The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

1 Heidegger's Autobiographies

1 Heidegger's Autobiographies There was hardly more than a name, but the name travelled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king. Hannah Arendt Rumors from Freiburg FOR YEARS WE heard rumors about an unofficial story regarding Martin Heidegger's unpublished youthful writings prior to his 1927 Sein und Zeit (henceforth abbreviated "SZ"). The rumors have included suggestions that in these writings he had already discovered the being-question, made the turn (Kehre) beyond subjectivity to being itself (such that his later turn after SZ was a return to his youthful period), and did all this in a unique way through readings of Meister Eckhart, Luther, Kierkegaard, Aristotle's ethics, Plato's Sophist, Dilthey, and Husser!. The first wave of rumors about this ]ugendgeschichte arrived via an anecdotal and doxographical tradition deriving from the memorabilia and reports of Heidegger's early students. A famous example is Hannah Arendt's story about "the rumor of the hidden king": the beginning in Heidegger's case is ... the first lecture courses and seminars which he held as a mere Privatdozent (instructor) and assistant to Husserl at the University of Freiburg in 1919. For Heidegger's "fame" predates by about eight years the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927.... there was nothing tangible on which his fame could have been based, nothing written, save for notes taken at his lectures, which circulated among students everywhere . Hans-Georg Gadamer has for decades praised "the revolutionary genius of the young Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's entrance as a young teacher at the University of Freiburg in the years after the war was truly epoch-making." "To this day," Gadamer also wrote, "hardly anything has been made public of this event." We heard from others such as Karl Lowith, Wilhelm Szilasi, Leo Strauss, and Helene Weiss this same story that not the years around SZ but Heidegger's much earlier thought is the real beginning of his thoughtpath 3 4 The Matter of Heidegger's Thinking (Denkweg).I Oskar Becker, who began attending Heidegger's courses in 1919, maintained that "Sein und Zeit is no longer the original Heidegger, but rather repeats his original breakthrough only in a scholastically hardened form" (DMH 351). Transcripts of Heidegger's youthful courses continued to circulate for decades in a kind of philosophical underground spanning the continents and took on the legendary status of a body of esoteric writings, similar to how Plato's lectures in the Academy were often used by Aristotle and others as the authoritative sources of his ideas. Through his teaching, the commerce in transcripts of his courses, and the indirect dissemination of his ideas, Heidegger helped to shape a whole generation of scholars who went on to dominate the German intellectual scene for decades. Theodore Kisiel has written that "this period preceding the publication of Being and Time is probably the most productive and most influential period of Heidegger's career" (G20 English tr., p. xix). Thus a second wave of rumors about the hidden king arrived via an effective history of his youthful thought in the work of others. This included not only many historical studies of especially Aristotle, Christian traditions, and Husserl, but also such new movements as Gadamer's hermeneutics, Arendt's practical philosophy, Becker's mathematical theory, Rudolf Bultmann's existential theology, Habermas's critical theory, and more recently John Caputo's "radical hermeneutics" and David Krell's studies of "daimon life."2. Another wave of rumors has come from the philological and philosophical detective work of such scholars as Otto Poggeler, Thomas Sheehan, and especially Theodore Kisiel, who tirelessly followed the paper trail of Heidegger's unpublished courses and essays from one archive and personal library to another , and over the years provided a series of ground-breaking studies. Heidegger 's youthful writings had fallen into such oblivion by the 1960s that, when Otto Poggeler published his research on them in his Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, it was dismissed in some quarters as a "fabrication."3 A decisive wave of rumors has begun to arrive via the publication of Heidegger's youthful manuscripts themselves in the collected edition of his writings. The publication of these manuscripts was initiated in the early 1980s and will be completed in the 1990S. Thus it is as if we now find ourselves in a strange Kierkegaardian scenario in which an author had long ago dispatched a number of manuscripts in the mail, only for them to become lost, rumored about for years...