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A Companion To Heidegger edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus, Mark A. Wrathall (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: Blackwell Publishers) A Companion to Heidegger is a complete guide to the work and thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The 31 essays in this volume make an important, illuminating contribution to explaining the complexity of Heiddeger's thought.

The volume opens by focusing on the most important elements of Heidegger’s intellectual biography, including his notorious involvement with National Socialism. The book then goes on to provide a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Heidegger’s work. The contributions proceed chronologically, starting with discussions of his magnum opus Being and Time, moving on to the period of his ‘Kehre’ or ‘turn’, and concluding with his neglected later work. A final section contains key critical responses to Heidegger’s philosophy, including consideration of his relation to pragmatism, religion, and ecology. Contributors include many of the leading interpreters of, and commentators on, the work of Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His work has been appropriated by scholars in fields as diverse as philosophy, classics, psychology, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, religious studies, and cultural studies.

At the same time, he is a notoriously difficult philosopher to understand. The way he wrote was, in part, a result of the fact that he is deliberately trying to break with the philosophical tradition. One way of breaking with the tradition is to coin neologisms, that is, to invent words which will, in virtue of their originality, be free of any philo­sophical baggage. This is a method that Heidegger frequently employed, but at the cost of considerable intelligibility. In addition, Heidegger believed his task was to provoke his readers to thoughtfulness rather than provide them with a facile answer to a well defined problem. He thus wrote in ways that would challenge the reader to reflection.

Our hope is that this book will be of assistance in making Heidegger more accessi­ble as a writer and thinker. The chapters in this volume review the main formative influ­ences on and developments in his philosophy, tackle many of the central elements in Heidegger's thought, and address his relevance to ongoing issues and concerns in the field of philosophy, broadly construed. By way of introduction to the chapters that follow, we would like to offer here a brief overview of Heidegger's life, thought, and work.

In his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes an ambitious ontological project – the central task of the book is to discover the meaning of being, i.e. that on the basis of which beings are understood (see SZ: 150). Although Heidegger never completed the project he had outlined for elucidating the meaning of being, he did manage to articulate a revolutionary approach to thinking about the problem in terms of time as the "horizon of all understanding of being" (see SZ: 17 and Blattner, this volume, chapter 19). Most of Being and Time itself is concerned with "preparing the ground" for understanding the meaning of being by carrying out a subtle and revolu­tionary phenomenology of the human mode of existence (see Sheehan, this volume, chapter 12).

When it comes to thinking about ontology, Heidegger argues that traditional treat­ments of being have failed to distinguish two different kinds of questions we can ask: the ontic question that asks about the properties of beings, and the ontological ques­tion that asks about ways or modes of being. Being and Time focuses on three ontolog­ical modes and three kinds of beings – Dasein, the available (or ready to hand), and the occurrent (or present at hand). If one investigates an item of equipment, say a pen, ontologically, then one asks about the structures in virtue of which it is available or ready to hand. These include, for example, its belonging to a context of equipment and referring or pointing to other items of equipment. In an ontic inquiry, on the other hand, one asks about the properties or the physical relations and structures peculiar to some entity – in the pen's case, for example, we might make the following ontic obser­vations about it: it is black, full of blue ink, and sitting on top of my desk. Heidegger's critique of the tradition comes from the simple observation that the ontological mode of being cannot be reduced to what we discover in an ontic inquiry, no matter how exhaustively we describe the entity with its properties. This is because no listing of, for example, a pen's properties can tell me what it is to be available rather than occurrent.

An ontological inquiry into human being, then, will not look at the properties pos­sessed by humans, but rather at the structures which make it possible to be human. One of Heidegger's most innovative and important insights is that the essence of the human mode of existence is found in our always already existing in a world. He thus named the human mode of existence "Dasein," literally, being-there. Dasein means existence in colloquial German, but Heidegger uses it as a term of art to refer to the peculiarly human way of existing (without, of course, deciding in advance whether only humans exist in this way). Translators of Heidegger have elected to leave the term untranslated, and so it has now passed into common parlance among Heidegger scholars.

Using his account of what is involved in human existence so understood; Heidegger argues that the philosophical tradition has overlooked the character of the world, and the nature of our human existence in a world. Dasein, for instance, is not a subject, for a subject in the traditional sense has mental states and experiences which can be what they are independently of the state of the surrounding world. For Heidegger, our way of being is found not in our thinking nature, but in our existing in a world. And our being is intimately and inextricably bound up with the world that we find ourselves in. In the same way that the tradition has misunderstood human being by focusing on subjectivity, it also failed to understand the nature of the world, because it tended to focus exclusively on entities within the world, and understood the world as merely being a collection of inherently meaningless entities. But attention to the way entities actually show up for us in our everyday dealings teaches us that worldly things cannot be reduced to merely physical entities with causal properties. Worldly things, in other words, have a different mode of being than the causally delineated entities that make up the universe and which are the concern of the natural sciences. To understand worldly entities – entities, in other words, that are inherently meaningfully constituted – requires a hermeneutic approach

Once we free ourselves of the idea that everything is "really" occurrent, we are open to the phenomenon of the world as something other than a mere collection of entities. The world, properly understood, is that on the basis of which entities can be involved with one another. And it is our familiarity with the world so understood which makes it possible for us to act on, think about, experience, etc. things in the world. This idea, in turn, allows Heidegger to address skeptical worries about truth and the reality of the "external" world. Since we always already find ourselves involved with entities in a world, worries that there is no world are ungrounded and unmotivated.

Once we see that human beings are inherently and inextricably in a world within which entities and activities are disclosed as available to us, we are in a position to ask.

In the past, it has been commonplace to subdivide Heidegger's work into two (early and late) or even three (early, middle, and late) periods. While there is something to be said for such divisions – there is an obvious sense in which Being and Time is thematically and stylistically unlike Heidegger's publications following the Second World War – it is also misleading to speak as if there were two or three different Heideggers. The bifur­cation, as is well known, is something that Heidegger himself was uneasy about, and scholars today are increasingly hesitant to draw too sharp a divide between the early and late.

Heidegger's phenomenological method provides an example of the complications involved in dividing his work into periods. Heidegger's early philosophy was profoundly shaped by his study of the phenomenological works of Husserl and, to a lesser degree, Scheler. But he broke very early on with any formal "phenomenological method" as such, and eventually largely dropped the term "phenomenology" as a self-description, worried that representing his thought as phenomenology would cause him to be asso­ciated with Husserl's substantive philosophical views. But despite his break with the phenomenological movement, Heidegger considered his work throughout his life to be "a more faithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology"4 (in his own loose sense of the term; for more on Heidegger and phenomenology, see Boedeker, this volume, chapter 10). For Heidegger, phenomenology is an "attitude" or practice in "seeing" that takes its departure from lived experience. It aims at grasping the phenomena of lived involvement in the world, before our understanding of the world becomes determined and altered in "thematic" or reflective thought. In this respect, Heidegger's work is in marked contrast to the method of conceptual analysis that has come to dominate phi­losophy in the English-speaking world following the "linguistic turn" of the early twen­tieth century. For Heidegger, our concepts and language presuppose our unreflective involvement, and have a different structure than our pre-propositional way of corn-porting in the world. It is thus not possible to discover the most fundamental features of human existence through an analysis of language and concepts. Instead, a constant feature of his work is the effort to bring thought before the phenomena of existence –in this sense, his "method" is always that of phenomenology.

Another constant in Heidegger's thought is his notion of unconcealment. Heidegger first discusses unconcealment in his 1924 lectures on Plato (GA 19), and for the next two decades nearly every book or essay Heidegger published, and nearly every lecture course he taught, includes a significant discussion of the essence of truth under the headings of "unconcealment" or "alêtheia" (the Greek word for truth). The later Heidegger continued his research into unconcealment through his writings on the clearing or opening of being – a topic that preoccupied Heidegger for the last three decades of his life. Thus, one could safely say that the problem of unconcealment was one of the central topics of Heidegger's life work. Throughout, Heidegger consistently insisted that many traditional philosophical problems need to be understood against the background of a more fundamental account of the way we are open to the world, the way in which the world opens itself and makes itself available for thought, and how we thoughtfully respond.

A prime case in point is the problem of truth. Heidegger recognized that any inquiry into propositional truth quickly leads to some of the most fundamental issues addressed in contemporary philosophy – issues such as the nature of language, and the reality or mind-independence of the world. He held that the philosophical discussion of truth can only be pursued against the background of assumptions about the nature of mind (in particular, how mental states and their derivatives like linguistic meaning can be so constituted as to be capable of being true or false), and the nature of the world (in par­ticular, how the world can be so constituted as to make mental states and their deriv­atives true). Heidegger's focus on unconcealment in his discussions of the essence of truth is intended to bring such background assumptions to the foreground. The claim that unconcealment is the essence of truth, then, is motivated by the recognition that we have to see truth in the context of a more general opening up of the world, i.e. in the context of an involvement with and comportment toward things in the world that is more fundamental than thinking and speaking about them (see Wrathall, this volume, chapter 21).

In Being and Time, Heidegger analyzed the unconcealment that grounds truth in terms of the disclosedness of Dasein, that is, the fact that Dasein is always in a mean­ingful world. Heidegger did not shy away from the consequences of this: "Before there was any Dasein," he argued, "there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more" (SZ: 226). He illustrated this claim with an example drawn from physics – the best candidate for discovering independent truths about the universe: "Before Newton's laws were discovered, they were not 'true'" (SZ: 226). The controversial nature of such a claim is a little diminished by the qualifications Heidegger immediately adds. To make it clear that he is not claiming that Newton's laws are somehow completely dependent for their truth merely on their being believed, he notes: "it does not follow that they were false, or even that they would become false if ontically no discoveredness were any longer possible" (SZ: 226). And he further explains, "to say that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false, cannot signify that before him there were no such entities as have been uncovered and pointed out by those laws. Through Newton the laws became true and with them, entities became accessible in themselves to Dasein. Once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which before­hand already were" (SZ: 226).

In such passages, Heidegger is clearly trying to walk a fine line between realism and constructivism about truths, and the status of scientific entities. But where exactly that line falls has been subject to considerable debate.

Heidegger's interest in art and poetry is driven by the belief that they can play a privi­leged role in instituting and focusing changes in the prevailing unconcealment of being. As he noted in a 1935 lecture course, "Unconcealment occurs only when it is achieved by work: the work of the word in poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of the word in thought, the work of the polis as the historical place in which all this is grounded and preserved."' This view was later explained and explanded in "The Origin of the Work of Art": "The essence of art, on which both the artwork and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art's poetic essence that, in the midst of beings, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual."' Works of art can show us a new way of understand­ing what is important and trivial, central and marginal, to be ignored or demanding of our attention and concern. They do this by giving us a work which can serve as a cul­tural paradigm. As such, the work shapes a culture's sensibilities by collecting the scattered practices of a people, unifying them into coherent and meaningful possibilities for action, and epitomizing this unified and coherent meaning in a visible fashion. The people, in turn, by getting in tune with the artwork, can then relate to each other in the shared light of the work. As we become attuned to the sense for the world embod­ied by a work of art, our ways of being disposed for everything else in the world can change also (see Dreyfus, this volume, chapter 25).

After his resignation from the rectorship, Heidegger also began an intensive engage­ment with Nietzsche's thought (see Sluga, this volume, chapter 7), offering lecture courses on Nietzsche in each year between 1936 and 1940 (see GA 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48; see also GA 6.1 and 6.2, and the essay "Nietzsches Wort: 'Gott ist Tot"' in GA 5). He later claimed of these courses that "anyone with ears to hear heard in these lectures a confrontation with National Socialism" (Heidegger 1993a: 101). Whatever political relevance these lectures had, they were philosophically decisive, as Heidegger further developed in them his account of the history of being, and the dangers of our con­temporary understanding of being.

Following the war, Heidegger was banned from teaching by the Denazification Commission. The ban was lifted in 1949, but Heidegger immediately took emeritus status at Freiburg University. He offered, after 1949, only occasional university or pro­fessional seminars (for example, What is Called Thinking? (1951/2) in GA 8, or the Heraclitus Seminar (1966/7) and the other seminars in GA 15). For the most part, Heidegger developed his later views on the history of being, the event of appropriation, unconcealment, language, the work of art, technology, and the need to foster poetical dwelling, etc., in the form of public lectures and essays.

For example, in his first publication after the war, "The Letter on Humanism," Heidegger argued that the history of being is not to be abstracted from historical events, but rather historical events need to be understood on the basis of history. "History comes to language in the words of essential thinkers" (GA 9: 335), and this history of being "sustains and defines every condition et situation humaine" (GA 9: 314). Thus, for Heidegger, the most fundamental historical events are changes in the basic ways that we understand things, changes brought about by a new unconcealment of being (see Guignon, chapter 24, and Okrent, chapter 29, in this volume).

"The Letter on Humanism" also launched a string of published essays and public lectures devoted to warning against the dangers of technology (see, for example, the

lectures collected in GA 79). Heidegger had commented as early as 1934 on the rise of a technology which "is more than the domination of tools and machine," but "rather has its fundamental significance in man's changed position in the world" (GA 38: 143). In the years following the war, Heidegger came to see more clearly that the real meaning of technological devices is found in the way that they, like works of art, have come to embody a distinct way of making sense of the world (see Borgmann, this volume, chapter 26). As we become addicted to the ease and flexibility of technological devices, Heidegger argues, we start to experience everything in terms of its ease and flexibility (or lack thereof). The result is that everything is seen, ultimately and ideally, as lacking any fixed character, or determinate "nature." Thus, Heidegger claims, the nature of technology consists in its being a mode of revealing. To say that technology is a mode of revealing amounts to the claim that within the technological world, everything appears as what it is in a certain uniform way. In the Christian age, everything showed up as God's creation, and showed up in terms of its nearness or distance from God's own nature. In the modern age, everything showed up as either a subject with a deep essence, or an object with fixed properties. In the technological age, by contrast, every­thing shows up in light of what will allow us to put it to "the greatest possible use at the lowest expenditure" (GA 7: 19). That is, we want it to be as maximally usable as possible. As technology expands into new domains, the world is gradually becoming a place in which everything shows up more and more as lacking in any inherent signifi­cance, use, or purpose.

Heidegger's name for the way in which objects will come to appear and be experi­enced in a purely technological world is "resource" – by which he means entities that are removed from their natural conditions and contexts, and reorganized in such a way as to be completely available, flexible, interchangeable, and ready to be employed in an indefinite variety of manners. If all we encounter are resources, Heidegger worries, our lives and all the things with which we deal, will lose their weightiness or importance. All becomes equally trivial, equally lacking in goodness and rightness and worth. Thus, in the technological age, even people are reduced from modern subjects with fixed desires and a deep immanent truth, to "functionaries of enframing" (GA 79: 30). In such a world, nothing is encountered as really mattering, that is, as having a worth that exceeds its purely instrumental value for satisfying transitory urges. In such a world, we lose a sense that our understanding of that in virtue of which things used to matter – a shared vision of the good, or the correct way to live a life, or justice, etc. – is grounded in something more than our willing it to be so.

Heidegger initially hoped that art and poetry could play a role in resisting the tran­sition to a technological world, But they can only do this if we have non-technological practices for experiencing art and language. This is because even art and poetry, in a technological age, are understood as resources for the production of mere aesthetic experiences. The result is that "the world age of technological-industrial civilization conceals within itself an increasing danger that is all-too-rarely considered in its foun­dations: the supporting enlivening of poetry, of the arts, of reflective thinking cannot be experienced any more in their self-speaking truth."'

Thus, a central theme of Heidegger's post-war lectures is the need to reconceive lan­guage in terms of world disclosure (see, for example, the essays collected in Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12; see also Taylor, this volume, chapter 27). Traditional accounts of

language as a conventional means of designation assume that a world has already been disclosed, for it is on the background of shared way of being in the world that language can designate. But how is it that the world is opened up in the first place, and opened up in such a way that language can serve to designate or refer to objects in the world? Heidegger argues that human speech originates from something that is prior to human communicative activity. Heidegger names this something "originary language." This originary language is the "saying" that shows things – it is the articulation prior to any human speech which brings things into a certain structure, and makes salient particu­lar features of the world. It is a kind of pointing out – a highlighting of some features of the world and not others. "We speak from out of" a language, and this language speaks to us "in everything that addresses us; in everything that awaits us as unspo­ken; but also in every speaking of ours" (GA 12: 246/Heidegger 1993b: 413). Human speaking is always a "hearing" – a responding to the articulation of the world worked by the originary language.

We can thus think of overcoming technology in terms of learning to hear a differ­ent language than that spoken by the technological world. We learn to hear and respond differently, Heidegger thought, by practicing dwelling with the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities (see Edwards, this volume, chapter 28). The fourfold names the different regions of our existence which can contribute to giving us a par­ticular, localized way of dwelling. As we learn to live in harmony with our particular world – our earth, our sky, our mortality, and our divinities – we can be pulled out of a technologically frenzied existence. This is because, in such being at home, we allow our­selves to be conditioned by things, understood as a special class of entities – namely, entities that are uniquely suited to our way of being in the world. As Heidegger noted in one of the very last things he wrote, "reflection is required on whether and how, in the age of the technologized uniform world civilization, there can still be a home" (GA 13: 243).

Heidegger's Later Philosophy by Julian Young (Cambridge University Press) Julian Young presents a sympathetic but not uncritical summary of Heidegger's later philosophy. Heidegger's, often maligned, late mystical or unintelligible musings are granted much benefit of the doubt. The book is surprisingly small and clear, given the number of articles and thoughts Heidegger produced long after his mid-maturity turning away. Among the major topics addressed are: metaphysics, technology, ecology, dwelling, and the guardian. Young grants little context beyond the philosophical, at which he is adept, and provides few psychological insights concerning the changes and development of Heidegger's thoughts. (I suppose it is unfair to clamor for a synthetic appraisal Heidegger's politics and philosophical development from a book seeking to be a handy overview of thoughts not of a life.) This book resembles a map of Sicily that mentions and stars all of the attractions except for the fiery pit of Etna.

The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger by Stanley Rosen (St. Augustine Press, Inc.) In this book, I propose to investigate the thesis of Martin Heidegger that European philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche is the history of metaphysics, or of what Heidegger also calls Platonism. I shall be primarily concerned with the beginning and the end of this history: with the ostensible origin of metaphysics in Plato and with its culmination in Nietzsche. This will require a considerable amount of textual analysis, but my intentions are philosophical rather than philological. The question before us, What is Being? is raised in the first instance by Heidegger, although the answer, to the extent that there is an answer, has a different inspiration. My "reversal" of Heidegger is at the same time a reconstruction of the spirit of Platonism, a spirit that must renew itself in each generation, like a firebird that is reborn from the ashes of refutation.

The texts I have chosen to analyze were selected because they enable us to understand what is fundamental in Heidegger's thesis and by extension in his interpretation of Plato and Nietzsche; no attempt has been made to provide an exhaustive account of Heidegger's views or of the history of their development.' I take my bearings by Heidegger because of his decisive influence in our time, an influence that repeats the fate of Nietzsche, as rhetoric and journalism provide an ever‑gaudier and increasingly meretricious substitute for what Hegel called the infinite labor of Spirit. It is not, however, simply because of his reputation or influence that Heidegger is the main figure in this study. I do not wish to substitute one form of meretriciousness for another. Heidegger's interpretation of Platonism, and so of metaphysics, is in my opinion the greatest obstacle to the contemporary understanding of the nature of metaphysics, and so too of philosophy. This is due to the power of his intelligence and the extent of his learning, however perverse may be the use to which he puts these very considerable attributes.

In particular, his authority and his thought stand behind the widespread conviction, even among the self‑styled "analytical" philosophers, that the history of philosophy is at an end and that we have arrived at a postphilosophical age. More Precisely, it it is Nietzsche who stands behind this conviction; and Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche has become canonical for our time. The entire debate among our leading schools of philosophy has been seriously distorted by Heidegger's influence, which has also contributed to a concealment of the true nature of the problem by encouraging a spurious distinction between analytical and continental philosophers.

This distinction produces the absurd impression that precision, conceptual clarity, and systematic rigor are the property of analytical philosophy, whereas the continentals indulge in speculative metaphysics and cultural hermeneutics or, alternatively, depending upon one's sympathies, in wool gathering and bathos. No intelligent person is taken in by the gestures toward "pluralism" that have presumably rectified the situation. Nevertheless, at a deeper level than that of the conference of academicians or the awarding of research grants, the influence of the wool­gatherers and the hermeneuticists has been steadily filling the void that surrounds the techne of analytical philosophy. I predicted almost twenty‑five years ago that this would inevitably occur, since there is no analytical justification for analysis.' The attempt to acquire such a justification from fashionable political and cultural views of the moment has left the analysts naked before the assaults of continental doctrines, one of which, namely, that logic and mathematics are poetry or perspectival constructions of the will to power, stems from Nietzsche, and the other, namely, that logic and logical or analytical philosophy are the incarnation of technicity, and so are a posthumous excrescence of Platonist metaphysics, stems from Heidegger.

The sociology of professional philosophy is of interest only in the sense that no progress can be made until the rubble is removed from the public highway. This book is concerned with the machines by which the rubble may be removed, not with the rubble itself. Let me repeat that I write in a spirit of reconstruction, not refutation. My fundamental intention, to employ a Nietzschean distinction, is active rather than reactive: I have a proposal to make about the next step in philosophy. Technical precision and speculative metaphysics must be unified in a step downward, out, of the thin atmosphere of the floating island of Laputa or of the balloons in which so many of our advanced thinkers are currently suspended, back into the rich air of everyday life. As will soon become evident, l understand this step to be equivalent to a sound application of genuine Platonism. We cannot orient ourselves outside the cave because our initial attempt to do so led not to illumination, but to blindness and sunstroke. I do not recommend that we remain in the cave, but rather that we try to distinguish between it and the heavens by regaining our sight of the surface of the earth as well as of the horizon.

Genuine Platonism is timeless, not reactionary; one may agree with Heidegger that it has more to do with the Enlightenment than with the obscurantism of Teutonic invocations of Wotan and the forest paths of the Schwarzwald. Heidegger criticizes Plato's famous comparison of the Idea of the Good to the sun on the grounds that this image expresses the utility of beings rather than their uncoveredness in the Being‑process.

In reply, I borrow Hegel's warning that philosophy must strive not to be edifying; mere edification is stultifying. Very far from attempting to deny Heidegger's point of interpretation, I shall argue that utility is an essential component of goodness. But what I mean by goodness has very little to do with a metaphysical doctrine of Platonic Ideas in the traditional sense of that expression. As part of the aforementioned step downward, I shall try to show how the doctrine of the Ideas, as explained by Socrates himself, emerges from a commonsensical reflection on the nature of ordinary experience.

There is a sense in which I regard myself as an ordinary‑language metaphysician, provided that this appellation not be transformed into a technical doctrine in its own right. Whether one speaks of phronesis, common sense, or (as does Heidegger) of Vorsicht and Umsicht, one is very close not merely to Aristotle's practical treatises, but to the practice of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues.' This practice has consequences that go beyond common sense, but there are different beyonds, not all of them identical to Laputa. However this may be, it is important to make clear at the outset that I am not advocating a return to metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense of the science of being qua being.

Heidegger's guiding concern is to arrive at a thinking of Being (other names are employed) that both questions and commemorates rather than defines, specifies, or calculates, or in other words to avoid thinking Being in terms of beings, rather than the reverse. Thinking that orients itself by beings is metaphysics or Platonism. Platonism has completed its historical destiny in the later teaching of Nietzsche. I cite from a paper written in 1964 and published two years later in French; the German publication dates from 1969. The title of the paper is "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." In the course of answering the question To what extent has philosophy arrived at its end in the present age? Heidegger says, "Throughout the entire history of philosophy, Plato's thought in derived forms remains continuously the standard. Metaphysics is Platonism. Nietzsche characterizes his philosophy as reversed Platonism. With the reversal of metaphysics, which was already carried through by Karl Marx, the most extreme possibility of philosophy is achieved. Thus it has reached its end. To the extent that philosophical thinking is still pursued, it arrives only at epigonal renaissances and their varieties."

We are now in a transitional period, in Heidegger's view, one which requires us to reappropriate metaphysics in such a way as to "release" ourselves from its grip and thus to prepare ourselves for the other beginning that enables us to think Being, that is, to be conveyed into the E‑vent. It is unclear whether the transitional period is itself a gift of Being, presented to humankind through the person of Heidegger, and so an "e‑vent" that is bound to occur, or whether we must ourselves act in such a way as to insure our entry into the promised land. Like all prophetic doctrines of history, of which Marxism is an alternative example, Heidegger's teaching cannot coherently resolve the relation between destiny and freedom.

In either case, namely, as a consequence of the necessary acceptance of the gift or as a free act, we must according to Heidegger detach ourselves from the grip of Platonism. My own claim is rather different. I shall first attempt to show that what Heidegger calls Platonism is more properly entitled Aristotelianism. This will clear the way for an account of the true difference between the questioning of Plato and that of Heidegger. The difference is not that of the road taken by both on their philosophical travels, but rather of how each proposes to see the sights on the way. The reconstruction of Platonism will lead us back not to Pindar and Heracleitus, but to what is just under our noses, and so is both present and absent in the everyday senses of those terms.

In the second half of this book, I shall turn to the fundamental points in Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche, paying special attention to the ‑two volumes of university courses and essays published in 1961. Again, my intention here is not to provide an exhaustive scholarly account of that interpretation, but to understand and to assess the adequacy of Heidegger's joint contentions that (1) Nietzsche is a reversed Platonist; (2) his Platonism is the culmination of metaphysics; and (3) the inner sense of metaphysics is nihilism. In this way I hope to free metaphysics from the charges that have been leveled against it by Heidegger and his followers, by presenting a different and more accurate portrait of Platonism, a portrait in which there is room for the best features of Nietzsche and Heidegger as well. If the history of Western philosophy is the history of metaphysics, my goal is to defend metaphysics against the new way of thinking recommended by Heidegger.

Finally, my book is not intended as a scholarly report on Heidegger's philosophical career. I have immersed myself in the Heideggerian texts, as in those of Plato and Nietzsche, not out of historical curiosity but in order to clarify the present manifestation of the perennial philosophical question: What is to be done? Those who, like Heidegger and Lukacs, followed Plato's example in going to Syracuse failed to grasp the significance of his publication of the failure of that act. One may agree instead with Heidegger that theory is the highest form of activity. The reason for this, however, is that theory is noble and good but not edifying.

 Stanley Rosen’s writings blend lively historical contextualizing with readable philosophical argument. He also has done Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay by Stanley Rosen (Carthage Reprint: St. Augustine Press, Inc.) and a good account of G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom by Stanley Rosen (St. Augustine Press, Inc.)

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