Abstract

This paper brings the analysis of the controversial parts of A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term by Bronislaw Malinowski and Black Notebooks by Martin Heidegger. Although the Polish-British anthropologist and the German philosopher did not influence each other during their lifetimes, they share many characteristics as authors who introduced paradigmatic changes in the field of twentieth-century human sciences. These include spatial displacement woven into their thoughts and theories, an inclination toward family life alongside engagement in polyamory, and posthumously published diaries and personal notes. The latter makes a problematic spot in human sciences as they reveal the racist and even misogynous side of Malinowski and the antisemitic sentiments of Heidegger.[1]

Keywords: Malinowski, Heidegger, Black Notebooks, diary, Hutt, Tent

1. Introduction

[T]he same applies to a native community, and if the Ethnographer wants to bring their real life home to his readers, he must on no account neglect this. Neither aspect, the intimate, as little as the legal, ought to be glossed over. (Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts15)

The contemporary opponents of an epoch always gaze only into the past and yet behave like successors. (Martin Heidegger, Ponderings VII-XI26)

“Exterminate all the brutes” is probably one of the most infamous phrases from the novel Heart of Darkness (1899), written by Polish author Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad. As part of a report, which was written by the commander of a trading post in Central Congo, Mr. Kurtz, upon request from “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” (49), this literary phrase directly reflects a very real colonial attitude toward indigenous people and their customs, the “inferior races,” one that also included enslavement, physical punishment, mutilation, and killing (Lindquist ix-x). This is why the anthropologists and wider research community were unpleasantly surprised by the affirmative tone of this phrase, which Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote in his field diary on the 21st of January 1915 during his stay at Trobriand Islands: “On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to ‘Exterminate the brutes’” (Diary 69). Titled A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term and published in 1967 upon the initiative of this second wife, Valetta Malinowska, twenty-five years after the sudden death of the father of modern anthropology, the diary was described as brutally frank and controversial (Firth, “Introduction” xvii) and as a “revealing document with its mixture of stimulus, dullness, pathos and outrageousness“ (Firth, “Second” xxi). Although the mention of “brute extermination” was enough to unsettle the readers well aware of the irreplaceable role of the Polish-British researcher in shaping new ethical, epistemological, and conceptual paradigms in social and human sciences (Gellner 143), frustration in these scientific fields was further fueled by a range of other remarks about the life of the natives, the frequent and repetitive use of derogatory term nigrowie, and lascivious, almost misogynistic comments about women and girls in his private notes. It is these notes that are the focus of discussion in this paper. Of course, Malinowski is not alone in his outbursts of animosity and intolerance toward the communities of ‘Others’ in a broader research field. The private notes of some researchers have turned out to be a blind spot in the human sciences, a sort of both a source and a reservoir of “antihuman” attitudes and ideas; in this regard, anthropology stands alongside other disciplines.

Diary entries, which have provided the foundation for a long list of autobiographies, including that of the renowned historian of religions Mircea Eliade, occasionally contain “disturbing” details about the lives of researchers who did not align with post-war humanistic ethos. Thus, until 1980s, the Romanian researcher did “lie, fabricate and keep quiet” about “his activities as a journalist and militant fascist within or in close proximity to the Iron Guard” (Dubuisson 174-75), whereas the diary he wrote while serving as a cultural attaché in Portugal, Jurnalul din Portugalia (1941-1945), revealed:

Eliade who fanatically believes in the victory of Reich and who seems dispirited after every new victory of the Allies … who keeps reminding himself of his “military task” and speaks of a “tragedy” of German defeat at Stalingrad. … Details written in the diary of over 400 pages are in line with the theses formed in the apologetic part dedicated to the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and his regime. (Laignel-Lavastine 215)

Personal diaries and notes can never be reduced only to a text precisely because they reflect a “behavior, lifestyle, where text is merely a mark or by-product” (Lejeune 268). It is precisely why they can be considered sources that significantly shed new light on the research oeuvre of individual authors.[2] In other words, as with these two authors—the anthropologist and the historian of religions—the scientific work that profoundly shaped their fields—revolutionizing the contemporary understanding of humanity and advocating for a “new humanism”—does not always align, if at all, with their private diaries and notes. Perhaps because this significant discrepancy in content and values calls their overall research credibility into question, diaries are rarely published during the author’s lifetime, as was the case with Malinowski, or are heavily edited and revised before release.

However, such “surprises,” the uncovering of certain value-laden and content-related skeletons from the closet of the academic community, are not exclusive to the twentieth century, although their origins can be traced back to it. In 2014, the first volumes of Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger were published. They were written in a specific form, not present in the thinker’s previous works. In comparison with “well-known types of text,” his notebooks are the closest to an “idea diary“ (Trawny 384) or a “thought journal” (Gretić 135) in which the philosopher noted down his “ideas and observations over the course of more than forty years, from the early 1930s to the early 1970s” (Rojcewicz vii).[3] This period covers the time after the publication of his key and monumental work, Being and Time, i.e., including the period after 1933 when the philosopher accepted and held the position of rector of the University in Freiburg for one year, almost simultaneously with his joining the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) to which he continued to pay membership fees and remained a member until the end of World War II, after which he was banned from teaching until 1951 (Paskow 522; Mikulić 67). Although recorded with a completely different intention—that philosophical thought should tread untrodden paths—his maxim that “Science confirms” and that “Philosophy upsets” (Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI 185) that reappeared in the publication of the Black Notebooks took a somewhat new and unintended meaning. Philosophy now truly “upsets,” but not so much because it is untrodden and exciting, nor perhaps even because it elaborates on themes characteristic of the right-wing ideological spectrum—such as tradition, will, power, National Socialism, leadership, or the significance of the Führer. Rather, it is because, after the publication of Notebooks, it was no longer possible to defend Heidegger and separate his philosophy from his ‘inner’ Nazism” (Mikulić 82), which inherently included antisemitism—the “great novelty of this work” (Di Cesare, Heidegger e gli ebrei 8). A kind of philosophical habeas corpus in print, published nearly forty years after the philosopher’s death, provoked “horror in many” to the extent that “in Paris in 2014, ‘Heideggerians’ tried to prevent the publication of Notebooks” (Mikulić 82).

Although Bronislaw Malinowski and Martin Heidegger were born just five years apart—the former in Krakow in 1884 and the latter in Meßkirch in 1889—they neither influenced nor took notice of each other during their lifetimes. Yet, numerous details connect these two European sons of the nineteenth century, who, in many ways, became the fathers of the humanities of the twentieth century. Their work introduced groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting insights into our understanding of anthropology and philosophy to the extent that these disciplines are usually framed in terms of before and after Malinowski’s functionalism in Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Heidegger’s existentialism in Being and Time. Both were accompanied by controversy during their lifetimes, and both were the authors of posthumously published diaries, broadly understood as belonging to that genre and most relevant to this paper. These diaries simultaneously undermine their scientific and research integrity and polarize the academic community built upon their premises, placing it in a position of discomfort. At the very least, they reinvigorate arguments condemning the at-times shameful role of researchers—and, by extension, science itself—in broader retrograde ideological and political movements. In addition, and not paradoxical at all, these “hidden” publications have brought them back to the very focus of interest and debate held beyond the narrowly understood academic community, thus giving them a new life (Geertz, Life; Di Cesare, Heidegger & Sons). Therefore, although these diaries profoundly differ in their form, content, volume, place and conditions of origin, and intention, we should focus on controversial parts, as these are precisely the sites of discomfort, controversy, and “scandal” (Heinz and Gretić 9). These parts are also the point where their impact spills over into the public sphere, after which even their other works should no longer be consulted with innocent eyes. As the anthropologist and the philosopher provided science with entirely new eyes for interpreting the world, their diaries have, in turn, become a lens through which they themselves are viewed in a different light.

2. I See the Life of the Natives as…

The private diary of Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish immigrant to Great Britain, was written mostly in Polish during two separate periods: first, during his initial expedition to New Guinea in 1914-1915, and later while completing his Trobriand research in 1917-1918. This was “probably the most famous, and certainly the most mythicized, stretch of field work in the history of the discipline: the paradigm journey to the paradigm elsewhere” (Geertz, Works 75). In other words, this exemplary four-year-long fieldwork trip established a sort of standard in anthropology, leading to the retreat and withdrawal of “classical evolutionism into disciplinary memory” along with the simultaneous “establishment of functionalist social anthropology and the predominance of synchronic over diachronic interpretations” (Stocking 293). Malinowski was thus, at least in Great Britain, a key stakeholder in dismantling the dominance of Victorian-era anthropology, which was burdened by its entanglement in the colonial project, race stereotypes, and methodological superficiality. Therefore, about this double émigré, we can reach the same conclusion as Alan Paskow did about Heidegger and his problem: “Were Heidegger a minor philosopher, his political fervor would not be a subject of grisly fascination. But he is a major philosopher – perhaps the greatest since Hegel – one enormously influential on all sorts of thinkers throughout the world” (523). Were he a less important anthropologist, were his contribution to the discipline less influential— “the introduction to Argonauts is a manifesto for ethnology” (Weston and Djohari 45) —his diary comments would likely slip beneath the radar. But what is it that stands out as troubling in his diary? We can identify a few key topics. Let’s begin with the most prominent one.

The most frequently mentioned and controversial aspect of these notes was Malinowski’s use of the term nigrowie to refer to the natives he lived with and studied. The term was translated in English as “niggers,” which gives Malinowski’s diary a deeply racist tone, as it is widely recognized as a “contemptuous epithet” (Stocking 261). The affirmative use of this term in speech or writing reflects an attitude that disregards significant differences between individual communities, trivializes and oversimplifies the cultural and intellectual achievements of the natives, and reduces human beings to the color of their skin, a marker of utter inferiority used to justify their subjugation and “civilization.” For that reason, it is not just another word from the colonial thesaurus but, as Farai Chideya puts it, “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets” (qtd. in Kennedy 87). That is the main reason why some contemporary authors, when analyzing his diary in English, censor the word by writing it as “n****rs,” “n***o,” or “N-word” (Weston and Djohari 42; 50). Of course, we should keep in mind the problem of translation of the unacceptable Polish term. Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz offers a meaningful explanation:

Since the diary was translated from the Polish and in Polish there is no equivalent for the term in question, some reviewers suspected an error on the part of the translator, but a careful examination of a photostatic copy of a few pages of the manuscript, enclosed in the book, exonerates him. It proved that instead of the correct Polish term for Negroes, Murzyni, Malinowski used a polonized term Nigrowie, declining it in the text according to the rules of Polish grammar. Although such a term could not possibly have any derogatory meaning in Polish, it is apparent from Malinowski’s choice of the word and his use of it in an emotionally negative context that he adopted this term with its prejudicial connotation from the British colonists in the area. (93)[4]

This brings the issue back to the actual fieldwork, partly shifting it away from the Polish-English translation dilemma and placing it within the domain of spoken English, the context in which the word and its derivatives were used in spoken language on the field. It also highlights the fact that the term was essentially translated from English and recorded in Polish in the original diary entries. Although, in a sort of crescendo in the second part of his diary, Malinowski angrily comments the missionaries’ work by saying: “My hatred of missionaries increased,” and using arguments that “these people destroy the natives’ joy in life; they destroy their psychological raison d’etre. … They struggle consistently and ruthlessly against everything old and create new needs, both material and moral. No question but that they do harm” (Diary 31, 41), he himself regards the natives with contempt and refers to them pejoratively: “I was fed up with the niggers; and with my work” (154), “The niggers were noisy--everybody idle because it was Sunday …. General aversion for niggers, for the monotony-feel imprisoned” (162), “On returning I felt fine and took part in conversation with the niggers, I also felt mentally balanced, but my longing for E. R. M. not diminished” (187), “Gymnastics should be a time of concentration and solitude; something that gives me an opportunity to escape from the niggers and my own agitation” (188), “recalled that I was engaged to E. R. M. In the morning, characteristic irritability: the niggers got on my nerves” (191), “I was irritated by the niggers and homesick” (208), “At once hatred for the niggers and general discouragement” (238). In this context, the photos he took during his fieldwork, where he posed in a pristine white suit with long sleeves, leggings, and high boots next to nearly naked, dark-skinned natives, take on a more problematic significance. It seems that the editors of his diary were not—or were they—completely aware of the possible colonial interpretation when they chose one of these photos for the diary cover and, by that decision, almost visualized the most problematic narrative aspect underlined by a short sentence from his diary— “Posed before the niggers” (197). The physical proximity recorded on these photos, observed through the prism of partly personal text, simultaneously juxtaposes his feeling of irreconcilability and distance.

We cannot but notice that the term niggers, which appears in the diary more than thirty-five times, is almost always used in pairs. He belittles the natives while simultaneously indulging in self-pity, lamenting the “monotony,” “loneliness,” “abandonment,” “discouragement,” “imprisonment,” and “saturation with work.” At the same time, his diary reflects his “desire” for his fiancée and future wife as well as his “longing” for his home in Europe, where, due to the war, he did not return until the end of 1918. Perhaps, without attempting to justify his words, we might say that in these private notes, the natives become collateral victims of his sense of “being thrown” into an unexpected and prolonged exile in the field—his “unfortunate prison of New Guinea” (Rapport 5).[5] In his diary, unlike in his published research works, he saw these same people not only as essential for the completion of his groundbreaking research but also as an obstacle, an irritation in his own everyday life. This sentiment culminates in entries such as the following:

Last night and this morning looked in vain for fellows for my boat. This drives me to a state of white rage and hatred for bronze-coloured skin, combined with depression, a desire to “sit down and cry,” and a furious longing “to get out of this.” (Malinowski, Diary 261)

On this occasion I made one or two coarse jokes, and one bloody nigger made a disapproving remark, whereupon I cursed them and was highly irritated. I managed to control myself on the spot, but I was terribly vexed by the fact that this nigger had dared to speak to me in such a manner. (272)

As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog. (167)

What is deeply disturbing in characterizations like this one, beyond their vulgarity and impermissibility, is precisely the realization that the complete shift toward “new humanism” (Malinowski, Diary 255) was never fully realized. Clifford Geertz described this situation metaphorically as “sailing at once at multiple seas” (Works 77). Perhaps it would be more appropriate to emphasize that this colonial vocabulary and attitudes were lying at the very heart of the new paradigm that declaratively wanted to show natives as “indeed surprisingly like ourselves, though living in different circumstances … He was the first ethnographer to represent “savages” as rational actors, no more liable to be bamboozled by superstition than the average European. On the contrary, he found them bourgeois in their preoccupations” (Kuper, Anthropology 16). Still, at the same time, he proposed profoundly different, declaratively surpassed attitudes and observations— “I understand all the German and Belgian colonial atrocities” (Malinowski, Diary 259). Because as much as the Trobriand people were “bloody niggers” and “savages” in his private diary, that much, in his ethnographic research, they were “through a mysterious transformation wrought by science, among the most intelligent, dignified and conscientious natives in the whole anthropological literature” (Geertz, Works 20). From a contemporary perspective, as well as from the perspective of the 1960s,[6] his diary seems like a Trojan horse within the discipline, and he himself—at best—like Tuva singer producing two simultaneous, not eclectic but irreconcilable, voices or melodies.

3. The Uprooting

However, while the anthropologist, displaced to fieldwork in the Southern Hemisphere, was seen by his colleagues as the man who sees himself as “one miserable white exile … deprived of a vocabulary of descriptive metonymy to express his dépaysement” (Rapport 8)—an individual in the context of a native majority—Heidegger’s case was almost opposite. Stubbornly attached to the “rural world,” he was the philosopher “who can only be at home in the vicinity of his original landscapes, and who even as a professor never actually relocated to the city where he held his chair” (Sloterdijk 4). This German, who contemplated Germany, its “historical call” and “struggle over its essence” (Heidegger, Ponderings VII-XI 23) in the context of German rural heimat, had more than a few negative comments in his Notebooks about Jews, who were a minority in a predominantly German context. According to Donatella Di Cesare, in Ponderings, his last two books that cover the period from 1938 to 1941, the terms “Jude, jüdisch, Judentum occur exactly fourteen times” (“Heidegger e gli ebrei” 93). This count seems marginal given the volume of the text—several hundred pages—and the number of topics that Heidegger tackled. However, the Italian philosopher warns that the term “Jew in Heidegger’s philosophical works prepared for publication started appearing in 1937 …, and its use exponentially increased between 1939 and 1941.” Furthermore, Di Cesare notes:

If the number of passages in which Jews and Judaism are clearly spoken about in the Black Notebooks is limited, indirect references are more frequent. By using an anti-Jewish theological vocabulary, citations from Nietzsche, biological metaphors, stereotypes expressed in jargon, and terms from the LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) – the language of the Third Reich – appropriately translated into his own philosophical idiom, where they acquired a new legitimacy and an unprecedented dignity, Heidegger could refer to the Jews while managing to avoid actually mentioning them. Direct attack had become superfluous. Thanks to the coded language of anti-Semitic rhetoric, Heidegger’s insinuations, his implied meanings, his references to the Jews and Judaism, albeit implicit, are easily decipherable. … The passages in the Black Notebooks in which Heidegger deals with Judaism are therefore much more numerous than the 14 occurrences of the explicit words. These indirect references include words such as Verwüstung, Entrassung, Entwurzelung, Vorschub, Herdenwesen, Vergemainerung, Rechenfähigkeit, Beschneidung des Wissens, Gemeinschaft der Auserwählter, and Unheil (desertification, deracination, uprooting, abetment, herd mentality, communization, calculative ability, circumcision of knowledge, community of the chosen, and disaster). And the list could go on. The vision of the Jews that Heidegger provided should therefore be read in the context of this broader speculative network. (93-94)

Jews in Heidegger’s Notebooks were removed by name and obscured behind a series of epithets and pronouns—partly behind what Victor Klemperer called the language of the Third Reich, “single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously” (16, 274). In other words, if Heidegger spoke of Jews largely indirectly, he referred to the leader of the movement to which he himself belonged in multiple instances directly and affirmatively: “The great experience and fortune that the Führer has awakened a new actuality, giving our thinking the correct course and impetus,” “How can a scientist ever be ‘Führer’? How not. (This inability is not a lack—instead, it secures a proper strength and at the same time a task for those who enter the domain of scientific work)” (Ponderings II-VI 81, 114). Although the philosopher also subjected National Socialism to criticism, which had a rather advisory tone, he still contemplated Jews, Judaism, and especially global Judaism, in the context and frame of that movement. Within this “speculative network” woven across the pages of Black Notebooks, ‘psychoanalysis’ became Jewish practice, and Freud— despite the advancements he brought to the research of the unconscious—only a mere Jew who did not come even close to the ontological domain (Ponderings VII-XI 200; Ponderings XII-XV 171; Marder 100).

If we view the Black Notebooks also as a kind of map of imaginings about Jews and Judaism, one that is not devoid of paranoid insights, which psychoanalysis would undoubtedly have much to say about, we can observe a distinct progression from the specific to the general and global. In addition to the already mentioned Sigmund Freud, the philosopher picked on “a Jew Maxim Maximovich Litvinov,” the representative of “insidious Bolshevist politics.” This indicates the beginnings of “truly opposite other National Socialism – Judaism” (Mikulić 73), which did not stop at merely an ethnonym casually written down in combination with Bolshevism or psychoanalysis. The insinuation, already present in Being and Time—and now it is clearer why—of infiltration into research areas characterized as “research of which did not evolve as ‘advancement’ but as repetition” (Heidegger 57), along with the appropriation of the cultural domain, are fundamental elements of the generalized framework in Black Notebooks:

The folkish [völkisch] principle manifests its gigantic modern significance when grasped as a variant and offspring of the sovereignty of the sociology of society. Is it an accident that National Socialism has done away with “sociology” as a name? Why did Jews and Catholics pursue sociology with special partiality? (Ponderings VII-XI 124)

To appropriate “culture” qua means of power and thereby assert oneself and allege a superiority—this is in its ground a Jewish comportment. What follows for cultural politics as such? (Ponderings VII-XI 254)

To write about how Jews “pursue” and “appropriate culture qua means of power” at the time when Germany was about to conquer and appropriate Europe by force seems in every aspect deeply wrong. It is the vocabulary of conspiracy (Girardet 18) for which Donatella di Cesare claimed to lay bare the idea that, according to that philosophy, “Jewish danger” was also the “red danger” (Heidegger e gli ebre 173). Furthermore, Heidegger explicitly mentions internationales Judentum, “international Judaism” as well as Weltjudentum, “global Judaism.” These terms were far from neutral and suggested notions of plots, conspiracies, and infiltrations. In the language of the Third Reich, Weltjudentum meant that “global Jews disseminate ‘atrocity propaganda’ and spread ‘horror stories’” (Klemperer 30). However, the philosopher took it a few steps further:

World-Judaism, incited by the emigrants allowed out of Germany, cannot be held fast anywhere and, with all its developed power, does not need to participate anywhere in the activities of war, whereas all that remains to us is the sacrifice of the best blood of the best of our own people. (Ponderings XII-XV 208)

Racial thinking makes “life” a form of breeding, which is a kind of calculation. With their emphatically calculative giftedness, the Jews have for the longest time been “living” in accord with the principle of race, which is why they are also offering the most vehement resistance to its unrestricted application. The instituting of racial breeding stems not from “life” itself, but from the overpowering of life by machination. What machination pursues with such planning is a complete deracializing of peoples through their being clamped into an equally built and equally tailored instituting of all beings. (Ponderings XII-XV 44)

Borislav Mikulić says that Heidegger’s ideas about the “calculative essence of Jews” as an “uprooted race“ are a constituent part of a “long tradition of the known, but little thematized social-political motivation of eugenic racism of the 19th and 20th century” and reflection of “Nazi reception of Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics” (91), whose ideas also resonate through Malinowski’s sharp remarks about the natives in his diary. Conspiratory vocabulary, global Judaism that “cannot be reined in anywhere,” which has “developed power” and, therefore, “does not have to sacrifice in warfare,” Judaism that possesses “calculative giftedness” and “lives the longest in accord with the principle of race,” along with presenting a grotesque and unrealistic character of collective Judaism that “lives in accord the principle of race and which is, therefore, originally racist itself” (Di Cesare, Heidegger e gli ebrei 124), reveals a parochial aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy. While Judaism is global, worldwide, without roots, superficial, which in “utterly unrestrained way can undertake as a world-historical “task” the uprooting of all beings from being” (Ponderings XII-XV 191, 207), the philosopher is rooted in the rural area of mountainous Schwartzwald region in the southern Germany. He experienced the world he lived in as a permanent, unchangeable habitat of his own life and creativity compared to urban areas in which he actually never lived, and which felt foreign to him. Like the writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, Heidegger’s writing also originates from a prolonged displaced life, a life outside the dominant fast-paced currents of urban life. However, while the anthropologist was “forced” to find his own ethnography in “remote” places, which he—as we know today—never really accepted, the philosopher developed his theory largely under the sky of rural south of Germany that he perceived as inherently his own until the end of his life. Thus, we may say that both researchers lived in a specific environment from which their writings, including their diaries, originated.

4. Displaced Thought: A Tent and a Cabin

Several photos taken during the fieldwork in Papua and New Guinea, including the one published in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, show a simple dwelling in which Bronislaw Malinowski resided. It was a tent located in the village of a local community near the cabins of the natives whose culture and life he studied. It was necessary to be close for interested, up-close, and refreshed research. In that sense, his tent may be understood as a metaphor for new ethnography and anthropology, a spatial prerequisite for “finding a way into the heart of the shyest savage” (Geertz, Works 80) and the conclusion that the natives have “very definite organization, that they are governed by authority, law and order in their public and personal relations” (Malinowski, Argonauts 8). Still, as we have seen before, it is probably proximity that caused eruptions of rage and uncontrolled anger towards the studied Trobriand population. From 1922, the year in which the anthropologist first published his Argonauts, his philosophical counterpart Martin Heidegger lived and wrote in a small three-room cottage—die Hütte—located near Todtnauberg in the Schwartzwald mountains, which led him, among other things, to endorse “a public image of his mountain life as a heroic confrontation with existence” (Sharr 77). The relationship between the place, location, residence, and research or specific system of thought was also quite pronounced in German philosopher, “one of the movers of philosophy … yet someone who in terms of his personal dynamic refuses to move” (Sloterdijk 4). The anthropologist’s situation is entirely different—his displacement results from radical and prolonged travel, a journey as foundational as it is celebrated. Modern anthropology was built on intensive fieldwork in distant climates beyond one’s own culture. In other words, while the anthropologist left Europe to study a remote local culture, the philosopher remained firmly rooted in his own Heimat, contemplating, among other things, the displacement of the modern world.

Das ist meine Arbeitswelt, wrote Heidegger. In fact, his wife Elfride made it possible for him to have a world in which he could do his philosophical work when she purchased a small plot of land at the fringe of a village at the altitude of 1150 meters in the municipality of Todtnauberg. A cottage measuring six by seven meters with only a few rooms was constructed for them by a local carpenter, Schweitzer (Di Cesare, Heidegger & Sons 17). Malinowski, on the other hand, pitched a humble tent on Kiriwina, Trobriand islands, with the help of other local men after he had picked the location:

I chose a place for the tent. Bomeran, a policeman, and a couple of boys helped me. I watched the tent a while and looked at the village a bit. I had the satisfaction of seeing a tent built. The pleasure of picnicking. Ilumedoi was there with his brothers and introduced me. I gave them three sticks of tobacco. I ate bananas. Then I drew a plan of the village. (Malinowski, Diary 150)

To settle close to the studied natives, inside the perimeter of their village, meant to set up a sort of modest ethnographic panopticon made of coarse cloth and wood, a tent from which he could holistically encompass the wholeness of the community and “relinquish his comfortable position on the veranda, cultivate a garden, exchange gifts, listen in to conversations, flirt, argue, and generally hang about” (Kuper, “Foreword” 18). In other words, through the process of imitation, the ethnographer became “a necessary evil or nuisance, mitigated by donations of tobacco” (Malinowski, Argonauts 38), whereas the philosopher in the Schwartzwald mountains, in a similar, almost ethnographic way, felt himself and his own philosophy intimately connected with the life of the local community:

And this philosophical work does not take its course like the aloof studies of some eccentric. It belongs right in the middle of the peasants’ work. When the young farm boy drags his heavy sled up the slope and guides it, piled high with beech logs, down the dangerous descent to his house, when the herdsman, lost in thought and slow of step, drives his cattle up the slope, when the farmer in his shed gets the countless shingles ready for his roof, my work is of the same sort. It is intimately rooted in and related to the life of the peasants. (Heidegger, “Why” 124)

Answering questions he was frequently asked, the philosopher—already a public figure—explained in his 1934 text, “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” —why he chose to settle in the countryside, equating manual labor with his own intellectual work. He additionally accentuated this egalitarian gesture, almost a concession to the “despised village,” by describing an idyllic scene in which “in the evening during a work-break, when I sit with the peasants by the fire or at the table in the ‘Lord’s Corner,’ we mostly say nothing at all. We smoke our pipes in silence” (24). This complete mimicry in the context of eloquent silence and wisdom was still occasionally interrupted, albeit only for him, “for long stretches by conferences, lecture trips, committee meetings and my teaching work down here in Freiburg” (“Why” 124). This meant that Heidegger, as opposed to the villagers who had no alternative but to do physical work, had the privilege to reside in, choose from, and draw the best from both worlds—urban and rural. We could also interpret the wise silence—because the villagers were well-aware of who the “Professor” was—as the discomfort in the presence of an academic citizen rather than a sense of unity with the philosopher. These, almost naïve, scenes described by Heidegger himself, in which “the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendor of the meadows in bloom“ alternate with “dying old peasant woman who just before the end sent her greetings to the ‘Professor’” and the peasant who advised him not to accept the professorship at the University of Berlin, provide the framework for the following constatation about his philosophy: “The inner relationship of my own work to the Black Forest and its people comes from a centuries-long and irreplaceable rootedness in the Alemannian-Swabian soil” (“Why” 124).

The character of Jews and Judaism described in Black Notebooks is now clearer, at least to a point. Uprooted, displaced, urban, international, and global, prone to complot and infiltration, it is outlined as an antithesis to the “inner relationship,” “centuries-long,” and “irreplaceable rootedness” of the German Schwartzwald and his work that originates from the mystification of that geographic area. German rural life, highly idealized and romanticized, stands in dark contrast with Judaism, portrayed in a denigrating way. At this point, Heidegger seems to commit a double error: he ventures into generalization and into a cliché. Contrary to Malinowski, who continuously amplified his sense of displacement through dissatisfaction, endless complaints, and, ultimately, the use of racist language in his private notes, Martin Heidegger idealized and elaborated it as a constituent counterpoint to Weltjudentum. Both concepts mutatis mutandis thereby seem disjointed—Malinowski could have returned to Europe, to his own home, but he took full advantage of the situation and opportunity presented to him in the part of the world untouched by the war, whereas Heidegger punctuated his declarative and complete devotion to provincial life with long periods immersed in academic obligations. For example, when he was in Rome in 1936, he “did not remove the Party insignia from his lapel. He wore it during his entire stay in Rome, and it had obviously not occurred to him that the swastika was out of place while spending the day with [his Jewish student]” (Löwith 115). The tent and the cabin—both modest, ascetic, and displaced dwellings—are thus mere metaphors of privileged choices and possibilities and by no means places of obligatory displaced habitation.

5. Relationship Toward Women

The extensive field research of Bronislaw Malinowski led to a series of insights and the publication of two books on sexuality—Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929), with Argonauts of the Western Pacific also particularly rich in observations on the topic. While these scientific monographs resulted in “indisputable methodological acumen to consider sexuality as a constituent part of culture description,” he himself failed to “move beyond a biologically determined view of sexuality, insisting on its functional cultural shaping that necessarily leads to marriage and family” (Škokić 77). Perhaps it is precisely due to his later, yet still conservative, understanding of sex and sexuality that he so often used the term “regret/remorse” in his diary when admitting his own “lecherous thoughts and feelings.” His intense emotions and desire for his fiancée and future first wife, Elsie Masson, were interwoven with guilt over his inclination toward affairs during his fieldwork: “I couldn’t keep my paws off the girls. Then, moral hangover. I could not write to E. R. M. in this state” (Malinowski, Diary 132). His prolonged stay in the field and his distinct status within the studied communities likely provided him with sexual opportunities. This is evident in a documentary filmed in the 1970s about his legacy, in which an indigenous resident of the Trobriand Islands says that “he was a great lover, he went for women in a big way” (Barrett).

However, the problematic aspect in this context is not so much the presence of erotic thoughts or occasional possible sexual encounters during his prolonged fieldwork in the post-Victorian era but rather his “image of a womanizing café intellectual cast among savages” (Geertz, Works 85), as portrayed in his diaries and, as we will see later, culminating in misogynistic remarks:

I have got rid of my distracting mental lechery and my impulses to superficial flirtation, for instance, my desire to get acquainted with the attractive women here (particularly the matrons); in short, I am trying to overcome the metaphysical regret of “V siekh nye pereyebiosh!” [Russian; literally: “You’ll never fuck them all.”]. (Malinowski, Diary 113-14)

Although, in Black Notebooks, he did not explicitly address his relationships with women, Martin Heidegger—the husband of Elfride Heidegger, ‘the one’— “had so many of them, and seduced them so quickly, as soon as he met them” (Badiou and Cassin 39). One of the relationships, which lasted to his death, was with philosopher Hannah Arendt— “the passion of his life.” This asymmetrical but mutually respectable relationship between already realized professor and his student began when she was eighteen (Di Cesare, Heidegger & Sons 66). Even though it is impossible to assess past relationships between university professors and their students by today’s much stricter standards, in Heidegger’s case, this is not the biggest issue. Since she was Jewish, “the moment Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and was elected rector in Freiburg, Arendt left Germany and started working for a Zionist organization, Youth Aliyah, in Paris” (70). If we recall his condemnation of “World-Judaism incited by the emigrants allowed out of Germany,” which is also applicable to Hannah Arendt, in what light does this portray his “brilliant friend”? Is she participating in “a world-historical ‘task’ of the uprooting of all beings from being”? These questions remain, of course, unanswered, but they indicate the cracks between empirical and passionate on one hand, and the idea of “metaphysical antisemitism” on the other— “a nomadic mindset that may mask itself as national identity but which is permanently opposed to the true grounded spirit of the rooted Aryan” (Gilman 34).

For this reason, it is not surprising that Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin claim that for the philosopher, his wife Elfride was “the home …. Work, family, home: Aufgabe, Leben, Heimat. Marriage, from engagement to death, was to be pursued as a ‘genuine, human’ task; it was a question of the Ur-, the primordial, the originary” (39). Rooted in their home, perceived as “a resting place [he wrote her] when I return tired from distant land of great questions” (40), she was the one who waited.[7] Mein liebes Seelchen! —this is how the philosopher addressed his wife in his letters and published private correspondence between 1915 and 1970. The diminutive Seelchen— (dear) little soul—stands in contrast to the Professor, who is big and dwells in the land of important issues. The roles are cast:

On one hand, she is a “saint” – pale and icy, almost devoid of corporeality – while on the other, he is an ambivalent heroic titan who gladly takes on the role of a boy, a son. What is certain is that Elfride, a practical, energetic, and resolute woman, remains outside the philosophical dialogue, beyond the realm of erotic seduction. (Di Cesare, Heidegger & Sons 59)

Maybe Heidegger was not “rooted” and “settled” enough in that sense either— “you look for ‘home’ in other women – oh Martin – what is happening to me?” (Badiou and Cassin 40). With these words, written in a 1956 letter addressed to him, his wife placed him in the context of love nomadism – heimatlos – where Bronislaw Malinowski could also be placed. As we know from his diaries, he also “sails at once at multiple seas” in an emotional sense. But again, just as with the derogatory terms for the natives in general, when referring to women, he often used offensive and denigrating language. During a visit to one of the villages, he recorded: “The women’s faces pleasant, not the perennial whorish expression of the Kiriwina women,” while on another occasion, he noted: “At the same time I thought a great deal about N. S., strong guilt feelings. Resolve: absolutely never to touch any Kiriwina whore” (Malinowski, Diary 225, 256).

6. Conclusion

Where do Bronislaw Malinowski and Martin Heidegger’s notes that we just analyzed lead us—the notes that resemble “the shipboard diary of a castaway crossing the night of the world” (Di Cesare, Heidegger e gli ebrei vii)? Do they tell us something about the human face of human sciences, exactly because it is the human face of the researchers and thinkers woven into their foundations? Can we still understand the shipwreck mentioned by the Italian philosopher as the impossibility of “sailing at once at multiple seas,” even for thinkers like these two? Before we align ourselves with one of the two dominant camps—the ‘pro’ and ‘con’ camps—formed in response to their posthumously published writings, where, in the philosopher’s case, we find both apologists and those calling for a definitive farewell to Heidegger (Mitchell and Trawny xxii-xxiii), and in the anthropologist’s case, we see a similar pattern that provokes deep unease within part of the research community as well as, notably, among his own descendants and family (Barrett; Thomson and Stuart), it may be worth considering the idea of “[t]hinking with Heidegger against Heidegger” (Habermas 197) and subjecting Bronislaw Malinowski to the same approach. This idea brings us to the possibility of perceiving the field researcher as a native whose life, to be understandable, as proposed by Malinowski himself, must be observed from a personal as well as public side. His diary allows us to gain a more complete insight, at least to some extent. This also applies to Heidegger’s, despite stylistic and thematic differences between their notes, because the philosopher took more liberty to talk about certain topics in his Notebooks than he did in his previously published work.

Against the backdrop of such methodological insight, Malinowski and Heidegger emerge as the figures who stand with one foot in new paradigms of thought and research while stepping with the other into the deep mud of declaratively surpassed ideas that, if we go to the end, are both found in “[G]alton’s social Darwinist manifesto, on which his African experience influenced … and where feeble nations of the world must give away before the nobler varieties of the mankind” (Stocking 95). While one does it by using rough and openly racist language, the other wraps the retrograde ideas into philosophical discourse. Thus, two deserving researchers take shape and, in their intellectual effort to oppose the “epoch” (Heidegger, Ponderings VII-XI 26)—primarily, the epoch of the nineteenth century from which they emerged—end up repeating its mistakes and becoming its heirs. The question is, of course, ethical as well as epistemological because new paradigms, to be truly new, must be able to break up with the old ones to a significant extent. And this is where they both get entangled in the web, they themselves have woven. There is no “new humanism” with a racist face and sporadic misogyny just as there is no “opposition to the epoch” with an apologetic attitude towards Nazism and antisemitism. It is merely the iteration of preexisting solutions, that is, if we use Heidegger’s critical vocabulary, an aspect of “they”: “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man/ general public] takes pleasure; … we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking” (Heidegger, Being and Time 164). Let us continue—they think about natives as it was usual to think about them, they place Jews within conceptual frames in which it was proper to place them, even when that thought is concealed behind “metaphysical antisemitism.” In that sense, surprising as it may seem, they are both passive heirs and repeaters, but their heritage was inherited in a profoundly different way and “managed” differently by their families. Also, they are both, personally and privately, posthumously given a new life that extends beyond their writings.

Bronislaw Malinowski, the subject of “paradigmatic voyage into paradigmatic elsewhere,” as Clifford Geertz famously put it, fared quite differently from Heidegger, whose “paradigmatic stay in paradigmatic here” was exalted to the level of a heroic relationship with existence. Thereby, the anthropologist, in his displaced fieldwork setting, was constrained by the lack of modernity he had access to in Europe, while the philosopher criticized its excess and often remained in the province, sojourned in an almost ascetically modest hut and conditions. Perhaps it is precisely this physical and intellectual closeness to the idea of the province that would lead to “Heidegger’s posthumous works—lecture manuscripts, articles, works, conference presentations, and correspondences—being zealously overseen by his son Hermann and his former assistant, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann” (Di Cesare, Heidegger & Sons 22). While the philosopher’s family was directly involved in managing this legacy and defending his character, the faith of Bronislaw Malinowski was completely different. “Nobody read his books in our family besides me,” said his great-grandchild Zachary Stuart, adding that he felt “[t]he Malinowski curse in family … after his death in 1942 no one bothered to put a headstone to his grave. It sat unmarked for 24 years. A controversial figure in anthropology he is also a controversial figure in my family history” (Thomson and Stuart). Should we understand a personal diary as content that pours over from life into words, but then—because it lives longer than its author—it pours back into the life with a sort of boomerang effect, in this case, on the reasercher’skin, we arrive to a quite important characteristic of the diaries. It is that their content, inextricably connected with their authors, has the power to homogenize as well as disperse not only the academic community but also their families. Therefore, it is significant that the descendants of Bronislaw Malinowski are utterly disinterested, whereas those of Martin Heidegger are zealously interested in their intellectual legacy. The extreme positions from which their families speak are intrinsically linked to the extreme positions from which these texts were written.

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