Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Existential History and Metapolitics

Abstract

Philosophers actively discuss Black Notebooks – Martin Heidegger’s philosophical notebooks. Their publication opened for researchers a new field in the concept of existential history. The Notebooks are a good example of how closely related philosophical thought and the political atmosphere of time can be. Heidegger witnessed events that caused him to be confused. He had certain ideas about the reorganization of a German university, the formation of “aristocracy of spirit,” which is why he became involved in the National Socialist Party. Of course, this period of his activity and work should be carefully analyzed by many historians of philosophy in order to have a broad and well-founded idea of the motives of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20^th century, to realize the degree of solidarity with the policy of the Nazi party, and, most importantly, to grasp philosophical content in politically biased texts of those years. History knows examples when a philosopher, in his desire to influence reality, collaborated with government, but such collaboration hardly ever turned fruitful for his philosophical research. The article contains an analysis of Heidegger’s text as well as a review of contemporary discussion on the Black Notebooks. The author gives his assessment of the evolution of the political and philosophical views of Heidegger from 1931 to 1948. It can be concluded that Heidegger was never the ideologist of the Third Reich and his works must be considered primarily as the result of a philosophical comprehension of the events taken place in the world, in the country, in the academic sphere.