Richard Polt

In these lectures, delivered in 1933-1934 while he was Rector of the University of Freiburg and an active supporter of the National Socialist regime, Martin Heidegger addresses the history of metaphysics and the notion of truth from Heraclitus to Hegel. First published in German in 2001, these two lecture courses offer a sustained encounter with Heidegger's thinking during a period when he attempted to give expression to his highest ambitions for a philosophy engaged with politics and the world. While the lectures are strongly nationalistic and celebrate the revolutionary spirit of the time, they also attack theories of racial supremacy in an attempt to stake out a distinctively Heideggerian understanding of what it means to be a people. This careful translation offers valuable insight into Heidegger's views on language, truth, animality, and life, as well as his political thought and activity.

Zizek is right to focus on the element of action in Heidegger's political engagement and to try to develop what I call a traumatic ontology that would supplement Heidegger's thought of the 1930s . However, I draw on Arendt's distinction between work and action to show that both Zizek and Heidegger misunderstand the nature of action. Work can be carried out by a lone, silent creator and normally requires violence; action is necessarily interpersonal and consists of speech, first and foremost. When we substitute work for action, we lay ourselves open to irresponsible revolutionary enthusiasms and run the risk of condoning tyranny

Heidegger’s 1936 notes titled “Running Notes on Being and Time” (“Laufende Anmerkungen zu Sein und Zeit”) are impatient, even irritable reactions that characterize both major and minor moments in Being and Time as “superficial” (GA82 60), “inadequate” (GA82 36), “ridiculous” (GA82 123), or “wholly off track and erroneous” (GA82 52). Among the many thoughts in the “Running Notes,” one theme emerges as paramount: what was presented in Being and Time as a phenomenology of Dasein—understood as the human way of being—should instead be conceived as projecting a new possibility for humanity, a possibility into which we are invited to “leap” to initiate a new epoch.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant attempts to solve two problems about our knowledge of the world. First, how can we know any necessary truths about the world, such as the principle that every event must have a cause? Second, how can I know that things other than I exist at all? Kant’s strategy for dealing with both these problems is to repudiate the kind of distinction that Descartes and Hume had made between self-knowledge and our knowledge of ‘outer’ things. Kant’s innovation is to distinguish sharply between two sides of what his predecessors understood as self-knowledge: ‘inner sense’ and ‘apperception.’ This paper shows how Kant's conception of ‘apperception’ is meant to overcome Humean skepticism, and how ‘inner sense’ is meant to overcome Cartesian skepticism; I then touch upon a complication in Kant’s view of the relation between apperception and inner sense, a complication which relates directly to the problem of the ‘thing in itself.’

This is the second volume to be published in Division III of Heidegger’s collected works, which is devoted to texts never before presented to the public, either in print or as lectures. The first such was volume 65, Beiträge zur Philosophie —a crucial text from 1936–8 which appeared in 1989. Besinnung dates from 1938–9, and is a sequel of sorts to the Contributions, for it is rooted in the fundamental experience described in that text: we stand at a juncture between “the first beginning” of Western thought and “the other beginning.” The first beginning attempts to represent beings as such; the other beginning inquires into “the truth of be-ing [Seyn].” This truth occurs as the event of appropriation in which be-ing both displays itself and withdraws, beckoning us into our role as Dasein, or the creative preservers of meaning.