On the new edition of Heidegger’s Zollikoner Seminare
An open letter
Anthony Stadlen
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2017, 2020
[Note:
[Note:
I wrote this open letter to urge that the new edition of Heidegger’s Zollikoner Seminare should be published in the name of Professor Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. A German translation of my letter, ‘Zur Herausgeberschaft der Zollikoner Seminare’, was published in Heidegger Studies 43 (2018): 319-321.
In my letter I give the number of Jewish references in Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (GA 94-7) as twenty-six. In his book Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties (2019, 155) Professor Richard Polt gives the number as twenty-seven. But at Inner Circle Seminar No. 254, Quodlibet Heideggeriensis, on 1 December 2019, Professor Richard Rojcewicz announced that his computerised investigation revealed that the correct number was nineteen.]
I understand
from Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann that there is to be a new edition
of Zollikoner Seminare containing
much new material which he has discovered, but that there is a suggestion that
this edition should come out not under his own name but under that of Professor
Peter Trawny. In my view the book should come out under the name of Professor
von Herrmann, who has not only prepared this new edition but was entrusted by
Martin Heidegger himself during his lifetime with bringing out the monumental
102-volume Gesamtausgabe. He has
fulfilled this task magnificently.
Professor von Herrmann is uniquely qualified to be in charge of the
publication of this new edition of Zollikoner
Seminare. He was a friend and colleague of Dr Medard Boss, Dr Marianne
Boss, Dr Gion Condrau, and other leading Daseinsanalysts. He was involved in
the creation of the Zurich Daseinsanalytic Institute.
I first met Professor von Herrmann at the 5th Forum of the
International Federation of Daseinsanalysis (IFDA) in Vienna
I am the only Daseinsanalyst and teacher of Daseinsanalysis in the
UK, the Independent Effective Member of IFDA for the UK London Athens
As a teacher of Zollikoner
Seminare, intimately familiar with this book’s content, I would welcome a
new edition under Professor von Herrmann’s name.
I regret that I would not have the same trust in an edition under
Professor Trawny’s name. I have read with interest Professor Trawny’s two books
on Heidegger’s alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ in the four published volumes of Schwarze Hefte, and despite good
passages I find them confused and misleading.
I am myself a Jew, a Board Member of my synagogue, and a lay cantor
who takes services and chants in Hebrew from the Torah scroll. I know something
of Judaism.
I also know, from my research, something of anti-Judaism and ‘anti-Semitism’.
I have researched Christian and post-Christian anti-Judaism of
various kinds. Anti-Judaism is ubiquitous as an often unexamined and unthinking
assumption in European culture, including the most sublime, for example Bach’s Passions. It can be traced to Paul,
Augustine, and Luther (all of whom were important influences on Heidegger). It
is present in the post-war writing of the Christian theologian Bultmann, a
friend of Heidegger’s, whose book Primal
Christianity, published after the second world war, is replete with
ignorant assumptions about the inferiority of Judaism. Yet Bultmann bravely
opposed Nazi ‘anti-Semitism’.
I have also researched the very different pseudo-scientific,
'biological’, absolute ‘anti-Semitism’ of ‘race’ developed by the National
Socialists. Specifically, I researched the work of Eichmann, Hagen, Dannecker,
and others in the Sicherheitsdiensthauptamt in the 1930s to study the different categories of Jew (assimilated,
Zionist, religious - all of them members of an absolutely alien and ‘wrong’ ‘race’) and to manipulate them psychologically and socially to work on each
other to leave Germany
This anti-Judaism and this ‘anti-Semitism’ should not be confused.
But just such a confusion is perpetrated, in my view, by Professor Trawny in
his books.
Heidegger makes very occasional (26) negative comments about ‘Weltjudentum’ and Jews in the Schwarze Hefte. But he explicitly
insists that these have nothing to do with ‘anti-Semitism’, which he calls ‘reprehensible’, let alone with Nazi ‘biological’ ‘scientific’ ‘anti-Semitism’,
which indeed he categorises as itself
a manifestation of the destructive ‘calculative machination’ that is his
central target.
Heidegger, in fact, denounces almost everybody as engaged in this ‘calculative machination’: the English, the Americans, the Bolsheviks, the
National Socialists. Not many people escape his condemnation: ancient Greeks,
Hölderlin, traditional non-Bolshevik Russians, Lawrence of Arabia (whom he
oddly reveres), and few others.
But Professor Trawny insists that, when Heidegger criticises ‘Weltjudentum’, this is really ‘anti-Semitism’ even though
Heidegger says it is not. Not only this, Trawny goes on to say that when Heidegger
attacks the English, the Bolsheviks, Nazi ‘biological’ ‘anti-Semitism’, etc. this is also a manifestation of Heidegger's ‘anti-Semitism’, because
Heidegger, according to Trawny, really means
that the Jews have contaminated the
English, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, et
al., with their ‘calculative machination’.
Thus Professor Trawny arrives at the absurd position that the very
heart of Heidegger's critique of ‘calculative machination’ is that the Jews are
responsible for it, wherever it occurs. Trawny has expanded 26 anti-Jewish
comments into four volumes of Schwarze
Hefte, and indeed into the whole of his philosophy, which becomes in its
entirety a manifestation of the ‘anti-Semitism’ which Heidegger expressly denounces.
I do not think this is a caricature of what Professor Trawny has
done. It could itself be described as a form of ‘calculative machination’.
For this reason, I think Professor von Hermann should be in charge
of the new edition of Zollikoner Seminare,
with its kindly, beneficent, deeply thoughtful contribution to a more human and
less alienated psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Anthony Stadlen
20 April 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment