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Phe nome nol og y
koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 214|doi 10.1163/15691640-12341291
Naming and the Inner Truth of National
Socialism: A New Archival Discovery
Julia A. Ireland
Whitman College
Abstract
This article offers an interpretive reconstruction of Heideggers first reference to the
inner truth of National Socialism in the 1934/35 lecture course, Hlderlins Hymns
Germania and The Rhine (Gesamtausgabe 39), which has remained unknown due to
an editorial error. Focusing on the distinction Heidegger draws between Greek
and natural science, it examines the way Heidegger conceives politics more originally
through Hlderlin and the naming force of Nature. It then contextualizes Heideggers
specific reference to National Socialism in terms of the then contemporary debate
between liberalism and the racially determined new science, arguing that Heidegger
thinks the inner truth of National Socialism as a -event.
Keywords
Heidegger Hlderlin National Socialism inner truth and greatness
natural science
Scandalous. It is the single word most often used to characterize Heideggers
1935 reference in Introduction to Metaphysics1 to the inner truth and greatness
1 First and foremost, I wish to thank Dr. Hermann Heidegger for permission to cite the manu-
scripts, and for his willingness to allow me to publish a reproduction of the manuscript page
with my article. I would also like to thank Frau Heidrun Fink and Frau Hildegard Dieke at the
Deutsches Literaturarchiv (dla) in Marbach, Germany, for helping me locate Heideggers
manuscripts, as well as the head of the Archive Department, Dr. Ulrich von Blow, who took
the time to review the manuscript page with me and to address some of my basic questions.
I also wish to thank Tracy Colony, Theodore Kisiel, Richard Polt, William McNeill, John Sallis,
316 Ireland
research in phenomenology 44 (2014) 315346
of N.S. [National Socialism].2 The consistency with which it is deployed by
nearly everyone writing on Heideggers politicsfrom journalists to philo-
sophically minded internet bloggers to serious Heidegger scholarsreveals
it to have assumed an almost idiomatic force. Scandalous is the word used
to capture and mark the experience of immediate moral offense built into a
formulation that has the disadvantage of showing Heidegger engaged in the
activity of drawing a distinction. And it is also the word used to describe the
relationship between the experience of that offense and its blatancy, which
connects the scandalous to shamelessness and to publicity.
This has placed more than one scholar into the ambivalent position of, on
the one hand, praising Heidegger for the courageousness of his decision to
include in the 1953 Niemeyer edition of Introduction to Metaphysics a sentence
he did not deliver as part of the lecture course, while, on the other hand, taking
him to task not just for not deleting the phrase when presented the opportu-
nity but also for retrospectively justifying it by way of a later parenthetical.3
Greg Fried, Thomas Sheehan, and Peter Trawny for their advice and assistance. I am par-
ticularly grateful to Tom Davis, whose questions and comments have been invaluable in the
progression of this article through its many drafts. Finally, I am indebted to both Whitman
College and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for contributing funding for the three
separate trips to the dla that supported my research and the checking of my facts.
2 I will be referring to Heideggers original formulation of this sentence as it is found in the
Fritz Heidegger typescript and cited by Petra Jaeger in her editors Afterword to the fourth
edition of Einfhrung in die Metaphysik. Jaeger confirms that Heidegger had originally
employed the abbreviation n.s. [Nationalsozialismus], which he subsequently revised to
read as this movement (diese Bewegung) in preparing the course for publication in 1953 by
the Max Niemeyer Verlag (Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, ed. Petra Jaeger, 4th ed., vol. 40 of
Gesamtausgabe [Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1983], 243; translated by Gregory
Fried and Richard Polt as Introduction to Metaphysics [Yale University Press: New Haven,
2001], 213; hereafter cited as ga 40 and im, respectively). I have modified Fried and Polts
translation throughout in order to bring forward Heideggers use of particular words. The
sentence published in the 1953 Niemeyer edition and currently found in the 4th edition of
the Gesamtausgabe volume of Einfhrung in die Metaphysik reads: What is being peddled
about today but has not the least thing to do with the inner truth and greatness of this move-
ment [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is fishing
about in these troubled waters of values and totalities (ga 40: 208; im, 213). Fried and Polt
place Heideggers parenthetical reference to global technology in square brackets to indi-
cate its status as a later addition.
3 This passage from Introduction to Metaphysics has a remarkably contested editorial history,
which includes not only Heideggers replacing of the abbreviation n.s. with this move-
ment but the question as to when, exactly, he added the parenthetical referring to global
technology. Hartmut Buchner, who assisted Heidegger in reviewing the final changes to be
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