The so-called Black Notebooks are a kind of philosophical diary that contains the annotations that Martin Heidegger was making in parallel to his academic teaching and his published works. These notes link the most strictly theoretical reflections with references to the personal and professional situation of the philosopher and to both historical and day-to-day events.
Few philosophical publications have in recent times aroused as much anticipation, interest and controversy as these private texts by Martin Heidegger. He himself had contributed in advance to his notoriety by designating them as the "coronation" of his complete works and indicating that they should be the last to see the light. But above all, the edition of these Black Notebooks was expected to provide irrefutable evidence of Heidegger's anti-Semitism and his sympathies for the National Socialist regime. How is it possible that whoever was probably the most important thinker of the twentieth century used his speculative genius to make an ontological foundation of the Holocaust?
This first installment, which includes the notebooks from 1931 to 1938, is an essential source for contextualizing and valuing Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism, which he conceives from a metapolitics framed in the history of being. But it also helps to raise the general question of the relationship between historical forces, the existential condition of man as an individual and as a community, philosophy and politics.