Miles Groth

This volume publishes the important correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Binswanger and between Heidegger and Viktor Frankl. In essays by established experts, Heidegger's influence on psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, and existential analysis is discussed and his lasting significance for these disciplines is shown. Heidegger's thinking makes it possible to think deeply about health and illness, the human body or the doctor-patient relationship. For anyone interested in Heidegger's work, his way of thinking, the relationship between philosophy and medicine, or the question of human nature, this volume offers a wealth of new insights and stimulates an in-depth new dialogue across the boundaries of the disciplines.

Despite the great influence of Martin Heidegger on the development of 20th century philosophy, a complete understanding of his thought is difficult to achieve if one relies solely on English translations of his works. Since Gilbert Ryle misjudged his work in 1929 review of Sein und Zeit Heidegger's philosophy has remained an enigma to many scholars who cannot read the original German texts. Groth addresses this important issue in this illuminating work. Groth examines both the history of the first English translations of Heidegger's work and Heidegger's philosophy of translation, revealing that there is a coherent philosophy of translation in Heidegger's texts. The book not only articulates the elements of this theory of translation chronologically and thematically, but also shows it at work in Heidegger's meticulous and radical translation of Parmenides Fragment VI, in "What is Called Thinking? Translating Heidegger" concludes with a complete research bibliography of English translations of Heidegger.

The volume under review contains manuscript-based texts of two courses offered by Martin Heidegger, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview” and “Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value,” as well as a student’s transcript of a third course given by Heidegger, “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” for which there is no extant autograph manuscript. All of the courses were given in 1919, Heidegger’s first year as a teacher at the University of Freiburg, where he had completed his doctorate six years earlier. The first course was given in place of a previously scheduled course on Kant during the university’s special academic session for returning World War I veterans. The other two courses were part of Freiburg’s regular summer semester offerings. Heidegger wrote out these and all subsequent courses he gave in his career although, as the student transcripts with which the original manuscripts were compared for the first two courses show, he often extemporized in his presentation of the written texts. The manuscript of the text of the second course is incomplete, but the second edition of the book in which these three courses were first published in German in 1987 includes an excerpt of a student’s transcript of the last two lectures of the course. According to the editor of the German edition, for the first two courses “collations of manuscript with transcription have allowed lacunae to be filled and errors to be corrected” in Heidegger’s text. The extensive titles of “divisions and sub-headings [within the texts] were made by the editor.... The overall title of the volume was also provided by the editor”. This follows a practice established by the publisher of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe that is said to be based on Heidegger’s directives. The translator, Ted Sadler, has added a brief “Foreword” and a short 35-item English-German glossary to this, the first volume of a projected Collected Works of Heidegger in English announced by the publisher.

Today, too little is heard about Aron Gurwitsch, who was one of the clearest expositors of Edmund Husserl’s later philosophy and who, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, brought together in fruitful synthesis the findings of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. It is therefore timely that the present set of essays should be published. The collection is comprised of versions of papers, most of them by friends and former students of Gurwitsch, given on November 7–9, 1991, at the New School for Social Research, where he had taught. One article, “Gurwitsch’s Interpretation of Kant: Reflections of a Former Student,” by Henry Allison, has already been published. The volume concludes with “A Bibliography for Gurwitsch Studies,” compiled by one of the editors.

This book is both an intellectual biography and a thematic analysis of Martin Heidegger's "youthful writings" from 1910 to the appearance of Sein und Zeit in 1927. It is nearly contemporaneous with the publication in the first Heidegger Gesamtausgabe of the texts of the lecture courses he gave during his first period at the University of Freiburg and while he taught at the University of Marburg, courses which figure prominently in the book. Van Buren's analysis covers early articles Heidegger wrote for the Catholic journal Der Akademiker, his doctoral dissertation, "Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus", the dissertation that qualified him to teach at the university level, "Die Kategorien-und [[sic]] Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus", book reviews, public lectures, and his first lecture courses, several of which have been reconstructed from students' transcripts by the editors of the Gesamtausgabe. Many of the early lecture courses are currently being translated into English. The Habilitationsschrift was translated as a doctoral dissertation in 1978 but is not readily available. As a result, The Young Heidegger will serve many as a temporary substitute for reading the original texts.

The coterie of commentators represented in the present volume include some of the clearest voices for Heidegger’s way of thinking among the second and third generations of American Heidegger scholars. Two of the contributors, who are also the volume’s editors, have just published a new translation of Einführung in die Metaphysik, an event that would appear to be one of the reasons for the project published here. Its thirteen essays are organized under three headings: the question of being, Heidegger and the Greeks, and Politics and Ethics. The first part begins with Thomas Sheehan’s “prolegomenon to a fresh reading of Introduction to Metaphysics ” from the perspective of Heidegger’s later ruminations on Ereignis, “what brings about being,” that is “the opening of a clearing in which entities can appear as this or that”. Professor Sheehan’s discussion is both comprehensive of Heidegger’s major concepts and comprehensible to the beginning student. For specialists, the essay challenges the standing interpretation of one of the recurring topics in Heidegger scholarship, the so-called Kehre in which his way of thinking is said to have been implicated. According to Charles Guignon, Introduction to Metaphysics “undertakes the task of recovering the earliest ways of understanding Being for the purpose of revitalizing our contemporary understanding” of Being. He distinguishes in Heidegger’s thinking an “event ontology” that contrasts with the “ substance ontology” of metaphysics in effect since the classic Greek philosophers. Professor Guignon’s comments focus on Heidegger’s understanding of the early Greek concept of phusis and “how such a notion is illuminating in trying to make sense of things that the substance ontology fails to make intelligible”. He observes that history “provides a prime example of an entity whose Being is that of phusis”. Such an interpretation of phusis is in striking contrast to the standard understanding of phusis as physical nature. Later, in part 2, Susan Schoenbohm continues the discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of phusis, noting that, according to Heidegger, in its fundamental sense, phusis does not mean nature but rather “the emerging, for the fist time, of something out of no determination at all.” It is “a name for the emerging of the originary difference of determination and no determination”, and, as such, must for certain reasons itself be “determinately ambiguous”. For Heidegger, she observes, phusis and Being are the same. Richard Polt, who is one of the volume’s editors, attempts “to lay the foundation for an adequate interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘Nothing’” in the context of the question brought into philosophical focus and prominence by Lebiniz: Why is there something instead of nothing? He notes that “the closest antecedents of Heidegger’s Nothing are to be found in nineteenth-century thought”, but that there are resonances of the topic as Heidegger treats it to be found in Eastern thought as well. In both traditions, “the question of Nothing forms part of the question of Being”, and that “precisely because Nothing is Being’s other, the question of Nothing is included in the question of Being”. Professor Polt points out the rich history of the notion of Nothing in Heidegger’s way of thinking. “We have found,” he writes, “that Heidegger uses ‘Nothing’ to refer to a wide variety of phenomena, including inauthenticity, uncanniness, death, guilt, meaninglessness, and the withdrawal of Be-ing”. He concludes that Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics does not contain a “‘doctrine’ of Nothing,” but rather should be understood as “a voyage and a provocation, not a treatise”, adding that “Heidegger himself did not always view the text as a success”, which may account for why he chose not to publish it for nearly twenty years after first presenting it in public. Daniel Dahlstrom sees Heidegger’s text as “an introduction to the end of metaphysics and [the] beginning of a new way of thinking.” He suggests that Heidegger is in search of understanding “what it means to say that something is at all”. The author’s focus is on Heidegger’s interpretation of the sense of logos in pre-Socratic philosophy. Professor Dahlstrom examines what he terms the “logical prejudice” in Western philosophy as Heidegger construes it and attempts to show why, for Heidegger, such a way of understanding the relation between thinking and being “is understandable but not inevitable”, but, regrettably, “disables thinking about being”. According to the author, Heidegger discovers among the pre-Socratics an understanding of thinking that is “more rigorous and original than judgmental or propositional thinking”. On Dahlstrom’s assessment, Introduction to Metaphysics is, in fact, an introduction to logic. Part 1 of the Companion concludes with a refreshingly challenging analysis of “a complication in Heidegger’s theory of language and its consequences” for his way of thinking about being as a whole. In his text, Dieter Thomä sets out to “turn the tables and claim that shortcomings in both the early and late thinking of Heidegger can be pointed out by means of the Introduction to Metaphysics … in the respective conceptions of language”. He uses “an approach that takes Heideggerian arguments as incentives for a way of thinking that leads beyond him”. Focusing on the philosophical possibility of the declaration “I am,” that is “indexical being”, Professor Thomä discusses changes in Heidegger’s view of language from Being and Time to the Introduction, which he claims, by the way, “is not to be regarded as one of Heidegger’s strongest texts,” in particular “[i]n terms of systematic cohesion and unity”: “The tone of the book is uneven, changing among bold appeals, philological details, simple mistakes and bold arguments”. Thomä’s discussion of Heidegger’s concept of naming is respectful of and fully conversant with the texts, without, however, being reverential in tone, a feature that unaccountably has characterized so much Heidegger scholarship.

As the editor notes, the importance of this collection of “Heidegger’s early experimental essays” is considerable for an appreciation and understanding of the formative period of Heidegger’s thought, including his early lecture courses, Being and Time, and even the transitional reflections from the late 1930s gathered under the title Contributions to Philosophy. Modestly entitled “supplements,” these texts are illuminating documents of the formative period of perhaps the twentieth century’s most important philosopher.—Miles Groth, Wagner College.

It may seem remarkable that Professor Kroker also cites with nearly equivalent reverence Bill Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought, but the incongruity is eased when one realizes that, for the author, Gates is the living clue to the Heidegger–Marx/heidegger–nietzsche connections he identifies. In Kroker’s analysis, Gates plays the role of both heroic visionary and subtly sinister harbinger of the end of the fully human. Moreover, “[w]hat is disclosed in [Gates’s] book is nothing less than a general political philosophy” that serves as a basis for understanding the construction of the “digital nervous system” in which, Kroker contends, we are all irrecusably implicated and its disembodiment in the first “virtual class”, “the self-realized form of the knowledge theory of value” of which we are all already members and which Heidegger foresaw. The “virtual class is... a specialist class of the digital nervous system.” It is “how the circulation of the digital circuit is deep-time coded into every dimension of human experience.... It is a Heideggerian class working in the practico-inert of Marxist social history”. “Gates as the ascetic priest of the digital world is Nietzsche’s übermensch, the ‘overman’ whose ascetic task lies in establishing the value-direction of the softwaring of human flesh” and “Heidegger is Nietzsche recombinant”. Kroker mines On the Genealogy of Morals for its premonitions of Heidegger’s insights into the impact of technology on human beings, asserting that “Nietzsche is the fatal object of attraction and repulsion around which Heidegger’s thought hovers like a captive moon”.

This book is "a series of [eight] philosophical-political essays in which the boundary between philosophy and politics remains hazy and the discussion shifts readily across this disciplinary divide". Four of the essays, all written since 1989, have already appeared in print, and two of those have been revised for this book. Fred Dallmayr, who is Dee Professor of Political Theory at Notre Dame, finds in Heidegger's writings after 1933 "a prolonged struggle to expel or subdue the virus" of fascism, to which Heidegger was exposed during his "encounter" with National Socialism. He aims for "another political reading" of Heidegger's work. These essays are in direct counterpoint to the great many articles and books published during the past few years that explore what is claimed to be Heidegger's life-long fascination with fascism. Dallmayr, by means of a close reading of selected texts, presents the picture of a badly shaken philosopher who sought redemption in an entirely new turn of thought quite opposed to anything at all resembling pedagogic or political authoritarianism. On the question of why Heidegger never fully recanted publicly his affiliation with the Nazis during his rectorate at the University of Freiburg, Dallmayr asks: "But would such a retraction--and I mean a complete reversal, since nothing else would do--really have served anyone's purposes"? As a matter of fact, Heidegger did just that in private.

The present volume is a translation of Volume 60 of the Collected Edition of Heidegger’s works, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, which was first published in 1995 edited by Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly and Claudius Strube. It consists of three parts: an “approximation of the train of thought and articulation” of a course of lectures Heidegger gave in the winter semester 1920–21 entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” edited by Jung and Regehly; the actual text of his summer semester 1921 course, “Augustine and Neo-Platonism”, edited by Strube; and a “fascicle,” also edited by Strube, “Phenomenology of Religious Life,” which comprises the “first notes” for “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism,” a course scheduled for Winter Semester 1919–20 but not given. Strube suggests that the first two parts may be construed as “the high point, and at the same time the end, of [Heidegger’s] studies in the phenomenology of religion”, which, he says, “constitutes the background against which Heidegger will develop his ‘hermeneutics of facticity’”.

The “dominant feature” of the present volume is an “attempt to introduce realism as a partner in the discussion of phenomenological-transcendental epistemology,” in order to determine “whether realism as such is compatible with phenomenology”. By the term realism, the author means “classical realism of the kind advocated by Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and contemporary philosophers such as William Alston and Alvin Plantinga” ; namely, the view that “an entity has its own being, no matter whether it is known to have that being or not”. Pietersma wants to show that, in the end, a phenomenological epistemology actually “safeguards the realist mode of thought” by providing a “conceptual framework” that serves as “a kind of accommodation of object and subject”. He believes that the three “phenomenological thinkers” he discusses may be understood as “having freed realism from its own incoherence and restored it to the status of a viable philosophy”.