Sources and viewpoint

I think it very likely that Heidegger repeated to Celan what he had put in writing to Marcuse.

It is now known that the inflated estimates of the Ost-Deutschen feared to have fallen victims to the Soviets were highly exaggerated by historians who themselves had been variously compromised during the war and who should have been barred from this important task of estimating the numbers of the dead.

Just as we now know that the loss of refugee lives in Dresden was not likely at all what had been feared, there is no longer any excuse of avoid the question of why the Würzburg bombing was permitted after Dresden.  Numbers are not what is at issue now.  The pracice of "total war" is at issue.

It is perhaps ironic that Heidegger who despised zealots armed with numbers, fell prey to improper estimates of the dead.

But would a statistical critique have changed his thinking on essentials?  The Teutonic fate was clear: the cataclysm for south Germans would come regardless.  The recent past could even be ignored if the immediate future were clearly utter devastation such as has never been witnessed.

Heidegger was never a witness to slaughter - Schlacht - in human Stoßen.  There is no reason to think that his acquaintance was anything but second-hand.  It is one thing about which he appears not to have lied.

In the current assessment of the sources used by Arendt for her books, it is essential to come back to her Plato, Augustine and her access to the Rahel correspondence.  Just when is a letter to serve as "grounds"?  The letters exchanged with Jaspers betray a confidence in insights which was quite foreign to, say, Husserl - regardless of his published writings, he, personally, remained very unsure [see Fink and Cairns].  He was anything but resolute, as Heidegger learned and exploited.  Arendt had never gone through the confrontation of a Christian believer with the work of Bultmann.  She had no such relationship with texts.  Neither was she trained as an historian and certainly not as a political scientist.  She writes as an intellectual - the artist crossed with the seer.  Only when the occasion requires it of the speaker, does she speak as one of the Jews.  Her Rahel is likely the key to how such grotesque misappropriations could occur as are now imputed. Her actual conversations with Heidegger appear not have left indications in notes jsut as her days spent with Jaspers in Basel are perhaps not revealed not in notes.

Where is the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence on the altruists who risked hanging for sheltering the sub-human?  Were they unaware that acts of great heroism had occurred?  Was not someone arriving at a door, an event?  What greater moment for Sorge to envelope an irruption into daily life?  A neighbour is phenomenologically first a neighbour and only secondarily, derivatively, a Jew let alone an orthodox Jew.  Arriving first with a bucket of water at your burning cottage or barn, do you ask him to wait until all of the Christian neighbours have arrived and had their turn?  Having been thrown from your horse, do you ask him to desist and leave you to your fate to drown in the ditch?  How many variations are needed?  Is your first fear that he will rob or murder you because he is other?  Will he ruch to rape your mother, wife or daughter because he knows where to find your house?  Or is he first their as your fellow, your nearest neighbour?

Jaspers persistent folly is to ask Arendt about the "German".  As if he were asking Raymond Aron whether he were indeed first a Frenchman or first a Jew [see France and the double allegance hysteria.]  It is essential to see what an utter fool Jaspers could be armed foremost with Max Weber and only secondarily by history and the historians.  Arendt was absent from Germany during the decisive years;  I am not aware of her working with Polish scholars.  She did not live to see the unfolding of the trial of Klaus Barbie or the film, Shoah, of Claude Lanzmann.  At the critical juncture for her work, Jaspers was in retreat in Basel.

Arendt's Men in Dark Times should have had a Heidegger chapter: instead it has two Jaspers chapters.  Her remarks on his book of 1931 [letter Dec 2, 1931] appear to have been lost.  By 1948 she appears anixious to see a new addition of his Die Geistige Situation der Zeit - as if the book were not as problematic as his response to the Freiburg address ( we have only his word for his response to the inflammatory Heidegger address at Heidelburg - and I believe he, Jaspers, has lied in that regard.)  It is almost as if she failed to read entire passages - perhaps believing that she knew already what he was saying.

When I was twenty-one the importance of Arendt is difficult to convey today:  not fundamental as was Heidegger, but rather essential.  Today I consider them both to be fair-game: no holds barred.

Jaspers is held to be timeless by his sycophants.  He would have found that rather sickening.  But can there be a more troubling prospect than that of replacing Heidegger with Jaspers - as if the "Philosphy of Existenz" were thereby validated?  As if Philosophical Anthropology were so easily to be side-stepped?