The Heidegger question doesn’t go away, mostly because he is a man of the left that the left cannot let go of. A National Socialist is a socialist, with all of the right sorts of attitudes and beliefs. But there are now, apparently, the “Black Notebooks” which have been edited and a piece commenting on what they show is found here.

Eric Aeschimann, writing in Le Nouvel Observateur, reports that Heidegger’s Schwarzen Hefte (‘Black Notebooks’) will trouble even the most faithful of his acolytes in France. It appears that the German editor of the notebooks, Peter Trawny, has written an essay entitled ‘Heidegger: “The Black Notebooks” and Historial Antisemitism’ (‘historial’ being one of those neologisms of which Heidegger, and Heideggerians, were and are fond) in which he argues that these manuscripts, written between 1931 and 1946, contain ideas that are ‘clearly antisemitic, even if it is not a question of antisemitism of the kind promoted by Nazi ideology.’ One of Heidegger’s French translators, Hadrien France-Lanord, has read Trawny’s essay and has pronounced himself dismayed by many of the extracts from the notebooks that it contains. We are, Aeschimann writes, on the verge of another ‘Heidegger affair’.

There is also a quite insightful analysis of the kinds of philosophy Heidegger offered up:

Heidegger came to believe that the present is characterised by a forgetfulness of ‘Being’ and that this forgetfulness shows itself in the global domination of modern science and technology. Where, in 1933, Nazism, and the Führer in particular, had promised an ‘awakening’ of the German people and salvation from the ‘nihilism’ of the modern age, now Heidegger regarded it as the latest embodiment of that dispensation. But, as his former student Karl Löwith pointed out in 1946, this did not mean that Heidegger had stopped believing in the necessity of national revolution after 1934—far from it. And Löwith maintained that what a ‘naïve apology’ for Heidegger published the same year in French in Les Temps Modernes really showed was that he was a ‘distinguished representative of the German Revolution’.

To the extent that I make sense of Heidegger, he emphasises that all national groups are different from the cradle on up. One cannot choose one’s destiny; it is not so much in the genes but in the social world in which one is raised. His anti-Semitism is to point out that Jews are not Germans, and he liked what was German and not what was Jewish. So this, about his uptake by Sartre, must have been utterly dismaying for him.

Heidegger denied all connection between his thought and Sartre’s. Sartre takes for granted, he argued, precisely what ought to be questioned, namely: the meaning of ‘the human’. In assuming that man’s essence lies in action or decision, Sartre misses the more fundamental question about the meaning of Being. Sartrean existentialism, it turns out, is but another mode of forgetfulness. The history of the West, for Heidegger, is the history of the growing power of human subjectivity, in which man enjoys technological dominion over nature rather than the more humble role of ‘shepherd of Being’.

So the French Heideggerians believe the opposite of what Heidegger himself believed. Philosophy really is loopy, but the point I think Heidegger is making is right, that your culture will provide barriers against some beliefs and make others virtually mandatory, the absolute reverse of this existential freedom which is a total nonsense. But if Sartre doesn’t understand Heidegger, why should I think I do who has never read more than a hundred pages of his writing, none of which I could really say I understood. But this comes close to what I think he thinks:

Heidegger certainly rejected the biologistic racial theories propounded by Nazi ideologues such as Alfred Bäumler and Ernst Krieck. But this critique is compatible, Faye argues, with Heidegger’s retention of a ‘metaphysical’ conception of race.

The final conclusion of this article I would accept myself, that “the French left should now recognise that there is nothing in Heidegger that has anything whatsoever to do with the ‘promise of freedom and equality’.” There’s a lot in it but the notion of freedom as a universal and an intrinsic aspect of the life of we poor humans, is as nonsensical as any philosophical proposition that has ever been proposed.