Response to G. Fried on the Black Notebooks

This is not on migration but it is on Heidegger, and I did say I would post my personal publications on this blog. I was recently selected to reply to G. Fried's article on the publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks and so I'd like to share my response (to be published online in the LA Review of Books. Link coming soon).
You can find Fried's article here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks

Learning From Heidegger

Andrea Martinez

We do not always get the opportunity to radically question the importance of the work of a ground-breaking philosopher such as Heidegger. We normally understand and accept their relevance in terms of the insight they have provided regarding reality, human existence, ethics, knowledge, etc. The papers that are published in journals on foundational philosophers usually debate issues of interpretation, of aspects of their writings about which we are still in the dark.  Very rarely does anyone dare to question the absolute value of such thinkers. We are now once again presented with the question—as we have been for some time--of what to do regarding Heidegger and his legacy. The publication of the “Black Notebooks” has raised the question whether we should revise altogether the uttermost relevance that Heidegger has had for over half a century.

I consider this to be a great opportunity.

Fried’s essay has already shed light onto the de-contextualization of some of the quotes from the “Black Notebooks” that surfaced in different blogs and articles in order to “demonize” more than to clarify Heidegger’s attitude towards Judaism. However, in his conclusion, he points toward the assumptions implicit in our judgment of Heidegger. What lies behind our questioning of Heidegger’s value as a philosopher? Who do we want to be as we answer the question?  Are there totems, timeless truths, absolute values that can guide our questioning? And finally, what can we learn from Heidegger’s mistakes? Heidegger once spoke of the need for a crisis in the sciences in order to bring about “a radical revision” of their concepts (Being and Time, 1962). We could apply the same logic to his philosophy because it allows us to question not only his reasons for supporting the National Socialists, but also to ask why we are so altered by this question.  What does the question say about ourselves as readers, thinkers, and consumers of philosophy?

Instead of blacklisting Heidegger from the philosophy syllabus, let’s try to understand why he allowed himself to be so “easily” seduced by Nazi ideology. The question of Heidegger’s value and of his legacy should be asked alongside the teaching of his texts, yet it should be a question asked amongst others, such as his conception of the motherland, and his approach to technology and machination. However, it should not be addressed, as some seem to recommend (see Emmanuel Faye´s The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, 2005), as the defining character of his philosophy. Heidegger’s work continues to be relevant to our contemporary society insofar as it continues to ask the uncomfortable question of who we are, and how we shape the world (and vice versa) through our being.

Fried suggests that we take Heidegger’s National Socialism as a negative response to the question of being, and points at the possibility of learning from Heidegger’s mistake. For Fried, Heidegger was too optimistic regarding an “utterly other” inception of our time and along the way he made generalizing judgments about Jews. This formed a part of the “uprooting” from history and home that he considered quintessential to understanding ourselves. Yet, our times have revealed that these categorizations continue to blur their own boundaries.

In a number of his texts, Heidegger, despite his condemning words towards Judaism, works to offer a way of thinking the relationship between different perspectives in terms of understanding each other through common existential issues, and not through difference alone. Heidegger helps us to think about everything from the question of how to be authentic in our modern world to the way we inhabit and relate to our homes and our history. It is this Heidegger who can illuminate paths of mutual understanding, reaching beyond his own mistakes and revealing that the value of his legacy is not merely a problematic historical one. Polarization regarding his work will remain, but those poles will continue to be valuable so long as there is someone asking these questions in the lecture hall. Neglecting such poles seems to indicate that there is a definite answer to our question, and thus fails to question the question itself, by continuing to understand our judgments as timeless truths and diluting the possibility of asking if this really is who we want to be.