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.

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