Diary: Written by professor Dr Gottlob Frege in the ... - AAAARG.ORG

304 Richard L. Mendelsohn
and, preferably, expelled from Germany. When I first read that diary, many years
ago, I was- deeply shocked, because I had revered Frege as an absolutely rational
man, if, perhaps, not a very likeable one. I regret that the editors of Frege's Nachlass
chose to suppress that particular item.'
Professor Gabriel, in his companion essay, 'Gottlob Freges politisches
Tagebuch'," takes vigorous exception to Dummett's accusation of suppression,
and provides important information about the history of the typescript.
Because of the significance of Gabriel's response, I have excerpted his
'Background and Editorial Comments' from that essay as a preface to the
diary. The typescript of the diary was openly accessible when I visited
Miinster in the summer of 1995. Gabriel says that this has always been so. I
would have only wished that this were made public years ago. For, certainly,
given the wide interest in the diary, it is intolerable that in the twenty-one
years since Dummett's revelation about its existence and the twenty-five
years since the publication of the Nachgelassene Schriften there have been
no published comments in English about the actual content of the diary -
except for the very recent (1993) work of Hans Sluga, and his brief
description of the diary is quite misleading." 1 The Gabriel/Kienzler scholarly
effort is clearly welcome: we can at last all see for ourselves what lies there.
Frege was quite old at the time of the writing of the diary. And there is
reason to suspect that these later years were not easy for him. His life-project
of reducing mathematics to logic lay in ruins, he was virtually unappreciated
in his day, and he was surviving on a meager pension. Does the diary only
record the words of an embittered old man? I am inclined to believe that the
views Frege expresses in this diary reflect a more deeply entrenched outlook.
Sluga records' v Frege's connections with the right-wing, antisemitic Bruno
Bauch and the Deutsche Philosophische Gesellschaft he established in 1916.
Frege had been still vigorously creative at the time, and he published his
most important later works in that society's philosophical organ, Beitrage
zur Philosophic des Deutschen Idealismus: 'The Thought' and 'Negation'
appeared in 1918 in the very first volume, and 'Compound Thoughts'
1 London: Duckworth, 1973, p. xii.
ii Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42 (1994), 6, pp. 1057-66.
iii Sluga says: 'Frege confided in his diary in 1924 that he had once thought of himself as a
liberal and was an admirer of Bismarck, but his heroes now were General Ludendorff and
Adolf Hitler. This was after the two had tried to topple the elected democratic government in a
coup in November 1923. In his diary Frege also used all his analytic skills to devise plans for
expelling the Jews from Germany and for suppressing the Social Democrats,' (Hans Sluga,
Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993], p. 99). The diary sustains Sluga's claim that Frege admired
Ludendorff, but not that he admired Hitler; and certainly not as a result of the 1923 putsch,
which Sluga's second sentence seems to imply, for Frege disapproved of Ludendorff s
involvement; Sluga's final sentence presents a gross distortion of the content of the diary.
iv Op. cit., pp. 98 f.