Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941

Poverty and Mortality under the Dominance of Technology

“…2 Here, instead, the Humanismusbrief is taken as providing the summa of the reckoning both with the metaphysical tradition and with Heidegger's own path of thinking through and beyond the tragic dark decade that he philosophically faced in the socalled Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks), especially in those notebooks that date back to the period of European fascism. That was the same period in which, in the aftermath of the failure of the rectorate, acknowledged by Heidegger himself as a "great mistake" (2016, 118 -119), 3 the disempowerment (Machtlosigkeit) of human sovereignty and the related possibility of thinking beyond the dichotomy of power and impotence became a widely recurring theme in -1941. 4 Heidegger reports that right after the publication of Sein und Zeit, in 1927, a young friend asked him when he would write "an ethics" (1998,268).…”