Heidegger's Beiträge
The single most important text for the relation between Heidegger's later position and his Nazism is a still little-known, recently published treatise composed in the period immediately following the rectorate: Contributions to Philosophy (On the Event) (Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis )). The Beiträge , one of Heidegger's most difficult but most important works, is a highly technical philosophical study, unlike the semipopular texts and lectures so far considered.
In turning to the Beiträge , we enter uncharted territory. The speech and the essay we have studied above are available in English translation; they are at least well known and often mentioned, and the speech although not the essay has often been discussed. Although the Hölderlin lectures are not yet translated, Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures are available in English; the worked-over German version has been in the bookstores for many years, and the original lectures are now being published. With the exception of a few colleagues who possessed copies of the original manuscript, the Beiträge is not well known, even to the large circle of Heidegger enthusiasts. It was published only in January 1989. It is at present untranslated, and is still rarely mentioned outside of the circle of Heidegger specialists.[1]
Any discussion of the Beiträge must face difficulties specific to this unfinished, difficult text. The Beiträge is the only major Heideggerian work that has not yet been discussed in detail in the enormous Heidego ger secondary literature. In writing about a work, especially one that is
not well known, there is a natural tendency to cite passages, in fact to cite with more than usual frequency, in order in this way to make the work available to the scholarly public. This is useful in order to acquaint the reader with this difficult, little-known text as much as possible in Heidegger's own words. Yet even to write about this work requires one to undertake the perilous effort, which cannot be successful, in Kant's words a vergeblich Versuch , to put into standard English or at least into English a treatise that is scarcely in German, at least as measured by standard German. We do not possess a standard philosophical vocabulary to render Heidegger's difficult terminology in this work, unusually difficult even by Heideggerian standards. The difficulty in presenting Heidegger's thought in the Beiträge begins with the crucial term "Ereignis, " the master word of Heidegger's later thought, which, in the absence of received practice, I shall arbitrarily translate here as "event."[2] Since there is as yet no translation of the work as a whole or even any agreed-on way to render key terms, the passages cited will be rendered in literal fashion, with closer attention to meaning than to English style.
Although Heidegger is never an easy thinker, the Beiträge is especially difficult to comprehend. It is as if Heidegger, who in the wake of Being and Time increasingly thought of himself as the most important thinker of modern times, perhaps since the pre-Socratics, were forced here, in the wake of the failure of the rectorate, to come to grips with himself and his philosophy in the midst of a Nazi Germany heading rapidly toward a world war. There is a sense of urgency and confusion in this text, a feeling of the embarrassment of thought before the present day and history, a palpable confusion, present in none of Heidegger's other writings. There is an existential dimension in this text, equally present in the rectoral address, but with none of the self-confidence, conceptual hubris, even overweening pride evident in the speech.
Important philosophical works resist easy summary. It is not possible to describe the Beiträge in simple fashion since the thought it contains is of extraordinary complexity. As this text has only recently been published, there is no standard, or even well-known, way to understand it, so that any reading literally has to forge its own route. In the absence of guidelines, or extensive prior discussion against which to react, with respect to the Beiträge this chapter will concern itself with two tasks: a general description of some main lines of this difficult text, as a sort of first effort to relate it to Heidegger's corpus, without which a more detailed discussion would be literally out of context;[3] and a more specific scrutiny of its connection to Heidegger's Nazism.
In view of its recent appearance, it is both easy and difficult to write about this text. It is easy to do so since the Beiträge has only recently
appeared. Accordingly, there is almost no discussion that needs to be taken into account. It is for that reason also difficult to write about, since there is no well-traveled path to follow; and, with a single exception, there is not even a well-developed view of the precise relation of this work to the question of Heidegger's Nazism. In order to prepare for an analysis of the link of this book to National Socialism, it will be useful to provide some general remarks about the treatise.
The text of the book was handwritten by Heidegger during the period 1936-1938 and transcribed by his brother, Fritz Heidegger, in typewritten form.[4] The original manuscript, which was compared by Heidegger with the typescript prepared by his brother, is described by the editor as consisting of 933 handwritten pages, mainly of the size known as DIN A5.[5] It appeared for the first time in 1989, in the year of Heidegger's hundredth anniversary, as volume 65 of his collected works, in a version edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.[6] The whole is divided into eight parts and 281 numbered paragraphs of uneven length.
The Beiträge is obviously unfinished.[7] Although much of the work is rather polished, even complete, there are numerous passages that lack final form. These include discussions embedded within other discussions, and even "sentences" that lack verbs.[8] The terminology is particularly laborious: many words are written in hyphenated form, presumably in order to indicate their etymologies; Being is no longer written as Sein but now appears as Seyn , and Dasein occurs as Dasein; and there are numerous neologisms that render translation even more perilous than usual.[9] The reading is unusually difficult, even by Heideggerian standards. Although the parts of the book cohere internally, they do not form a single whole, and the overall line of argument is difficult to determine.
Little about the published book is clear, perhaps including the proper ordering of its parts. In a handwritten note, dated 8 May 1939, Heideg-ger complains that the discussion of Being, the second part of the typewritten manuscript, is not at its proper place and indicates that his manuscript requires another revision.[10] The editor reports that he placed the discussion titled "Das Seyn," at the end of the published version.[11] He justifies this decision through the remark that Heidegger renumbered the pages in such a way as to suggest this reordering of the manuscript. But a revision is more than a change in the numbering of the pages or the ordering of the parts of the work which Heidegger carried out. It is an open question whether a finished, or even a further-revised, manuscript would have presented its constituent elements in the same or a different order.
In part because the book has so recently been published, there is little literature and even little agreement about it. Pöggeler—for many years,
one of the few to have a manuscript of the text—has always believed that it is Heidegger's Hauptwerk .[12] ` This opinion was quickly contested by others after the work appeared. In response to Pöggeler, Alexander Schwan characterizes the Beiträge as Heidegger's second great philosophical work.[13] He insists that it refutes Farias's thesis that Heidegger remained a convinced National Socialist.[14] For Schwan, the Beiträge indicates a clear withdrawal from the interrelation of philosophy and politics in 1933.[15] Schwan maintains that the Beiträge does not lead to a criticism of National Socialism but to a renunciation of practice.[16] Von Herrmann, who takes a weaker line, describes the Beiträge as merely one of Heidegger's main works.[17] Vietta regards this book as Heidegger's most important Hauptwerk after Being and Time , a view that continues to give primacy to the early study of fundamental ontology.[18] He makes extensive use of this text to examine what he describes as Heidegger's critique of National Socialism and technology.[19] More recently, Pöggeler has insisted that the Beiträge presents a sharp critique of National Socialism, as well as liberalism and Bolshevism.[20] Thomä states without elaboration that the Beiträge continues Heidegger's critique of Nazism as it exists.[21] On the contrary, Tertulian maintains that in the Beiträge Heidegger manipulates the history of ontology in order to conceal fascist political goals.[22]
Obviously, this book is not only a key document in Heidegger's position; it is also a key document for a grasp of Heidegger's comprehension of Nazism after the rectorate. For this reason, the Beiträge is itself caught up in the political struggle now under way. It opposes defenders of Heidegger's life and thought, who for generations have resisted full access to the Heidegger Archives and sought to prevent the appearance of damaging material, and those who are less concerned to defend Hei-degger than to uncover the truth. This political struggle concerns the Beiträge in three ways. First, and most obviously, there is the scholarly interpretation of the text itself, the kind of hermeneutical struggle that occurs in any learned enterprise. Second, there is the prior problem of the establishment of the text, the object of interpretation, the determination of what is available for scrutiny. It is, then, a matter of some concern that a question has been raised about the completeness of the present published version of this text.[23] It is fair to say that the text we now have is probably incomplete, and we do not know what has been omitted from it. Obviously, it is important to have a full version of the text on which to base an informed judgment, and just as obviously, that is probably not the case at present. Third, there is the present struggle, unusual in scholarly circles, recently under way between those who control the ongoing edition of Heidegger's collected writings in German and the American publishers to find a translator acceptable to both parties to
render this text into English. In view of the political stakes, and the history of Heidegger scholarship, in which even noted scholars are frequently personally implicated in sustaining a particular interpretation, one can anticipate efforts to control even the wording of politically sensitive passages in the English translation.