Miles Groth

Most of Heidegger’s readings of early and classical Greek texts are unconventional by traditional philosophical and philological standards. The present reading of Plato is no exception. Heidegger suggests that the “essence of truth is what first allows the essence of man to be grasped” and “the man whose liberation is depicted in the allegory is set out into the truth.” But since such “setting out” is the very “mode of his existence, the fundamental occurrence of his Dasein,” the allegory is not chiefly about the essence of truth but, as already noted, rather about “an occurrence happening ‘in man’, that is, in his history”. The real novelty of Heidegger’s reading, however, is his conclusion that the “decisive result of the interpretation of the cave allegory... [is] the insight that the question concerning the essence of truth as unhiddenness must be transformed into the question concerning untruth”, that is, “that untruth belongs to the essence of truth”. For this reason Heidegger’s course takes a turn to a passage in the Theaetetus, which he dramatically characterizes as “that stretch of the road of the question concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato actually trod”. While the dialogue is generally taken to be about knowledge, for Heidegger it is about untruth.

This is the ninth volume of translations of major works by Martin Heidegger to be published by Indiana University Press. It is the second translation of one of his lecture courses by the late Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. No other thinker who wrote in German brings to the fore more seriously the problems of the translation of his texts into English than Martin Heidegger. In a certain sense, one of the major themes of his work is translation. In a lecture series given a few years after Basic Questions of Philosophy, he said: "Tell me what you think about translating and I will tell you who you are." Though we do not hear anything about the basis of their translation decisions, in the translators' foreword we learn something about the Gesamtausgabe [Collected Works] edition of Heidegger's texts as they are currently being brought out by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag: "The words of Heidegger are reconstructed with as much faithfulness as the editor can bring to the task, and they are then simply left to speak for themselves". All translation is, however, transformation and interpretation, and the bridging of two linguistic worlds. There is no choice but to read Heidegger's text with the original German nearby. The present translation of the course Heidegger gave during the Winter Semester of 1937 at the University of Freiburg retains the tempo of Heidegger's delivery in class, even though the German editor, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, who worked with several revised and emended versions of the lectures, "deleted epithets and interjections, characteristic of the lecture style but disturbing in a printed text, to the extent that they were not already stricken by Heidegger himself'. A good many of Heidegger's emphases have not been carried over by the translators. There are frequent repetitions, reviews and recapitulations, which were part of Heidegger's pedagogic style in his steady pursuit of a topic. In addition to the text of the lectures themselves, there is an appendix which includes an outline of the course as Heidegger initially envisioned it. His original plan was abandoned, but a fairly substantial and thoroughly worked out portion of the first two sections and part of the third section of the course as originally outlined are also contained in the appendix. Finally, supplements to the last two sections of the lecture course as it was given are included. The editor notes that this course, first published in 1984, is of particular importance for understanding Heidegger's 1936-38 Beiträge zur Philosophie [Contributions About Philosophy ], which will also appear in translation in the near future from Indiana University Press. The theme of the course is the essence of truth. Heidegger had first given a public lecture with that title in 1930. Much of what is implied in the lecture, which was published only in 1943, is made explicit in these lectures. Therefore, they supplement and clarify that key text. In the course, Heidegger explores the characterization of truth as correctness, which obscures the early Greek experience of ἀλήθεια, understood as unconcealedness. Heidegger's phenomenological studies of wonder, admiration, astonishment, marvelling, and awe in §37 are masterly. The event about which there has been so much speculation is quite simply the possibility of a fresh start for thinking. This would emphatically not be a repetition of the Greek experience from which Western metaphysics originated, but requires a broad jump, an existential Quantensprung, à la Lessing and Kierkegaard, for which there must be a great deal of preparation of a certain kind since there is nothing leading up to it, neither introduction nor transition. Heidegger looks forward to an unprecedented event comparable to the emergence of philosophy out of early Greek life. At long last, Schuwer and Rojcewicz are prepared to render "Dasein" as "existence," which is correct. It has always been possible to dispense with the original German term, providing we bear in mind the place of another key term in Heidegger's vocabulary with which "Dasein" is easily confused, "Existenz". Heidegger's lecture courses, which he left behind fully written out and in most cases continued to annotate and revise through the years, provide the reader with a feel for what this remarkable teacher of thinking must have been like.--Miles Groth, Wagner College.

Some of the interest of philosophers of mind in the results of recent research in the social sciences, including especially cognitive science and developmental psychology, is reflected in this anthology of eleven essays on the long-standing discussion about how minds understand other minds. In a few of the essays, enthusiastic and often seemingly uncritical acceptance of the empirical findings of contemporary psychological research may cause some readers well-warranted concern. Taken together, these essays are welcome additions to the discussion of an important problem of epistemology.

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”.

Like Aristotle’s texts, the present volume consists of logoi, lecture notes Heidegger left behind which later in his life he considered for possible inclusion in his Gesamtausgabe. Omissions in the manuscript amounting to about eleven pages were made good by referring to two transcripts of what was heard, respectively, by Walter Bröcker and Helene Weiss, two of Heidegger’s students at Freiburg University in the summer of 1923, when the course was given. Here and there in the manuscript, Heidegger provided headings for sections of the text and for a number of inserts and supplements added later. The detailed section and subsection headings, which are an outline of the course, were added by the German editor, Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. According to the translator, by Heidegger’s own admission, the text comprises “the first notes for Being and Time”, and therein lies one element of our interest in these logoi, the other being the possibility that “Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity” was “the original form of Heidegger’s ‘original ethics’”.

The initial collaboration and subsequent parting of the ways of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and the closely related course of the early development of the phenomenological movement, are chronicled in part in the history of a text Husserl wrote for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The article, “Phenomenology,” which, until 1956, remained an important source of many a general reader’s information about phenomenology, was both one of Husserl’s few attempts to present in a concise way an account of the new fundamental science that he originated and “a programmatic outline for his future endeavors” from 1928 on. The five versions of the article and a set of lectures on phenomenological psychology that Husserl gave in Amsterdam in 1928 are brought together in the present volume. The fifth version of Husserl’s article was finally “done into English” by one of Husserl’s doctoral students, Christopher V. Salmon, whose version was eventually further truncated by the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The actual Britannica text is not reproduced here. The transmogrifications of this ill-fated text are meticulously illuminated by Thomas Sheehan, who has also prepared a complete edition of the marginalia to Husserl’s copy of Sein und Zeit. Richard E. Palmer has edited and translated the Amsterdam Lectures and Husserl’s marginal remarks in his copy of Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Both sets of marginalia occupy about two-hundred pages of the volume. Also included are several other documents relevant to the history of the philosophical and personal relationship between Husserl and Heidegger, whom Husserl had chosen to be his academic successor and philosophical heir: remarks made by Heidegger in April 1929 on the occasion of Husserl’s seventieth birthday; Husserl’s letter to Alexander Pfänder from January 1931, in which he reveals his disappointment with Heidegger; and a lecture on “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” given by Husserl in June 1931, in which he publicly rejects Heidegger’s philosophy. The editors have worked with and, at times, updated Walter Biemel’s critical edition of Husserl’s texts on phenomenological psychology, as well as other materials available in the Husserl archives, at Louvain.

This collection of conference papers is the third in a series of related volumes published under the auspices of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, an organization headed by the editor of the collection and based at her home in Belmont, Massachusetts. It was preceded, in 1996, by Life. In the Glory of Its Radiating Manifestations and Life. The Human Quest for an Ideal. The editor, who has assembled nearly all of the fifty-seven volumes of the series Analecta Husserliana published to date, explains that the twenty-one texts included here, all but four of which are in French, “present the work of [the Institute’s] fifth International Phenomenology Congress held in Paris, October 6th to 9th, 1994”, the theme of which was the editor’s own “phenomenology of life as a scientific, integrated philosophy of life”.

This volume is comprised of twenty-two essays on the early writings of Martin Heidegger, including a number of lecture courses he gave at Freiburg University and Marburg University from 1919 until the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927. Four of the essays have already been published in another form. Seven have been translated for the volume, two of them by the authors. In recently published studies, the editors have been responsible in great part for bringing to light the influence of the work of the young Heidegger on the presiding themes of his mature work. Their own essays in Reading Heidegger from the Start, "Heidegger on Becoming a Christian," and "Martin Heidegger: Martin Luther," summarize and supplement selected results of their work, which the present volume complements.

Heidegger scholars have sometimes assumed that Heidegger’s experience of thinking was unprecedented and that the peculiarity of his idiom was related to the novelty of that experience. Reinhard May’s study suggests that Heidegger’s thought is fundamentally indebted to his early familiarity with Zen Buddhist ideas and to his reading of Taoist classics, including the Tao te Ching of Lao Tse and the works of Chuang Zu, in German translations Heidegger knew by Victor von Strauss, Martin Buber and Richard Wilhelm, and, later, to his contact with Chinese and Japanese philosophers studying in Germany with Rickert, Husserl and Heidegger himself. Many European artists and intellectuals were engrossed by East Asian ideas, of course, but May’s conclusion is that Heidegger was in a sense a Taoist philosopher, and that the peculiarities of his philosophy are the same as those which inhere in East Asian philosophy, which prizes silence and rejects the hegemony of Western logic. While Heidegger’s appreciation for East Asian philosophy and his influence on modern Japanese thinkers have been noted often enough, the suggestion that the heart of Heidegger’s thought was profoundly oriented in the early 1920s by Taoist and Zen Buddhist ideas is provocative. The translator, Graham Parkes, who has supplemented his translation with an essay detailing Heidegger’s contact with Japanese philosophers, was among the first to suggest a deeper connection between Heidegger and East Asian philosophy in a series of essays he edited on Heidegger and Asian Thought, which includes contributions by Japanese and Chinese philosophers who knew Heidegger and were in contact with him for many years.

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’”.

Fewer than half of the fifty-two courses Martin Heidegger gave between 1915 and 1956 have now been translated into English. Twelve of them have not yet appeared in the first Gesamtausgabe of his works. The present volume, which was first published in German in 1977, is the translation of a course given during the winter semester of 1927–8, at Marburg University. As the translators note, with its publication, all of Heidegger’s published texts on Kant are now available in English. The text thus complements Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, What Is a Thing?, and “Kant’s Thesis about Being [Sein]”.

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.

This is the third and final volume of the author’s “attempt to understand and communicate the insights of Martin Heidegger... the most important philosopher of modern times”. It is a discussion of the “later Heidegger” or “‘finished’ Heidegger,” which Julian Young defines as texts written after 1936 and characterizes as a “complementary mingling of both meditative and poetic thinking, a happy marriage of the two”. He comments: “The ground from which [the texts] spring lies, not in any product of ratiocination, but in, rather, poetic vision”. Professor Young, who teaches at the University of Auckland, sees Heidegger as “the ‘physician’ of modern Western culture” who “identifies three leading symptoms of modernity’s spiritual ‘sickness’: loss of the gods, the ‘violence’ of technology, and loss of ‘dwelling’ or ‘homelessness.’” The pathogen of the sickness is metaphysics, which “is one and the same error as that of believing there to be no more to truth than correspondence”. Like a malignancy that commandeers all of an organism’s energy in servitude to one pathological process, metaphysics “elevates a particular disclosure [of reality] to tyrannical status, a status which allows the possibility of no other reality-revealing horizon”. This small but rich volume concludes with a nuanced discussion of “the therapeutic aspect of Heidegger’s ‘medical’ thinking” on Western culture’s spiritual malady which the philosopher had diagnosed early in the twentieth century. In nine neatly argued chapters, the author offers a number of fresh interpretations of familiar themes in Heidegger scholarship, including the meaning of Sein, the Kehre that affected Heidegger’s way of thinking, Gestell, Wohnen, Ereignis, and the Geviert.