Hans Ruin

Handbuch Philosophie is a series edited by Elisabeth Ströker and Wolfgang Wieland, the purpose of which is to present various fields and themes in contemporary thought. The author of the present work, who teaches philosophy in Erlangen and Heidelberg, has previously published two books in the history and theory of interpretation. The study is divided into two parts: the first adopts a systematic approach to its theme; the second develops a historical perspective. Using the Gadamerian term "philosophical hermeneutics," the author wishes to summarize three different fields or levels of questioning: the interpretation of texts, the understanding of human deeds and actions in general, and the idea of understanding as an ontological determination of man. The first level relates to the traditional art of hermeneutics as developed within theology and jurisprudence and, eventually, philology; the second refers primarily to the work of Dilthey and to different modern theories of human action and behavior; the third, finally, concerns the ontological turn that hermeneutics undergoes in Heidegger and Gadamer. Thus, "philosophical hermeneutics" is not the designation of a clearly delimited discipline, but the rather arbitrary name for a conglomerate of thinkers, questions, and disciplines which could be said to converge around the problem of human understanding. Ineichen's study is a handbook intended to serve as an introduction to this amorphous field. Despite its basically pedagogical intention, however, it is guided throughout by a highly critical spirit.

As a first step in a discussion of memory and philosophical hermeneutics, the chapter briefly surveys the ambiguity of the concept of memory itself. If hermeneutics has traditionally understood itself as primarily preoccupied with meaning, understanding, communication, and tradition, the phenomenon of memory in the more restricted Aristotelian, psychological sense could seem to be of lesser interest, as an auxiliary cognitive function. If we focus on its relation to subjectivity, time, and history, it appears very differently. If we look at the hermeneutic literature, the inner tension in the concept and phenomenon of memory is illustrated very clearly in a survey from Gadamer to Ricoeur. Finally, the chapter points to one of the most recent contributions to philosophical hermeneutics, where the impact of the mnemonic dimension of Gadamer's thinking is also brought to the fore in a very promising way.

The preoccupation with the "historicity" of thought and existence is central to thehermeneutic-phenomenological branch of modern philosophy. Its foremostrepresentative is Martin Heidegger, who in his main work Sein und Zeit (1927)developed a theory of historicity, according to which human beings not only exist inhistory, but are themselves historical. In subsequent writings Heidegger argued thatnot only man, but also truth and being, must be understood "historically" in aparticular sense. The meaning and the impHcations of Heidegger's "historicization" ofphilosophy are here analyzed along two parallel tracks: as a theory of the conditions ofphilosophical understanding; second, as an incentive to new ways of respondingphilosophically to these conditions. The study focuses on the sense of belongingwhich Heidegger assigns to historicity, as a dialogical relation to an enigmatic originthat cannot be exhaustively articulated, but to which understanding must neverthelessrespond in repetition and critique. The idea of the "hermeneutic situation," and what itmeans to occupy such a situation, is shown to be central in this regard. Heidegger's"historicization" of the philosophical territory is inte reted as an exemplary attempt topreserve philosophy as a quest for "origins" in the explicit recognition of theinterminable historical mediation of thinking. His approach leads to a criticalquestioning of fundamental philosophical distinctions, such as the temporal and theeternal, the absolute and the relative, subject and object, and of truth as correspondence.Eventually he is led to question the ability of language to express thehistoricity of thought and of being, which can only be indicated by means of conceptssuch as "moment" (Augenblick) and "event" (Ereignis). In seven chapters the themeof historicity is explored from different angles, which together provide a guide toHeidegger's path from a philosophy of life to a thinking of being in the "otherbeginning." The study covers the full range of his writings, but it emphasizes thedevelopment from the earliest lectures, over Sein und Zeit, to the second major work,Beiträge zur Philosophie (1938, published posthumously in 1989)

This review essay brings together five books on various aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking and writing from the last four years, from different cultural and political contexts, but also spanning a wide methodological range. The general question of how to orient ourselves in Nietzsche-scholarship is inspired by the title of Werner Stegmaier’s book which invites the reader to compare Nietzsche and Niklas Luhmann. It also invites us to contemplate the more general question of how to bring Nietzsche’s thinking into a dialogue with the human and social sciences. A central question concerns the temporality of Nietzsche’s thinking: is Nietzsche’s thinking a thing of the past that primarily necessitates a historical interpretation, or can it still open up ways toward the future. As this review highlights, many contemporary readers of Nietzsche continue to see themselves as working to “save” his texts from fateful misinterpretations. The last part of the review focuses on the new textual, or “poesiological” approach and the importance of seeing Nietzsche not primarily as someone professing a doctrine, but as the creator of uniquely multilayered texts.

The essay recapitulates the decisive steps in Heidegger’s development of the problem of human freedom. The interpretation is set in the context of a general matrix for how freedom is treated in the tradition, as both a theoretical ontological problem, and as practical appeal. According to some readers, Heidegger’s thinking is a philosophy of freedom throughout; according to others his “turning” implies abandoning the idea of human freedom as a metaphysical remnant. The essay seeks an intermediate path, by following his explicit attempts to develop an ontology based on the concept of freedom in the earlier writings, showing how this is the central theme in his confrontation and also his final break with German idealism, with Kant and with Schelling in particular, and with the prospects for a system of freedom. However, this break does not terminate his preoccupation with the problem of freedom, which is then transformed into the idea of thinking as a practice of freedom, as a way of reaching into “the free”.

: The article explores the topic of Gelassenheit in Heidegger, through the lense of the ambiguous role of Christian mysticism in general and Eckhart in particular in and for his thinking. In an analysis of how mysticism appears in his early lectures on religion, it explains why he is critical of this concept and of how it is commonly understood. It also gives reasons for why we too should be cautious in using it to describe his position in his later writings where he explicitly reconnects to themes and concepts from Eckhart. The text provides a critical rehearsal of Eckhart's understanding of both “Abgeschiedenheit” and "Gelassenheit" and how Heidegger relates to it both in his early lectures and in his later essays. Ultimately it outlines a phenomenological understanding of what is commonly referred to as a “mystical” comportment more along the lines of a heightened openness and awareness, in Heidegger’s words as a “releasement toward things and an openness to the secret”. Thus, instead of seeing Heidegger’s later writings as a sort of crypto-mysticism, the text seeks to show how his critical appropriation of Eckhart explicitly points beyond a standard dichotomy between the rational and the mystical, in an effort to develop a comportment of thinking than can respond to the demand of modern technological predicament.

The article seeks to challenge the standard accounts of how to view the difference between Husserl and Frege on the nature of ideal objects and meanings. It does so partly by using Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Husserl to open up a critical space where the two approaches can be confronted in a new way. Frege’s criticism of Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics (that it was essentially psychologistic) was partly overcome by the program of transcendental phenomenology. But the original challenge to the prospect of a fulfilled intuition of idealities remained and was in fact encountered again from within the transcendental analysis by Husserl himself in his last writings on geometry and language. According to the two standard and conflicting accounts, Husserl either changed his earlier psychologistic program as a result of Frege’s criticism, or he was in fact never challenged by it in the first place. The article shows instead how Husserl continued to struggle with the problem of the constitution of ideal objects, and how his quest led him to a point where his analyses anticipate a more dialectical and deconstructive conclusion, eventually made explicit by Derrida. It also shows not only how this development constitutes a philosophical continuity from the original dispute with Frege, but also how Frege’s critique in a certain respect could be read as an anticipation of Derrida’s deconstructive elaboration of Husserl’s phenomenology

This article explores the connections between Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Tove Jansson and the world of the Moomins. It begins with a short summary of the impact of Nietzsche in the Nordic countries and of his most important book, focusing on passages that are of particular relevance for the analyses that follow. It then proceeds to explore its meaning and significance for Jansson in three sections. The first concerns Atos Wirtanen, the writer and politician with whom she lived for ten years, and who encouraged her to publish her first book, while he himself was completing a book on Nietzsche. In the second section, the article analyzes an early semi-autobiographical literary experiment from the Jansson family archive that displays her as a passionate reader of Nietzsche long before her meeting with Wirtanen. In the third and last section, the framework of the Zarathustra narrative is used to interpret some of the figures and scenes from the Moomin books.

The review discusses four recent books and collections that approach in different ways the role of aesthetics in Nietzsche’s work, both as a question of poetic expression and as the shaping of sensibility. They testify to a deepening interest in the processes through which he forged his unique style. This involves micro-analyses of the composition of Nietzsche’s writings from the raw material of his notebooks. It also involves biographical and material contexts, as in Tobias Brücker’s monograph on the composition of The Wanderer and His Shadow. Instead of accepting the dichotomy between a Dichterphilosoph and a philosopher for whom style was merely an instrument for formulating truths, these books display in different ways how in the case of Nietzsche this dichotomy breaks down and gives way to a widened concept of philosophical writing that includes many different genres. Other works by Nietzsche discussed are Zarathustra and The Gay Science, and also Ecce Homo. Nietzsche seduced with his art, but he also saw through the art of seduction as practiced by the artist, opting for a position beyond the conventional split between poetics and philosophy.