Freedom to Fail E-Book

Peter Trawny

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 106

Beschreibung

Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work.

Leseprobe

First published in German as Irrnisfuge. Heideggers An-archie, © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin, Germany, 2014.

The German edition came into being upon the initiative of Sylvie Crossmann of Indigène éditions, the publishing house of Stéphane Hessel's Time for Outrage! (Indignez-vous!), and appeared concurrently with the French edition.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2015

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9522-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9523-5 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9526-6 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9525-9 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Translators' introduction

There are several noteworthy German terms and their cognates that present difficulties for the English translator, beginning with the original German title of Trawny's book, Irrnisfuge or “Errancy-fugue.”1Irrnis is a rare German word that we have always translated as “errancy.” As Heidegger employs it, it refers to an originary site of error, rather than to a particular error. When Irre is used in this way, as in Heidegger's “On the Essence of Truth,” it too is rendered as “errancy.” When it is used in a more particular sense, it is rendered as “error.” Irrtum, for its part, is always rendered as “error.” Other related words include abirren, in die Irre gehen, and verirren (“to go astray”), Abirrung and Verirrung (“aberration”), durchirren (“to wander through”), irren (“to err,” “to be lead astray”), Irrfahrt (“odyssey”), irrig and irrend (“errant”), and Irrweg (“errant path”).

The German term Fuge can for its part mean both “fugue” (in the musical sense) and “conjuncture.” We have translated this term mostly as “conjuncture” or “joint,” though occasionally as “fugue,” when, for example, Trawny appears to be alluding to Paul Celan's poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”).2 Other related terms and phrases include aus den Fugen (“out of joint”), Gefüge (“conjoined structure”), fügen (“to join,” “to structure”), and sich fügen (“to comply”).

In several of Heidegger's texts cited by Trawny, Heidegger employs an archaic spelling of the German Sein (“to be”), writing it with a “y” rather than with an “i,” thus as Seyn. Fortunately, an archaic variant of the English word “being” also used to be written with a “y,” enabling us (without recourse to neologism) to translate Seyn as “beyng.” The modern spelling Sein has been translated as “being” and its nominalized participle das Seiende as “beings.”

Ereignis, another Heideggerian term d'art, has confounded translators for decades. While, in everyday German, it just means “event,” Heidegger often employs it with other valences in mind, such as those of appropriation or bringing something into its own, into what is proper (eigen) to it. We have therefore decided to retain both senses by translating it as “appropriative event.” Its verbal form (sich ereignen), however, has been rendered simply as “to eventuate,” although the resonance of appropriation should also be borne in mind.

Finally, unless otherwise indicated, Anfang and anfänglich have been rendered as “inception” and “inceptual,” respectively, since in this text they typically have a deeper sense than the start or beginning of anything whatsoever. Beginn has been rendered as “beginning.”

When Trawny cites a German translation of a non-German text, we have, except in the case of Imre Kertész's A gondolatnyi csend, amíg a kivégzőosztag újratölt (“A Breath-long Silence, While the Fire Squad is Reloading Their Guns”), consulted the original and either provided an existing English translation, or translated the passage from the original ourselves, as with Jean-Luc Nancy's La pensée dérobée. In such cases, reference to the German translation has been omitted. Where Trawny cites a text originally written in German, we have included Trawny's reference to the German edition and provided a reference to an English translation as well, when one exists. Unless otherwise indicated, we have also used the existing English translations in such cases. When no English edition is specified, it means the translation is our own.

Translators' notes and interpolations in the footnotes and the body of the text have been put in square brackets.

We would like to thank Sean Kirkland for encouraging us to take on the translation, as well as Will McNeill for his helpful suggestions concerning a few tricky terms, and especially for his dedication to teaching and translation. Without the countless hours he devoted to helping us improve our German and translation skills, we would not have been able to undertake seriously, let alone complete, this translation.

Notes

1

Irrnisfuge: Heideggers An-archie

(Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014).

2

English translations include

Poems of Paul Celan

, rev. and expanded edn, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 2002), 31;

and

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan

, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 31.

“Much is monstrous. But nothing / More monstrous than man.” Friedrich Hölderlin, translation of the first stasimon of the chorus of Theban elders from Sophocles’ Antigone.3

“Beyng itself is ‘tragic.’ ” Martin Heidegger, “Überlegungen XI.”

“In this poem, I have sought to bring the monstrousness of the gassings to language.” Paul Celan on “Death Fugue.”

Note

3

Hölderlin's Sophocles: Oedipus & Antigone

, trans. David Constantine (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2001), 81 [trans. mod.].

Freedom to fail: Heidegger's anarchy

The significance of the publication of the Überlegungen [“Considerations”], of the so-called Schwarze Hefte [“Black Notebooks”], as Heidegger himself referred to them, is still open. Yet they have shown more clearly than everything published previously by him that what he writes in 1961 at the beginning of his Nietzsche about the latter – namely, that “the name of the thinker stands as the title for thematter of his thinking” – holds also for Heidegger himself: “The matter, the point in question, is itself a confrontation.”4 Heidegger – the name stands for the matter of this thinker, a matter which was always already held to be objectionable, but now with the publication of the Überlegungen has become an unavoidable point in question – an unavoidable point in question for anyone who would like to encounter Heidegger's thinking.

Heidegger has no philosophy, no doctrine, that could become the model for an academic school. He once said that himself: “I have no label for my philosophy – and not indeed because I do not have my own philosophy.”5 The assumption that there is a Heideggerian philosophy presupposes that it is a fabricated product, that it can appear as an object, in the form of a book or a collected edition [Gesamtausgabe]. Yet he gave the right indication with the motto of his Gesamtausgabe: “Paths – not works.”6 The thinker's writings are open attempts. Even the most finished products like Being and Time remained incomplete.

This can be seen in his biography as well. When Being and Time appeared, Heidegger was 38 years old. Nietzsche reached this age having already worked on the first part of Zarathustra. At 38, Schelling's time of publications was already behind him. The thought that in Heidegger's philosophy it was a matter of “paths – not works” is no contrivance, but a fitting self-interpretation. One can learn from Heidegger that philosophy is a philosophizing, always rather a questioning than an answering.

The paths that Heidegger's thinking took are obscure. Ernst Jünger, who was not especially interested in philosophy, once characterized the “forest” as “Heidegger's home”: “There he is at home – on untrodden ways, on timber tracks.”7 The paths of thinking led to what is uncertain,8 into the wild, even into danger. When, in his lecture “On the Essence of Truth” – that turning point in philosophy at the beginning of the 1930s – he explains how “errancy” also belongs to the appropriative event of truth, he hit upon the character of his thinking best of all.

To be “at home” “on untrodden ways” – it is probable that Jünger intentionally brought closely together what is incongruous. Did Heidegger in his thinking want to be at home in the unfamiliar? Assuming this were so: could one explain on the basis of this that it almost irredeemably ended up not only on “timber tracks [Holzwege],” but was at times also led astray [auf Abwege]? Did not this thinking also move in domains in which there was hardly anything left to think? In which Heidegger in his way ventured to say what need not have been said? Is there a limit to what is to be said, to what ought to be said?

The limit, which must be asked about after the publication of the Überlegungen, is not that of the unsayable. Heidegger was familiar with this limit. He thought about it with words that are unique in the twentieth century. Yet it is not a matter of this limit. It is a matter rather of the limit that “separates [scheidet]” good from evil; “separating into good and evil,” which belongs to the “difference [Unterschied]” and the “decision [Entscheidung].”9 Should, indeed can, thinking ignore this limit? Should thinking conduct itself with neutrality regarding this limit, acknowledge evil because it belongs to being? Is not Nietzsche the master of all those who have ventured it and continue to do so? Was he Heidegger's master?

Jünger might be right to emphasize the friction between the home and the untrodden in Heidegger's thinking. Here the catastrophe begins, which the thinker recognized in, indeed as, modernity. And was it not especially he, he who occasionally depicted the home so unsentimentally that something threatening also or precisely in its provincial character was revealed – was it not he who was able to experience the alienations of the twentieth century? It seems obvious that this could be explained dialectically. Yet we have in the meantime come to learn that the whole is more complex. We not only have seen that and how the “planet” stood “in flames” and “the essence of the human” was “out of joint.”10 We also see how thinking is convulsed in its joints and complies with this convulsion.

Thought traverses “the errancy-fugue of the clearing.”11 “Errancy-fugue,” a sonorous word, a singular discovery, without allusion.12 “Errancy,” the place or, better, placelessness of error, a landscape of placelessness, an a-topography, which appears as a “fugue” or “conjuncture” [Fuge