Hegel: "About the State" (seminar)

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Hegel: "About the State" is the title of a beginners seminar that was held in the winter semester of 1934/35 by Martin Heidegger and Erik Wolf at the University of Freiburg . It took place in eight sessions from November 1934 to January 1935. The exact wording of the seminar is unknown, but the course, topics and evaluations have been handed down through notes from the students Wilhelm Hallwachs and Siegfried Bröse . The transcripts were published in the complete edition in 2011, but had been the subject of the Heidegger controversy since 2005.

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The primary source is a manuscript by Heidegger, which - for the most part in bullet points and in sentence fragments - only contains notes on the structure of the seminar. The notes of the student participants Hallwachs and Bröse, "supplemented in places" by hand by Heidegger, are stored in the Marbach literature archive . The textual basis of the seminar, which was conceived as an interpretation course, was not the complete basic lines of the Philosophy of Law (1820) by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , but an edition of the Kröner Verlag, which only reproduces about a third of it and for the first time in 1924 was compiled by Paul Alfred Merbach.

The seminar in the context of the Heidegger controversy

Hegel's tombstone with the year of death MDCCCXXXI (1831)

The seminar in 2005 came into the focus of public awareness in connection with Emmanuel Faye's publication on Heidegger's National Socialist past . The stumbling block was a sentence with which Heidegger responded to Carl Schmitt's statement by rejecting it and advocating the opposite:

“But what is the current conception of the state? It has been said that Hegel died in 1933; on the contrary: he has only just begun to live. "

According to Faye, it is a "hideous sentence" that is completely untenable and shows the "identification of Hegel with the state of 1933". In the seminar you meet “a Heidegger who wants to ensure the continued existence of the National Socialist Reich”. Carl Schmitt's thesis, "which asserts a profound continuity between the Hegelian thinking of the totality of the state (...) and the tripartite organization of the National Socialist state," he had radicalized. In the seminar, Heidegger presented a conscious reinterpretation of Hegel's philosophy with the aim of giving National Socialist ideology a philosophical foundation. To a large extent, the seminar even documents Heidegger's attempt to destroy Hegel's legal philosophy in favor of the Führer state . This interpretation has been partly confirmed and partly questioned by other scholars. However, there is broad agreement that Heidegger describes metaphysical thinking as necessary for the Hegelian view and only partially classifies the “new struggle for the state” in it.

“The importance of dealing with H [egel] 's state philosophy and first of all reflecting on it lies in learning what a metaphysical way of thinking and thinking through the state looks like. It is the form of state thinking. It is certain that our new struggle for the state from the sociological questions out is when it falls back again and again into it. "

In the context of interpretation of a Heideggerian criticism of the Nazi state, L. Hemming suggests that Hegelianism, insofar as it found fulfillment in 1933 and called for metaphysical thinking, was then rejected by Heidegger, along with Hitler's claim to admit the embodiment of the Nazi state be.

A comment by B. Altmann, 1938, goes in this direction, although it is undecided to what extent Heidegger's rejection of Platonic ideas is taken into account: “He once coined the word that the Hegelian state idea found its perfect expression in Hitler's Germany and has thus become 'a Platonic idea in itself in reality'. "

In his reply, H. Zaborowski rejected Faye's reading of the seminar as a whole. The editor of the seminar transcripts, P. Trawny, however, came to the conclusion that the manuscript documented Heidegger's attempt to "" Hegelianize National Socialism "".

Historical background

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power, Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg, in May 1933 he joined the NSDAP , and in April 1934 he resigned from his office. From 1934 he was a member of the Committee for Legal Philosophy of the Academy for German Law , which was headed by the Reich Commissioner for the Harmonization of Justice Hans Frank . The members of the Legal Philosophy Committee included Hans Frank and Martin Heidegger, their deputy chairman Carl August Emge and, among others, Hans Freyer , Alfred Rosenberg and Erich Rothacker . The seminar from the winter semester 1934/35 can be seen as further evidence of Heidegger's interest in legal philosophy after his resignation from the rectorate.

literature

  • Martin Heidegger. Hegel-Schelling seminars. Edited by Peter Trawny. Complete edition Volume 86. Frankfurt a. M .: Klosterman 2011. ISBN 978-3-465-03682-1
  • Peter Trawny : Heidegger and the Political . To the "Philosophy of Law" seminar ". In: Heidegger Studies. Vol. 28, 2012. pp. 47-66.
  • Emmanuel Faye : Heidegger. The Introduction of National Socialism into Philosophy . In the vicinity of the unpublished seminars between 1933 and 1935. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2009. ISBN 978-3-88221-025-5
Detailed review by Peter E. Gordon in: Philosophical Reviews. University of Notre Dame. December 3, 2010. Full text
  • Peter E. Gordon: Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (or, How Derrida read Heidegger) . In: Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, Sara Rushing (Eds.): Histories of Postmodernism. Routledge 2007. pp. 103-130.
  • Holger Zaborowski, A Question of Irre and Guilt , Frankfurt am Main, 2010

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ University of Freiburg, course catalog WS1934 / 35
  2. ↑ Holger Zaborowski, A Question of Irre and Guilt , Frankfurt am Main, 2010, p. 406; Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger. The Introduction of National Socialism into Philosophy. In the context of the unpublished seminars between 1933 and 1935 , Berlin 2005, p. 280.
  3. ^ Martin Heidegger: Seminars Hegel-Schelling. Complete edition Volume 86. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2011.
  4. ↑ Holger Zaborowski, A Question of Irre and Guilt , Frankfurt am Main, 2010, p. 406
  5. ^ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The State . Leipzig: Kröner 1934
  6. ↑ cf. Thomas Meyer, Thinker for Hitler , p. 2
  7. ↑ GA 86, 85.
  8. ↑ Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. Yale University Press, 2009, p. 223
  9. ↑ Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger. The Introduction of National Socialism into Philosophy. (2005) Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2009, 273 , 313 , p. 328 .
  10. ↑ Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger. The Introduction of National Socialism into Philosophy. In the vicinity of the unpublished seminars between 1933 and 1935. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2009. P. 273 ff.
  11. ↑ cf. Laurence Paul Hemming: Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013, p. 162 ; Henning Ottmann: History of Political Thought. Volume 4.2, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, PDF ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Alexander Hollerbach , On the relationship between Erik Wolf and Martin Heidegger. A letter from Erik Wolf to Karl Barth that was not sent, in: Heidegger Jahrbuch 4, Freiburg - Munich 2009, 284–347, here: 337. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.metzlerverlag.de
  12. ↑ GA 86, 86.
  13. ↑ cf. Laurence Paul Hemming: Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013, p. 162 .: “In understanding the extent to which Nazism and Hitlerism are the form of the fulfillment of Hegel's theory of the state (...) Heidegger is (...) repudiating Hitler's claim to be the embodiment of the (...) Nazi 'program'. "
  14. ↑ See Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4, p. 207.
  15. ↑ Holger Zaborowski, A Question of Irre and Guilt , Frankfurt am Main, 2010, p. 405 ff .; 433-445.
  16. ^ Martin Heidegger: Seminars Hegel-Schelling . S. 903 .