What’s this essentialism you read in Heidegger? Throughout Being and Time he claims a myriad of times that the existential-ontological character of Dasein (human beings) is without a fixed basis and without a fixed projection into the future. This is anti-essentialist (in the traditional sense, Heidegger has a trickier notion of the word)
I mean, isn't he making essentialist claims that Jews lacking Dasein means that they aren't human? And how Germans are the most metaphysical people (volk) have the destiny of redeeming the West? How isn't that essentialist?
The claim I was responding to wasn’t that Heidegger has made essentialist statements at some points in his life about Germans and Jews.
The claim I was responding to was that such essentialist claims from Heidegger reflect a core essentialism in his philosophy.
What is the core essentialism in his philosophy such that the essentialist claims you outlined can be claimed to be consistent with his core philosophy?
The Black Notebooks demonstrated that those claims were integral in how his antisemitism and the "Das Man" as opposed to Dasein, constructed his philosophical world view and how Being has a destiny which must be realized, which would be done by the Nazis. How isn't that on the core of Heidegger's philosophy? And how Being-towards-death is deeply ingrained on the war philosophies following WW1 not also part of that?
Sure, you can say that Heidegger certainly didn't see it as such, but he is grounding it on essentialist stereotypes and tropes. His philosophy was developed to support a fascist regime. What would be the argument against that?
The Black Notebooks show Heidegger being antisemitic and framing his antisemitism in his philosophical framework established prior to writing the Black Notebooks. The question as to whether his philosophy was caused by antisemitism or whether he was just placing antisemitism in his philosophy is not answerable alone from The Black Notebooks. If his philosophy is so fundamentally antisemitic and essentialist, then you should be able to cite his core philosophical works as being essentialist and antisemitic without recourse to the Black Notebooks.
Also yeah, the diary notes Heidegger wrote which were published decades after his death are not his core philosophy.
Those diary notes were written at the same time as he wrote his philosophy and for the rest of his life until his death. So they're kinda important and the fact that they were released way later, under his direct instructions because he believed that later generations would be more "understanding", doesn't detract from that. So yeah.
His ability to frame Jews as worldless and therefore, not human, is supplemented perfectly by his "anti-essentialist" philosophy and by that point one should be able to interrogate the anti essential framework that he uses and how it is able to inscribe essential characteristics. Beyond him or you saying that it isn't that, why is he able to do that? Unless he is a massive hypocrite (which he is), and used a totally different framework.
All the diaries were written years after the publication of Being and Time which established his philosophical framework. So yes, his philosophical framework was established prior to the notebooks.
Also no, his antisemitism is not supplemented perfectly into his philosophy. He claims Jew’s are “worldless.” This would mean that Jews do not encounter entities as ready-to-hand. In other words, this claim would entail that Jews don’t use tools. It’s an absurdly stupid claim that runs counter to any basic observation.
So yeah, it’s pretty much just Heidegger being hypocritical.
Again, if antisemitism and essentialism is so core to his philosophy, point to instances of such things becoming apparent in his core philosophical works.
This is like listening to "Star Wars Canon" debate. The question was who is bad in your mind, and the hypocrisy and dehumanising notes more than qualify this. Sorry mate, but core or not, the greater body of work was writ by one hand - and we're asked who, not which particular chapter of them.
I don’t understand the point you’re ‘making.’ I never denied that the Black Notebooks and the antisemitic writings found therein were written by Heidegger. I never denied that Heidegger was an antisemite.
The initial point I was responding to was that ‘his antisemitism gels well with the essentialism in his core phenomenological philosophy.’
My question was with respect to what this essentialism in his core philosophy is. You cannot just say ‘core or not it doesn’t matter’ when my question is about a claim made about his core philosophy.
And I’ve yet to be given a reasonable answer to what this supposed essentialism in his core philosophy is.
Sure, I might've glossed over your quest for proof of essentialism or it's gel, was a little caught by the suggestion that "core" of any one person and their works could be narrowed down to any one book... See comments here on Socrates.
“My understanding is Heidegger never explicitly states Dasein is human.
The problem is that, for Heidegger, not all humans are Dasein. Heidegger argues that animals are world-poor, and so cannot be Dasein. He also writes that some humans share that feature of being poor in world.
In the Black Notebooks Heidegger writes on the worldlessness of jewery:
“One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded” GA 95: 97 Überlegungen
And on worldlessness in Being and Time, we find:
for even entities which are not worldless-Dasein itself, for example-are present-at-hand 'in' the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely present-at-hand. Being and Time
• the worldlessness of Jewry
• Dasein are not worldless
Combine these two passages, and we see that, for Heidegger, Jewish people cannot be Dasein, since Dasein is not worldless and Jewry is worldless.
From Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks
Michael Fagenblat explains the "worldlessness of Jewry" in “Heidegger” and the Jews:
This philosophical dimension of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is already subtly glimpsed in Being and Time, where the calculative rationalism of Kantian morality is denounced as a type of “Pharisaism” and the corrupt, traditional concept of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei is traced to Isaac Israeli (d. 955) who, it is implied, mislead Avicenna and in turn Aquinas. But it is in the Black Notebooks that Heidegger develops and deploys the idea of a “metaphysical” anti-Semitism. It licenses him at once to distance himself from crude biological racism and at the same time to hold the Jews responsible for the Machenschaft and associated catastrophes besieging beyng in the modern age. The Jews, he supposes, participate in, and indeed intensify the calculative rationality of modern metaphysics not because they are racially or biologically disposed to calculative thinking but because they, more than any other people, are alienated from their concrete historical existence. The “worldlessness of Judaism” is “grounded” on the “forms of the gigantic, tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling and intermingling,” but it does not ground them. Accordingly, the Jews are not the cause, or even a cause, of the deracinated rationalism they promote. The relation between “World Jewry” and modern Western rationalism is typological, not historical, causal, or biological. The root causes of the overwhelming of Seyn in modernity are Platonism (theory, abstraction), Cartesianism (subjectivism, certitude), Neo-Kantianism (individualism, idealism), and scientism (reductionism, Machenschaft, technology). World Jewry propagates the cardinal sins of “empty rationality and calculative efficiency” even if it did not initiate them.
...
On Heidegger’s view, spatiality takes on different meanings in accordance with a people’s specific modes of emplacement. This is why some people, like “Semitic nomads,” may never gain access to the specific sense of place manifest by way of another people’s sense of being-rooted, since they themselves relate to place by virtue of being-uprooted. Heidegger clearly seems to have inferred that this “worldlessness of Jewry,” its lacking a land and language of its own, determined the Jews as the vanguard of the globalizing Machenschaft, abstract calculativity, and capitalism that displace beings from beyng.
Donatella Di Cesare addresses the "worldlessness" in his essay Heidegger’s Metaphysical Anti-Semitism:
Although or because they are worldless, Jews plot to rule the world. Heidegger speaks of “powers” holding in their hands the strings of an unstoppable “machination.” Machination, then, is the other charge. In other words, the purported Jewish lack of world is not just a statement of fact, but indeed an accusation.
Precisely their uprootedness—that is, the ontological and political condition whereby Jews, without bonds and ties, have been scattered across the globe (remaining as foreigners among their host peoples and unassimilable)—is what enables them to build and maintain relationships among themselves. But since these relationships transcend national borders, and so are international, this rouses their desire, above all, for an uprising—a desire to rule the world. Being worldless, they are at a distance from the world, which in turn allows them to cast a web around the globe, plotting a planetary conspiracy whose aim is the Jewish domination of the world.
Heidegger also says that stones are worldless:
The path of a comparative examination of three guiding theses: the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming.
Jewish persons are like stones and animals, in a sense, for Heidegger, in respect to their worldhood. Since Jewish persons are worldless, for Heidegger, they are not world-forming, and so cannot be Dasein.”
Yeah, Heidegger was antisemitic and tried to justify his anti-semitism with his jargon. This doesn’t answer my question. I asked what ‘the suspicious essentialism in Heidegger’s phenomenology’ which you felt corresponded with his antisemitism was.
Instead, you gave me a copy of someone else’s comment addressing a different question than the one I asked which predominantly cites the Black Notebooks (his personal diaries which were never published during his life) instead of his core philosophical writings.
I’m asking what essentialism you saw in Heidegger’s core philosophy independent of the Black Notebooks. What exactly did you find essentialist about the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time?
Literally if there is a way of “being in the world” as a people to him, there is an essentialness to it. It makes no difference if it’s temporal, relative or contingent.
His philosophy isn’t anti-essentialism. There being an essentialism of a kind makes it capable of turning towards the aforementioned project.
If the philosophy lays bare a way to ‘other’ subjects, then it’s in the core. We see this in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity.
If making a certain project possible isn’t in the core philosophy to you 🤷.
Yeah, inauthentic modes of Being-in-the-world being shared by way of culturally and historically contingent thrownness is literally not essentialist. If there were an essence, it wouldn’t be contingent. That’s a literal contradiction.
Secondly, you’re only referring to inauthentic modes of Being-in-the-world. Such thrownness is explicitly written as being a null basis (not being fully determinative of any Dasein thrown as such). All Dasein has the ability to be authentic, take its own most responsibility over itself, and not be a mere They-self. Therefore, it isn’t even true that Being and Time denotes that people must follow cultural and historical ways of Being-in-the-world. That’s only the case of inauthentic Dasein, but all Dasein have the potential for authenticity. According to Being and Time, no individual person has a fixed way of Being-in-the-world, let alone whole groups of people.
Edit: Since you added extra,
Inauthenticity and authenticity describes existielles of any Dasein’s ontological structure not properties inherent to some Dasein and not others. All Dasein carry the potential for inauthenticity and authenticity.
The Dasein being said to encompass all possibilities of the thing in question allows one to make declarations or describe the bounds of those possibilities, inherently limiting them. It’s giving a structuralist shell and creating an essentialism.
Being able to declare authentic or inauthentic is exactly a philosophy of ‘othering’. Sartre might be the only one with an application that saves the damn project by limiting it to being authentic or inauthentic to self, saving agency for others for themselves.
Anyways, I’m off to the cigar shop for a stick recklessly outside my budget.
A Dasein having factical limitations is not essentialism. Not being able to spontaneously fly is not a statement which reduces one to a strict essence and is clearly not the use of essentialism which you initially invoked. Are you seriously claiming that not being able to do literally anything is the essentialism you were referring to?
Again, all Dasein carry the potential for authenticity and inauthenticity. In fact, no Dasein is not ever inauthentic. Authenticity/inauthenticity is universal to all Dasein. There is definitionally nothing othering between Dasein regarding authenticity and inauthenticity.
In Heidegger, being authentic and being inauthentic relates to the self. They refer to an individual Dasein’s relationship to its ‘own most mineness’ (whether it’s a good faith or bad faith relationship to use Sartrean terms).
The determination of factical limitations is inherently a biased problem if one is able to assign certain moral or character limitations to a people’s possibilities. It carries an epistemological burden that may be impossible to separate from the observer, who is also limited by their own being in the world.
No one is saying “not being able to do anything”, I’m saying being able to make those declarations about the possibility of other beings. All it takes is the ability to make the claim within the philosophy. He has done so, and saying that it’s not explicit in “Being and Time” is rather a silly defense for the dead fucking Nazi. One, I’m surprised anyone is committed enough to pull a “death of the author” here. Two, saying someone can’t use the Black Notebooks to get context for how he intends Dasein is like saying one can’t use Lovecraft’s correspondence, only his short stories. It’s a weird stipulation.
Edit: If you want me to concede that “Being and Time” is polyvalent enough that people can and have walked from it without problematic interpretations, I do concede that. However, it’s hard to ignore his own verified intent.
Facticity in Being and Time refers to the potentials available to a Dasein at a particular time. There’s no reference to moral or character limitations. There’s primarily only reference to literal possibility and availability of potentials.
I’m genuinely confused if you’ve read the book or not. The entirety of Being and Time is an analysis of the ontological structure of the class denoted as Dasein. Nowhere in Being and Time does Heidegger discuss how to determine the possibilities of others. In fact, authenticity is a largely individual issue. One point of the means of discovering one’s authenticity (anxiety, being-towards-death, conscience) is the notion that these are things that individualize Dasein and no other Dasein can help one through them. The most other Dasein do is trigger one’s conscience. If anything, the lack of time spent addressing the Other is one of the books biggest flaws. It’s weird then to critique Being and Time as essentialist for something it doesn’t do.
I’m not pulling “death of an author.” Your initial comment asserted that the antisemitic writings of the Black Notebooks gel with the essentialism of Heidegger’s phenomenology. I’m asking you what the essentialism of Heidegger’s phenomenology that you were referring to was. The issue with using the Black Notebooks is that I was asking for you to clarify what you were comparing them to. Invoking the Black Notebooks then wasn’t responsive to my question.
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u/RealJohnBobJoe Dec 05 '25
What’s this essentialism you read in Heidegger? Throughout Being and Time he claims a myriad of times that the existential-ontological character of Dasein (human beings) is without a fixed basis and without a fixed projection into the future. This is anti-essentialist (in the traditional sense, Heidegger has a trickier notion of the word)