more Gesamtausgabe

It looks like another Heidegger Gesamtausgabe volume came down the pipe while I wasn’t looking. It’s called Das Ereignis, and sounds Beiträge-esque. You all know the 1930’s is just about my least favorite period of Heidegger (and not just for “Triple Sieg Heil to the Führer!” reasons), but I’ll dutifully read this one like all the others. It’s a kind of lifetime commitment once you’ve put this much energy into it.

I’ve said before that these new volumes are mostly a bore: there is generally a reason why they were left for last. It gets tiresome to read Greek words splattered across a page by the hand of Heidegger, along with hyphenated throwaway terms like An-klang and Er-eignung. However, once in awhile there are brilliant passages, and occasionally even an entire brilliant volume.

The collections of letters are almost always fascinating, so I will continue to cheer the appearance of more of those.

And here’s something else I will consider doing, before long…

Stephen Houlgate was teaching at DePaul before he left for Warwick, as many of you know. He ran a very generous Friday night German reading group at his home in Evanston in those days. And on one of those nights (this would have been 1991 or 1992) he said he had originally planned to reread all of the works of Kant and the German Idealists on the anniversary of their appearance. So in other words, he would have reread the Critique of Pure Reason in 1981, and so forth– just to get some personal sense of what the time span felt like. And then for some reason he got distracted and wasn’t able to carry out that project.

I thought of doing something similar with Heidegger… rereading his lecture courses beginning in 2019, Being and Time in 2027, etc.

The main problem with the project, however, is obvious… I’m a ’68 baby whereas Heidegger is an ’89 baby. So, I’m effectively 21 years “older” than Heidegger for the purposes of this exercise. I would be 81 years old by the time I got to the 1949 Bremen lectures, and even if I live that long may well not live long enough to get to all the language essays of the 1950’s. And why start a project that you might realistically not live long enough to complete, unless others are going to complete it for you? (And it would be pointless in this case.)

So maybe I’ll only think of doing it for the 1920’s. Yes, that’s a nice idea– I’ll consider spending the 2020’s doing a reread of Heidegger’s 1920’s stuff. It’s his best decade anyway.