Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: The ≫Self‑Annihilation≪ of the Philosopher’s Legacy?

Abstract

The Black Notebooks [Schwarze Hefte] are personal notebooks that Heidegger wrote from the beginning of the 1930s to the end of the war. The first notebook has been lost, but transcripts of the next fourteen, which originated in the decade 1931–1941, were published in 2014 in three consecutive volumes of the philosopher’s Gesamtausgabe (more recently, further notebooks up to 1970 have been published). Their publication triggered a new wave of public polemics about his Nazism and anti-Semitism. This paper evaluates Heidegger’s multistage and multilayered relationship to Judaism and National Socialism, and the most prominent modern interpretations of that relationship, especially in light of the Black Notebooks. Among such readings, some of the most profound and lucid are those of the editor of the German edition of the Notebooks, Peter Trawny, and the Spanish philosopher Jesus Adrian Escudero. Many early reactions to the first publication of the notebooks were characterized by a combative outrage that was not supported by serious study and understanding of the material in question. This paper studies the reasons why that initial, sensationalist reaction stimulated precisely the opposite effect from what might be expected: Instead of jeopardizing Heidegger’s well-established place in the Western philosophical canon, the controversies of 2014 triggered a kind of renaissance of interest in his life and work.

Keywords

• martin heidegger
• black notebooks
• nazism
• anti-semitism
• peter trawny
• jesus adrian escudero