on this trip Heidegger famously wore a swastika badge.²⁰We should also note that the publication of the first edition of Commentaries came on the heels of the publication of a Nazi edition of Ho¨lderlin for the troops on the front. Similarly Heidegger’s final lecture as full profess or in 1945 – before his ban from teaching under the Denazification laws – was on Ho¨lderlin.²¹Remarks in the lectures on Ho¨lderlin regularly mention the wider political events in Germany and the world. In these texts we must hear the distant roar of battle; we are forced to confront the political in the thought.

THE GERMANIA AND RHINE HYMNS

Heidegger’s first course looks at the hymn ‘Germania’, and, in its second half,

‘The Rhine’, one of Ho¨lderlin’s many hymns to rivers. Though Heidegger considers Ho¨lderlin’s poetry, he does not simply see him as a poet. Indeed he suggests that he ‘is one of our greatest, one of the most rich prospects as thinker , because he is our greatest poet ’ (GA39, 6). The engagement with the poetry opens up many avenues of thought. Right from the beginning of the course it is clear that Heidegger sees in Ho¨lderlin an understanding of being that avoids many of the modern pitfalls:

One considers Ho¨lderlin ‘historiographically’ and one is unaware of what is essential, the fact that his work – which has not yet found its time-space – has

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already overcome our historiographical fuss [ historisches Getue] and has founded the beginning of an-other history [ Geschichte], that history which starts with the struggle [ Kampf ] deciding the arrival or flight of the gods.

(GA39, 1)

This is, of course, the distinction suggested in Being and Time between history [Geschichte] and historiography [ Historie], parallel to that between experiential and clock-time. This is regularly emphasized in Heidegger’s reading of Ho¨lder-lin. Heidegger argues that the standard understandings of time are totally insufficient for mastering the poetically thought experience of time in Ho¨lderlin (GA39, 55ff). Such a critique is made clearer in the 1939 lecture on the poem

‘As on a holiday . . .’ Here, Heidegger focuses on the first line of the third strophe – ‘But now day breaks! [ Jetzt aber tagts! ]’. He suggests that the ‘Now’ is clearly Ho¨lderlin’s time, but that it needs to be understood in a different way to standard understandings of time: ‘Such a time can never be dated, and is never measurable in numbers of years or the division of centuries’. This time is historical not historiographical (GA4, 75– 6).²²

‘Germania’ is a hymn to the German homeland – Heidegger’s discussion therefore also looks at the spatial aspects of the poetry. Here too he finds the problem of relying on the modern understanding, in this case geography: ‘the earth of the homeland is not simply a space delimited by exterior frontiers, a natural region, a locality [ O¨ rtlichkeit ] destined to be a scene for this and that to take place. The earth which is the homeland is readied for the gods’ (GA39, 104). Later Heidegger warns against allowing this space to be thought of as a storeroom [ Abstellraum] (GA39, 108). What Heidegger is suggesting is that Ho¨lderlin’s poetry, and his conception of historical time and of the homeland are more poetic, more experiential, than those of modern metaphysics. This can be designated the lived: ‘The poet moulds something . . . which is “lived”

[erlebt ] in his interior and exterior world, a so-called “Experience” [ Erlebnis]’

(GA39, 26).²³

However, the attitude of Being and Time remains, as the passages on space are relatively rare, and the spatial characteristics of the homeland are not considered as important as the passages on historical fate [ Geschick]. Time and space need to be regarded differently, and there is a linking of these two characteristics – ‘neither place spatially [Ort ra¨umlich] nor time temporally [ Zeit zeitlich] understood in the habitual sense’ (GA39, 141) – but the hierarchical ranking still remains. Indeed, at one point Heidegger shows that he has not departed from the attitude of Being and Time , citing §§65ff as his exposure of the essential constitution of srcinary temporality (GA39, 109).

Such an attitude is, to an extent, amended in the second part of the course.²⁴ To make the transition, Heidegger asks what Ho¨lderlin means by the ‘waters of

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my homeland’ in line four of the ‘Germania’ hymn. He suggests that ordinary

my homeland’ in line four of the ‘Germania’ hymn. He suggests that ordinary