“The so-called black notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941 and named for the color of their oilcloth covers, show Heidegger denouncing the rootlessness and spirit of “empty rationality and calculability” of the Jews, as he works out revisions to his deepest metaphysical ideas in relation to political events of the day.
“World Jewry,” he wrote in 1941, “is ungraspable everywhere and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.”
The anti-Semitic passages total only about two and a half of the notebooks’ roughly 1,200 pages. Still, some scholars say, they put the lie to any claim that Heidegger’s Nazism can be kept separate from his philosophy, or confined only to the brief period in the early 1930s when he was the rector of the newly Nazified University of Freiburg.”
The NYT article is interesting in full, if you’re interested and have access, as it gives more background on the debate, the recent publishing of the black notebooks, Heidegger’s “‘historical’ antisemitism,” and his relationship with the Nazi state and National Socialism, that seems to be more than “just” opportunism:
“In the notebooks for 1939 to 1941, Mr. Meyer said, Heidegger’s thought underwent a radicalization, in which the Jews become an integral part of his philosophical account of the decay of modernity, and the “final struggle” (as Heidegger put it) then underway. “I think he can imagine and does imagine a world without Jews,” [Thomas] Meyer said.”
(Above emphasis mine)
Thoughts?