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German Thought

Heidegger Interpretations, Introductions

Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays by Lee Braver (Cambridge University Press) This volume of essays by internationally prominent scholars interprets the full range of Heidegger's thought and major critical interpretations of it. It explores such central themes as hermeneutics, facticity and Ereignis, conscience in Being and Time, freedom in the writings of his period of transition from fundamental ontology, and his mature criticisms of metaphysics and ontotheology. The volume also examines Heidegger's interpretations of other authors, the philosophers Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche and the poets Rilke, Trakl and George. A final group of essays interprets the critical reception of Heidegger's thought, both in the analytic tradition (Ryle, Carnap, Rorty and Dreyfus) and in France (Derrida and Lévinas). This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to all who are interested in the themes, the development and the context of Heidegger's philosophical thought.

Excerpt: Heidegger is known for the importance he places on interpretation. In his view we are creatures of interpretation. Every move we make is an interpretation: elaborating, exposing, and shaping our self-understanding and, in the process, our relationships to ourselves, our world, and other things within the world. At the same time, from the moment we find our-selves, as interpreting animals, thrown into this process, we find that our interpretations are not ours alone, but the often mindless yet time-tested iteration of a tradition of interpretations written into our most common practices and beliefs. If we create our lives through our interpretations, it is not without the inertia of traditional interpretations. We are both the parents and the progeny of interpretation and, in both these ways, interpretation constitutes our existence and any sense of being.

This centrality of interpretation is no less true for Heidegger when it comes to what, in his view, most urgently calls for thinking today. We need to think responsibly and creatively about what it means to us for things, including ourselves, to be and what grounds this meaning. The task of thinking is, in other words, thoughtful interpretation of the ground (not merely the cause) of our understanding of what it means to be. At the same time, given the historical character of our thinking, we can only think creatively and responsibly about these matters by considering how the history of such interpretations — philosophical as well as poetic — enables and disables that understanding.

The importance that Heidegger attaches to interpretation in this sense directly affects his interpretations of others' works and helps explain why those interpretations often appear strikingly unconventional if not skewed. For Heidegger, interpretation can never be a matter of simply setting the record straight, of providing the most accurate ex post facto reconstruction of the meaning of a thinker or a text. Instead, his interpretive horizon is the process by which beings are meaningful or, alternatively, how the understanding of what it means for them to be takes hold. When Heidegger turns to poets and other thinkers who allegedly contribute to this process, he presumes that they share this horizon on some level. While this seems at times presumptuous, it is partly offset by Heidegger's humbling cognizance of being caught up in the very process that, like them, he is grappling to express, with a future beyond the reach of any mortal soul. At the same time, while not over, this interpretive process has a beginning and, indeed, a history that we fail to tap at our peril. In Heidegger's view, one of our main tasks is to interpret the history of Western thinking as the beginning of a thinking that remains unfinished and incomplete, even as it shapes us, in need of us (thoughtful interpretations, responsible and creative thinking on our part) just as much as we are in need of it.

For all these reasons, Heidegger by no means dismisses the importance of determining the most coherent reading of a text, on the basis of the meanings of the words in question and/or the intention of the author. In his own interpretations of thinkers from Aristotle to Kant, he is often sensitive to these issues and their deep connection with philosophical interpretation, even where he plainly acknowledges the violence or unorthodoxy of his reading. Indeed, while sharply distinguishing the truth of an interpretation from the correctness of an explanation, he recognizes that correctness — despite or perhaps because of prose's illusory veneer of timelessness — can be a "first indicator of the truth," provided that it stems from a preview (Vorblick) of the truth.' There can, of course, be no guarantees of this preview and therein lies the unmistakable risk and pretentiousness but also the promise of venturing interpretations of Heidegger's thinking. In this spirit, the essays in the present volume, ran-ging over Heidegger's entire corpus, attempt to interpret correctly (Part I) basic themes of his thinking, (Part II) his interpretations of philosophers and poets, and (Part III) some prominent critics' interpretations of his thought. The aim of the following glosses is to introduce readers to these new essays as attempts to interpret responsibly and creatively Heidegger's thinking and critical interpretations of it.

INTERPRETING HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY

Hermeneutics is not, expressis verbis, a prominent theme in Heidegger's
later thinking and, indeed, this silence has been interpreted as one
of many indicators of a major break or discontinuity in his thinking.

Countering this interpretation is one of the motivations for Holger Zaborowski's "Heidegger's hermeneutics: towards a new practice of understanding." After identifying basic themes and sources that led the young Heidegger to rethink philosophy as a hermeneutics, Zaborowski elaborates the hermeneutics of facticity in his early lectures as well as the hermeneutics of Dasein in Being and Time. He shows how Heidegger, rejecting doctrines of hermeneutics as a theory or method of interpretation, is bent on retrieving its significance for philosophy proper as a mode of self-interpretation of factical life. After tracing how this practice of thoughtful self-understanding informs the Contributions to Philosophy and the "Letter on Humanism," Zaborowski arrives at the measured conclusion that Heidegger's later thinking is best considered "a transformation, rather than a dismissal, of his early hermeneutics."

In his essay, "Facticity and Ereignis," Thomas Sheehan also identifies a basic continuity in Heidegger's thinking, traceable to his early hermeneutics of facticity. One of Sheehan's targets is a widespread tendency to interpret Heidegger as a thinker preoccupied with the question of being. According to Sheehan, this way of interpreting Heidegger obfuscates his basic theme: the necessary correlatedness of Dasein and meaning as such. Arguing that Heidegger embraces the phenomenological reduction of being to meaning, he shows that the overriding concern of Being and Time is Dasein's facticity in the form of its ineluctable relation to mean-ing. Nor does this basic concern attenuate in his more mature thinking as the focus shifts to the theme of Ereignis. Far from something outside this relation, "Ereignis" signifies its reciprocal character, whereby Dasein submits to being appropriated to the meaningprocess, while also actively sustaining it. More simply, the notion of Ereignis, like the notion of facticity, signals that there is no human being without meaning and no mean-ing without human beings. In much this way, Sheehan makes a powerful case for reading Heidegger from beginning to end as a hermeneutical phenomenologist. "Both Ereignis and Faktizität," he concludes, "bespeak the same thing: the 'fate' of human being as necessary for maintaining (projectively holding open) the meaning-giving process."

With its focus on Heidegger's analysis of the call of conscience in Being and Time, the next essay in the volume, Simon Critchley's "The null basis-being of a nullity, or between two nothings: Heidegger's uncanniness" bridges Zaborowski's and Sheehan's foregoing treatments of facticity and Guignon's subsequent essay on freedom. In the process Critchley gives a penetrating interpretation of Heidegger's analysis that moves him closer to Beckett than Nietzsche (or, at least, Nietzsche as he is often read). Critchley's point of departure is the paradoxical strangeness of conscience's silent call: it stems from me, yet in a sense against my will, indicating a division at the very heart of myself, my Dasein. The self, as evidenced by the call of conscience, is divided between the nothingness of the world into which it is thrown and the nothingness, revealed in its being-towards-death, of what it projects. Dasein, as Critchley puts it, is correspondingly constituted by two impotencies, a lack of power over both its thrownness and its projection. Turning to the pre-moral, existential sense of guilt straddling this divide, Critchley argues for understanding the call of conscience as a call, not to heroic self-sufficiency, but to the uncanny potency of this dual impotence that defines our humanity, the freedom of embracing the "unmasterable thrownness, the burden of a facticity that weighs me down without my ever being able fully to pick it up."

In Charles Guignon's essay on "Freedom," he tracks two key mean-ings of the term in Heidegger's writings during the late 1920s and early 193os. As a means of introducing the first sense, Guignon shows how Heidegger's distinction between inauthentic and authentic existence neatly maps onto the difference between lives oriented primarily to what Aristotle dubs poiesis, the quotidian process of producing something distinct from themselves, and lives oriented to praxis, the process of making themselves. But Guignon also helpfully flags how this conception of praxis corresponds to the Hegelian notion that an action counts as genuinely free only if one can properly claim it as one's own. Thus, our authentic actions can be characterized as "free" because "in authenticity, we do indeed stand behind our actions: we own them and can own up to them." Not to be confused with individual willfulness, the resoluteness required for standing behind our actions (choosing to choose) is, as Guignon puts it, a means of vigilantly redirecting "our care from every-day dispersal in worldly doings, from poiesis, to the role of action in constituting the self, toward praxis."

While this robust form of freedom is determined by a "proper" relation to one's own self, the second prominent meaning of freedom for Heidegger at the time consists in "letting be." "Letting entities be" means "freeing up" a space for the truthful encounter with them and, indeed, not as something already finished but with multiple possibilities of their own. This same sense of "freedom" is also operative, Guignon shows, in our authentic relation to ourselves, not least to our finitude. In the conclusion, Guignon turns to On the Essence of Human Freedom, where Heidegger criticizes the ontological naivety of Kant's theoretical approach to the notion of freedom while applauding Kant's practical approach. Guignon suggests that, by assuming a derivative conception of being as presence-at-hand (as Heidegger contends), Kant's theoretical analyses of freedom prefigure contemporary debates about compatibilism and libertarianism — and their futility. At the same time, Guignon shows that Heidegger's positive, albeit highly unorthodox, gloss on Kant's practical approach grounds ethicality in decisiveness and authenticity, thereby recapitulating the robust sense of freedom articulated in Being and Time.

In the first part of his Habilitation, Heidegger repeatedly cites Scotus' commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. The commentary begins with the question "whether the proper subject of metaphysics is being as being (as Avicenna contended) or God and the Intelligences (as the Commentator Averroes contended)." In this way Scotus introduces an old dispute regarding Aristotle's work, namely, whether it is ontology or theology — or somehow both? Heidegger's own notion of "the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics" can be traced to this dispute, at least in the sense that a conception of what it means to be at all and a conception of the primary or pre-eminent being go hand-in-hand in the history of philosophy. In his essay "Ontotheology," Iain Thomson aptly recasts these parallel conceptions as the innermost core and outermost form or expression of an age's sense of reality. Thomson elaborates how, in Heidegger's view, Nietzsche's doctrines of will-to-power and eternal recurrence not only recapitulate ontotheology but, in the process, supply the ontotheological structure for the unremitting reach of technology today. With a deft interpretation of a scenario from Gulliver's Travels, Thomson also provides an imposing image of the sense of ontotheology that undergirds our technological age.

INTERPRETING HEIDEGGER'S INTERPRETATIONS

The thinking that marks the beginning of metaphysics presupposes, Heidegger contends, the Greek experience of being as phusis. What he understands by this presupposition can be gathered from his readings of Heraclitus' fragments. Moreover, according to Otto Pöggeler, these readings provide some of the clearest statements of Heidegger's own late thinking. The issue is complicated, however, not only because his views of Heraclitus develop, but also because he explicitly maintains that the earliest Greek thinkers stop short of the central theme of Heidegger's own work, namely, being (Seyn) as the grounding appropriation of being and beings to one another. Against this backdrop, I examine Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus' fragments on phusis as a key source of the meaning of being at the beginning of Western thinking.

After touting Aristotle's treatment of pathe in the Rhetoric as "the first systematic treatment of affects," Heidegger makes the oft-cited remark that "since Aristotle the basic ontological interpretation of affective [life] in general has scarcely taken a step worth mentioning" (SZ 138 f.). Yet Aristotle's treatment of pathos is by no means confined to his Rhetoric and, in fact, during the period leading up to Being and Time, Heidegger exam-ines Aristotle's treatment of pathos in De anima at length, not least in his 1924 lecture, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Josh Michael Hayes' illuminating essay "Being-affected: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the path-ology of truth," investigates Heidegger's interpretation of pathos in these and other lectures during his early Freiburg—Marburg period. Following a review of Heidegger's interpretation of pathos generally, Hayes critically discusses Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's accounts of moods of "being composed" (pleasure, tranquility, wonder) as well as "being decomposed" (pain, fear, unrest, anxiety). Hayes shows that Heidegger's reading of these accounts has a direct bearing on the analysis of disposedness and aletheia in Being and Time, precisely insofar as disposedness is an existen-tial and thus a form of disclosedness. As Hayes puts it, given Heidegger's interpretation of the disclosedness of pathos, he is engaging in a pathology of truth, consisting in retrieving the truth disclosed in our moods and the disposedness upon which they rest.

During the period just before and after the publication of Being and Time, only one thinker rivals Aristotle in capturing Heidegger's attention. That thinker is Kant and, indeed, as Stephan Käufer puts it in his essay "Heidegger's interpretation of Kant," Being and Time is itself "a deeply Kantian work." Käufer points out that Heidegger is engaged with Kant for his entire career, though perhaps never more so than in the period from 1925 to 1936. Heidegger himself characterized his reading of Kant as "violent," but Käufer argues that his reading proposes no more substan-tial a departure from Kant's text than does the Marburg Neo-Kantian interpretation that Heidegger combats. Indeed, while Heidegger shares with these Neo-Kantians a sense that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason lacks an underlying unity, Heidegger's attempt to find the common ground of its two basic elements is arguably more charitable than eliminating one of them (as the Neo-Kantians propose). Käufer also notes that, far from superimposing a wholly alien framework onto Kant's thought (as Cassirer charged), Heidegger develops his own approach from his reading of Kant and makes no secret of his disagreements with Kant, especially regarding the analysis of the self. Still, despite these disagreements, Heidegger's debt to Kant remains fundamental. For, as Käufer demonstrates in adroit detail, Heidegger merges his phenomenology of existence with a transcendental argument about the temporal conditions of existence and this argument is modeled after Kant's analysis of the threefold synthesis in the transcendental deduction.

"All philosophical thinking," Heidegger writes, "is in itself poetic [dichterisch]," adding that "a poet's work — like Hölderlin's Hymns — can be thoughtful [denkerisch] in the highest degree." In his essay "Heidegger's poetics of relationality," Andrew J. Mitchell shows just how serious Heidegger is about thinking with the poets. Mitchell demonstrates how Heidegger's mature emphasis on our exposure to the world and the world's exposure to us develop in tandem with his interpretations of Rainer Maria Rilke (1946), Georg Trakl (195o, 1952), and Stefan George (1957-1958). Mitchell shows how Heidegger finds in Rilke someone deeply appreciative of the threat of total objectification, attempting to counter it with poetry that reveals the field of relations that objectification presupposes but cannot touch. But, as Mitchell also shows, while Rilke understands this "relational field" as infinitely open, a place where through poetic speech things can "perfectly belong to the world," Heidegger understands our finitude (including our not belonging perfectly to the world) as the very condition for encountering things in it. In Trakl's figure of the wan-derer, Heidegger finds this understanding of human finitude that is missing in Rilke. Mitchell relates how, on Heidegger's reading, the animal that meets the wanderer's gaze in Trakl's Sommersnei ge is able to do so, not because they fit some metaphysical categories of animality and humanity but only because they are in a relation that exposes them to their limits (their not belonging and, ultimately, their mortality) and, in the process, transforms them. In the final segment of this rich essay, Mitchell turns to the humbling power of the poetic words, recounted by Heidegger in his reading of George's poem Das Wort. While all three poets have the gift of bringing relationality to words, George makes clear that this is a gift of the words, of language itself, as he writes, in the closing line of the poem, "No thing may be where the word fails." Thinking this gift means thinking of language non-instrumentally and, indeed, as the medium of meaning to which things and humans in their relationality are alike beholden.

Grappling with Nietzsche's thought, Heidegger submits, is absolutely essential to the task that he sets for his own thinking. In his essay "The death of God and the life of being: Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche," Tracy Colony searches for the interpretive horizon against which Heidegger regards Nietzsche as at once so close to this task and yet so far from taking up it. Complicating this investigation is Heidegger's revision of his lectures for the 1961 edition of them. Comparison with the original lecture notes published in 1985-1986 (GA 43-44) reveals that the principal themes of the texts altered or deleted by Heidegger are Nietzsche's understanding of the death of God and the possibility of a recurrence of the divine. Colony argues that the horizon for Heidegger's original interpretation of Nietzsche is to be found precisely in these themes eliminated from the first edition of the lectures. To make this case, Colony first presents a detailed review of Heidegger's discussion of divinity in the 1934-1935 lectures on Hölderlin and in his Contributions to Philosophy, written in tandem with Heidegger's first two Nietzsche lectures. This review effectively establishes the proximity of Heidegger's thinking at this time to Nietzsche's thought. But Colony also demon-strates how Nietzsche's conception of being as life represents to Heidegger the culmination of metaphysics and thus is the furthest removed from the sort of thinking that he deems necessary for a re-encounter with the divine.

INTERPRETING HEIDEGGER'S CRITICS

For a substantial part of the twentieth century, the most influential Anglo-American philosophers have been more at home with Fregean and Wittgensteinian than with Heideggerian conceptions of the fundamental philosophical issues and ways of addressing them. Nevertheless, there is a history of responses by such "analytically minded" philosophers to Heidegger. In his essay "Analyzing Heidegger: a history of analytic reactions to Heidegger," Lee Braver charts the ups and downs of this history. Braver argues that, while Gilbert Ryle's sincere but lim-ited engagement amounts to a missed opportunity for potentially fruitful dialogue, Rudolf Carnap's charges of linguistic confusion and obscurant-ism shut the door — for a while — on any rapprochement. Nor, Braver contends, do Richard Rorty's best efforts to rehabilitate Heidegger the historical ironist reopen the door, not least because, on Rorty's reading, Heidegger himself undermines the pragmatic potential of such irony with his deferential reverence for the History of Being. After challenging

Rorty's reading, Braver concludes with an account of a successful appropriation of Heidegger's thinking to central concerns of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, namely, Hubert Dreyfus' adaptation of Heidegger's conception of being-in-the-world to the basic issues of cognitive science.

As attention rightly turns again to the relation of Heidegger's philosophy to his woeful politics, the position of his former student and later critic Emanuel Lévinas deserves close scrutiny. For Lévinas was himself a victim of National Socialist savagery and a critic, not only of Heidegger's engagement with the Nazi Party, but also of the violent impulses in his thinking. Nonetheless, as Wayne J. Froman points out in his even-handed essay "Lévinas and Heidegger: a strange conversation," these criticisms did not keep Lévinas from appreciating the importance of Heidegger's thinking and the irreducibility of that importance to its political dimensions or Heidegger's own political failings. In an effort to illustrate that importance for Lévinas, particularly in Lévinas' attempt to think what escapes Heidegger, Froman begins with a review of their distinct but complementary criticisms of Western metaphysics — its obliviousness to time, for Heidegger, and its obliviousness to alterity, for Lévinas. Both Heidegger's conception of the absence that is constitutive of the meaning of being and Lévinas' conception of a relatedness to an other that cannot be assimilated to sameness signal a break with a substantialist metaphysics of presence. As Froman shows, this common ground is also evident in their differences with Sartre's conception of subjectivity. These lines of agreement invite the question of whether Lévinas' ethics can be legitimately interpreted as the implicit ethics of Being and Time. Froman shows that the question cannot be answered directly since Lévinas' thinking includes critical assessments of Heidegger's philosophy. Froman carefully sorts through various misunderstandings involved in these assessments and potential responses to them, as he works his way to the sobering conclusion that, while there is basis for agreement in some crucial respects, the basis for equally fundamentally disagreement (on the relative priority of ethics or thinking what it means to be) remains.

In her essay "Derrida's reading of Heidegger," Francoise Dastur points out that Derrida's critical engagement with Heidegger's thought was life-long. As Derrida puts it, Heideggerian questions provided him with the "opening" for his own thinking, even though those questions also contain the most powerful defence of the very thought of presence that he aims to undo. Dastur distinguishes two periods of Derrida's debate with Heidegger: the period from 1964 to 1968 (culminating in the lecture "'The Différance") and the second from 1968 to 1997 (extending from the lec-ture "Les fins de l'homme" to the lecture "L'animal que donc je suis"). Dastur recounts how, in the first period, Derrida takes issue with Lévinas' criticisms of Heidegger, draws on Heidegger's notion of Destruktion, and credits Heidegger with recognizing how Western metaphysics privileges a particular linguistic form. At the same time, as Dastur also points out, Derridean deconstruction (debunking the alleged difference between sign and signified) is by no means reducible to Heideggerian Destruktion (dismantling the content of ancient ontology to retrieve the original experiences that ground the first determinations of being). Yet Dastur also explains how Derrida takes up Lévinas' notion of trace and Nietzsche's notion of play in ways that expand — even further than Heidegger does — the project of undermining the dominant Western conception of being as presence. Dastur questions Derrida's criticism that Heidegger him-self remains captive of metaphysics in his differentiation of authenticity and authentic time from inauthenticity and vulgar (linear) time. But she also acknowledges Derrida's insistence that there are two gestures in Heidegger, one that remains inside metaphysics and another that gestures beyond it.

According to Derrida, this ambiguity in Heidegger's thinking reveals itself in the ontological difference, since it can be construed as the difference between beings themselves and being as their presence. To counter this understanding, Derrida introduces the notion of " differance" as the difference among beings that is older than the ontological difference. But Dastur contends that Derrida misconstrues Heidegger fundamentally in this respect, by failing to acknowledge Heidegger's conception of "the withdrawal of being, the concealing which occurs with the clearing of beings." Indeed, as Dastur observes, Heidegger anticipates the Derridean Différance by thinking being as "coming from" the difference and, indeed, a difference that is co-extensive, not with mere process of propriation, but depropriation (Enteignis).

When Dastur turns to the second period of Derrida's engagement with Heidegger, she finds Derrida once again taking up a Heideggerian theme and trying to take it beyond the point where Heidegger himself considered it. In the second period the issue is the intimate relation of humanism and metaphysics to one another, discussed by Heidegger in his "Letter on Humanism." Derrida charges that Heidegger himself fails to evade this very collusion, given his insistence on tying the question of what is proper to man to the meaning of being. After noting the increasing influence of Lévinas' thinking on Derrida during this time, Dastur demonstrates how, in the series of texts entitled Geschlecht and the book De l'esprit, Derrida continues to find unmistakable traces of metaphysical humanism — and a certain telling obtuseness towards the Hebraic — in Heidegger's work.

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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