Heidegger: The Question

The Rectorate, the Black Notebooks, and the verdict

A course on the thought of Martin Heidegger.

What you will learn

• Know the basic record of 1933-34: the rectorate, party membership, the rectoral address.
• Grasp why Heidegger embraced the moment — not mere careerism, but a being-historical hope he read into it.
• Understand the history-of-being narrative (first beginning to machination) as the framework driving Heidegger's politics.
• Grasp 'spiritual' vs 'vulgar' National Socialism — and how the narrative both engaged him and held him apart.
• Read the actual antisemitic passages and identify the three forms Trawny names (calculation, the principle of race, world Judaism).
• Hold the distinction firmly: a critique of machination has reasons; identifying it with 'the Jews' is the conspiracy myth, the contamination — no warrant at all.
• Understand Trawny's concept of 'contamination' and the task of delimitation.
• Weigh the nadir passages (the wartime 'self-annihilation' / 'best blood' logic) and decide how far the poison spreads.

Course outline

1. The Rectorate — In 1933 Heidegger became rector of Freiburg, joined the Nazi party, and lent his voice to the regime. Not opportunism alone — he saw in the upheaval a chance for the "other beginning." That is what…
2. The Being-Historical Narrative — The engine of the whole affair. Heidegger read all of history as the unfolding of Being's forgetting — Greeks to machination — with the Germans as the people who might begin again. This story drew…
3. The Black Notebooks — The hardest module. In his private notebooks of 1938-41 Heidegger wrote antisemitism directly into the history of Being. We read the actual passages — Jews as calculation, as the principle of race…
4. How Far Does It Reach? — Trawny's central question: the antisemitism is real, but is it a few contained pages or does it seep through the thinking? We read the wartime nadir — and weigh "contamination" against both the…
5. The Verdict: Separability and Silence — Being and Time was finished in 1927, before the rectorate and the notebooks. Can it be read apart from what came after? We weigh the strongest case for separation against the Husserl break and the…

Works read in this course

• The Black Notebooks (Ponderings and Remarks) — Heidegger's private philosophical notebooks, 1931 onward (published from 2014). The Ponderings of 1938-41 (GA95-96) contain the being-historical antisemitism; he ordered them published last, as the capstone of his collected works.
• The Self-Assertion of the German University — The rectoral address of May 1933, Heidegger's inaugural speech as rector of Freiburg — the public face of his Nazi engagement.
• Introduction to Metaphysics — The 1935 lecture course, with its line about the 'inner truth and greatness' of National Socialism — and the bracketed clause whose date became a scandal.
• Bremen Lectures — The 1949 lectures on technology, including the sentence equating mechanized agriculture with the manufacture of corpses in the extermination camps.
• 'Only a God Can Save Us' — The 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published at his death in 1976 — his fullest and most evasive postwar self-account.
• Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy — The scholarly study (2014) that named 'being-historical antisemitism' and framed the question of contamination this course follows.

Part of the Simposeum course library.