He cares for being taking care of things for their thingingiii. Heidegger thinks that this statement “speaks of man’s dwelling. For Heidegger, between building and dwelling there is an essential relationship. The god, however, is unknown and he is the measure nonetheless. For Heidegger, dwelling rests on poetic creation. This site uses cookies. “only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” (Heidegger, 1971: 160). Dissection of Martin Heidegger's 'Building Dwelling Thinking,' through which the. The link took me to a list of excel spread sheet timetables with what I.
If I had to rate the best intellectual experiences of my life, choosing the two or three most profound—a tendentious task, but there you are—one of them would be reading Heidegger. I was in my late twenties, and struggling with a dissertation on the nature of consciousness (what it is, where it comes from, how it fits into the material world). This had turned out to be an impossible subject. Everything I read succeeded only by narrowing the world, imagining it to be either a material or a spiritual place—never both.Then, in the course of a year, I read Heidegger’s 1927 masterwork, “Being and Time,” along with “The Essence of Truth,” a book based on a series of lectures that Heidegger gave in 1932. It was as if, having been trapped on the ground floor of a building, I had found an express elevator to the roof, from which I could see the stars. Heidegger had developed his own way of describing the nature of human existence.
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It wasn’t religious, and it wasn’t scientific; it got its arms around everything, from rocks to the soul. Instead of subjects and objects, Heidegger wanted to talk about “beings.” The world, he argued, is full of beings—numbers, oceans, mountains, animals—but human beings are the only ones who care about what it means to be themselves. (A human being, he writes, is the “entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue.”) This gives us depth. Mountains might outlast us, but they can’t out-be us.
For Heidegger, human being was an activity, with its own unique qualities, for which he had invented names: thrownness, fallenness, projection. These words, for him, captured the way that we try, amidst the flow of time, to “take a stand” on what it means to exist. (Thus the title: “Being and Time.”).
In “The Essence of Truth,” meanwhile, Heidegger proposed a different and, to my mind, a more realistic idea of truth than any I’d encountered before. He believed that, before you could know the truth about things, you had to care about them. Caring comes first, because it’s caring about things that “unconceals” them in your day-to-day life, so that they can be known about. If you don’t care about things, they stay “hidden”—and, because there are limits to our care, to be alive is “to be surrounded by the hidden.” (A century’s worth of intellectual history has flowed from this insight: that caring and not caring about things has a history, and that this history shapes our thinking.) This is a humble way to think about truth. It acknowledges that, while we claim to “know” about a lot of things intellectually, we usually seek and know the deeper truth about only a few. Put another way: truth is as much about what we allow ourselves to experience as it is about what we know.
When I read Heidegger’s books, I “knew”—but didn’t particularly care—that he had been a Nazi. (He joined the party in 1933, the year after giving the lectures behind “The Essence of Truth.”) I was so fascinated by his philosophy that his Nazism stayed “hidden”; though his ideas felt vivid and present, his biography belonged to the past.
But, over the past few months, not caring has become more difficult. That’s largely because of a philosophy professor named Peter Trawny, who has begun publishing some of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic writings. Trawny is the director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, in Germany, and the editor of Heidegger’s “black notebooks,” some of which were published for the first time this spring.
(Heidegger wrote in the small, black-covered notebooks for nearly forty years—publishing them all could take decades.)It’s always been safe to assume that Heidegger, being a Nazi, was also an anti-Semite (though not necessarily a “virulent” one, whatever that term might mean). But, as my colleague Richard Brody a few weeks ago, the passages reveal a particularly unsettling kind of anti-Semitism—one which hasn’t been fully visible before. They show that, even as Heidegger held the most banal and ignorant anti-Semitic beliefs (he wrote about a worldwide conspiracy of “calculating” Jews “unfurling its influence”), he also tried to formulate a special, philosophical, and even Heideggerian kind of anti-Semitism. (Jews, he writes, are “uprooted from Being-in-the World”—that is, incapable of authentically caring and knowing.) The passages, some of which were written during the Second World War, account for only a few pages out of more than a thousand.
But they have alarmed and disgusted Heideggerians because they show that Heidegger himself had no trouble using his own philosophy for anti-Semitic ends. Philosophy has a math-like quality: it’s not just a vocabulary, but a system. A failure in one part of the system can suggest a failure everywhere. And so, earlier this year, in a book called “Heidegger and the Myth of Jewish World Conspiracy,” Trawny asked the inevitable question: could Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole be “contaminated” by Nazism? Berkowitz, who served as moderator, started things off by reading passages from the black notebooks. One began: “The Jews, with their marked gift for calculating, live, already for the longest time, according to the principle of race, which is why they are resisting its consistent application with utmost violence.” When Berkowitz finished, it was quiet enough to hear traffic on the Bowery. Then, slowly, the professors, along with members of the audience, tried to talk about what Heidegger had written.
No one knew what to say; the conversation was halting and desultory. After a while, the group paused for wine and crackers—the glummest cocktail hour ever. (Later, an enraged audience member found his words, and responded to the passage by saying, “That sentence strikes me as somehow so deranged, so alien to a sense of the real. Anyone who is capable of that sort of argument cannot be trusted to think.” A few people—by no means everyone—applauded.). Trawny was unmoved by the idea of discretion; instead, he wanted to double down and talk it all out in public.
“There’s a point where we have to say, ‘No, no, this is a point we cannot contextualize anymore,’ ” he said. “There is a responsibility to say, ‘It’s impossible—Heidegger, you cannot say that! Even if you are the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, this is over the limit.’ ” At the same time, he saw a way out for Heidegger in one of the philosopher’s own concepts, “errancy”—the idea that human beings are not calculators, but conjecturers, and that being wrong is, therefore, an irreducible part of being a person. (In “The Essence of Truth,” Heidegger wrote that “the errancy through which human beings stray is not something that, as it were, extends alongside them like a ditch into which they occasionally stumble; rather, errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the existence into which historical human beings are admitted.”) Trawny continued, “He knew, at the end of his life, what was written in these notebooks. He was aware of the problems.
But he couldn’t take the pen and wipe it out. He tries to show us how deeply a philosopher can fail. I don’t know whether this interpretation is strong, but I hope so—that this could be possible.” (As to the question of “contamination,” Trawny said that he regretted, somewhat, the choice of that metaphor. It may have been “too strong.”). On the whole, I find myself agreeing with Trawny. It’s impossible to disavow Heidegger’s thinking: it is too useful, and too influential, to be marginalized.
(A few weeks ago, when I pulled “The Essence of Truth” down from my bookshelves, I found it as compelling as I had a decade ago.) But it’s also impossible to set aside Heidegger’s sins—and they cannot help but reduce the ardency with which his readers relate to him. Philosophers like to play it cool, but the truth is that intellectual life depends on passion. You don’t spend years working your way through “Being and Time” because you’re idly interested. You do it because you think that, by reading it, you might learn something precious and indispensable. The black notebooks, however seriously you take them, are a betrayal of that ardency. They make it harder to care about—and, therefore, to really know—Heidegger’s ideas. Even if his philosophy isn’t contaminated by Nazism, our relationship with him is.“The problem is not just that I’m morally shocked—it’s also a problem that he is so dumb,” Trawny said, as the evening drew to a close.
“Observe what he is writing there. You see that, like all the others, he was not better. You thought it, actually; for long years, you thought he was very clever, but he is not. This is something that requires a certain distance,” he concluded.
“You shouldn’t be too much in love with what you are reading, or you will be disappointed, like always.”Above: Martin Heidegger, circa 1950.