Plagiarism in the Academy: Stuart Hampshire

Has someone come right out and said that Stuart Hampshire plagiarized pages 39-85 of his "Thought and Action"?  Or is it more polite to say "cribbed extensively"?  What can be said about the 1st Ed. having no reference to Brentano or Merleau-Ponty?
The text is clearly that of Merleau-Ponty.  Russell is mentioned along with the usual Hume, Descartes, empricists, idealists ...
Gilbert Ryle was no better.  His 'knowledge how" versus "knowledge that" was taken straight out of Heidegger (he reviewed Sein und Zeit for Mind.)
And from their work during and after the war, perhaps one can understand how they may have felt uneasy referencing the Nazi or the Marxist.
In the Hampshire text it is often so painfully obvious - was he never confronted over this?  The dust jacket touts his originality and imagination.  The Times Literary Supp. seems to have been completely taken in.  Has no one ever responded?
Someone who might have spoken up was John Searle.  Did he?  Nancy Cartwright might know ...
What if Chatto and Wind-up had asked Sam Beckett to look over the text?

Heidegger and Body: Krug, Ding and the elevation of sex to gnosis

In May 1950, Heioegger is writing to Arendt about distance and intimacy: this is the Venus letter.

In June 1950 Heidegger delivers a talk, Das Ding, in which he extends a talk originally delivered to a well-heeled private audience in Bremen.

The talk is rendered almost untranslatable due to its reliance on northern dialect: the term in question is Krug.

Heidegger is addressing the Fine Arts audience and he chooses the useful Krug and not the fine Greek amphora or other form.  Heidegger is not always averse to Kitsch, and the reader should know that a beer mug is also a Krug - a Bierkrug. We will ignore that one layer behind lies the Putsch and Krieg.

The Krug for the esteemed listener is that from which water poured over the feet of the apostles, that they might be washed. The Krug is that which was borne by the woman at the well, it is what is borne on the heads of women the world over.

But the Krug for the North Germans of Bremen is also the pub or inn - Schenke  - and now we have reached Mary and the trusting Joseph at the inn and the gift, Geschenk.

But more than that, Krug is the vessel with the neck, the col, and so we delve.

Krug will return in a poem of Celan, some two years later.

It is essential to know that 'womb' or utero - the ultimate locus of Geborgenheit - comes to us with a close connection to buc and bucket as the old leather water bucket would swell as it filled.  So we even return to wine skins, as will Heidegger in his talk, for the Krug is also the Weinkrug.

The published talk begins with what could be a citation from the letter to Arendt: distance which is not.

S. 167 gives us Das Keimen und Gedeihen der Gewächse (see my previous post on Heid. and eros)

The principal moments come in parallel verses, almost Hebraic in manner:

Das Geschenk des Gusses kann ein Trink sein.
Er gibt Wasser.
Er gibt Wein zu trinken. [S. 164]

Why "kann ... sein"?  If this does not bring the gushing labia [Schamlippen] to the mouth itself, then consider this:
What is so remarkable in his choice of "laben" as we have now returned also to "laver" and the washing of the feet.

Im Wasser das Geschenkes weilt die Quelle.
...
Er labt ihnen Durst. [laben - both to drink in and to feast upon but also to quicken as with life*]
Er erquickt ihre Muße

Das Ding is also the maiden. And we remember the scent that was in the house after Mary annointed His feet. This was the Magd and not a priestess.

But Heidegger can also be quite low-brow, and he moves on the gushing blood and the "Opfer" - the victim offered in sacrifice.

And deeper still:

Im Geschenk des Gusses weilt die Einfalt der Vier.

This is one of the more troubling passages in Heidegger: he returns to four, as he often does: and next will be four mirrors.  Place four mirrors in an intersection of Heaven and Earth, godly and mortal and we have the elements of the Hakenkeuz and not the Christian cross.  It is very likely his offering of the ancient Swastika.

Einfalt gives us both the innocence and also the folds and creases. We are back to the Tal on the mons veneris.  Heidegger knew how to keep his audience in thrall.  He will give us the Mondlauf and we will have mens one layer below his explicit ens.

I leave off with this before turning to sciences: astronomy and anatomy.

das Zwiefache Fassen
das Fassende
die Leere
die Ausgieß als Spenden

The Geschenke is indeed a Spende, but one layer below is the fountain that spends water - but we are also back to Keim, for man in German also spends his seed and must not do so on the ground, Erde. And Heidegger dwells on Erde without mention of die Frau.

The four which is barely suppressed as Geviert is gender + walten: father, mother, daughter, son (the Heideggers adopted Erika.)
Without these four, whence the shepherding of Being? Lamb are begotten, male and female. The key phrase is missing, as in: Sorgfalt walten lassen (but far from "prudence' or 'phronesis'.)

Gender is what cuts across all of the genera and species.  And gender brings us to Symposium.

Heidegger in the hands of Arendt has a focus on Galileo and astronomy.  But this is short-sighted.  Heidegger also had his sites set on anatomy.  What astronomy to had done to Heaven by violating Venus (exposing her phases), anatomy had done to body, Leib. The connection here is intimate in all respects: both the depiction of the anatomy lesson and the etymology with tomos.  With the slices we return to the false analyses of time.

The ana- here is not the animal: it is merely the sense of slice "up completely" as in ana-temnein.

Heidegger is at pains to distinguish man from animal in Das Ding. But he will not have recourse to reason or even language: man is the one who dies.  The animal merely comes to an end.  The parallel with gender and sex should be obvious: the sexual act, despite the clear anatomical similarities across female mammals and male mammals - the act between man and maiden is not bestial. In man the climax is "the little death".  But "climax" is the climbing of steps: it only came into use with regards to orgasm in pamphlets on birth control - Heidegger often refers to "steps" and surely understood birth control with all of his affairs - but we must not look there: we have simply "organismus" which in German is Lebewesen and so no direct connection to Orgasmus.

But Lebewesen we do have: and we have Geheimnis.  [to be continued in another section] (my pun)

In order to pursue "Das Ding dingt" it is necessary to place his text so that translations and selective annotations are available: glosses at the conventional, polite level (for which Heidegger had such disdain) and those properly Nietzschean notices that he would wish to share only with what he called "womanly" company - for certain of his insights he was loathe to share with men (see his letter to Elfride indexed in my post on that Briefwechsel book's incomplete index.)  I will endeavor to do this at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ once I have completed a posting of Galileo's pre-Venusian Sidereal Messenger.

Missing in the Martin - Elfride Heidegger epistolary index

These are some of the  missing items in the 2008 index of "Letters to His Wife 1915-1970" by Martin Heidegger (original published in German in 2005.)

biophysics 200
conservatives 299
culture 133,137,190, 197, 236
determinism 303
death 275
eros 246
fate 197
framework (Ge-stell) 257
freedom 303
gods 297
Hera 213
infidelities (missing rendez-vous of p.314)
Indian 277
lies 255
logos (missing p.241)
mathematics 257
marriage 77, 237
motivation 303
poetry 297
psychiatry 284
party (NSDAP) 273, 274
'philosophers' 308
physics 235, 237, 250,256-7,269,284,300,308
responsibility 266
revolution 73,141,295
science 157,294,303,309 (sometimes in 'scare' quotes)
spirit 137
trust 213,255
worldview 101, 157, 303, 309

Also missing:
Any mention of Einstein or Weyl in the many mentions of physics (where Heisenberg dominates.)

Grund 248, 259 (with the "camouflage" quote being on page 249)
human being 123
music 243
Insight 241
dwelling 219, 225-6
tractors, cars and paths 273, 305
women 83, 127
record (his recorded voice) 287
object-like (in relation to physics and functional terms) 257
tradition (university) 215
neo_kantianism 267
sacrifice 164
will 175
Brock 294

It is often unclear to me when he is mentioning Ernst Jünger (example: 242.)

On page 131 there is a curious remark of Gertrud about the "available letters": 1933, 1934 and 1935 have but one letter each which is preposterous given the number of times he lectured outside of Freiburg and his habit of writing to Elfride when away from Marburg or Freiburg.

Page 119 gives the lie to any claim that Heidegger was physically unfit for duty.

June 14, 1945 (page 189) should trouble any philosopher:

We go about our daily business with great sorrow and the essential truth is still quite unutterable.

Not long after we have February 17, 1946 (pg 191 - the letters are not numbered by the editors) with

Given the essential unfathomability & unpredictability of events today, one can never say for sure such things as that the officers have been kept behind.

Yet he never went on to speak of "total war" and the slaughter of the Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn?
Contrast this with his letter to Elfride when the war is going as expected:

Nov 6, 39
Great transformations in thought & human existence are perhaps already preparing themselves, the contours of which we can hardly conceive.

There is no lament for the Poles.

May 18, 40
In addition, the invasions are sufficiently well-rehearsed.

This is the letter in which is reference to "warriors" was not deemed suitable for an entry in the index.  Here he speaks as if Ernst Jünger spoke truth.

warriors 167

the single person disappears as an individual, but at the same time he has the opportunity to be informed of how the whole thing stands in the quickest possible way at any day & any time.

His apologists will have this as meant to reassure his delicate spouse. A few years later he will have no word of the fate of his sons for weeks, months.  For many others it would be years, with some not returning for ten years if they returned at all.

Again, June 14, 1945,

As long as the young men are missing from university, any work is only half-done, with no opportunity fir venturing another attempt at sowing the seeds of a real spiritual tradition. Perhaps we ought to try to bring people together in our house, without falling prey to the usual culture industry.

Within weeks people not of his choosing were under his roof. And of course the houses in which Heidegger had lived in Marburg came through the war unscathed.

Now he would wait for the clash of the titans, America and Russia, the outcome of the hubris of reckoning.

Strangely - or not - economics is not in the index, and I recall but one mention of an economist (economics was Elfride's academic interest.) See page 83.

For Derrida on Heidegger on spirit, see pages 133 and 137.

For index entries on other Nazi "thinkers" see his mentions of Bäumler, Krieck and Rosenberg.  Note the entries for Carl F. von Weizsäcker whose view of ethics and "camouflage" and revisionism may have been close to that of Heidegger.

Compare: Elfride and mistresses; Veza Canetti and the mistresses
Note: neither "soul" not "Stein, Edith" nor "Geiger, Afra" are found in the index.
Neither Bonhoeffer - neither Karl nor Dietrich - figure in the annotated index of names or the index tout court.
In the annotated index of names, Elisabeth Blochmann (Lisi) is listed as a friend.
Geiger, Afra is found in the in the annotated index of names.

Blackamoor is not in the index.
Moritz Geiger is missing.
Erich Frank is missing and is his death (1945)
The death of Ernst Cassirer is missing (also 1945).  See "neo_Kantianism".
The death of Bergson is missing (but see letter pg 71)
Love is not in the index (nor was responsibility, trust, guilt, shame ... )

Comparison: womanizers Elias Canetti, Paul Tillich and Bertrand Russell; promiscuous Ludwig Wittgenstein, André Gide.

Note: Heidegger was almost engaged or engaged when he met his student Elfride Petri and "confided" in her - some nine years before confiding in Hannah Arendt.

Another absence in the Martin Heidegger letters

The absence of an index in the GA volume of Vorträge unde Aufsätze may reflect Heidegger's view on "der Leser".

The absence of one particular entry in the index to the English translation of "Letters to his Wife" is vexing: it may reflect the use of digital indexing and the exclusion of "common words".  The missing term is culture or Kultur. There are a few old Indo-European words which any reader should know and this is one.

I have added two notes: page 137 and page 190 which correspond to his letter 19320620 and his 19450614.

While both remarks are distasteful as quotations, they are perhaps not as troubling as his repeated mention in other works of those who "reckon" or "calculate".

Unlike correspondence between Jaspers and Arnedt with its many discussions of "German" and "Jewish", in the letters to Elfride the English translators have the term "Jews" in the index refer the reader to "anti-Semitism."  This is astonishing.  If many politically radicalized Jews were attracted to Communism then his remark to that effect is to indicate what?  A lack of anti-Semitism? His literary executors proved unable to translate one of his remarks; another appears to be a repetition of a stereotypical insult.

But the absence for me will always be the Jews of Marburg.  How many mezuzah were neglected on doorframes?  Where is the map of Marburg for December 1938?  Who later retired in comfort from the sale of such a house in 1965, 1975?  How were the tax-rolls of Marburg lost in the undamaged town? Lost in a town so free of the "culture" that the Heideggers despised? What would be a simple index on such a map?

When Heidegger says hegen it is as if the forest has not only a steward, but a shepherd.  And the houses in the town, what he called "Wohnhäuser" - who was to be the steward of those absent names and each Mezuzuh "en-framed"?

Weg, Frage, Denken

The debt of Heidegger to Husserl's antipsychologism is nowhere clearer than in Heidegger's approach in Die Frage nach der Tecknik.

It would be too easy to be distracted by what he says about das Wesen des Baumes. That would be a distraction.

What the reader should consider is the near parallel to Wittgenstein's confidence in ordinary speech.

Das Frage baut an einem Weg.

The confidence here - perhaps misplaced, but nonetheless - is that whoever genuinely pursues this questioning may arrive at an opening.

This confidence is not unlike that of Husserl with regard to the horizonality of a presentation - a horizonality which - with some training - any attentive reflection will note.  Of course, more and more with Husserl the structure to adumbrate is on the side of the ego, but co-constitution remained the norm.

With Husserl, there was a certain way of framing things.  A more peripatetic philosopher might have said: "try looking at it this way" or "try thinking of it this way" or just "go away and think it over."  There might be no prescription as to how to proceed to achieve an analytical or a synthetical result.

What is naturally worrisome is the confidence which Heidegger places not in the pragmatics of everyday language, but it the revelations of etymologies. In many ways, the belief in what "lies behind" the word as used today, by us, is not unlike a variety of doctrines concerning true natures and their possible - or even inevitable - revelation.

There is of course no reason to think that the fundamental requirements for the tasks of thinking are to be found in Parmenides and Heraclitus.  Why not Lao Tzu? Why the belief that no one more evocative than Heraclitus will not appear in some remote village of some distant land?  Because Homer's achievement is unique?  And if the work of Plato and Aristotle had been lost?  And dare we ask, if nothing of Parmenides and Heraclitus had come down to us?

Heidegger's romance of the Greeks has no claim on a Chinese, Korean or Indian reader.  Why should it exercise a claim on a reader in Minnesota?  The answer can only be in a presumed common heritage, a tradition to be recovered.

This is quite irrational in a way in which Born seeing the applicability of matrix algebra to the first results of Heisenberg - seeing them as incomplete - is not irrational.  Someone other than Born could have had this insight if she had come to Heisenberg's paper by way of matrices - even if for her matrices were only a pointless hobby, an amusement.

Why should we feel convinced that the solar astronomer with her automated binocular telescope does not appreciate the warmth of the rising sun on the day of a transit of Venus or Mercury?  Why should the technical expert be cut off from poesis?  If a Heraclitean figure were present in the Caritas asylum where Heidegger found himself, would that ecstatic figure not rightly have been impatient with pedestrian Heidegger?

But Heidegger was not an amateur astronomer nor schooled as a sailor in celestial navigation.  Nor was he an amateur botanist or musician.  But he was at times, in his way, a bit of a poet. He made no sketches when in Rome. He never troubled to learn Polish - he had nothing to learn from Ingarden.

What Heidegger could not suspect is that crows make tools, that apes make tools, that some cats and dogs recognize mere images as objects of interest. Inter-est. For Heidegger, a Catholic, could not allow that the beasts were betimes puzzled, even if they ask no questions. As Leibniz wrote his French: Estre. The Hawaiian humpback whale observing the male scuba diver has no Zweck and need use no instrument.  The humpback whale observing the scuba diver needs no telos. The whale observing the diver.

So what can be learned from Heidegger about thinking outside the confines of anthropocentrism?

First: that Heidegger was himself trapped in his enthrallment with a tradition and being a thinker and known and recognized as a thinker. To this, Arendt fell prey.

Second: that Heidegger was more focussed on knowledge than on learning - more concerned with insight than over-coming metaphors and bias. It is an irony of Heidegger on knowledge that he knew so little about the how of learning. In so many ways, he remains in the grip of a Husserl, a Cassirer.  It is not enough that God is dead if the theology of Aquinas had been adequate in its time.  This is the lesson of navigation and the peril of going too far from shore when not equipped to navigate. As perilous as being too close to shore in a storm. And Heidegger might have known, for all of Hoelderlin on the sun, ships and shores. The issue was not speed or the Raketenflugzeug. Homer's time was not ready for the open sea.

Perhaps if Heidegger had taken the post in Japan, he would have overcome his German tradition - or at least stepped off his path  - and not simply onto another.

Question: what was Heidegger's comprehension of Japanese ceramics?

Gutenberg and Spectacles

Arendt in The Human Condition, Chapter VI, singles out the Reformation, global navigation and the combination of the telescope as technical instrument and astrophysics as "universal" science.

Any reader might ask why not spectacles and the printing press?  When the early phenomenologists adopted the slogan "To the things themselves!", no one was expected to be excluded by having to rely on spectacles: phenomenology was not exclusively or primarily focused on perception and appearances.

In one early text, "Phenomena" are roughly what we would call the constellations visible in the Mediterranean sky - a sky somewhat different from ours as the northern celestial pole was not Polaris as it is today, some two millenia later.

A more important phenomenon is the "moon illusion" as it is not dependent on either telescope or spectacles. This illusion need not be subsumed under issues of apparent numerical measure.  It is quite possible that Arendt was not aware of the illusion and how it was resolved - the nature of this appearance, if you will - by science and critical dialogue.

In the arc of the sky, the full moon, high in a winter sky, subtends less than a single degree of arc - about the width of your little pinkie extended above you at arms length.  Call this by some neologism such as "lunar-spatial-form-in-high-sky-hand" for some non-numerical astronomy.  The rising full moon at the horizon appears to be - is said to be - much larger. If the high moon is a "dime-size" then the rising moon is a "nickel-size" - or sleeve-button-sized versus front-button-sized, to address Heidegger's numeric phobia.  Pupil-of-lion versus iris-of-lion.  What you will.

The telescope is another matter: the "sickle" Venus is larger in the field of a given telescope than the "full" Venus.

At the time Arendt was writing - during the 1950's - there was no star that appeared larger when in focus at high-magnification within a given star-pattern or asterism than when at low magnification in that same field.  This is not so for a planet, a cluster or a nebula.  With allowance for the distinct differences between the resolved image at optical limit in a refractor and in a reflector telescope, stars remain "points" of light.  Only recently has the "surface of a star" been explored - other than the sun.

What was critical was the discovery that so many stars are in fact double stars and some even triple.  To Herschel we owe the confirmation that true binary stars - not virtual or "optical" apparent doubles (one star appearing near another (only due to our relative alignment of star-A and star-B from earth at some point in her orbit) - obeyed Newtonian mechanics (to a good approximation given his instruments.)

Our understanding of our solar system is that it might more readily have been a binary arrangement of a yellow star with a smaller star - perhaps a brown dwarf comprised of what today are our four gas-giant planets.  Our sun likely began in a cluster of stars: the fate of the solar dust ring was to be a mix of rocky planets, asteroids, gas planets, icy debris and residual dust.

It is not an illusion that Venus appears larger in one phase than in another.  Nor does it require Arendt's "Archimedean" standpoint to think about this. Insight alone will not resolve this - did not resolve this.

The moon illusion is a critical absence in Chapter VI of Arendt's book - as much are the concepts of acceleration, limit, group and symmetry - not to mention the orbit of Mercury.

If only Arendt had written a book on Emmy Noether, Edith Stein and the destiny of the thinking woman at Goettingen!

see: Dorian Cairns recall of Husserl on near, far and astronomy.
also see: Sonja Kovalevsly (Sofia Kovalevskaya); Sophie Germain
more recently: Maria Skłodowska, Julia Robinson, Louise Volders
among philosophers: Susanne Langer, Susan Stebbing, E. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch

Günther Stern, Günther Anders and the first marriage

What Heidegger says about Günther Stern in the letter to Hannah Arendt of Oct 18, 1925, makes it hard to believe that she later becomes Hannah Stern.  As she says in her letter of 1929, Heidegger might understand least of anyone.  The letter is undated, and it is not clear to me if it is before or after the wedding.

In the next letter in 1930 she is placing Stern beside Heidegger - one can imagine the "Heideggerian" prattle that she must have been listening to from his sycophant.

But in the 1929 letter, already with Stern, she is telling Heidegger that her love for her Martin will always be the love of her life.

Once divorced, Stern would later help her to escape from France to America with her new husband, the political activist, Heinrich Blücher.

Stern would later be known as Günther Anders and would continue to write on the themes from the Marburg lectures.

The first marriage surely shows what harm has been done to the young student by the predatory professor whose wife was so often absent from Marburg.  And yet Blücher goes on to establish some sort of friendship with Heidegger in the post-war years.  Or was he just making things bearable - normalizing the bizarre -refusing to be bourgeois, possessive, jealous or protective.  So it had not been exploitation of an impressionable young woman, alone in Marburg.  Or had he not read the letters?

Kristeva on Heidegger: colours

In his Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Heidegger invites the students in his Marburg lecture to consider what it is to think on the wall.  He cannot tell them how, when she first entered his office, that he asked her to removed her hat, her raincoat - or did not.  Husserl insists that when the thing is present, the backside is present in consciousness in the horizon, a phenomenon well-known in the worldwide demand for denim.

Colour.  Denim was originally colored using Newton's absent shade (just as the sun and the moon with the known planets numbered seven, so must his colours of the prism) - indigo - and not Genoa blue.

Kristeva draws our attention to the turn from green to brown in his thought of his saucy wood nymph.  Here is a possible clue: Trakl "Die Raben".

In Die Raben we find the Schatten, the doe, the braune Stille and the furrowed acre.

Über den schwarzen Winkel hasten
Am Mittag die Raben mit hartem Schrei
Ihr Schatten streift an die Hirschkuh vorbei
Und manchal mal sieht man sie mürrisch rasten.

O wie sie die braune Stille stören,
In der ein Acker sich verzückt,
Wie ein Weib, das schwer Ahnung berückt,
Und manchmal kann man sie keifen hören.

Und ein Aas, die sie irgenwo wittern,
Und plötzlich richten nach Nord sie den Flug
Und schwinden wie ein Leichenzug
in Luften, die von Wollust zittern.

Or not.  But what awaits the doe (hind), if not the buck (stag, Hirsch) in rut (Brunst, Hirschbrunst)?

re-readig Karl Jaspers: 1930 - 1937

I had intended to cotnrast Jaspers post-1945 on the idea of the university and Liz Coleman on her plan for Bennington College (while noting the seeming collapse of the FNCU in Saskatchewan.)

But I cannot reconcile Heidegger's letter to Elfride of March 19, 1933.  The Reichstag fire had been on Feb 27 of that year.  Granted, the next act in the consolidation of Hitler's power is March 23.  So I look to the letters of Jaspers to Heidegger and Arendt for some sign that he grasps what is happening.  It is more than sad and disillusioning.

One reason that I work on site-specific research browsers and the Curl web content language at aule-browser.com is to be able to place side-by-side such texts as these with and without combinations of links and annotations - and to let the reader or researcher determine that quotations are not out of context or poorly translated.

Start with the letter to Elfride.  We seem to learn from the assessment of Heidegger which Jaspers held back from the 1st Ed. of the Schilpp "Jaspers" collection that Jaspers found a kindred spirit in Heidegger.  Their first meeting is so telling: it is an "occasion" at the Husserl home.  We have only Jaspers word that he confronted Husserl on the matter of Afra Geiger.  What I take from my reading is that Jaspers and Heidegger were given to mocking Husserl, Cassirer and the like (see Jaspers 1930 on "The Sophist".)

In the letter to Elfride, Heidegger makes one of his unkind references to Jaspers wife. Gertrud, a Jew.  Jaspers is portrayed by Heidegger as open to the possibilities that are opening up.  Now comes the name of Kriek.  Then Baumgarten. This latter is key.  Why would Heidegger lie to Elfride about Jaspers' views?

I flip to the Jaspers letters to Hannah Arendt of this period: full of "the German character" and his doubts about what roots a Jew could have in sharing the fate of Europe's Jews (he is imagining assimilation here, not annihilation - the focus is the Arendt book on Rahel.)

I then flip to the Jaspers letters to Heidegger (these are noa vailable in German in Minnesota colleges and universities, so I am reduced to an incomplete "preview" on Google Books.)

One possibility is that Jaspers now fears Heidegger and is bilking him for information - deceiving the ever mendatious Heidegger (one could take this impression from the post-war letters between Arendt and Jaspers - but we now know how much she deliberately misrepresented her role in rehabilitating Heidegger in those very letters to her "most Honoured").  I see no sign to indicate this.

Here is what I am able to read in "Briefwechsel 1920-1963" by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Walter Biemel, Hans Saner.  Jaspers would have us believe that it was only in 1934 that he learned of Heidegger's deunciation by letter (Dec. 1933).  What they were they discussing in early 1933 - Baumgarten and American pragmatism?  The Heidegger letter to Elfride suggests that there was an issue of "funds" that needed to be brought to the attention of Max Weber's widow.  Baungarten joined the NSDAP in 1937 and was later linked with Konrad Lorenz in Koenigsberg.  What is essential to know is whether Baungarten's opposition in Freiburg was to the SA (Rohm's SturmAbteilung was Heidegger's preferred movement.)

It is almost impossible to form a clear opinion of where Jaspers stood without being able to lay side-by-side the original 1930 text of "Die Geistige Situation der Zeit" and the sanitized 1946 version.

In the letter to Elfride, Heidegger asserts that it was Jaspers who ensured the career of Ernst Krieck!. (task: look for the connection of Kriek and Elisabeth Blochmann.)  Kriek had already been censured in 1931 for his use of the Hitler salute (which we now know Heidegger retained even after 1936.)

Jaspers to Arendt: that Heidegger spoke like an anti-Semite when with an anti-Semite, spoke like a radical conservative when with him; spoke like a Lutheran when with Husserl; spoke very carefully while first at Catholic Frieburg and later with often wirh caution at Protestant Marburg (see Husserl's letter to Natorp; see Heidegger to Elfride on "debate" at Marburg.)

From reading the letters to Elfride where so much is not said:
  My suspicion: that a DNA test would show that Hermann was in fact Heidegger's biological son - and not the son of Friedel Caesar. 
  My second suspicion: that Erike Birle was compromised by Heidegger: in 1945 her first son is named Martin.  She was 14 at the time she became a foster daughter.