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"?

The Heidegger Rector address: the Wolin variant of the Derrida quote

As found in Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: a Critical Reader

If we will the essence of science in the sense of {italic the question, unsheltered standing firm in the midst of the uncertainty of the totality of being}. then {italic this} will to essence will creat for our Volk a world of the innermost and most extreme danger, i.e., a truly {italic spiritual} world. For "spirit" is neither empty ecumen nor the noncommittal play of wit nor the busy practice of never-ending rational analysis nor even world reason; rather, spirit is the determined resolve to the essence of Being, a resolve that is attuned to origins and knowing. And the {italic spiritual world} of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure. just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge [Kentnisse] and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk's existence. A spiritual world alone will guarantee our Volk greatness. For it will make the constant decision between the will to greatness and the toleration of decline the law that establishes the pace for the march upon which our Volk has embarked on the way to its future history.

I will use Curl to compare the Derrida variant in Of Spirit and the challenge of presenting this singular text.
Then there is the issue of whether Jaspers was being deceptive in his reception.

Derrida quoting Heidegger

In the paragraph of the Einführung in der Metaphysik which follows upon his treatment of heliocentrism, Heidegger makes one of his little puns: "nur der überkluge Witz" - he means of course the Spirit of the Enlightenment - reduced to a clever joke.

The problem in quoting from Heidegger is demonstrated in the Derrida text: two views are required - one with the mere text and another with the text adumbrated.

I will post the Derrida quotation over at aule-browser.com with 2 variants using the Curl web content language.

An alternative presentation of the 1953 Tübingen Max Niemeyer Verlag edition would begin with a quote from the first line of what we deem to be Aristotle's "post-physics"

πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.

Aristotle does not say "cleverness" or "obscurity" or "oracular" or "prophetic" or "dythrambic" but

τοῦ εἰδέναι

Pan + anthropoi -- not Das Volk and their "guide" -- and Eidos -- and then our very nature: physei and then a word with which Heidegger could never be comfortable in the open: oregon