I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example.¹

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Paths – not works,” writes Heidegger at the beginning of the collected edition of his works (Gesamtausgabe) that extends to more than a hundred volumes.² In this way, Heidegger wishes to point to the open and performative character of his thinking. Among his texts we find Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege) and Pathmarks (Wegmarken).³ On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache) is his philosophy.⁴ The Country Path is particularly dear to the thinker.⁵ The use of the plural “paths” indicates that his thinking does not know a unique path that would culminate in an “oeuvre.”

For Heidegger, thinking has a “path-like character,” i.e., it has more to do with its actual carrying out than with the production of an “oeuvre.”⁶ “I hold no brief for my philosophy, precisely because I do not have a philosophy of my own,” says Heidegger during a lecture course.⁷ For Heidegger, philosophy is nothing one could “have.” Philosophy takes place (ereignet sich): it is to experience the world in a reflective manner, “to make way for it,” that is, “to provide paths for it.”⁸ In this understanding of philosophy, it is not at all certain that these paths will lead to truth. On the contrary, a philosophy that is on the way can go astray.

“Woodpaths” (Holzwege) are a kind of “aberrant path” (Irrweg); they come to an end inside the forest, leading nowhere. “Pathmarks” (Wegmarken) are points of orientation along such paths. It is not easy to find one's way. This is why Heidegger's thinking goes astray along wayward paths. It belongs to the peculiar pathos of this philosophy not to shy away from what is false, far away, and even obscure. This problematic pathos according to which it is possible for thought to err – given that we can never be absolutely certain that we are always “on the right path” – is a source of irritation that Heidegger's philosophy stirs up time and again. On the one hand, Heidegger is considered to be one of the few truly important philosophers of the twentieth century; for the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, he is “perhaps the philosopher of the twentieth century.”⁹ On the other hand, Heidegger is massively rejected by many critics. Ultimately, this rejection does not hinge on Heidegger's irremediable error of getting lost in National Socialism.

“The depth of a philosophy is measured – in case there is measurement here – by its power to be errant,” writes Heidegger in an entry from Ponderings VII, one of his so-called Black Notebooks.¹⁰ In early 2014, the publication of a number of these notebook entries caused an earthquake in the reception of Heidegger's thought. Though it had long been known that Heidegger decided to become involved with National Socialism in the early 1930s, no one knew that he had also, sporadically and privately, accorded philosophical importance to anti-Semitism. This is precisely what the entries of the Black Notebooks from 1938–48 attest.

Therefore, an introduction to Martin Heidegger's philosophy necessarily introduces us to his anti-Semitism. Wouldn't it be better, then, not to write such an introduction at all? Instead, shouldn't we be advising others against such a “philosophy”? Shouldn't we banish it into history's “poison cabinet”? Should access to it be granted only to those who are educated enough to recognize its errors?

As concerns the core of the anti-Semitic statements that surface in Heidegger's thinking, we must present them in a clear and lucid manner. In a certain way, this presentation will already be an interpretation that we must likewise underscore in a particular manner. This interpretation will focus on Heidegger's notebook entries concerning the Jews – entries that are, in many regards, highly problematic and absurd (Abwegige). As opposed to other interpreters, my view is not that Heidegger's entire thinking is to be characterized as anti-Semitic. I have thoroughly revised my 2003 introduction because I could no longer leave it as written after coming to know the Black Notebooks.

We cannot, however, reduce what is troublesome and provocative about Heidegger's thinking to his misguided worldviews and political errancies. Rather, the causes for this are many, and they seem to be the same sources that triggered and still continue to trigger fervent admiration as well as bitter contempt for this thinker. At age seventy-one, Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of Heidegger's most influential students, recognized that he was much indebted to his teacher. He then very tellingly adds: “[…] and I also know very well that it is precisely my tendency towards moderation – an ultimate indecisiveness almost raised to a (hermeneutical) principle – that makes me accessible and tolerable, whereas your original engagement is inaccessible and passes as intolerable.”¹¹ Heidegger's thinking is anything but moderate. The philosopher is familiar with extremes and does not mince words: he takes what is most extreme as the norm and has no desire to think any differently. Time and again, not only does he thematize the “decisions” and “ruptures,” the profound caesuras and horrors of existence, but also that which heals, with which every life is acquainted. And is it not the case that wars and genocides have affected life in an extreme way during the two halves of the twentieth century? Yes, certainly: for philosophers – men and women – the singularity of the twentieth century lies in the fact that they must necessarily respond to its events, the two world wars, the Shoah, the revolutions. There is no other century in European history whose catastrophes have gripped philosophy in such an ineluctable way. Heidegger's thinking, too, takes a stance vis-à-vis the catastrophes of that century and has thus become a kind of manifestation of this period.

This, of course, does not mean that Heidegger's provocative thinking relates only to concrete events. We can sense Heidegger's barely masked desire to be provocative when he makes the following scandalous statement in a lecture from 1952: “Science does not think.”¹² Didn't he know that this was an affront to many scientists? Wasn't he aware of how he was scolding academic scholars of philosophy who did not wish to be exposed to a permanent self-contradiction? Nevertheless, as provocative as this sentence appears to be, it makes perfect sense when understood in context. With increasing affect, Heidegger again summons a “decision” and declares that we must not tolerate indifference. Is philosophy a modern science or not? From the start, Heidegger stated that philosophy is either the science of all sciences – as Aristotle and Hegel would have it – or is not a science at all. But how is a self-declared scientific philosophy supposed to relate today to a thinking that refuses every demand to justify itself before a (morally) higher authority, let alone institution?

“To think is to thank,” says Heidegger in a lecture course from the early 1950s.¹³ Thinking is not a science, but a “thanking.” This seems to be a dramatic exaggeration, a statement that is also alienating and which we attribute to Heidegger's style that is often considered kitsch. Implicit here is simply the thought that also resonates in the German word for “reason” (Vernunft), namely, the notion that thinking is not a spontaneous faculty but depends on what it “apprehends” (vernimmt). Again, a “decision” is apparently at stake: does thinking itself fabricate its own thoughts, or does it receive them? Has man invented language or does man originate from language?

Yet the maxim “to think is to thank” can still be understood in a different way. Though many critics are suspicious of Heidegger's prophetic posturing and cringe at his not at all “moderate” tone, finding this admittedly esoteric aspect of his thinking to be off-putting, we may not, however, overlook the fact that no other German philosopher of the last century has had as many important students and different interlocutors. Among Heidegger's students, we could mention Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Hannah Arendt learned an enormous amount from her teacher and lover. With Ernst Jünger, Heidegger engaged in a philosophical confrontation. He intensely exchanged ideas with the philosophers Max Scheler and Karl Jaspers. With the former psychoanalyst Medard Boss, he co-founded “Dasein-analysis.” Extensive correspondence testifies to friendships with the pedagogue Elisabeth Blochmann and also with Imma von Bodmershof, the widow of his admired Hölderlin editor, Norbert von Hellingrath. The theologian Rudolf Bultmann learned from Heidegger during the latter's time at Marburg. The Germanists Max Kommerell, Emil Staiger, and Beda Allemann recognized his hermeneutical genius. In a double bind of attraction and rejection, Paul Celan sought to be near him. After the war, Heidegger developed relationships in France with Jean Beaufret and his students; he met the poet René Char. We could still mention many others. If “thinking” is a “thanking,” this means that philosophy is a dialogue and that the philosopher must be able to let something be said to him, i.e., that it is more important for the philosopher to be able to listen and answer than to close himself off in a monologue. We must be thankful to the other, because the other – others, as Heidegger would be the first to say – makes it possible for us to think.

Heidegger often insisted that each philosopher has only one question to ask. His was the “question of the meaning of being.” This question can only be understood in relation to the beginning of European philosophy with Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger relies on these thinkers when he speaks of “being itself,” “beings” or “beings as a whole.” However, we must not overlook the fact that, in the first phenomenologico-hermeneutical lecture courses that Heidegger gave as an adjunct professor at Freiburg University, he initially thematized the “facticity of life,” i.e., the vital actuality of the human being. Without taking lived life into account, we cannot understand the “question of being.” There is, then, something nevertheless accurate about the rough shorthand label of “existential philosophy,” which is how Heidegger's thought was initially received. The “question of being” is, so to speak, the question of existence and of life. The “factical” was always in play, even when Heidegger's thinking turned to the “history of being” in the 1930s.

Being and Time, an unfinished book manuscript from 1927, is taken to be Heidegger's first major work. Without a proper study of this text, Heidegger's entire oeuvre remains inaccessible. Here, he presents his thinking as “the Dasein analytic,” that is to say, at bottom, as the analysis of “factical life.” However, according to his own interpretation, Heidegger thus launched the question “of being itself” by relying too heavily on the perspective of the Dasein that is in each case mine, that is, on a human perspective. It became necessary for Heidegger to modify his thinking.

For the most part, the concept of the “turn” is employed to capture this modification. According to Heidegger's thought after Being and Time, questioning no longer has to begin with Dasein but rather with “being itself,” so that it can, from there, come back to Dasein's life. However, the division of Heidegger's philosophy into a thinking “before” and “after” the “turn” is misleading. Instead, we must observe that Heidegger is always thinking “at” the “turn,” that is to say, he is meditating on the relation between “being” and Dasein. When he stresses in a few texts that he wants to think only “being itself,” he is then quite aware of how extremely difficult this attempt is.

In the mid-1930s, Heidegger settled on a particular interpretation of “being.” “Being” is, in truth, “the event of appropriation” (das Ereignis). In his first major work, Heidegger had already called attention to the interconnection between being and time. For Heidegger, the thought of the “event of appropriation” radicalizes this connection. This radicalization has more specifically to do with one determinate aspect of “temporality.” For us, time happens as “history.” In the notion of “event of appropriation,” history becomes an important factor. It is also clear that this emphasis on history has an anchoring point in “factical life.” It became more and more evident to Heidegger that the political events of his time did not fall from the sky. They came from their world; therefore, we can understand them by reflecting on their origin in European history.

Subsequently, in the second half of the 1930s, stimulated by an interpretation of Hölderlin's poetry that became ever more important for him, the philosopher is gripped by the thought that certain leitmotifs of European philosophy must be “overcome.” Here, we must not overlook the coincidence of this goal with the ever more powerful and totalizing domination of the National Socialists. There is indeed a link between the “factical life” in the totalitarian State of the Third Reich (and all the horrors associated with it) and the notion of “overcoming metaphysics,” a notion that goes back to the concept of “destructuring” (Destruktion) developed in the early 1920s. In this context, the question concerning technology and its power becomes an ever more burning one.

Right around this time, the aforementioned anti-Semitic affect erupts in Heidegger's thinking and gives rise to crude theses on Judaism. Here, Heidegger's contemporaneity with National Socialism acquires a terrifying ambivalence from which not even his interpretation of Hölderlin escapes unscathed. With the latter, the philosopher wishes to inscribe himself in an epochal destiny in which “the Greeks” and “the Germans” play the main roles. A “first inception” (with “the Greeks”) is answered by “another inception” (with “the Germans”). As they abandon a world that has forgotten being, “the Germans” are charged with the mission of beginning history anew and in a completely different manner. According to Heidegger, Hitler's disastrous politics threatened to sabotage this mission. As this happened, Heidegger's thinking became ensnared in attacks against everything that encouraged this failure. Next to the military enemies of the German Reich, and the National Socialists who misinterpret “the German,” we find “World-Judaism.” The passages Heidegger dedicates to this subject are some of the most horrifying – but also the stupidest – passages the thinker ever wrote.

After the war, Heidegger uses two concepts to further develop the thinking of the “event of appropriation.” In the 1930s, he had, in a very problematic way, characterized the “essence of technology” as “machination.” He now understands it as “positionality” (Ge-Stell). “Positionality” corresponds to the concept of the “fourfold” (Geviert), which articulates the world in accordance with a fourfold structure. During this period, Heidegger occupies himself almost exclusively with the question of how the human being can live in an ever-increasingly technicized world. It thus becomes clear that, on the one hand, Heidegger did not believe that the fundamental ideas which determined his politics and ethics actually changed after 1945. On the other hand, in the discussion of “positionality,” Heidegger overcomes a fatal one-sidedness in his understanding of “machination.”

An introduction to Martin Heidegger's philosophy faces a particular problem of language. At first glance, Heidegger's conceptuality seems very simple. The philosopher hardly uses any technical terms. At times, he speaks an expressive but awkward German; at others, his German is plain and rough. In this manner, Heidegger makes use of everyday words but in an entirely peculiar sense. This is already the case with the words “life” or “event” (Ereignis). But if this is so, the question of using quotation marks becomes a pressing one. They will be rigorously used in the present text. When we think about or with Heidegger, our thinking must remain free from his thinking. It may neither let itself be seduced by the power of his language nor simply appropriate his language and concepts. In philosophy, it is essential that the reader of philosophical texts remain free both when agreeing and when disagreeing with them. This is not at all simple, but it is essential nevertheless.

An introduction to Heidegger's thinking has to deal with the problem that Heidegger's philosophy is an inexhaustible source of new concepts. At times, Heidegger changes his terminology from lecture course to lecture course; he arrives at new formulations from manuscript to manuscript. One meaning can be expressed in a manifold way. These movements from word to word have everything to do with the “path-like character” of Heideggerian thought. An introduction must follow the rhythm of these inventions without being able to meet the demand for completeness. I have tried from time to time to offer the reader some help in this regard.

The present text is a critical introduction. In the truest sense of the word, krinō means “to separate” (scheiden), “to divide,” i.e., to make distinctions (Unterscheidungen) that result in a decision (Entscheidung). However, the question stands: what is our criterion? That is difficult to say. Presumably there is more than one. It is certainly a matter of a universal reason that is aware of its own weaknesses and dangers. Philosophy must, however difficult it may be, hold fast to this criterion. Over and beyond this, the criterion is above all “the other,” particularly as attested in the poetry of Paul Celan.¹⁴ Heidegger faces the greatest problems when he annihilates and sacrifices “the other” for the purposes of his narrative of “the history of being.” My criticism of Heidegger is in itself a plea for “the other.” It listens to the “silent voices” of the dead – of the Shoah.¹⁵ They listen very closely to us as we debate the events of the twentieth century. They know what we will never know. They are the origin of the conscience of our age. My view is that it is above all to them that we owe the moral clarity in matters regarding anti-Semitism and the Shoah.

This introduction is written for readers who are willing to put some effort into reading this book. Though philosophy asks questions that concern all human beings, it requires the free time and leisure of those who want to occupy themselves with it. This leisure does not preclude effort. Yet these efforts belong to the best possible activities we can undertake. For, in philosophy, we deal with ourselves, with our blind spots on which we try to shed some light. It is quite possible that this book will be particularly useful to philosophy students who encounter Heidegger. But it would be very nice if men and women who love philosophy also found the book stimulating.

In the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger's works, 89 out of a planned total of 102 volumes have already appeared. Given this mass of texts, an introduction cannot possibly consider all the themes that Heidegger investigated. Therefore, I had to be selective and make certain decisions. Whoever does not find in this introduction this or that aspect of Heideggerian thought will hopefully be inspired by it to develop these ideas further on his or her own.

Nietzsche claimed that what is exemplary in a philosopher is his ability “to draw whole nations after him.” “Indian history” in particular would give evidence of this. It is important that this philosophical example be “supplied by his outward life and not merely in his books.” What matters for Nietzsche is how the philosopher “bears himself, what he wears and eats, his morals, and not so much what he says or writes.” The philosopher must be seen; he must leave his writing desk and live. And Nietzsche concludes his meditation in a resigned manner: “How completely this courageous visibility of the philosophical life is lacking in Germany.”¹⁶

Has Heidegger given us the “example” of a “philosophical life in Germany”? Or was it precisely such a life that he was denied by a Germany that subscribed to death with inexplicable energy? Or have he and his thinking only made this energy more powerful? It could perhaps be argued that German history of the twentieth century becomes visible in Heidegger's thought as in hardly any other thinker. Whoever wishes to become familiar with Heidegger's thinking has to come face to face, in an abyssal fashion, with the abysses of this history.