The true danger (and liberation) of Heidegger is that he put judgments and justifications in question, including, at least implicitly, his own, by suggesting that justification is ultimately not grounded in anything other than a decision or narrative created to conceal the essentially original quality of that decision. In the bold new language of Heidegger, scholarly objectivity and restraint are little more than cant, caution, or self-deception, and they protect scholars from the realization that there is nothing insulated from politics, from combat, from self-assertion. While Heidegger might have deployed the mask of scholarly objectivity when it served him (and he did so in many ways, especially through his astonishing mastery of philosophical technē), the Black Notebooks, perhaps more than any of his other writings, shed this mask and show what lies underneath.

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