A single public event can retroactively re-frame a hearer’s whole memory of coded language

Evidence

Hans Jonas, one of Heidegger’s former students, remembered how such coded terms were present even in earlier lectures, although Jonas himself was oblivious to them at the time. He did not see them because he was not attuned that way, but in retrospect - he told an interviewer - he recognised the ‘Blood-and-Soil’ language of the lectures, and the ‘(how should I say it?) primitive nationalism’ in Heidegger’s talk of resoluteness and history, together with his occasional anti-French political asides and his emphasis on Black Forest rusticism. At the time, it seemed a mere eccentricity. Only after Jonas was told of Heidegger’s rectorial address in 1933 did he re-evaluate his whole memory of the long-ago seminars he had taken. ‘That was when I realised, for the first time, certain traits in Heidegger’s thinking and I hit myself on the forehead and said: “Yes, I missed something there before.” ’ By Christmas of 1933, however, Heidegger was feeling less at home in the role of public National Socialist philosopher than he had expected to be. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls the phenomenology of retroactive meaning-revision — the ‘Aha’ restructuring of past experience — related to memory studies and to how trauma survivors reinterpret prior events. — connects to: Priming can vary recognition of degraded speech while holding the stimulus fixed — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4372
• SHARE: For a friend interested in fascist aesthetics or Heidegger scholarship: the detail that coded völkisch language was audible in lectures years before the rectorial address, but only decodable in retrospect.

Broader Connections

• Priming can vary recognition of degraded speech while holding the stimulus fixed #expands (0.78) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4372