©1994, Thought House Publishing Group

Joyful Wisdom: A Journal For POSTMODERN ETHICS Volume 1, Number 1, 1994

The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic Omega:

Heidegger's Anti-Semitism and the Inner Affinity

Between Germany and Greece

Babette E. Babich

At the extreme limit of suffering [Leiden: pathos] nothing indeed remains but the conditions of time or space. At this moment, the man forgets himself because he is entirely within the moment; the God forgets himself because he is nothing but time; and both are unfaithful. Time because at such a moment it undergoes a categoric change and beginning and end simply no longer rhyme within it; man because, at this moment, he has to follow the categorical turning away and that thus, as a consequence, he can simply no longer be as he was in the beginning.

Introduction

In what follows, I discuss the rhetoric of equivocation, that is, the logical ambiguity that advances the causes of the politics of suspicion in the case of Heidegger's Nazism, his anti-Semitism, his silence. The equivocation is between Heidegger's Nazism (that is, his party membership) and Heidegger's Nazism (that is: his anti-Semitism). The first assertion concerns Heidegger's political affiliation with Nazism and the matter of Heidegger's biographical fact as the first Nazi Rector of the University of Freiburg and Nazi party member until the end of World War II, that is, as a party member up until such an affiliation ceased to have any meaning. One can argue that these facts of Heidegger's own life imply the second general and effective sense of Nazism as an expression of anti-Semitism: Heidegger's Nazism thus tacitly condoning the sense of the party line against Jews to the extreme of the mass murder of six million Jews, the Holocaust which resulted, following precisely from that same "party line." Heidegger's political Nazism, his party affiliation, redounds to his affective Nazism: his anti-Semitism.

Working neither to validate nor to invalidate such an argument in its possible expression (the points mentioned above outline but do not articulate such an argument), the functioning of equivocation as a rhetorical figure sidesteps argument altogether. In this discussion, I am not seeking to make formal, logical, or any other points against such a rhetorical campaign. Rather I seek to identify the workings of such rhetoric in what is said about Heidegger's Nazism. This is not to say that a formal analysis

could not be offered only that to date such an analysis has not been offered just because such a formal argument or proof is not necessary where what is at stake is persuasion on the matter of Heidegger's (political) persuasion and his (political) persuasiveness. All in all, an ethical issue in the realm of logic, a domain traditionally ruled by rhetoric.

On another rhetorical level, Heidegger's silence on Nazism (and anti-Semitism) is the literal and metaphorical enthymeme for the same kind of ethical judgment concerning political and affective orientation. An enthymeme, when it is not defined as a Ciceronian rhetorical figure ending in two contraries, is the logical description of a syllogism consisting of only two propositions, that is, a syllogism in which one premise is suppressed. Thus one may conclude, as important contemporary thinkers have already argued, that the connection between Heidegger and National Socialism is not only racist but impenitent, pernicious evil. In this way, the connection between Heidegger and Nazism not only renders the man morally culpable but his philosophy morally corrupt and, where the turns of argument move fast and easy in enthematic connection, it also renders the study of his philosophy morally corrupting. Secondarily then, it is necessary to consider Heidegger's silence as itself constituting the enthymeme legitimating the suspicions of Farías and almost all of Heidegger's recent commentators, right and left, on this point. These commentators do not suppress what Heidegger simply does not say. A logical or rhetorical figure is not necessarily telic. But by Heidegger's silence he gives voice to his guilt, precisely because anything said is also impotent before the tribunal of right. In the end I seek to indicate but not to prove, where, once again, all arguments directed to this question are inherently enthematic, the philosophical relevance of the discussion of Heidegger's Nazism and the suspicion of his anti-Semitism and conviction of racism, to philosophy and what, appropriating Hölderlin here, may be called the extreme limit of suffering.

because the man is what is under attack, is suspect, and because in the case of Heidegger, who spoke no less than if also subsequent to Nietzsche against the strictures of school logic, hithertofore one had not been permitted to name the person where the question to be thought was being, the task of thinking itself. Thus the case of Heidegger so called has released a tender flood of personal reminiscences, retributions, and restitutional accountings of Heidegger's personality and spirit -- all rather more than less at the expense of his philosophy. There is a hint, a suspicion of scholarly Schadenfreude in all of this. If, in the past commentators have supposed that for the sake of rigour, Heidegger would have liked to have it said of his life as he said of Aristotle's -- he was born, he worked, he died -- they are no longer bound by this restriction.

The upshot of this "Vermenschlichung" of Martin Heidegger -- "The Man" foregrounding and backgrounding "The Thinker" -- now allows access to the matter of Heidegger's guilt: the substance, or the question -- in the best Heideggerian sense -- of Heidegger's philosophy, but without the effective person of Heidegger or the stuff of thinking getting in the way. Just how this works we may be able to see below.

But let me emphasise here that the major issue to be discussed is not a matter of what is philosophically relevant or not. What follows is not a discussion of points of philosophy as such. Quite the opposite. Indeed, the rhetorical question of Heidegger's Nazism does not connect Heidegger with a complex historical phemomenon which specialists are fond of discussing with reference to particular years -- the years in question being 1927, the date of publication of Being and Time and the efforts, for or against, to see Nazi connections or preconditions in that text, 1929, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1944, and of course, 1945, all have special value for historically minded specialists, for Lebensphilosophen, for philosophers with one axe or another to grind, etc. These technical details, important as they are for academic specialists are not important on the common, the public, the average level. What is important are colloquial images and personal associations, that is, what is important are the equivocal details.¹ And it is this rhetorical level that is effective in drawing general attention to the political fortunes of a philosopher (where presidential candidates and moviestars have more selling appeal) just because as Heidegger would say, we are (academics included) proximally and for the most part [zunächst und zumeist] common and average (a typification Heidegger with uncommon restraint -- or else with uncanny kindness -- named uneigentlich, that is: inauthentic, not truly our own, not truly what we are, except, and this exception turns the claim around again, in what is closest to us and most ordinary in us). And with the best philosophic interest in the world, one informed by Heidegger's own

anthropological or hermeneutic concessions to the connections between biography and philosophy we turn to the level of the individual, the man Heidegger, just because unlike Socrates, to recall one reader's analysis, Heidegger was just Swabian (or Allemanic or German) enough to be reticent about himself and not like a Mediterranean type, not at all like the people Ted Kisiel characterizes as the "loquacious" Greeks. For Kisiel, a former engineer and currently a philosophy professor from Illinois, seeking an answer to the question of Heidegger's silence we are "left to eavesdrop on the private record which [Heidegger] graciously left behind. Even Heidegger's intimacies now belong to the world."²

But what is the meaning of such a suggestion, betraying the rehabilitation of approaches traditionally damned in philosophic discourse, namely that of the argument(um) ad hominem, a rehabilitation now effected to excess in the bibliography growing and proliferating into subsections and research specialties of such a personal history used as a pernicious rhetorical device? At the very least the results of such an effort are embarrassing.

Thus in an equally embarrassing connection, it is important to note that in the USA when one speaks of Nazism one refers, more or less, apart from generally unfavourable characterizations of the German as such, quite single mindedly to the Holocaust and nothing else but the Holocaust. In this quasi- Aristotelian association, the Nazi history of Germany is the history of the holocaust, which it surely is if it is not, and this is the pernicious advantage of an enthymeme, only that. To say from an American perspective that Heidegger was a Nazi, to marshal -- with Victor Farías and others writing exposées conducted in the same spirit -- all manner of details showing the permanence and depth of Heidegger's Nazi commitment, convicts in one move, this one premise leads to the conclusion against Heidegger: finding him guilty of every bit of the biological racism in its most virulent form, that is again, of the radical anti-Semitism that lead to the instauration, the still consequent execution and ongoing results, that constitute the meaning, the fact of the Holocaust. This association occurs against the intentions of even Heidegger's most extreme opponents.³

What is problematic here is the rhetorical twist, a kind of metaphorical swerve, or clinamen in the scheme of argumentative cause and effect. To be a Nazi as Heidegger was is to stand for, in causal and necessary connection, to be a representation, of absolute evil, the diabolical, sheer horror, as claimed by more than one commentator on the matter. But, at the same time, and this is the luxury of equivocation, trading on one term to mean something else also signified by the same term -- one need not actually maintain that Heidegger, in his own person, was actually evil. Or then again, one can. In any case one now knows what this kind of evil looks

like: it writes Sein und Zeit and Zeit und Sein; speaks of Ereignis and Gelassenheit, quotes Heraclitus, claims an essential connection between its own philosophy and a poet known to be mad, has a personal history of neurasthenia and general gutlessness, and holds in just this connection, mysticism can go so far, that thinking and poetry are the same.

Silence: Heidegger's Racist Humanism and The Name of the Jews

Simply by speaking of "Heidegger's silence" I can be heard to speak -- to be speaking -- of Heidegger's anti-Semitism. The focus of the above rhetorical association means that Heidegger's silence concerns what he did not express and this the question of anti-Semitism, for in almost every other connection with his Nazism, Heidegger did indeed, more or less, express himself.⁴ The culpable silence here is Heidegger's "calculated silence" (using George Steiner's expression) on the matter of the crimes of Nazism. The silence in question names what can be taken for anti-Semitism even if we had no other evidence, and we do have other evidence. Heidegger's silence refers to his failure⁵ to denounce the murder of the Jews, in a complete and sufficient or satisfactory fashion, which murder, which crime is the most resistant, ultimate facticity of the Holocaust. For all who write and think on this point it must be remembered again and again that those who attempt to write on this topic are very nearly without words for it. If any constellation of events shows the singular violence of a word of naming it is the naming of the kind of thing the Holocaust was. One may not call the Holocaust a tragedy, or a sacrifice, or a crime or employ any other qualifying nomination simply because what was done exceeds naming and must be acknowledged as it exceeds, is in positive negativity plus quam: exceedingly violent and horrifying, the more than merely diabolical act of all the very many -- and there are indeed very, very many, -- horrifying brutalities of this century, crowning 3000 years or so of Western civilization, that is to say, if we begin with the Greeks.

And we do begin with the Greeks, for the problem of anti-Semitism is also the problem of the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens. With Christianity, the problem is Latinized, Romanicized to the conflict between duties to Ceasar and duties to God or what we in the US are fond of discussing as the separation between Church and State, but note that even here the opposition is the same. If Heidegger repudiates the translation of Greek into Latin, it is because Heidegger together with a longer German tradition, historically and most notably, the Romantics, who are nevertheless according to one account, absolved as guiltless in this connection simply by virtue of their earlier birth,⁶ find a special linguistic and spiritual affinity

between German and Greek. Hence if Heidegger claims, as he does in the Spiegel interview, in reference to his thinking's "essential connection" with Hölderlin, that the Germans have special world-historical task, his point is that this task is mediated by "the special inner relationship between the German language and the Greeks."⁷

Heidegger assumes then that we begin as his thinking most primordially begins with the Greeks. Tom Rockmore, whose anti-Heideggerian credentials are patent, writes that if "there is no reason to believe that Heidegger shared the Nazi race hatred of the Jews ... there is evidence in his writing that he believed in the ... racial superiority, of the Germans, as well as the intrinsic philosophical superiority of the German language."⁸ This conviction yields what is for Rockmore the ultimate sense of Heidegger's Nazism: "the concern to realize the historical destiny of the German people."⁹

What is problematic here is the implicit barb, the intended and effective slight to be heard in the claim of the "inner affinity" between German and Greek just where ancient Greece continues to have the preeminence it does have in Western culture, as a reserve uttered against all other peoples and languages within the same Western, Greek heritage.¹⁰ One would have to be half-deaf in heart and spirit not to hear the implicit condescension and insult in Heidegger's pronouncement of impossibility of philosophizing in languages that are not Greek or German.¹¹ The contest between Athens and Jerusalem is given a different tone, a different resonance -- to be heard in the Nietzschean contrast that may be made between thumos and chutzpah (although, obviously enough, these were not Nietzsche's words). With all his Germanness and his claims for Greek affinities, Heidegger is best characterized by the latter -- and that merits further attention. Thus as Rudolf Augstein puts it, the boldest assault against speakers and thinkers of other languages was explicit in the claim Heidegger made during his interview with Der Spiegel, "Just as little as one can translate a poem can one translate a thought."¹² Supplying a fuller context to Heidegger's statements,¹³ and in the process paralleling Heidegger's alethiology in quasi-juridical fashion,¹⁴ Augstein points out that from the start Heidegger's articulation of the pride of German place in language and the house of Being, is a veritable coup against the French (if also against the English, the Italians, and of course, to Heidegger's everlasting pain, having insulted that "certain" Victor Farías, against the Spanish).

It is of course significant that to these terms and on these terms even the French surrender not only in fact but as a fact that Heidegger takes to full account. In the house not of Being but philosophy, as practiced under the "continental" rubric, that is between contemporary <break>

As a reflection on this point, it is worth remembering what we have heard not merely from Nietzsche or even Schopenhauer, but in this same connection, from Freud and the subsequent psychoanalytic tradition that it is part of the thinking of innocents and victims, part of the psychology of violation that offense is rarely rebuked as such but swallowed. The primordial transference yields the complicity between trauma and the psycho-pathology that in repression constitutes the everyday -- that is, that tells us who we are, proximally and for the most part. It is the negative word, the word of abuse that tells us our own names. One becomes a victim simply by receiving an insult, where one quite literally -- this is the assault of naming -- has no other choice than to take the abusive word at its word. This efficacy of the negative word against the individual works coming and going. And to protest an insult confirms the full force of the slight. We are reminded once again of the irrecusable violence of the name. It is not only Heidegger who cannot by any number of uttered (or unuttered as we see) words defuse the charges made against him, but no Jew, no Black, no woman, no abused child,¹⁷ has the power to refuse an insult, to defuse a characterization, a name, or to deflect a hand raised in suspicion against what is suspected. There is no defense against being, against being called a Jew. Nietzsche has shown us that even the positive becomes its inverse when the claim of being what one is rather than something else is held against one. Thus strength, thus the expression of strength becomes a weakness: what is becomes a defect in being. And this for Heidegger is the essential violence of logos, the word.

But let us be clear here, just to keep to the rhetorical track. Heidegger's philosophy includes, exactly as Rainer Marten has categorized it, in a frequently cited article, "A Racist Conception of Humanity."¹⁸ Elsewhere Marten details, with both balance and passion, a discussion of the issue in question. For Marten it is not a matter of prejudice, but what he calls in a deliberate reductive reference to Jacques Derrida, as well as perhaps unconsciously to a rather local, even specifically provincial German sense, "Heideggers Geist." What Farías's book makes possible renders, as mentioned at the start, Heidegger discussable,¹⁹ as a philosopher in the spirit <break>

of philosophy. If the atmosphere of Heidegger studies was previously one of trans-human reverence, this circumstance no longer obtains. "Heideggerians" are now prepared to take their revenge upon and self-declared anti-Heideggerians their own sweet way with the father.

But what this means is not a season of openness but here where the fall season coming upon us is also the hunting season, an "open season" on Heidegger and those who read his work. What this means in a scientific age, the era of technicity, of techno-complicity -- if one may coin a word here where so many words have been coined -- is that it is ranged under the opposite sign, the sign of regress and indeed of religion. Thus so-called "Heideggerians" have been and will continue to be -- if one may predict -- attacked and abused in a postmodern but still scientific age by the explicit use of quasi-religious terms. To this effect, Heidegger is named "the Master," Heidegger's philosophy "Dogma," or "Dogmatics," his "followers" "devotees," "acolytes," or quite simply "the faithful." The religiously inclined (the Catholic) or the mystical (here we have the proof of the catholicity of scientific anti-religious prejudice) is per se ideological, fanatical, capable of anything and in this then not properly philosophic. This is the rhetorical use of enthymeme and with it we are quite nearly landed back where we started with the traditional analytic philosophic suspicion against Heidegger's philosophy proper. The positivistic ghost of Carnap could not be more if more perversely vindicated.

It must be noted that there is surely an hagiographic tendency among Heidegger scholars, if it is unclear that such hiagiography is missing in studies of Nietzsche or among Rilke or Hölderlin enthusiasts.²⁰ But one denounces the literal consequences of that sanctity in Heidegger's case, namely his mysticisn and of course, this is the point of the attack: his opposition to technology and science. It is this opposition which as two social science critics observe, Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Wolin, one a sociologist and the other a political theorist, pits Heidegger against the average person. According to this review, Heidegger is nothing but an elitist mandarin, expressing the privileges and values of the priest at the expense of the ordinary, the average man. After all, the average, common person is no one else but the one who stands to benefit in whatever dimension from the speciously, intellectually maligned advances of modern technology. Technology makes life better for the common man, just as the Enlightenment ideal has always promised. Thus Luc Ferry and Alain Renault decry Heidegger's anti-humanism as making possible at once both "the return of the nationalistic myth and the fanatical hatred of modernity."²¹

Technology is not the problem as Marten sees it. Instead, the problem is the egregious absence of protest, of protestantism, anti-clericalism, anti-papism, here to be heard as dissonance or dissidence: what one had in the case of Heidegger was nothing like the case of Wagner -- still on the musical index in Israel -- rather one had an "unconditional and fervent for, without a corresponding against."²² Thus Heidegger could "complain not of opposition but much rather ignorance." Dogma once again. But for Marten the telling consequence here and now will be that at last "the recollected Heidegger case can no longer be handled by way of the to and fro of explicit clarification and inarticulate obfuscation with regard to 'Heidegger, the human being,' but places a question mark after his philosophy instead."²³ It is this question that leads to the issue of racism and thereby to anti-Semitism as such. The issue for Marten is that already named: the connection between Germany and Greece. The fact that Heidegger's spirit is "primordially Greek," means for Marten what it signifies for other philologically sensitive readers. To say that Greek and German may be counted as a single spiritual race is -- using the deliberately militant language of Nicholas Rand, an American commentator on the same theme -- to retroactively "annex" a people's (however dead) language. Rand goes further than Marten here and notes, without blinking, that once having seen the future of one's illusions, the resultant philosophical thought must be entirely renounced as "infused with an ideology linked to the impenitent perpetration of evil."²⁴ Whether protesting or dogmatic Catholic, it would seem that the religious impulse remains the same.

Marten for his part suggests that in the claim made, from Heidegger's historical perspective and time, that "the Greek spirit is at home simply and solely in German blood and on German soil,"²⁵ a certain violence is done to the Greeks as such. We have seen that more crucially, more significantly, violence is also done to those who no matter how much they may second the deed are excluded from this common heritage. For philological sensitivities, the problem is the same as it ever was: Heidegger is in error. Hence the connections Marten finds are typically tendentious ones, and not just in subtle ways -- for Marten "What is at stake is major and basic: it concerns the central concepts and positions of the Greek doctrine of being."²⁶ It is hardly necessary to note that the remedy -- more rather than less preoccupation with or study of Greek,²⁷ -- is one that might have been taken from Heidegger.

And in all the general conclusion to be drawn is the one claimed by Heidegger: that we are not yet thinking. And we are indeed not yet thinking, at least not enough, not to the point, not to the philosophy, the philosopher in question. For the issue remains unposed before its. We fail,

as ever in Heidegger's regard, to think or to question so long as we fail to pose the question in the proper way. And what belongs to thought, or to questioning Heidegger here?

There are two rhetorical tacks to the equivocal question of the relation between Heidegger, the man and the thinker. The first stylistic approach -- and for all his ferocity and thickness vis-a-vis Heidegger's thought, Habermas takes this tack -- separates the thought from the thinker, the thinker from the thought, and the sinner and the sin in a move common to both Catholic and Protestant but not, let it be noted, to the Greek, allowing us to condemn the one and embrace, or even love the other. It is remarkable once more that this tack is not the other, the second interpretive turn, sophisticated readers other than Habermas or philologists who flatter the innocence of the same sophisticated readers, are given to take after Heidegger. For what Heidegger taught more than anything else is not, as Heribert Boeder has claimed as a point of perplexity -- to read Aristotle for ten years ---- or, in other apocrypha, to read Lotze's Logik (this according to Georg Picht) -- but as Hannah Arendt could enthuse, "to think." What Heidegger taught his students to do, despite the philologists' fury at the audacity implied by this inversion, made attentive, reflective thinking on a text primary for, made it the preparation for careful, resonant reading.

To read Heidegger is not to read a philosophy of Nazism or anything else but it is to read philosophically. What we have to learn from Heidegger in the phenomenological tradition after Husserl is a dedication to thinking. To prepare for thinking in this way is no matter of mere reading but a task to be undertaken, a doing which must, as it is thought, undertake, or as Nietzsche taught in another sense, overtake us. In this way Heidegger took seriously Nietzsche's own injunction that "thinking has to be learned in the way that dancing has to be learned" just as much as "reading" is to be practiced as an art. In all Heidegger read Nietzsche and took him seriously as a philosopher.²⁸ From Heidegger too, following the hermeneutic turn, one read Freud, one read Marx, one read Kierkegaard, one read Schopenhauer and even Wittgenstein and found cause to confirm Nietzsche's subterranean strategies in the genealogy of reason, the morality, the grammar of science and philosophy. Not merely desire continues to speak in the name of the logos but power, ambiguity, and fear.²⁹ What we have from Heidegger is a complex legacy, one addressed only with comparable complexity.

In the present context, to advert to the ineluctability of ambiguity admits -- in Reiner Schürmann's expression accuses -- as Nietzsche charges us to see, that it is a compound lie to pretend that all truths are simple. Here the problem does continue to be, in the spirit of Heidegger, again, not

a matter of opposition or disagreement but still understanding. And of all the many expressions on this topic, Schürmann's efforts to limn the original meaning of ambivalence -- the Real as Lacan has it -- speaking of the bifrontal essence of technology and Western Culture and the ethical meaning for life of triple binds, a tracking of subtle turns to trace one's way to the heart of Heidegger's question and to the old tradition of the question, the love of sophia, wisdom, and the importance of the thinker's, that is, of one's own journey in thought, seem to this one reader to go the best way in this unmasterable direction.

But that said, focusing on the exigence of understanding, we may not forget what it means to understand differently. Our questions to Heidegger's philosophy, to the topics of his questioning, to his affirmations, to his collaboration, our suspicions raised against his silence, his commission, where we note that he gives consent by silence to a crime at the extreme of expression, beyond image and against reason in its most perfect expression. Heidegger's complicity with this crime of abyssal, abysmal, cataclysmal, horribly sublime proportions inaugurated the terms on which this thinking must acquit itself or stand the threat to be quitted. This is the threat behind the question Löwith began to pose and seconded by Adorno, and raised now with far greater venom and vengeance: "Why read Heidegger?" The greatest evil, we say, perpetuated here once again by refusing to name the Jews, that people singled out now not by God but by evil itself, by what was done, and what thereby is perpetually done against the Jews. As I write this, this is to be said in the wake of Yom Kippur, the subsiding awe of the Day of Atonement. It is this thought of the horror and the consequences of anti-Semitism that sets the stakes for thinking from now on. For as Sandor Gilman writes, "This is not the age of 'post-modernism,' it is the post-Holocaust age."30

Speaking of the Jews, as Heidegger did not, Heidegger's racism embraces rather more than the violence done to an ambivalently, complicatedly, nuancedly magnificent people, that is the Greeks -- as articulated in Marten's catalog of the ambivalent meaning of Greek culture -- by the assertion that the German captures the spirit the Greeks themselves failed to master and forgot, so that in the predictable formula here: German becomes for Heidegger more Greek than Greek itself. The problem of nuance and complexity is that the thinker is thereby permitted, following his star, to forget the gross and rude matter at hand. I would repeat, we would repeat: Heidegger failed to express significant sensitivity, horror, pain, remorse; Heidegger failed to confess responsibility for and complicity with the Nazi programme of exterminating Jews, the murder of the Jews. It is this last awful fact that weighs on us, that gives the equivocal force to the expression of Heidegger's Nazism, as the ultimate meaning of anti-Semitism today. We are not merely talking about Heidegger's "racist" conception of humanity.

With the claim that thinking is possible only in the language of ancient Greece (and in German as Nächstverwandte), one closes off the words for counting certain events as happenings, as things that matter. Turns of expression, cliches, idioms, phraseologies all speak in the hermeneutical space and play of a language. Whether one follows Gadamer, Quine, or Wittgenstein here, the hermeneutic, the experience, the game of learning a language confirms that to learn a language is to learn to catch, to learn to see or to hear what is cast forth by the play of words. To learn Greek then is to learn to catch this same glimmering playing of a phrase, of what is spoken in what can be, what is said by this one in that time and that place. For a Sophocles is not a Plato in word or in the constellation of words offered and the difference in expression bespeaks more than the difference between tragedy and philosophic literature but a different resonant efficacy, where the time in which both styles "flourish" is roughly the same fifth and fourth (if not sixth) century Athens. What Heidegger, what Hölderlin, what Goethe and what Milton saw first reading the Greeks is an intimation of a way of being that can be made to speak and in speaking to us be restored as a possibility for us to know and in knowing to share. This flash of recognition, the vestige of humanism, subjective primacy at its best or worst, betrays a "special linguistic and spiritual affinity" not only for the German student of Greek but the English student of Greek (or German). For something hike this occurs in every apt scholar of another language and culture just as Nietzsche saw it occurring between cultures of genius. The nature of an affinity is not a given: it is no "second-nature" as such and from the start.

Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic Omega," p. 14

It is important to question the nature of these "dragon's teeth," that is, to question the meaning of the autochthonous as such and the meaning of related or affine being, to question those who have an affinity with the original, share the same, the autochthonous essence? This is the question of the relation in Heidegger's word of Germany and Greece. Nietzsche saw "genius" as the resonant capacity which alone and in the end expresses the meaning of affinity. For Nietzsche speaking about "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks," "nothing would be sillier than to claim an autochthonous development for the Greeks. On the contrary they invariably absorbed other cultures. The very reason they got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it."³² Such skill in time "art of fruitful learning" is the key to affinity. It is this that constitutes genius -- like the spirit which lists where it will and is no where limited.

The question of interpretive affinity can only be raised in a liminal way and not elaborated here. But we have seen enough to suggest that a "special spiritual and linguistic" affinity cannot be a given but must be learned. The need to learn recalls Nietzsche's warning precisely, if perhaps all too appositely here, on the matter of "What the Germans Lack." The question for Nietzsche as he posed it both at the beginning and in the end of his reflections on culture, turns on the matter of hearing, seen again as if for the first the. "[O]ne has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write." Learning to see is for Nietzsche, the philologist, the disciplinarian and advocate of careful reading, the hardest of all, requiring one to habituate oneself to a veritable epoche in the best Husserlian and scientific sense -- even where Nietzsche names this the "first preliminary schooling in spirituality": "habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it, learning to defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects."³³ Such an eye for details or subtlety is perhaps a "listening" or attuned eye, an eye that would be able to see and to hear.

If we would condemn Heidegger it cannot be for his silence where, as the path of another inquiry would show, silence, the still point between

Heidegger and Nazism: Philosophy and Tragedy

I have not sought to prove or disprove Heidegger's Nazism. As Jürgen Habermas's own word has it: "Martin Heidegger? Nazi, sicher ein Nazi!"³⁵ And Heidegger himself, in his interview with Der Spiegel, expressly acknowledges his then conviction of "the 'greatness and magnificence' of Hitler as Chancellor of the Reich,"³⁶ a judgment which easily parallels the infamous passage where Heidegger declares that the works "peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement."³⁷ I have suggested that the effect of acknowledging what one has done, giving the deed a name naming oneself as the doer, as responsible ultimately legitimates, recognizes the past and so naming it, sanctions it, defuses its violence, admits it into presence as what was done. This naming, this setting into language, this failure of failure, of the breaking of the word is, we remember, for Heidegger and in the same classic text: the purest heart of violence. The prime rhetorical effect of linking Heidegger and Nazism, as such and as Farías has done, yields guilt by association much on the order of Gilbert Ryle's reported laconic and very British, very analytic statement uttered in 1960: "Heidegger. Can't be a good philosopher. Wasn't a good man."³⁸ Citing this comment from a journalistic review of the Heidegger problem, Robert Bernasconi, in an article elliptically and titularly quoting Levinas, goes on to repeat Jean-Francois Lyotard's point: "One should not seek to neutralize the intrinsic inequality of this affair by regulating it through its alternative: if a great thinker, then not a Nazi; if a Nazi, then not a great thinker -- the implication being: either negligible Nazism or negligible thought."³⁹ But as Lyotard hastens to remind us, it is not merely Heidegger who is on trial here. The rhetorical English put on the questions puts us, we ourselves, "we" -- to use Nietzsche's pronoun as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe likes to use it in <break>

Lacoue-Labarthe, in an appendix to the English translation of La fiction du politique, Heidegger, Art and Politics, offers an abject illustration of the impossibility of articulating the demand to express the meaning of Nazism -- in spite of his best efforts, where he seeks to express the impossibility of his own expression, and is thereby condemned to condemn himself. It is this neutralizing distinction that is deeply problematic and not just in the directions not quite given voice by Lyotard. For when one begins as we do, as we all tirelessly seek to show that we do begin, from a position of revulsion, a perspective of condemnation, by recognizing, acknowledging, and denying Nazism for what it was and must be, in all that caused it and all that steadily results from it as its constant effect, we find ourselves on the track not of the diabolical but the repressed. We are thereby condemned to the repetition here and elsewhere, to the compulsion to name Nazism as Lacoue-Labarthe does "an absolutely vile phenomenon both in its goals and its result -- without question the most grave -- by a long way -- that the West has known (i.e., that it has produced.)"⁴⁰ We could analyze the character of this qualification and others like it as the necessary anacoluthon, nay the very series of breaths and hesitations and indirections required to purchase the space for a near consent (a la Levinas) to horror or again (with Levinas) for a sanctioned transaction with the diabolical.

The limits of the present essay do not permit m to trace the essentially philosophic implications of this question to the anacoluthon that is only a blind aposiopesis, an admonishing hesitation that stumbles in its stammering refusal. But I must say that such breaths are far from the caesura, the "pure word" to speak with Hölderlin of a "counter-rhythmic interruption" of a null or turning point of balance and decay so that what appears, what conies to stand in appearance is finally "representation itself."41 The key to Schurmann's discussion of law, of Heidegger's awful privileging of the No, the mortal and god-awful height of the meaning of Heidegger's utterance that higher than actuality stands possibility -- like William J. Richardson's deep concern with the nature of die Irre -- is found in Hölderlin's titling expression of a fragment from Pindar, as The Law [Das Gesetz]. We do not need Lacan's strictures on the meaning of law, or Adorno's discussion of mimesis in turn, to understand the dynamic between the imaginary of reflective phantasy and the symbolic of mastery and denial to understand Hölderlin's expression of the Law of finitude: "'The immediate as impossible for both mortals and immortals ... But rigorous mediateness [Mittelbarkeit] is the law.'"

Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic Omega," p. 17

Conclusion

By questioning the virtue of our expectations and our questions, one might in the end underline something of Heidegger's own special integrity, his consuming preoccupation with philosophy. For it is not in the end a fascination with a "word-tinker of the first order"⁴² that draws one to Heidegger, not at least, not I would hope, among philosophers. What is compelling instead is the realization, as almost all of Heidegger's students have confirmed and that a reader's encounter with his works can still offer, that here one has to do with what it is that thinkers think about, what there is, what calls for thinking. And what is to be thought can be called Being -- it can be called truth-- it can be called the tragic essence of the event or law -- it can be called destiny -- but it always speaks to the reader as a thinker as that which is given, as mine, to be.

The political scientist, Richard Wolin, in a recent study that baldly states its ambitions to be nothing less than "an immanent philosophical analysis"of Heidegger's "political thought as such,"⁴³ traces what he will call Heidegger's decisionism to "the unabashedly elitist motifs that inform the existential analytic" and adds somewhat gratuitously that the "de facto separation of human natures into authentic and inauthentic is radically undemocratic."⁴⁴ For Wolin, as an extension of the consequent "politics of authenticity," to use his term here: "authentic Dasein alone, as a type of existential 'elect,' can endow a thoroughly rationalized and disenchanted cosmos with renewed greatness. If authentic Dasein is to lead, inauthentic Dasein must follow."⁴⁵ This is, at the very least, a very flawed reading of Heidegger's position, but Pierre Bourdieu also subscribes to it (if Wolin does not simply follow Bourdieu) and hence it must be compelling enough to deserve some concluding mention here.

Wolin's reading can be easily corrected with recourse to the text in question, a return to Sein und Zeit. Obviously we cannot here review that text at any length. But briefly, we recall that in reference to the "Full Existential Conception of Death," if we are told that "inauthenticity rests on the possibility of authenticity"⁴⁶ we also recall that authentic Being-one's-self is "an existentielle modification of the 'they' as an essential existentiale."⁴⁷ With this expression of the "they," Heidegger invokes a proximal and primordial inauthenticity without negative, because without excluding, elitist undertones. Heidegger does not separate human types into authentic and inauthentic natures, in an undemocratic or in any other political fashion because such a distinction is foreign to his analysis. By such talk, that is, proximally and for the most part, Heidegger speaks of all of us, as we are in our nearest and dearest way of being human. For "authentic Dasein to lead" then, it is not necessary, as Wolin suggests, that "inauthentic Dasein must follow" but >

rather that Aristophanes' jesting myth in Plato's Symposium be invoked to split not humanity but the human being, this time into two unequal halves: one great inauthentic part and one authentic sliver. This is deliberate buffoonery in Aristophanes but inevitably -- for such is the force of the moral turn -- as Wolin interprets Heidegger, it is in earnest.

Beyond such biased interpretation, so effective in the equivocal way I have here sought to explain, the turn to the personal, to the man as the thinker, recalls the anthropology and history, psychology and genealogy of concepts and reference characterizing a casual expression of hermeneutic phenomenology as existentialism. With this one asks as Heidegger does at the start of his Introduction to Metaphysics "Why are there beings rather than nothing?" ⁴⁸ That is, why is there what is at all, or better still, the one who is, rather than not-being, rather than the higher possibility of nothing? This high question is the question of possibility as such, of what is mine to be, and the question of my ownmost never-to-be-outstripped possibility, and that is again to say: the tragic essence of being. This is the height of suffering, once grasped as a law, even if the law transgressed is -- to the point at which Hölderlin broke off in his reflection on punishment and law -- unknown to me. Thus Heidegger ends by observing "the true problem is what we do not know and what insofar as we know it authentically, namely as a problem, we know only questioningly."⁴⁹

1. In this connection, the exchange between a Farías-forerunner, as it were, Paul Hühnerfeld and Heidegger is illuminating. Heidegger, in a typically professorial, intellectual expression of smugness and distance refused to cooperate with Hühnerfeld's request for biographical information, saying that his life was "totally uninteresting." Bitterly angered, Hühnerfeld d responded with a book published at his own expense, Im Sachen Heidegger: Versuch über ein deutsches Genie. (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1959). Guido Schneeberger's later Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Suhr, 1962), is better known. For Heidegger's account of his correspondence with and reaction to Hühnerfeld , see Heinrich Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen. Begegnungen und Gespräche mit Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976 (Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag, 1983), pp. 9 and 91.

2. Theodore Kisiel, "Heidegger's Apology: Biography as Philosophy and Ideology," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, XIV:2-XV:1; 1991, p. 398.

3. There is the minor exception of Farías himself but his slanderous views on this point, intending to attribute every kind of guilt to Heidegger, have been sacrificed or better tacitly ignored as the sheer thatness or there thereness of his book has been lionized. Warts and all, the Farías thesis stands on the philosophical best-seller list and if Farías has not as a result been transformed into a philosopher as such, with a book polished via a storm of publishing and editorial support invented for the purpose, Farías has become a known name, an author, an authority and that is close enough in the academic world. See too Note 19 below.

4. This now notorious silence was a silence in connection not with the well-publicised Rektoratsrede (Heidegger himself oversaw the publication of that text and referred to it both at the post-war "clean-up" hearings, and indirectly in other texts as well as directly in a 1945 reflection, "Facts and Thoughts" published by his son in 1983, timed either to memorialize the 50^th anniversary of the rectorial address itself, or else as Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore suggest in their introduction to the English language edition of Farías's Heidegger and Nazism, Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, "Foreword," V. Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, tr. P. Burrell, et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. xi, "possibly... to coincide" with the anniversary of Hitler's rise to power) nor does it concern the sheer fact of Heidegger's being named rector, and thus the fact of his collaboration as such with, National Socialism (this too Heidegger himself discussed, referring to it not only through the patent and notoriously unaltered references in Einführung in die Metaphysik but also in the posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel).

5. Though one must ask what could count as "satisfactory" where the stakes in question are increased with every decade that sees the issue of Heidegger's political involvement emerge once again, and there have already been a number of such decades.

6. Cf. Nicholas Rand, "The Political Truth of Heidegger's 'Logos': Hiding in Translation." MLA 436-447. For Rand it is unavoidably self-evident that "The Romantics' imperious exaltation of emergent nationhood and their claim to a prestigious cultural past (by way of Greece, Christian, and the medieval tradition) differ from Heidegger's attempt to establish German as the measure of what is authentic in ancient Greek. Cultural patriotism and chauvinism are not to be conf used with the retroactive annexation of a people's linguistic heritage." The contemporaneity of Heidegger's essay is crucial here. "Had the same commentary been written by an early nineteenth-century Romantic -- for example Hölderlin -- its political significance would be vastly different from what it is six years after the end of World War II." p. 445, emphasis added. Apart from the prima facie difficulty of delimiting such an anachronistic claim, the fact that not all commentators are as scrupulous in distinguishing the temporality of effects is evident in the recent trend to find responsible connections between not only Nietzsche's thinking and the Nazi reception of that thought but also Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Hölderlin (despite Heidegger's recent popularity) and so on.

7. Heidegger, "die besondere innere Verwandtschaft der deutschen Sprache mit der Sprache der Griechen und ihrem Denken." "Spiegel-Gespräch," p.107 in Antwort. Martin Heidegger im Gespräch. Günther Neske und E. Ketterinig, Hrsg. (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1988). English: Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers. G. Neske & E. Kettering, eds., (New York: Paragon House, 1990).

8. Tom Rockmore "On Heidegger and National Socialism: A Triple Turn?" in The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal XIV:2-XV:1 1991.

9. Rockmore, ibid.

10. Heidegger writes in Hölderlin Hymne "Der Ister," Gesamtausgabe 53 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984), "Tell me what you think about translation and I will tell you who you are."

11. The idea of German as a superior language, the concept of the destiny of Germany, is not innocent -- not where the American Germanist (and self-described "Ost-Jude"), Sander Gilman can find a flyer circulating at an upstate New York and Ivy League university challenging the "facts of" and "proofs for" the Holocaust to be no more than the latest instantiation, of the "long (and constant) association of the study of the German, with the ingrained anti-Semitism present within German and American society." Sander Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 16.

12. Heidegger, "So wenig, wie man Gedichte übersetzen kann, kann man ein Denken übersetzen." "Das Spiegel-Interview," Antwort, p. 108. Cited by Augstein, p. 189.

13. Augstein furnishes what Heidegger specifically admits with the fuller context of the putatively unsaid. Thus, for one illuminating example in a suggestive series, Augstein repeats the query concerning the strain in Heidegger's relations with Jaspers because Jaspers' wife was Jewish and with Heidegger's assertion that Jaspers sent him all his publications with warm greetings, but adds "however that from 1937 from Jaspers received no acknowledgment from Heidegger." [Sein Verhältnis zu Jaspers getrubt? Vielleicht wegen dessen jüdische Frau? Jaspers hat ihm seine Veröffentlichunge zwischen 1934 und 1938 alle mit herzlichen Grüssen zugeschickt. Nur Jaspers bekamm vom 1937 an keine Antwort mehr von Heidegger.] Augstein, "Aber bitte nicht philosophieren" in Die Heidegger Kontroverse, p. 194.

14. At the very least such a casual und literal tour de force proves if nothing else that Augstein has more than outgrown his youthful fear of the "famous thinker" -- on Heinrich Petzet's report. See Petzet, "Nachdenkliches zum Spiegel-Gespräch" in Antwort. Neske & Kettering, hgg., p. 11f. "Afterthoughts on the Spiegel-Interview," Martin Heidegger and National Socialism., p. 67f.

15. For Augstein, Heidegger "influenced French thought like no other, a mystagogue of the word" [ hat französisches Denken beinflusst wie kein anderer, ein Mystagoge des Wortes.] Augstein, "Aber bitte nicht philosophieren," p. 188.

16. Heidegger, "Das bestätigen mir heute immer wieder die Franzosen. Wenn sie zu denken anfangen, sprechen sie deutsch; sie versichern, sie kämmen mit ihrer Sprache nicht durch."Antwort, p. 107-108.

17. And please remember here who it is who is found to be at fault, and at fault from the very beginning -- for this is the force of Masson's neglected charge in Freud's own essay on the subject of the abused, the "beaten" child.

18. Rainer Marten, "Ein rassistisches Konzept von Humanität." Badische Zeitung. December 19-20, 1987.

19. Once again we may seek to refrain from rehearsing an account of its excesses or its factual errors, If we are not allowed as Marten is also not permitted to dispense with a reference to the complementary, ameliorating, journeyman work of Hugo Ott. Thus one commentator notes of Farías's book that "it only appeared in the 'original' Spanish and German after the 'original' French edition, and then only in re~written form. If ever there has been a book that wrote itself in public and corrected itself with the help of its translators while en route to its original it is this book." Dennis Schmidt, "Changing the Subject: Heidegger, 'the' National and the Epochal." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Vol. 14, No. 2 -- Vol 15, No 1, 1991. Footnote 34.

20. It would seem that quasi-worshiping reverence can be detected at every level in the university where a residual clericalism belongs to the academic way of life.

21. Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, Heidegger and Modernity, tr. F. Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 108.

22. "ein bedingungloses und heisses Dafür, ohne entsprechendes Dagegen." Rainer Marten, "Heideggers Geist" In Die Heidegger Kontroverse, J. Altwegg, Hrsg. (Athenaeum: Frankfurt am Main, 1988,) p, 226. And below, "So beklagte sich Heidegger auch weniger über Gegnerschaft als vielmehr über Ignoranz." For Marten this will be one ironic sense of Seinsvergessenheit, the oblivion or ignorance of Being as the failure to properly receive the word, from Heidegger.

23. "Der wiedererinnerte Fall Heidegger lässt sich nicht mehr durch das Hin und Her redlicher Erhellungen und unredlicher Verdunklungen des 'Menschen Heidegger' behandeln. sondern setzt ein Fragezeichnen hi miter seine Philosophie." Marten, p. 226.

24. See Rand, p. 445, citation: p. 446.

25. "ist der griechische Geist einzig und allein im deutschen Blut und auf der deutschen Erde daheim." Marten, p. 228.

26. "Es geht um Grosses und Grobes: um die zentralen Begriffe und Positionien griechischer Seinslehre" Marten, p. 229.

27. Marten observes "Andernfalls hatte ihm Sappho am Ende geistig dazu verführt, über menschliches Lieben ein Wort mehr zu sagen als dies, dass es ein Mögen sei, und Aischylos, dem Hassen der Fremden eine dem Lieben der Eigenen korrespondiere, machtstabilisierende Funktion zuzutrauen: "Und auch hassen eines Sinns/Das ist's, was viel Leid dem Menschen heilt." ("Eumeniden" v. 986f.)." p. 228.

28. Thus it is not insignificant that by time grace of the Heidegger case as such, the older case of Nietzsche, thought to have been effectively chloroformed by the deficient manipulations of a Princeton professor has been given new life. By the case of Nietzsche, we mean not the continuing and yearly ever more ecstatic volumes exposing his homosexuality or his hypochondria, but rather the case of Nietzsche and fascism: his totalitarian politics, his elitism, his biologism, his ideology of the Will to Power, redone to be sure by his sister but demanding hardly anything of her maligned imagination for the purpose -- all this muck is back in style.

29. Cf. Dennis Schmidt's assessment of modernity: "'Thinking was called upon to face its own certain uncertainty and confess that it could never free itself from desires."

30. Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other, p. 17.

31. "Geschichte [ist nicht] ... ein Speicher nebeneinander aufgeschichteter Produkte des Geschehens und Leitens, Geschichte ist unauflöslich weitergestaltende Kraft des Menschen. ...Geschichte ist nichtTrennung, sondern Einigung, nicht Auflösung. sondern Band, nicht blosser Verlauf, sondern unsterbliche Wirkung, die Fuge im Goethes grossem Wort. Die Einigung aber, das ist ihre Tradition durch die Rezeption ihrer Kulturgestalten." Ludwig Curtis, "Morphologie der antiken Kunst," Logos IX.2 1920/21:195- 221; p. 217. Curtis's style (characteristic of reviews of the time) is bombastic, he tends to be overwhelmed by the great minds of his time (kindly disposed towards Troeltsch, chiding his life-antipode in Riegl) and today most readers would so concur with his judgment of Spengler as to find it overstated. Nonetheless his expression of Wirkungsgeschichte as "Einigung" is worth recalling here.

32. In his early essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche writes"Nichts ist thörichter als dem Griechen eine autochthone Bildung nachzusagen, sie haben vielmehr alle bei anderen Volkern lebende Bildung in sich eingezogen, sie kammen gerade deshalb so weit, weil sie es verstanden in den Speer von dort weiter za schleudern, wo ihn ein anderes Volk liegen liess. Sie sind bewunderungswürdig in der Kunst, fruchtbar zu lernen." Die Philosophie im tragischem Zeitalter der Griechen. KSA 1, p. 806.

33. As Nietzsche reminds us in Twilight of the Idols, "Man hat sehen zu lernen, man hat denken zu lernen, man hat sprechen und schreiben zu lernen .... dem Auge die Ruhe, die Geduld, das Ansichheranikommen-lassen angewöhnen ... Das ist die erste Vorschulung zur Geistig keit." "Was dem Deutschen abgeht," 6 Götzen-Dämmerung.

34. Nietzsche, "die Entscheidung aussetzen k ö n n e n." Ibid.

35. "Ein Gespräch mit Jürgen Habermas," in Die Heidegger Kontroverse, pp. 172-175.

36. Heidegger, "The Spiegel Interview," p. 44.

37. [Was heute vollends als Philosophie des Nationalsozialismus herumgeboten wird, aber mit der inneren Wahrheit und Grösse dieser Bewegung nicht das Geringste zu tun hat] Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1953,1976) p. 152. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) p. 199.

38. The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12. Cited by Robert Bernasconi, "Habermas and Arendt on the Philosopher's 'Error': Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14:2/15:1, 1991. p.4.

39. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Heidegger et "les juifs", Paris: Galilee, 1989, p. 90; Heidegger and "the jews," trans. A. Michel and M. S. Roberts, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 52. Cited by Robert Bernasconi, "Habermas and Arendt 0n the Philosopher's 'Error': Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14:2/15:1, 1991. p. 4.

40. Lacoue-Labarthe, "Victor Farías's Heidegger et le Nazism." in Heidegger. Art and Politics, trans. C.Turner, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 127.

41. Hölderlin, Remarks on Oedipus: 1. For Hölderlin further: "The (re)presentation of the tragic rests, principally, on the fact that the monstrous (das Ungeheure] -- how god and man join together and the power of nature and the innermost being of man boundlessly become as one in the fury -- is to be understood through the boundless becoming-one purified by boundless separation." Remarks on Oedipus: 3.

42. Augstein's phraseology, my translation.

43. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. xv.

44. Wolin, p. 56.

45. Emphasis added. Wolin, p. 66.

46. Heidegger, "Uneigentlichkeit hat mögliche Eigentlichkeit zum Grunde" p. 259 in Sein und Zeit.

47. "Das eigentliche Selbstsein ... ist ein existentielle Modifikation des Man als eines wesenhaften Existentials." ibid., 130.

48. "Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts ?" in Einführung in die Metaphysik, p. 1.1n his translation, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Mannheim has "WHY ARE THERE ESSENTS rather than nothing?" p. 1

49. "Das eigentlich Aufgegebene ist Jenes, was wir nicht wissen und was wir, sofern wir es echt wissen nämlich als Aufgegebenes, immner nur fragend wissen" p. 157. Mannheim, p. 206.