Martin Heidegger’s notes on Hegel are finally available to an English-reading audience thanks to the excellent translation by Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn. Heidegger’s Hegel was originally published in 1993 as part of division III of the Gesamtausgabe: ‘Unpublished Treatises: Addresses—Ponderings’. The book is comprised of two short texts. The first one is on Negativity: A Confrontation with Hegel Approached from Negativity (1938–39, 1941). The second text is an Elucidation of the ‘Introduction’ to Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (1942). Ingrid Schüßler, the editor of the German original, notes that the texts seem to have been intended for a private circle of colleagues. However, it is not clear who the addressees were and whether Heidegger in fact ever presented his thoughts to an audience (Schüßler 1993: 151–52). The reader will note quite remarkable differences between the texts: the notes on negativity especially are fragmentary, elliptic and even aphoristic at times. At a first glance they do not appear to contain a sustained argument on negativity. The second text, on the other hand, is more of an elaborated and clearer approach to Hegel’s thought.

Nonetheless, both texts will be of interest to Hegel and Heidegger scholars precisely because of Heidegger’s unique approach and the importance he grants to Hegel’s philosophy in the history of being. Heidegger’s central question is thus about Hegel’s place in that history. He understands Hegel’s philosophy as the completion of metaphysics: ‘[T]here is no longer a higher standpoint of self-consciousness of spirit’ (3). Heidegger explicitly rates Hegel’s philosophy highly as it is the first to question Aristotelian logic and bring being back into focus.

Arel’s and Feuerhahn’s translation pays careful heed to Heidegger’s linguistic peculiarities while making the text accessible to a non-German readership. Recent decades have seen heated debates about the extent to which neologisms are required to transfer meaning and sense from the German to the English. This present translation tries to avoid any unnecessary neologisms and to respect the English vernacular. The translators have kept Heidegger’s use of the hyphen, whenever the etymology of words is similar in German and English. For example, Ent-scheidung is translated as ‘de-cision’ and Ent-täuschung as ‘dis-illusionment’, since the English and German prefixes here have similar meanings. Heidegger uses the hyphen to emphasise that dis-illusionment is only possible on the ground of illusion or even deception (Täuschung). However, hyphenation is not always possible and the translators are right to abstain from it whenever the English prefix has a different meaning from the German. This is the case for example with Er-fahrung, experience, or Ur-sprung, origin (where Heidegger stresses the leap of Sprung). The translation is especially strong in respecting the ambiguous meanings of some of Heidegger’s key terms. Take Einfall (literally ‘falling into’); Arel and Feuerhahn translate the word appropriately as either ‘mere idea’ or ‘intrusion’ wherever appropriate. Heidegger, however, sometimes exploits the ambiguous meaning of the German word and uses it in both senses simultaneously. Whenever such ambiguous use is the case, the translators draw attention to it in the glossary.

Heidegger seems to have considered his notes on Hegel’s conception of negativity to belong to some of his most important work. Despite their fragmentary and seemingly repetitive style the notes can be highly instructive, as they give insight into not only Heidegger’s thoughts on Hegel but also his approach to philosophical problems more generally. The notes, a collection of sketches, can be read as a continuous questioning after the origin of Hegel’s conception of negativity, approximating the issue from different angles. Heidegger considers negativity to be the ‘basic determination’ of Hegel’s system (6) and its ‘energy’ (21). Even though negativity is at the core of Hegel’s system, Heidegger alleges that Hegel ultimately fails to take negativity seriously. He claims that ‘no καταστροφή is possible [in the sense of] downfall and subversion’ (19). Negativity necessarily leads to balance of thought because, Heidegger alleges, Hegel’s metaphysics secures beings and thought for all times. Moreover, Heidegger maintains that Hegel does not question the origin of negativity. Its concealed nature, however, is what interests Heidegger the most. Disclosing the origin of negativity is what ultimately would allow Heidegger to position Hegel in the history of being. In this regard, one interesting question for Heidegger and Hegel scholarship alike will be whether Heidegger takes negativity in Hegel’s system to be immanent or whether he understands it as a given horizon.

The second part is more elaborate and more easily accessible, especially to those not very familiar with Heidegger’s philosophy and language. This text is primarily concerned with Hegel’s concept of experience (Erfahrung) in the Phenomenology, but it also again raises the question of Hegel’s position in the history of being. The text should be understood as an addition to Heidegger’s essay on Hegel’s conception of experience, published in Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege). Both essays focus on the introduction to the Phenomenology, but the text published here allows the reader to reconstruct how Heidegger arrived at his published position. Heidegger maintains that the concept of experience is central to any confrontation with Hegel’s early system, as well as to understanding the subsequent path of Hegel’s philosophy. Heidegger notes that, unlike Aristotle and Kant, Hegel does not consider experience as the way in which beings are immediately encountered in everyday life. ‘[N]or is “experience”, strictly speaking, a mode of cognition’ (78). Rather, experience is the ‘experience of consciousness’. It is the ‘movement of dialectics’, such that ‘the path does not in itself lie before the journeying’ (78). Thus, Heidegger seems aware of the immanent movement of Hegel’s philosophy. It might be of interest to both Heidegger and Hegel scholars to determine how far Heidegger’s own conception of the experience of being (Seinserfahrung) is similar to Hegel’s. While Heidegger’s Hegel book does not give us full answers to this or related questions, the English translation provides a welcome and necessary addition to scholarship for all those interested in fruitful and critical study of Heidegger’s reception of Hegel.