The beginning of Black Notebooks: Martin Heidegger's esoteric initiative

Abstract

The paper presents the hermeneutic interpretation of the first records of Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks ("Reflections II-VI", October 1931). Heidegger's "esoteric initiative" is reconstructed and compared with Nietzsche's critique of reading and writing and Plato's parable of the cave. Other related Heidegger texts such as his Vom Wesen der Wahrheit lecture (1931/32 and 1933/34) and his correspondence with his brother Fritz Heidegger and with E. Blochmann covering Heidegger's 1930s and 1940s period are also analyzed. Additionally, the denial of the academic and scientific ways of writing in Heidegger's work is discussed. The methodological problem lies in the fact that there is no mindfulness of the esoteric gesture in Heidegger's thinking, and, paradoxically, the whole research of Heidegger's philosophy is separated from the openness of thinking that we can learn from Heidegger himself. Therefore, the critical awareness of Heidegger's esoteric initiative provides an opportunity to acknowledge the philosophical (rational) dimension of this initiative, a consistent thread running through the majority of Heidegger's texts. The article also examines the arrangement of Heidegger's message and focuses on the fundamental constants of the life- and thinking-experience that enable both the knowledge of truth and staying in the truth. These constants include solitude (Einsamkeit), the vivid correspondence between thinking and Being expressed through cordiality (Innigkeit) and continued insistence (Inständigkeit), silence (Schweigen), and concentration (Sammlung). Finally, the article explains Heidegger's notion of truth in compliance with his esoteric initiative.