Heid-egger

A Different Calling

Heidegger’s reinvention as a farmer was the result of several events in the 1930s and 1940s. Before Heidegger realized his agricultural vocation in 1946, he had assumed that he had a different calling altogether. In 1933, Heidegger famously received “a call from the SA Storm Trooper Bureau” (Ronell 6), which led to his appointment as the rector of the University of Freiburg, a role in which he served from 21 April 1933 until his resignation just over a year later on 23 April 1934. In his public appearances during this time, Heidegger frequently engaged with popular themes of Nazi ideology. For instance, in a 26 May 1933 speech, Heidegger commemorated Albert Leo Schlageter, an early member of the NSDAP who had been executed by French occupational forces in 1923 for acts of sabotage and who was later idolized as a Nazi martyr and commonly referred to as the “first soldier of the Third Reich” (qtd. in Baird 36; Behrenbeck 268). Heidegger’s speech contributed to this hero worship by alleging that Schlageter had faced his execution with his head held high, aware that his death serves a greater cause, the future of the German people. Heidegger concluded the commemorative speech by arguing that Schlageter “was not permitted to escape his destiny” (Schlageter 42).

Heidegger believed that he, too, had a destiny he must not avoid: to make the German people aware of their constitutive role in world history. Accordingly, one day after his speech on Schlageter, Heidegger delivered his infamous Rektoratsrede in which he proclaimed that the German university, under the guidance of his philosophy, was meant to foster the “leaders and guardians of the fate of the German Volk” (The Self-Assertion 30). In his speech, Heidegger essentially declared himself the intellectual and spiritual leader of the Nazi movement and that his fate was inextricably intertwined with that of the German people.

Heidegger’s fervent espousal of Nazi ideology was met with disbelief and disappointment by several of his friends and colleagues, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, and Karl Jaspers. Löwith, a former student of Heidegger’s whose research explored the survival of such ideas as destiny and providence in modernity, argued that Heidegger’s espousal of Nazi ideology was fueled by his belief in fate. In other words, Heidegger really believed that the political developments in 1933 had revealed his purpose in life (Löwith 51). Yet roughly a year later, Heidegger was disabused of that belief when he was forced to resign from the position as rector of the University of Freiburg.

In 1946, 13 years after the call from the SA Storm Trooper Bureau, Heidegger received another call. He commented on this call in Anmerkungen I–V:

Today (January 23, 1946) the rector of the university informed me that the senate has unanimously approved my application for emeritus status from October 8, 1945, but with the “interdiction” of teaching activities for an indefinite period of time. Later, in case of good conduct, it could be subject to review whether and in which form I would resume my teaching activities. At the same time, I was told to keep a low profile in public, which presumably also meant “publications.” (Anmerkungen 68–69)

What caused this “interdiction”? Two months after the German Instrument of Surrender had been signed into effect in May 1945, Heidegger was summoned to a hearing before the University of Freiburg’s Denazification Committee. His time as a rector in 1933–34 fell into a vital time for the consolidation of Nazi ideology within German academia. At Heidegger’s own suggestion, the members of the committee decided to request an evaluation from Jaspers. In his evaluation, Jaspers advised the committee that Heidegger’s teaching would have a “fatal” (qtd. in Ott 316) impact on young students and recommended that he be prohibited from teaching (Ott 291–327; Safranski 390–95).

Consequently, Heidegger was indefinitely banned from academic teaching in the spring of 1946. Yet for Heidegger, the rector’s behest to keep a low public profile and refrain from publishing was at least as troubling as the Lehrverbot (Ott 303). He suffered a mental breakdown and sought help from psychiatrist Viktor Emil von Gebsattel. What is more, Heidegger subsequently reframed the Lehrverbot. Indeed, philosopher Andrew J. Mitchell argued that for Heidegger, the Lehrverbot marked the beginning of “a new phase of his career” (71). In light of Heidegger’s reinvention as a farmer, however, these developments are downplayed when described as a “new phase.” The Lehrverbot initiated a change of career.

Existential Ruminations

Jaspers published his Psychology of World Views in 1919, and Heidegger praised it as a major contribution to the understanding of human existence (Heidegger, Comments 19–25). In his book, Jaspers describes a particular set of situations that induce a level of existential distress that has the power to annihilate a person’s sense of self. Such a Grenzsituation can emerge, according to Jaspers, from a confrontation with one’s own mortality, for example, in connection with a tragic accident or the onset of a serious illness. If the afflicted person manages to overcome this unsettling experience, a new purpose in life may emerge, and with it a new identity (Jaspers 202–47). Heidegger’s ruminations in his notebooks suggest that the Lehrverbot was, for him, just this sort of Grenzsituation.

Heidegger did not mince words when discussing the sanctions imposed by the Denazification Committee in his notebooks. At one point in Anmerkungen I–V, he claims that the decision to ban him from academic teaching would go down in history as worse than the atrocities committed in concentration camps (Anmerkungen 84–85). Heidegger’s comparison of his Lehrverbot with the Shoah is so repugnant and vile that it can obscure how it also reframes the Lehrverbot as an event of broad historical consequence. Rather than a sanction imposed on an individual, the Lehrverbot amounted, in Heidegger’s account, to a “betrayal of thinking” (Anmerkungen 85), that is, a catastrophic event in the History of Being.

Why did Heidegger conceive of the Lehrverbot as a “betrayal of thinking”? If, as Heidegger claimed, throughout the history of philosophy various philosophers had attempted to capture the essence of being by proposing narrow definitions, such as idea, presence, or possibility, it was his goal to overcome philosophy and its inadequate terminology by thinking about Being on its own terms (Contributions 227). Hence, the Lehrverbot was a catastrophe in Heidegger’s eyes because it threatened not only his purpose in life but also the Fate of Being. Rather than a reflection on the consequences of his actions, Heidegger’s notebooks offer a revisionist account in which the Lehrverbot emerges as the true catastrophe.⁴

The questionable nature of Heidegger’s reframing efforts may suggest to some readers that their intellectual merit is limited. Yet these ruminations give evidence of a thinking pattern that is paradigmatic of Heidegger’s late philosophy, not an erratic departure to be dismissed. Reframing the Lehrverbot as a catastrophic event in the History of Being not only substituted the real reasons behind it with secret motives, but also caused its troubling context to fade into the background. For Heidegger, a redemptive dimension came into focus.

Adapting Jasper’s claim about the rehabilitative qualities of adversity, Heidegger argued that every catastrophe is followed by an anastrophe, i.e., a reversal that exposes the redemptive aspects of a tragic event. In his notebooks, Heidegger wrote that before “the anastrophe, the catastrophe occurs” (Anmerkungen 391).⁵ The catastrophe thus becomes a prerequisite for a fateful peripeteia and for this reason catastrophes, however terrible they may be, must be endured with equanimity. Heidegger condensed this idea into two stanzas with Hölderlinian undertones: “In view of distress, / What is fate, acquiesce” (Heidegger, Anmerkungen 342).⁶

At first glance, Heidegger’s call for an acquiescent acceptance of one’s fate appears reminiscent of the Stoic doctrine of fatalism, the idea that both the life of the individual and the course of the world are predetermined and cannot be changed. Heidegger’s propositions concerning catastrophe and anastrophe, however, are more radical than traditional fatalism. Whereas the Stoics recommended adopting an unperturbed state of mind in the face of the inevitable vicissitudes of life, Heidegger’s tragic fatalism suggests embracing the annihilative qualities of tragedy. Susan Taubes, an early critic of Heidegger’s “eschatological hope” (168), noted that Heidegger’s focus on the redemptive qualities of catastrophe was an especially troubling figure of thought in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War.

What was Heidegger’s anastrophe? Heidegger’s existential ruminations suggest that, in an ironic twist of fate, the Lehrverbot, intended as a punishment, turned out to be a secret gift. Had he continued to be a professor of philosophy, Heidegger surmised, he would have failed to realize his true destiny.

Heidegger, Interrupted or, What’s in a Name?

The middle of the 1930s has long been regarded as a decisive turning point—a Kehre—in Heidegger’s thinking.⁷ More recently, Heidegger experts Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall came to question the monothetic postulate of a single Kehre and posited that Heidegger’s thinking was marked by several turning points (9). Indeed, Heidegger himself flagged various “turnings, circles, and loops” in his thinking (Contributions 322). The slip of paper found in Anmerkungen I–V was one of these turning points. Struggling to come to terms with the termination of his tenure as a professor of philosophy, Heidegger considered the following question: What’s in a name? More specifically: What’s in his name?

Heid-egger

someone who comes across uncultivated land, a heath (Heide), and harrows (eggt) it.

But before the harrow (Egge) and for a long time, he must let a plow precede through stony fields. (Heidegger, Anmerkungen 62)⁸

According to Heidegger, Heid-egger—literally translated as Heath-harrower—is someone who discovers an untended piece of land and proceeds to first plow, then harrow it. Put differently, Heid-egger is a farmer who works the field and transforms infertile soil into arable land capable of sustaining new crops. “How astonishing” that somebody is “called what he is” (Anmerkungen 7), Heidegger remarked, implying that his surname is an aptronym that closely relates to his vocation in life. Nomen est omen.

Various thinkers entertained the notion of nominative determinism before Heidegger. For example, around 1910 such psychoanalysts as Karl Abraham, Herbert Silberer, and Wilhelm Stekel explored the idea that a person’s surname exerts a determinative power. Once, Silberer noted, surnames referred to a person’s occupation, characteristic features, or place of birth or residence. In short, a surname denoted the nature of the person who bore it. Although surnames have lost this function over time, Silberer continued, the idea continues, and psychoanalytic methods can be employed to uncover the unconscious significance attached to names (460). Heidegger, however, applied not psychoanalysis but his own method of hyphenation to reveal the meaning of his surname.

Heidegger often employed hyphens to destabilize philosophical vocabularies, e.g., Da-sein and An-fang. By hyphenating his own surname, Heidegger turned this method of destabilization against his identity as a philosopher. In his essay “The Nature of Language” (1957), Heidegger commented on this method of hyphenation: “An ‘is’ arises where the word breaks up (zerbricht)” (The Nature 108). Consequently, the hyphen’s disruptive connection reveals the truth of how Heidegger is: Heidegger exists as Heid-egger. The hyphen was the key that unlocked the cryptonym that had kept Heidegger’s proper identity and destiny hidden.

For Heidegger, this is where the redemptive dimension of the Lehrverbot came to the fore: “I was thrown out of the profession (Beruf) and, at the same time, once again pulled into my own trajectory” (Anmerkungen 411).⁹ Heidegger describes the anastrophe of the Lehrverbot as having saved him from a false vocation and opened up the possibility of finally coming into his own—as a farmer. In Platonic terminology, the Lehrverbot here can be described as a periagoge, i.e., a turning point that leads to the transformation of a person’s entire essence (Plato 121).

Naturally, Heidegger did not argue that he was a literal farmer; however, this was also more than a florid metaphor. His novel identity reveals to Heidegger a hidden correspondence between the work of the farmer and the task of the thinker. His newly discovered task in life, Heidegger claims, is to plow the field of philosophy, clearing it of weeds and stones—philosophical ideas and concepts that have become entrenched over time—before harrowing the field and preparing it to nurture new seeds and thoughts.¹⁰

How seriously should one take Heidegger’s reinvention as Heid-egger? In a sense, the significance of this episode lies precisely in its peculiar oscillation between biography and philosophy. In order to make sense of the Lehrverbot and its consequences, Heidegger drew on his philosophical methodology and terminology; in turn, this introduced a personal dimension into his broader philosophical program. In his notebooks, Heidegger explains his biography in terms of philosophy—and this resulted in his philosophy being permeated with biographical undertones.

The question remains: why was being a farmer more in line with Heidegger’s destiny than being a philosopher? Heidegger’s notes from this time offer two answers that will be explored separately. First, Heidegger argued that it was his fate to be a farmer for genealogical reasons; second, he maintained that farming and thinking were similar modes of existence.

A Fateful Genealogy

Heidegger’s reinvention as a farmer relies on an intricate combination of etymological and genealogical arguments. According to Heidegger, his destiny as a farmer was reflected not only in the etymology of his surname, but also in his genealogy. Throughout Anmerkungen I–V, Heidegger repeatedly mentions that his ancestors were farmers, not philosophers, and that it was his task to follow in their footsteps. The life of his “farming ante-cedents” (baüerliche Vor-fahren) (Anmerkungen 101), Heidegger argues, prefigured his own destiny.

Heidegger often relies on etymology to destabilize philosophical terms with seemingly unambiguous meanings. “The etymological method’s purpose” was “to overcome the tendency for the meaning of words [ … ] to become restricted over time” (King 278). Yet by exploring the etymology of his family name, Heidegger strove to overcome his own self-understanding as an established German philosopher. Scholarship supports Heidegger’s etymological argument: The surname “Heidegger” does indeed have occupational origins and refers specifically to agricultural labor (Dammel et al. 587–95).¹¹ The genealogical dimension of Heidegger’s argument, however, is more nuanced and needs to be carefully unpacked.

Heidegger’s surname derives from his father’s side of the family, as was customary in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany. Yet neither his father nor grandfather had been a farmer. Heidegger’s father had worked as a cooper. His grandfather had been a shoemaker. Surprisingly, the “farming ante-cedents” Heidegger repeatedly invokes in Anmerkungen I–V were his maternal ancestors. Indeed, Heidegger’s mother, Johanna Kempf, came from a family of farmers who had resided and worked for centuries on the same farm located in a village called Göggingen, close to the Swabian Jura. According to parish registers, an ancestor named Jakob Kempf had obtained a fief for the so-called Lochbauernhof in 1662 (Ott 48–49).¹²

Heidegger’s reinvention as a farmer hinges on the claim that his mother’s legacy is inscribed in his father’s surname. This improbable coincidence, Heidegger argues, is evidence of the providential workings of Being: “The hidden history of saying (Geschichte des Sagens) does not know coincidences. Everything is fate” (qtd. in Pöggeler 41). For Heidegger, that he is called what he is amounts to proof that the Fate of Being predetermines the course of history. But if everything is fate, what is the proper mode of responding to it?

The question of how to relate to one’s own destiny was an ongoing concern in Heidegger’s oeuvre. In Being and Time, Heidegger queries what it means to “exist in the mode of fate” (437); his lecture series on Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine” reflect on the destiny of the German nation (157–64); in The Principle of Reason Heidegger argues that history is not propelled by human action but shaped and governed by the Fate of Being (96–101); and an essay on the pre-Socratic Parmenides broaches the connections between fate and death (Moira 79–101). For Heidegger, there are many ways to respond to one’s destiny, but only one that is proper. “In keeping with fate (das Schickliche) is that which answers to the sending of fate (das Schicken des Geschickes), conforms to it, and thus resigns itself to the ordinance of the event” (Anmerkungen 48). One can try to evade one’s destiny or to shape it to one’s will, but the only proper way to deal with a twist of fate is to bear it. Heidegger invoked examples from ancient Greece to illustrate this acquiescent submission to fate.

For Heidegger, as for several notable German philosophers before him, the tragic plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides were the touchstone of the proper response to a stroke of fate. Consider, for instance, Schelling’s reading of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannus” in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) or Hegel’s interpretation of “Antigone” in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Heidegger, too, referenced Sophocles’ Theban Plays in his famous lecture series Introduction to Metaphysics from 1935. Yet in his notebooks from the 1940s, the paragons of a willful submission to fate are no longer tragic heroes like Oedipus and Antigone but farmers and peasants. To “exist in the mode of fate” now means to endure vicissitudes and adversity with the equanimity with which farmers endure hard labor in the fields. For Heidegger, the farmer’s willful submission to fate is a characteristic that also applies to his own thinking.

Thinking and Farming

At first glance, it may appear as if Heidegger’s fascination with farming entails a fetishization of physical labor, similar to the redemptive qualities praised by French philosopher Simone Weil in The Need for Roots. Like Heidegger, Weil saw modernity as an era haunted by a rampant deracination, that is, an unsettling loss of traditions, of social cohesion, and of a proper relation to nature and the environment. Yet whereas Weil actually engaged in physical labor, working in factories and on a farm (Perrin and Thibon 104–05), Heidegger was content to observe rural life from his cabin in the Black Forest. Heidegger’s strange attraction to and at the same time marked distance from agricultural labor inspired Peter Sloterdijk to call Heidegger a hybrid farmer (214). Indeed, unlike Weil, Heidegger ignored how farming can be debilitating and draining work and focused instead on framing it as an aesthetic mode of existence.

Heidegger describes farmers as attuned to “the secret of the tides of the year” (das Geheimnis der Gezeiten des Jahres) (Überlegungen 54). Their work in the fields is based on an attentive observation of nature and thus rooted in the natural passage of time, i.e., the cyclical rhythm of nature. Moreover, the work on the field is not achieved by the farmer alone, but in cooperation with the “sun and the rain and the birds of the sky” (Anmerkungen 511). His own thinking, Heidegger argues, is “of the same sort” and is thus “intimately rooted in and related to the life of the peasants” (Why Do I 17). On Heidegger’s figurative acre, however, not crops but Being ought to prosper. This required Heidegger to find an understanding of Being that corresponds to the way the farmer relates to nature—a relation that is, at least according to Heidegger, inaccessible to urban philosophers.

Whereas philosophy seeks to control and dominate nature, Heidegger noted, thinking is fundamentally in tune with Being—just as the work of the farmer is in tune with nature. An example from the history of philosophy that Heidegger does not explicitly mention can nevertheless serve to foreground Heidegger’s differentiation between philosophy and thinking. Francis Bacon, in his utopian text “New Atlantis” (1627), claimed that the progress of natural philosophy would eventually allow farmers to force “trees and flowers to come earlier than their seasons; and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course” (179). They also would make those trees and flowers “by art greater much than their nature; and their fruit greater and sweeter and of differing taste, smell, colour, and figure, from their nature” (Bacon 179).

Several of the achievements anticipated in Bacon’s “New Atlantis” became reality in the twentieth century. For Heidegger, this constituted a dystopian development that threatened to annihilate the farmer’s authentic relation to nature: “Nowadays, the trace of tractors marks the country road” (Anmerkungen 512). In contrast, Heidegger continues, a true farmer never forces the earth to bear fruit. A true farmer does not uproot the crops on the field prematurely but waits for the proper time to harvest and leaves the sprouting crops to the hidden workings of nature that protect and safeguard their growth. True farmers do not employ force to achieve their goals; instead, they observe the signs of nature and act in accordance with them. In short, Heidegger argues that a farmer’s work is characterized neither by excessive activity nor by passivity. Instead, the farmer’s existence is marked by a medial quality that also characterizes Heidegger’s own way of thinking.

Whereas Nietzsche claimed to rely on the hammer to teach his philosophy, Heidegger understood his thinking to depend on subtler methods. Heidegger posits that his steadfastness (Inständigkeit) in the unfolding of Being corresponds to the farmer’s rootedness in nature (Bodenständigkeit). Heidegger’s terminology encompasses several terms that serve to highlight this medial quality of his thinking, which is neither adequately characterized as activity nor as passivity but lets Being be (Guidi 79–96). Often, yet not always, these terms also comprise agricultural semantics: acquiescence (Gelassenheit), consideration (Besinnung), preservation (Wahrung), caution (Behutsamkeit), gathering (Sammlung), conservation (Schonung), care (Sorge), and sheltering (Hüten).

Heidegger’s position on a caring relation to nature seems closely related to his student Hans Jonas’ argument that modernity needs to adopt a conscious and responsible attitude toward nature. In The Imperative of Responsibility (1979), Jonas argued for an ecological imperative modeled on Kant’s famous categorical imperative: “Act so that the effects of your actions are not destructive of the future possibility of [ … ] life” (Jonas 11). Indeed, various scholars have attempted to read Heidegger as a precursor of environmentalism (Jung & Jung; Glazebrook; Zimmermann; Rentmeester). The medial quality of Heidegger’s thinking, however, is fundamentally at odds with Jonas’ call for responsibility and accountability. It more resembles an attitude called attentisme in French, wherein actions and decisions are postponed indefinitely and a primarily observational position is adopted.

There is another, perhaps even more compelling, reason why it would be precipitous to understand Heidegger’s thoughts on nature, destiny, and farming as early forms of environmentalism: Heidegger’s thinking in this respect echoed National Socialist blood-and-soil ideology. Nazi ideologists, including Richard Walther Darré (who held the position of Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture between 1933 and 1942) and Hans F. K. Günther (author of several highly influential books on scientific racism) claimed that the way German farmers relate to fate was paradigmatic for the German people writ large. Günther argued that the “peasantry’s belief in fate” (367) is exemplary of the fighting spirit displayed by German soldiers at the frontier, the determination of German settlers in Eastern Europe, and the industriousness of German factory workers. The emphasis Darré and Günther placed on the farmer’s submission to fate closely related to Heidegger’s characterization of rural life.

At first, Heidegger’s ruminations in his notebooks framed the Lehrverbot as a veritable story of success—not a legal sanction but a way toward the realization of his true destiny. Eventually, however, the newly discovered identity also became a source of consternation. When Heidegger designated the plow and the harrow as the instruments of his thinking, he implicitly also characterized his thinking as preparatory. The work of the plow and the harrow precedes the time of harvest: “Right now, the growth remains strange and without harvest. Even sowing is still too early. It does not get beyond the plow and the harrow” (Anmerkungen 501). Indeed, Heidegger frequently remarked in Anmerkungen I–V that he was concerned his destiny might not be to harvest the fruits of his thinking but rather to disappear into oblivion.

True Oblivion

According to Heidegger, the lives and work of farmers are essentially rooted in oblivion. While the fruits of their labor are ubiquitous and sustain life in country and city alike, the urban public is oblivious to the farmers’ rural existence. Although their work has provided nourishment for the masses of people who lived throughout history, the names of farmers are not recorded in history books. Heidegger notes that this was also true for his maternal ancestors whose “laborious and meager having-been-there” was spent in “many long solitudes” in a “remote village” far from the centers of power (Anmerkungen 101).

The farmer, Heidegger posits, remains oblivious to the world of appearances while working in the fields. The farmer’s attention is focused on what is currently hidden in obscurity and will over time emerge from concealment into being. In other words, the farmer works to “bring forth what is hidden there” (Thomson 106). Throughout the year, the farmer cares for the seeds concealed by the soil and supports their emergence from the darkness of the earth into the openness of the world—a cycle that starts da capo every year. Accordingly, the term farming is not simply a term for an agricultural activity, Heidegger claims, but rather a “noble name” for the vocation to take care of the earth (Anmerkungen 312). For Heidegger, to attend to the needs of the earth and to wait until “the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming” (Heraclitus 68) is the very purpose of the farmer’s existence.

Being is similar to nature in this respect, at least according to Heidegger: Just as plants depend on the earth for nourishment and support, the world of appearances is based on concealment. Heidegger’s exploration of this cryptic nature of Being is a main concern in his thinking. In Anmerkungen I–V, the farmer’s work is presented as exemplary for the work of the thinker. Through the work in the fields, the farmer is singularly attuned to Being’s ambivalence, that is, to the way Being vacillates between absence and presence as well as concealment and appearance. Applying agricultural metaphors to his own thinking, Heidegger argues that only the thoughts that have been surrendered to dark oblivion, like seeds left in the ground, can take root and perhaps one day see the clear light of day: “Only that which can disappear like furrow and plow in the finished bread is true thinking” (Anmerkungen 338). Thus, it is no offense to a true thinker like Heidegger if his contemporaries forget him. Quite the contrary, Heidegger argued that forgetting is the proper way to engage: “One ought to forget them and learn to know that one does justice to their nature so most properly” (Anmerkungen 338).

The Lehrverbot allowed Heidegger’s thoughts to dwell and prosper in oblivion. Indeed, he intended to embrace the “seemingly averse, yet in truth benevolent fate” (ein […] Geschick, dem Anschein nach widrig, in Wahrheit huldvoll) (Anmerkungen 86) that had led him from a public life to solitude, silence, and oblivion. For the true thinker, Heidegger concluded, it is necessary to avoid urban life and embrace a solitary and secluded existence.

The Dis-Appearance of Thinking

The question of whether a philosopher should lead a solitary, secluded life or a publicly engaged one did not first arise with Heidegger. Arendt observed in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy that this question was “one of the few things on which all thinkers were agreed” (Lectures 40). Such various philosophers as Plato, Kant, and Hegel all argued that while thinking is “an entirely solitary business which everyone must complete within their own mind” (Schleiermacher 11), philosophy and philosophical truth are based on dialogue and public debate. Thinking and philosophy are mutually exclusive—and yet inseparably intertwined in the life of a philosopher (Arendt, Lectures 38–41).

In contrast, Heidegger claimed that true thinking does not translate into philosophy and is only in keeping with the concealed nature of Being if it remains a solitary business. Heidegger concedes that only a few thinkers have been attuned to this truth; yet in modernity—an era in which everything is geared towards feasibility and transparency—the future of this truth has become even more precarious: “The isolation of thinking will henceforth be so unequivocal that there will be no measure for it from what came before. Who will be able to bear it?” (Anmerkungen 82) Put differently: Who will attain true renown by remaining unknown?

Heidegger was not content with the solitary life imposed by the Lehrverbot for long. In 1949, at Heidegger’s request, the rector of the University of Freiburg applied to the military government for the revocation of the Lehrverbot. In 1950, Heidegger was categorized as a mere Mitläufer; in the fall of 1951, he resumed teaching activities at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger was aware that his return to the university was inconsistent with the importance he had attributed to solitude and oblivion in previous years. Going forward, Heidegger pondered how to ensure that his public appearances—in lectures, speeches, and publications—would not be misconstrued as activities associated with philosophy. Is there a way of speaking publicly that remains indebted to oblivion? Is there a way of writing and publishing that is rooted in solitude? Is there a way of philosophizing that is in keeping with thinking?

Heidegger explored several answers to these questions. For instance, starting in the 1930s, he increasingly relied on the old-fashioned spelling Seyn (Beyng) to highlight that he was thinking of a Being beyond the narrow confines of philosophy. In his late philosophy, Heidegger went one step further and repeatedly crossed out the word Being in his texts, attempting to thwart any immediate understanding of what is to be understood under this Being sous rature. Heidegger’s crossing-out of Being—a radicalized version of Hegel’s “determinate negation” in which the process of repudiation entails a moment of affirmation—was intended to prevent a reading of Being as something self-explanatory and retain it as something demanding further inquiry. By crossing out the word Being, Heidegger stressed that Being is based on Nothing just as the farmer’s work is rooted in the hidden workings of nature.

For Heidegger, the resumption of his teaching activities in 1951 seems to have compensated for the forced resignation from the rectorate in 1934 and the Lehrverbot in 1946. What his return to the university did not accomplish, however, was a resolution of the question of Heidegger’s standing as a public figure—a debate that is still ongoing. In the course of his reinvention as a farmer, Heidegger himself argued that the proper way to engage with thinkers of his stature was to forget all about them. If this is the case, perhaps the hyphenation of his surname was not radical enough. Perhaps nothing less than a crossing-out of Heidegger’s name would be in keeping with his late philosophy, and with his destiny as the farmer of Being:

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