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.

Balderdash in Arendt's The Human Condition

This is just a quote from Chapter VI of The Human Condition:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

The conjunction of conditionals is false, so the rest may be neglected. Here is that conjunction in bold:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

Placing such a falsehood in BOLDFACE may help a reader.  But it would also help to have links to those who supposed the age of the sun to be some scientific "unintelligibility" or the need for medical practitioners to wash their hands when going from anatomy or pathology lab to patient rounds (Semmelweis).

This alternative treatment of a text is rather easy using Curl as the web-content language.

For a philosophy course, it might mean that, for the first n days of an assignment period, an online text would be "plain" and then on days following would be annotated progressively as the maximum grade for a paper on that text also changed - in a downward direction from 100% to, say, 65%.  Think of it as a variant of "no student need be left completely behind."

Other variants are easily imagined for a philosophy course with a mixed group of undergrads and graduates.
Here is a variant with simple falsehoods in bold:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

Obviously for some presentation tasks, BOLDFACE will not be adequate: a stripped-down text placed in parallel or simply converting some text to whitespace may better serve ones purpose.
High-lighting what little may be true in the Arendt text is sobering:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

But such is the work of the famed author.

The Human Condition Chapter VI "World Alienation"

When Harry Frankfurt published his book "Truth" he may have been thinking of this book.

Chpater VI of The Human Condition opens with a quote from Kafka.

The opening section of the chapter is "World Alienation", which I quote:

Three great events stand at the threshold of the modern age and determine its character:
...
the invention of the telescope and the development of a new science that considers the nature of the earth from the viewpoint of the universe.

The 3rd great moment is the telescope in astronomy (we ignore that the events that matter in the early history of observational astronomy concern establishing certain facts by description and by drawings prior to testing any hypotheses.)

Initially Galileo's importance was to the military - for the angle at which to set a canon for greatest distance. Galileo's improved telescope was a boon for the artillery and the tactical commander.

But was the invention of the telescope on a par with global navigation and the Reformation?  There she is almost certainly mistaken as we can see with the continued rejection of Darwin based on the age of the sun until Gamow, Hoyle and others had explained that the Sun is not oxidizing a fuel (and so can be more than 5000 years old and not have "burned up" its own mass as fuel.)

What was important was the inclined plane experiment and the concept of acceleration seen in terms of distance and time.  Next in order may be Lavoisier defeating Phlogiston by experiment.

It is not that I have an experimental bias - far from it.

Arendt repeats the old saw that Kopernik had no great impact (spread by another popularizer without regard to the historical facts: the documents, once reviewed by an historian of ideas, now show otherwise.)

What is worse is her sheer ignorance on so many historical matters critical to any phenomenological contribution to astronomy and modes of experience in natural science.

The solution is to present in adequate layout her texts - both the 1st and 2nd edition ( the 1st edition has a worthless index) and just ignore the introduction pasted onto the 2nd Ed.

Geophysics: 1956 marks the major break-through in plate techtonics.

Evolution: Arendt conflates the evolution of the earth with that of our species in one and the same sentence.

Arendt conflates all relativism with Einsteinian relativity.

Arents conflates mathematics and mathematical physics (wholly ignorant of Bryn Mawr's Emmy Noether and the role of non-arithmetic symmetries and groups to GTR.)  See Heidegger on science as classification, measurement and calculation.

Arendt conflates mathematical physics with experimental physics across both celestial mechanics and particle physics.

Arendt shows no sign of knowing what Maxwell had achieved (she repeats Heideger's claim which he made on television of what can no longer be comprehended.)

Arendt conflates "fixed point" with ":Archimedian point" with Mach on no privileged point.

Arendt repeats misconstruals of Galileos' own views.

Arendt appears not to know that two orbiting masses orbit about their commonpoint of mass (would she have known where this point lies?)

Arendt appears not to know that Plato knew the view of Pythagorous that Hesperus is Phosphorus.

Arendt seems to believe that uranium does not occur naturally (and so was ignorant of the actual WORK done by Pierre and Marie Curie with pitchblende.)

The 1st ed. has no reference to Heidegger but is riddled with almost direct quotes from him and includes the capitalization of Being.

Arendt appears not to know the basis for Einstein's Nobel prize (see her comments on matter and energy.)

Arendt appears not to have read books which she quotes based on her remarks about relativity: the role of invariants is lost on her.

Arendt seems unaware of how non-Euclidean geometries arose (this is not a matter of arithmetic, measurement or calculations but an issue which her Plato would also have acknowledged concerning a premise.)

The work of a seminal thinker.

Arendt was as anthropocentric as Heidegger- perhaps even more so.  The use of her word "creature" could mislead the naive reader.  See Heidegger on animals.

Arendt has amassed in a single chapter such a wealth of falsehoods, false dichotomies, fallacies, suppressed premises, pointless polemics, deliberate distortions and yet not a reference to her source: Heidegger.

As a philosopher she fails to distinguish instrumentalism, pragmatism, mechanism, physicalism, naturalism - all in the Heidegger tradition (see Heidegger on Erich Frank.)

Heidegger never sat his exams in science and math.  Arendt was a political ignoramus before 1930.  She bungled her work as a commentator on some of the most appalling events and outcomes of the 20th Century and she utterly bungles her learned assessment of the "modern age".

Any poet who has ever looked at the moon through a telescope will know what I mean.

With regard to Galileo, even an a world with no moon (no tides - so likely no tidal pools so likely no terrestrial life) and with a thick atmostphere with no view of a sun - and especially a foggy world in need of telescopes and accurate artillery - would might have an experiment in acceleration of lead shot on a smooth inclined plane, navigation using the polarization of light and Maxwell.

The answer is to layout some of her most outrageous claims in plain view in web pages designed to facilitate the documentation of bullsh*t.  This I will get rolling at http://aule-browser.com/

The reviews of the book at SEP, IEP and wikipedia should bring all of those encyclopedist efforts into question -especially the "peer-reviewed" bullsh*t.  Truth is worth the effort and the work required - and collaboration, not singular individuals as is the model at SEP and IEP.

see Jocelyn Benoist and others on the triumph of Heideggerian bullsh*t as philology, etymology and classical scholarship in French philosphy.  Theology in disguise is a dark travelling companion.

Humor: Arendt also warns that we may explode the entire planet.  Luckily the CERN collider was not named in her honor.

Arendt seems to think the phenomenology of "heaviness" is impugned by distinguishing weight from mass.  She was not a student of Stumpf or Lipps but did spend a few months attending Husserl's lectures (himself a former assistant to Weierstrass and influenced by Bolzano who is something of a parent to "modern" science and to the theory of the militarist state.)

Is there any indication that Arendt ever read Mach, Poincaré or Bolzano?  Was knowing Aristotle in the Greek a basis for a critique of twentieth century physics let alone mathematical physics in the western world?  If she only knew Mahomet in Arabic, it might be enough: see the Fatwa that helped end new science in the Islamic world.  Compare the view of the Vatican on astronomy during the past 150 years and its current contributions to astronomy.
See: Robert Musil dissertaion on Ernst Mach
See: Arendt on the watchmaker.

Truly curious: Arendt quotes Russell from a secondary source.

Fact: in a letter to Heidegger Arendt claims to read Merleau-Ponty only in 1972.

For a defence of Descartes see various. On the claim that the early is superior to the later, see Heidegger.  Compare this view to Locke as a Cartesian versus Hume (Locke being "prior" to Hume as were Parmenides and Heraklit prior to Plato and Aristotle. CF Heidegger on Aristotle's physics in Wegmarken/Pathmarks)

Humor: the great collection (assemblage) of Seba becomes the first museum (Kunsthaus) of Peter I's Saint Petersburg.  Linnaeus follows shortly thereafter.  See the role of classification and the Cepheid variables in the discoveries of Edwin Hubble.

Remark: see the evidence for dark matter with regard to the role of patient, observant women in astronomy.
A seminal thinker and seed spilled on the ground.  Or was it on the bench?