Product Description
This book offers a clear and informative interpretation of Heidegger's extremely complex later philosophy (which is often dismissed as unintelligible mysticism), exploring its main themes and offering analyses of its most obscure formulations. It will be widely welcomed by students as well as scholars in Heidegger studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Not terribly informative or interesting
In the course of writing a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger's Beitrage, I've been reading through all scholarship on the later Heidegger; Young's book is one of the last that I've read, and so I have a broad basis for comparison.This book is simply not very good --- there are far better introductions to the later Heidegger.Just off the top of my head, Vycinas's "Earth and Gods", Polt's "Heidegger: An Introduction" and "Emergency of Being," von Herrmann's "Wege ins Ereignis," and Poggeler's "Denkweg Martin Heideggers" are all far superior.All of these books are perfectly clear and well-written (i.e. not bogged down in post-structuralism), and show a true interpretive depth.

Young literally seems to have just written down every instance of a word in Heidegger (for example, pp. 94-102, 'divinities' or 'gods'), mixed up contexts completely, and then presented a vague summary of 'the gods' that has absolutely no sensitivity or hermeneutic depth whatsoever ... he combines references to divinities from the 1920s, 1960s, and 1930s in the same paragraph, taking each instance completely out of context, and assuming that he's found some sort of 'general' Heideggerian doctrine.

Very good overview of later Heidegger
This book is an outstanding introduction to later Heidegger. Its main virtue is its clarity and brevity. Most works on philosophy are excesively long. Not this one. Young works far enough from American institutions to be free from the devastating influence of Derrida that is crippling American Continental philosophy. Unfortunately, he stays away from using "Heideggerianisms." The disadvantage of that is that this work is perhaps written a little too plainly, making it less interesting too read.He is also distanced enough from England to be free of the arrogant wit(lessness) of analytic philosophy. Still, there is some tendency to understand Heidegger's philosophy in an epistemological light rather than an ontological. For example, many of the key concepts are understood exclusively as "modes of disclosure." He has the courage to try to explain the fourfold and to attempt to answer the question of what Being is. The latter is not a good question to ask since for Heidegger, Being is not the kind of a "thing" to have a whatness, but he does make the valuable distinction between being and Being, which I agree is at work in Heidegger. He, however, unnecessarily, wants to link Being with god and sometimes is unsure about which of his meanings is being used and in those cases Young writes "B/being." I appreciate his willingness to approach these important questions head-on, which scholars usually think are either too silly or too archaic to worry about.
Young has a great command of the Heideggerian corpus but makes almost no reference to secondary literature. His working-out of the notion of Gestell is laborious but outstanding. There is a helpful "common sense" approach to some of the more difficult concepts and a use of good examples to clarify them.
One of the advantages of this book is that Young does show conclusively, that one can derive an Heideggerian ethics from some of the clear and obvious statements Heidegger did make and without the need to be too creative. There is quite an emphasis on philosophy of art and ecology, which seem to be Young's personal interests.
My main concerns are the aforementioned lack of ontological nuance as well as of phenomenology, which are still operative in the later Heidegger. But as these are challenging and not fashionable, most scholars ignore them.
My second complaint about this book is its odious citation mode. Who knows what bizarre manual of style Cambridge University Press is making him use but it is annoying to say the least. Every Heideggerian word AND every single common word used in an Heideggerian sense is placed within single quotations. Phrases are cited parenthetically. A list of abbreviations name the sources of the most commonly used texts. Untranslated Heideggerian works are cited in the GA# convention. Some short comments are placed within parenthesis. And to avoid any consistency whatsoever on top of that we have footnotes used for parenthetical remarks and other sources. This makes for visually offensive sentences like "Since the fundamental term _Being and Time_ uses to picture 'average everyday','inauthentic' Dasein's stance to death is _evasion_, 'negation' means here, I suggest, 'evasion'. Most of us are unable to look death directly in the face without terror: terror before the 'abyss' (_Abgund_, absence of ground) (WPF p. 92), the 'empty nothing' (BDT p. 151), horror at the void." The confusion between abbreviations, GA convention, parenthesis and foot/endnotes is not exclusive to this book or publisher. Some seem to favor this madness. If publishers aren't aware yet of the problem this poses, they will be when one day all of the 102 volumes Of Heidegger's works are translated. In that case will there be a list of 102+ abbreviations used? Will they expect readers to make sense of the acronym soup? Wasn't the purpose of footnotes to replace hideous parentheses to begin with? As the sentence above shows, Young has also a tendency to introduce himself into the text for no good reason. Finally, the universe of this book is populated entirely by females- "she" this, "she" that. I've seen this in other CUP books so I won't blame the author. It is pathetic that a distinguished publisher would as late as 2002 still pander to moronic politically correct fads.
Once one gets past the single-quotation, parenthesis, and footnote madness, one will find a clean and concise elucidation of a good part of Heidegger's later works. Young also does a fine job of addressing common views about underlying currents in Heideggerian thought and arguing for his interpretation. Highly recommended for anyone interested in later Heidegger, ethics, ecology, philosophy of art, as well as those who are not fond of early Heidegger or _Being and Time_ but are looking for the more accessible aspect of Heidegger.

A way forward for philosophy after Nietzsche
Julian Young's book on Heidegger's Later Philosophy (2005) provides a clear and concise overview Heidegger's developed thinking. I greatly enjoyed Young's earlier book, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life (2001). His chapters on Heidegger in this book were intriguing, making me very keen to read about Heidegger in more detail.
Though I studied theology at university, I also have a deep interest in philosophy. While I will not attempt to summarise Young's exposition of Heidegger's in this review, I will say that I feel Heidegger's thinking provides a way forward for philosophy after the huge impact of Nietzsche ("God is dead", "there are no [moral] facts, only interpretations", etc). Though reading and understanding Nietzsche will raise serious religious doubts, I cite a slightly cliched phrase: "With doubt there's no way back, but there is a way through." Heidegger's later philosophy by no means provides the comforts and promises of conventional religion. However, it does provide an intellectually credible alternitive to the bleak nihilism of much philosophy of the Nietzschean tradition. (Final note: the picture and colours used on the cover of the book are significant, hinting at the 'green' implications of Heidegger's philosophy.)

weeding the garden near the dwelling of the guardian
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 philosphical, 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. ... Read more

Product Description
Introduction to Phenomenological Research, volume 17 of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, contains his first lectures given at Marburg in the winter semester of 1923–1924. In these lectures, Heidegger introduces the notion of phenomenology by tracing it back to Aristotle’s treatments of phainomenon and logos. This extensive commentary on Aristotle is an important addition to Heidegger’s ongoing interpretations which accompany his thinking during the period leading up to Being and Time. Additionally, these lectures develop critical differences between Heidegger’s phenomenology and that of Descartes and Husserl and elaborate questions of facticity, everydayness, and flight from existence that are central in his later work. Here, Heidegger dismantles the history of ontology and charts a new course for phenomenology by defining and distinguishing his own methods. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not all in ENGLISH
I am using the phenomenological model of research for my dissertation and I was disappointed to open up this book and find it was not fully translated.It is useful but I am betting more so if it was entirely translated in English

WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGY?
Introduction to Phenomenological Research is Heidegger's lecture notes for a course he gave at the University of Marburg in the winter semester of 1923-24. Let me get right to Heidegger's argument. He begins by noting how the term "phenomenology" is constructed from the Greek words "phenomenon" and "logos." Phenomena show themselves. For Heidegger, worldhood implies that something is manifest, that we have access to the existence of beings: disclosure. But for something to be manifest, for it to be able to arise in the first place, it needs a certain context in which it can be what it is. But what supplies the context for things so that they can manifest themselves and, in Heidegger's view, exist (be there)? Surely things must be taken together with other things, but it is our own existence that supplies the necessary context, the precondition, for phenomena. Phenomena don't just appear; they appear TO us. They turn up in our lives. Now if something can show itself, it can also be covered over and not show itself. Therefore truth is not the mere agreement between our judgment and an objective state of affairs; rather, truth and falsity (as well as ambiguity) arise from the interplay of concealing and revealing, of disclosing and covering over. Our own existence essentially offers the possibility that anything (true or otherwise) can show itself at all. The essence of our existence is to reveal a world, of BEING that disclosure of world. But here we must understand that, for Heidegger, worldhood is CONSTITUTED by this disclosure. It is not as if there is a world before it is disclosed. Revelation is a prerequisite for worldhood. Subject and object get subsumed into a pre-existing context which always includes our being in the world as a precondition. Without the self's being there, nothing shows itself, there are no phenomena, and -- since worldhood is a phenomenon -- consequently no world. But just as there can be no world without the self, there can be no self without a world (context, situation) in which that self can be what it is AS being in the world. As Heidegger points out in Being and Time, being-in-the-world (our existence and the world's) is a whole structure. Hence the self is not an ego that should be posited seperately from its world. Descartes is in error when he makes such an ego the unshakable ground of his philosophy.

The pretheoretical context provides the basis of the logos. Pointed out by word, a phenomenon can be explicitly treated as a theme for discussion. Once we treat something explicitly, however, it changes its aspect and is no longer seen in its prethematic primordiality, which requires that we NOT turn it into the object of an investigation, that the phenomenon NOT draw attention to itself as a mere object that we poke, prod, measure, calculate, and "study." Phenomenology is the articulation (logos) of the coming "to the light of day" of entities in the implicitly thematic language of ontology. As you might have guessed, the difficulty of phenomenology is that it has to speak formally of what is primordial, of what resists formulation. In his interpretation of "phenomenon," Heidegger explores the ambiguity that the word has had since the ancient Greeks. Originally a synonym for reality, it also means illusion, mere appearance. Phenomenology isn't after the sun's "actual" size as determined by objective measurement; it's about how the sun (or anything else) is revealed to us unthematically in our pre-scientific comportment and circumspection. Phenomenally, it is not a mere appearance or illusion that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Science revealed that the earth rotates around the sun, but this does not negate the phenomenal fact that the sun rises and sets.

Phenomenology is existence's inquiry into its being in the world. However, phenomenology (<> fundamental ontology) should not be confused with scientific explanations of sensory perception. Phenomenology deals with the life context in which things exist not as the mere objects of scientific investigation but as significant entities that are there for us in our involvements with them in everyday life. Initially, phenomena do not reveal themselves as neutral objects of physical perception, nor are they first revealed to one's objective or scientific comportment. Our subjective experience is not "added" to an initially objectively given substance. Rather, phenomena are first revealed within a hermeneutical "as structure" to a fundamental human comportment that Heidegger describes as "significance" (the meaning of things in the context of caring for my own existence). The insight that things are not initially neutral objects on which we stick subjective meanings and value predicates (good, useful, beautiful) but that things are actually signifiers has revolutionized philosophy.

According to Heidegger, phenomena are not bare objects but inherently significant signifiers in a context of references (indications, meanings, signs). The world is not made up of objects; rather, each entity brings with it a whole implied context of meaning, a whole situation. It is this referential context, the inherently meaningful context in which things manifest themselves, that actually makes up the world. Things turn up (are there for me) within the situation offered by my own existence/predicament of being alive. The significance of my own life provides the "there" in which things make sense and have meaning, in which they are what they are. Objectivity is a modification of this primordial significance. Science erroneously posits objects first, and only then believes that our subjective experience of them is somehow added to the bare, pre-existing object. But for Heidegger the whole point of things is to be there FOR, reveal themselves TO understanding -- and always to reveal themselves AS something. We don't hear soundwaves; we hear rustling, the car speeding down the street, the patter of rain. To be there, the world must disclose itself to a being, a self, who supplies a "there" in which things can reveal themselves as what they are. Without this "there" (this clearing) supplied by our own being-there, there can be no existential space for things to show up in, no significance, and therefore no existence. In fact, physical space could not properly exist unless there is this prior existential space (a context of meaning and significance) in which physical space can show up and reveal itself AS physical space. In order to BE, the world must be revealed. But this implies a being TO WHOM it IS revealed. The primordial manifestation of phenomena involves the necessity of things being in the totality of relevance constituted by the self's being in the world and in an actual situation. But, along with my being, my not-being (mortal finitude) is also given. Since the self cares about its existence, things are primordially discovered by (they are there for) care. Care does not initially discover "objects" but an entire existential context IN WHICH particular significant things "signify" to care. My own "there" is the situation of relevance, the context of signifiers, in which and for which things manifest themselves. This primordial care -- and not its objective modification -- is what constitutes the world. The world is originally there for (that is, it is disclosed and thus given to) care.

Existence is not a substance. Physical things are disclosed, surely, but they should not be confused with the disclosure that discloses them. The disclosure of the material is itself not a material entity. Any explanation of the mechanism of perception here would miss the point, since it would have objectified everything from the outset and adopted the wrong attitude and methodology toward the phenomena we are studying.

So -- phenomena are there (although not explicitly) as care encounters them in interactions. For instance, what is a fork in its BEING? Care does not encounter a pronged, shiny, metallic object with an exactly determined weight and size; neither does it encounter some object made of elements, atoms, particles, or anything of the kind. When care encounters the utensil called a "fork," the latter's primordial being lies not in its object-character or material composition, but in some care-determined purpose. The fork as phenomenon is primordially encountered not when I look at it objectively, but when it is set in a situation -- for instance, when I use it at meal time (which involves a whole referential context of equipment and people, all of which aren't bits that I must put together but are together as a whole from the outset, a whole which can't be reconstructed by trying to add my subjective experience to the objects involved, or even by turning myself into an object and adding up all objects). The forkness of the fork is distinct from its mere objecthood since it is most properly a fork only when it is being used AS a fork, and not when it is viewed as an object to observe, examine, or study. The objective, theoretical context supplied or imposed on things by science is not the primordial context in which things appear. The less I analyze the utensil objectively, and the more I use it for some care-determined purpose such as eating, the more it is there for me in its essence.

Existence cares about itself, its being there. Yet, according to Heidegger, existence evades and obscures itself not only in daily life but in the mathematical and natural sciences, whose methods and concepts are totally inadequate for exhibiting existential structures. These sciences do not operate in a phenomenologically appropriate manner. This is not a deficiency in them, but a reflection of the fact that they necessarily limit their scope, as do all disciplines qua disciplines. Heidegger argues that the tradition of classical Western philosophy has tended to treat Being as though it were a thing. Because it has this fundamental quality of evading itself, existence isn't immediately accessible to itself, nor is it accessible to the theoretical framework imparted to Western thought by the ancient Greeks. The Greeks, however, had the wherewithal to ask about being, whereas modern philosophy takes being for granted as something that has been theoretically settled as objective presence, such that the question "What is Being?" is no longer posed by philosophers. Even--indeed, particularly--in everyday life, existence's way of being is to evade itself and get distracted with "things." Since it refuses to face itself, existence identifies itself with the things with which it is preoccupied. In this self-interpretation, existence misunderstands itself as something material, whereas Heidegger argues that what is material exists only in so far as it is there for what he calls There-being, which ultimately cannot be objectified or turned into a mere substance, or be explained away mechanistically.

This lecture course is designed by Heidegger to teach the way of letting existence announce itself without objectification. We must destruct theoretical formulations such as the subject-object framework traditionally employed by science and epistemology. The preliminary work entails dismantling the history of philosophy in order to see how traditional methods and concepts obscure existence, and how they do so on the basis of the primordial self-evasion and self-obfuscation of it in our everyday life. According to Heidegger, existence cannot be explained rationally (in the traditional sense of the term), it even defies logical categorization, so the analysis of existence must find a more primordial footing than theoretical knowledge or logic.

Heidegger deconstructs the fundamental temporal division imposed by Platonic metaphysics (or at least by its posterity), which posits, on the one hand, a timeless realm of verities and, on the other, a factical here-and-now in which the universally valid truths manifest themselves in particular instances. Since, as temporal, the here-and-now is finite and mutable, passing away and vanishing, Western metaphysics has traditionally considered the mutable as having less importance than the immutable verities that are eternally binding. Traditionally, it is the immutable truths that are considered real. Precisely existence is taken to be of little, or only circumstantial, importance, getting brushed aside as a mere temporal and subjective inflection of non-temporal, objective "reality." What matters to theory are the timeless, objective propositions, which, taken as eternally binding, serve as the conceptual framework within which mathematics and logic interpret reality. Heidegger argues that there is a neglect here. What gets neglected (through objectification and theorizing) is precisely what needs to be discovered phenomenologically: existence itself. Since the objectification of reality accomplished by theoretical thinking distorts the phenomenon of existence from the start, Heidegger goes beyond theory (metaphysics) to establish a new beginning for philosophy. Heidegger believes that philosophy, as traditionally developed, is at an end. A new horizon confronts thinking.

Existence evades itself, be it by real or ideal means. Existence anxiously looks to be reassured and tranquilized about its existence, which is primordially strange to it and uncanny. Mathematics and the natural sciences keep the uncanniness of existence safely at bay so that, as objective endeavors, they can go about the constructive work that belongs to them as disciplines. Existence is what these disciplines take for granted, what they constantly presuppose, not what they take as their subject matter. Since the authentic self is subverted by the scientific method, it is foolhardy to classify history, theology, or philosophy as objective endeavors. By objectifying existence, the very "stuff" of history and philosophy is lost sight of. History and philosophy are to be reinterpreted.

Since science, despite all its positive work, is a way in which existence evades itself, Heidegger challenges traditional notions of truth. Truth has long been defined as the agreement of subject and object, between a judgment and the state of affairs about which it judges. Supposedly, truth happens when the judgment (the subject) agrees with the objective state of affairs. And this correspondence IS one aspect of truth, but it is not the most primordial aspect. Truth as correspondence is founded upon truth as disclosure. Because the main characteristic of existence is that it cares about its existence, Heidegger rejects the notion that existence could ever be successfully posited in judgments or propositions. The objective methods of science strip away care from reality. By objectifying reality and stripping away "subjective" care, math and natural science obviate the very phenomenon that is crucial to understanding existence. Care is what discloses the world. It opens up a cosmos that would otherwise be closed to itself. Phenomenology asks about the being there FOR us of phenomena in the disclosure of one's own existence, in the "there" of one's life, which is determined by care. To see what things are primordially, we must focus not on material composition or quantity, but on how things are disclosed (and not disclosed, since revealing implies a simultaneous concealing) to care.

By evading itself, existence ensnares itself in fallenness, in things, in known quantities. Because it has this self-evading structure, existence avoids itself unless it is forced to confront itself, such as through existential anxiety in the face of death. Being finds itself "uncanny" because of the finitude of its being here in the world, in THIS life. This, in turn, is phenomenally linked to the underlying, suppressed shock that existence feels in the face of the fact that it -- and indeed anything -- IS at all, that it should find itself in its predicament, held out into the Nothing. Along with this comes the awe that things are disclosed to us essentially because of this finitude. When existence is made to confront the possibility of not being t/here, it comes much more sharply into focus.

It's a university course, so there's an implied reading list. Heidegger's analysis of Descartes is perhaps even more trenchant here than in Being and Time. Heidegger traces Cartesianism back to Scholasticism, whose wellspring is Aristotle. The book is barely two-hundred and fifty pages long, but it is super dense. His analyses of philosophical texts are rigorous. Dahlstrom does a tremendous job rendering Heidegger into English. Knowledge of Greek and Latin is helpful, but not necessary. The claim that this book is "not all in English" is misleading. ... Read more

Product Description

Since the publication of his mammoth work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought, and is a key influence for modern literary and cultural theory.

This guidebook provides an ideal entry-point for readers new to Heidegger, outlining such issues and concepts as:

• the limits of 'theory'
• the history of being
• the origin of the work of art
• language
• the literary work
• poetry and the political
• Heidegger's involvement with Nazism.

Fully updated throughout and featuring a new chapter on ‘Heidegger, Environmentalism and Ecocriticism’, this guidebook clearly and concisely introduces Heidegger's crucial work relating to art, language and poetry, and outlines his continuing influence on critical theory.

Customer Reviews (1)

The artistic side of Heidegger...
Timothy Clark's text on Martin Heidegger is part of a recent series put out by the Routledge Press, designed under the general editorial direction of Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London), to explore the most recent and exciting ideas in intellectual development during the past century or so. To this end, figures such as Paul Ricouer, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and other influential thinkers in critical thought are highlighted in the series, planned to include more than 21 volumes in all.

Clark's text, following the pattern of the others, includes background information on Heidegger and its significance, the key ideas and sources, and Heidegger's continuing impact on other thinkers. As the series preface indicates, no critical thinker arises in a vacuum, so the context, influences and broader cultural environment are all important as a part of the study, something with which Heidegger might agree, although many of the thinkers in this series are also influenced greatly by the productionist metaphysics against which Heidegger spent much time and energy.

Why is Heidegger included in this series? This series is primary for critical thinking in a literary sense, and Heidegger is no literary theorist or critic per se.In fact, this is the first volume to deal primary and exclusively with this line of thinking in Heidegger.However, Heidegger's influence extended far beyond what is more traditionally considered his confines of philosophy, primarily the philosophy of metaphysics, with questions of ontology.Heidegger, by influencing some of the key thinkers in the field of literary criticism, has had a knock-on effect far exceeding his actual contributions to the subject.Intellectual `workers in the field' such as Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and perhaps most importantly Jacques Derrida derive much in response to and reaction to Heidegger, whose influence extends into psychology, history, politics, linguistics, literary analysis, philosophy, science, and theology (and even further afield).

One of the useful features of the text is the side-bar boxes inserted at various points. For example, during the discussion on Heidegger's development of Geschichte (deep history), there are brief discussions, set apart from the primary strand of the text, on Nihilism and Explanation, developing further these ideas should the reader not be familiar with them, or at least not in the way with which Heidegger would be working with ideas derived from them. Each section on a key idea spans twenty to thirty pages, with a two-page summary concluding each, which gives a recap of the ideas (and provides a handy reference).

My first interest in Heidegger developed out of an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of politics and theology, but this volume looking at his interest in art, literature and the general mindset and development of Western culture certainly adds new dimension to the author of `Being and Time' (yet interestingly, the primary translation of `Being and Time' for English audiences is probably that done by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson - Macquarrie being an important Anglican theologian I study).To a certain extent, this kind of volume on literary analysis violates certain ideas of Heidegger that would resist the application of productionist theories to works of art.Heidegger is probably the father of postmodernism in many respects, something that might make him uncomfortable should postmodernism slip into being yet one more school in the line of Western philosophical and intellectual development.

Clark's primary text from Heidegger for this study is not `Being and Time' as much as it is Heidegger's lecture `The Origin of the Work of Art', delivered in the 1930s and published in 1950.Heidegger applies his principles of philosophical analysis to poetry, painting, architecture and other creative enterprises.Heidegger longed for a complete break with what he saw as the single strand of Western development from the time of the Greek philosophers to the present that culminates in the death of art and the nihilistic tendencies of the modern technological world.

Clark deals with Heidegger's flirtation with the Nazi party in a frank and clear way.That Heidegger was a dues-paying member of the National Socialist party is not a matter of dispute; that Heidegger was initially entranced by the Nazi idealism is likewise fairly well established, given his promotion of their ideals early in his rectorship at the university.However, Heidegger also became disenchanted with them very early in their tenure - by 1934 Heidegger was no longer a public voice in support of them.Why then did he continue paying dues to the party?One of the more bizarre elements of Heidegger's story is the intellectual devotion given to him by students, including Jewish students such as Arendt, Marcuse, Strauss, and others, and the level of influence he had on other Jewish intellectuals such as Derrida, given his Nazi flirtations.

The concluding chapter, After Heidegger, highlights some key areas of development in relation to other thinkers, as well as points of possible exploration for the reader. Heidegger's thought vis-à-vis Derrida and Blanchot (particularly with regard to destruction/deconstruction), his thought with regard to Ricouer and Gadamer (especially his response to the idea of hermeneutics), and his ideas as they apply to the continuing development of philosophical and intellectual history, particularly in the areas of art and literature, and insure Heidegger remaining a relevant if controversial figure in intellectual development.

As do the other volumes in this series, Clark concludes with an annotated bibliography of works by Heidegger, works on Heidegger, and a good index.

While this series focuses intentionally upon literary theory, in fact this is only the starting point. For Heidegger (as for others in this series) the expanse is far too broad to be drawn into such narrow guidelines, and the important and impact of the ideas extends out into the whole range of intellectual development. As intellectual endeavours of every sort depend upon language, understanding, and interpretation, the thorough comprehension of how and why we know what we know is crucial. ... Read more

Product Description
Martin Heidegger's overt alliance with the Nazis and the specific relation between this alliance and his philosophical thought--the degree to which his concepts are linked to a thoroughly disreputable set of political beliefs--have been the topic of a storm of recent debate. Written ten years before this debate, this study by France's leading sociologist and cultural theorist is both a precursor of that debate and an analysis of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse.

Though Heidegger is aware of and acknowledges the legitimacy of purely philosophical issues (in his references to canonic authors, traditional problems, and respect for academic taboos), Bourdieu points out the complexity and abstraction of Heidegger's philosophical discourse stems from its situation in the cultural field, where two social and intellectual dimensions--political thought and academic thought--intersect.

Bourdieu concludes by suggesting that Heidegger should not be considered as a Nazi ideologist, that there is no place in Heidegger's philosophical ideas for a racist conception of the human being. Rather, he sees Heidegger's thought as a structural equivalent in the field of philosophy of the "conservative revolution," of which Nazism is but one manifestation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Interesting and well researched
French anthropologist Pierre Bordieu has composed an investigation into the political-socio context of the revisionist Germany in which Martin Heidegger was imbedded, to attempt to explain how the great philosopher could have been involved in such a pathological political enterprise as National Socialism. Bordieu does not excuse Heidegger's involvement, but he does allow him the necessary failings of `being-in-the-world.' This book might have been re-titled `the political ontics of Martin Heidegger. Bordieu writes, "no single ideologue mobilizes all of the available schemata, which, for this reason, neither fulfill the same functions nor have equal importance in the different `systems' in which they are inserted" (25). Each thinker (even the greatest), operates within an amorphous politico-socio context, the context has no center, rather the center is "everywhere and nowhere" (ibid.), at the same time in history. But does this excuse Heidegger's silence? I think not. Bordieu writes that "the frontierbetween politics and philosophy is a genuine ontological threshold: the notions relating to practical, everyday experience, and the words that denote them, undergo a radical transformation which renders them barely recognizable in the eyes of those who have agreed to make the magical leap into the other universe" (36). There is a necessary will to remove oneself from the everyday world if one is to engage in metaphysical thinking, and Heidegger removed himself to perhaps a greater degree than any other thinker of his era. Yet Bordieu believes that Heidegger's ontological project is, despite all appearances, political to the core. He relates the conceptualization of `resoluteness' in Being and Time, to the resoluteness of the nihilism inherent in National Socialism. Perhaps he is playing a bit lose with Heidegger's concrete descriptions. Additionally, on the question of Heidegger's possible anti-semitism, Bordieu is slightly ambiguous. He argues that Heidegger participated in anti-semitic discourse, but that it was on account of his immersion in an anti-semitic cultural atmosphere (which he undeniably was living). Bordieu writes that "To fully understand the discreetly anti-semitic over-determination of the whole Heideggerian relation to the intellectual world, it would be necessary to recreate the whole ideological atmosphere with which Heidegger was inevitably impregnated" (120, fn.19), unfortunately, Bordieu only undergoes a preliminary recreation. Never the less the Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger is a fascinating and enormously helpful read.

The place of philosophy
On the misinterpretation of this book, Bourdieu writes in the preface: "All of this was there in the text, waiting to be read, but it was rejected by the guardians of orthodox interpretation, who have felt theirprivileges threatened by the unruly progress of the new sciences, and sohave clung like fallen aristocrats to a philosophy of philosophy, whoseexemplary expression was provided by Heidegger, erecting a sacred barrierbetween ontology and anthropology."

Surprisingly enough, the seedsof this book was written nearly a decade before the "Heideggercontoversy" that swept through the French academy in the late 1980s. Rather than denouncing Heidegger as a Nazi or defending Heidegger'sphilosophy as exempt from his political miscues, Bourdieu offers anotherroute: forget the singularity of the discourse on Heidegger, rather, wemust look at the historical, cultural, social, and political context thatmade Heidegger's involvement with Nazism possible.Forget the"man" and let us examine the context...

This is a brilliantinsight: we focus on the merits of the individual, even as great asHeidegger, and forget that individuals are actors in a larger matrix ofculture, politics, economics and history.To this, Bourdieu discusses thehomology of the three fields of production: philosophical, academic, andpolitical.In this, Bourdieu argues that there is no possibility ofreducing the discourse on Heidegger to any specific field.We must look tothe ways in which Heidegger's activities and writings both reflect and aredetermined by the constructs of the three fields.By "politicalontology," Bourdieu challenges the statements of pure ontology thathave been circulated by both Heidegger and his commentators."Pureontology" is contrasted with "political ontology."DespiteHeidegger's claims, and despite his enormous philosophical insights, can weever claim to notions of the "pure"?In this, is not Bourdieumaking a stake for himself as a faithful Heideggerian by virtue of opposingthe pure?

Beyond the discourse on the Heidegger controversy, Bourdieustrongly contends that we must give up notions of "pure"disciplinary studies whether they be a pure reading of philosophy or a purepolitical or social reading of an event.In the end, as Bourdieu suggests,this book isn't necessarily about Heidegger in any sense; rather, this bookis a practical exercise--that is, a preliminary exercise for a possiblemethod, which must always remain reflexive and changing. ... Read more

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This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.

In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the book.

Richard Wolin is Professor of Modern European Intellectual History and Humanities at Rice University. He is the author of Walter Benjamin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Poststructuralism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Useful survey of the debate over Heidegger's vile politics

This fascinating collection exposes Heidegger as a lifelong, unrepentant National Socialist. In 1936, Heidegger agreed `without reservation' with the suggestion that "his partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy." He saw his political decision as a realisation of the analytic of Being and Time. He said that his concept of `historicity' was the basis of his political `engagement'.

Being and Time distinguished between ontology and its `factical' actualisation in everyday life: this is idealism, the claim that there is a reality beyond real life, real history. It rejects everyday life, science, and all thought since ancient Greece. Husserl spoke of Heidegger's `disregard for scientific rigour'.

Heidegger wrote in 1933 of `the will to the historical spiritual mission of the German Volk as a Volk'.He saw Being as rooted in earth and blood, `the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk'. The Germans were `the metaphysical people'. Only the Volk was real, authentic, only they could break through the `inauthenticity' of daily life to reality. This obviously denied our common humanity.

With Nietzsche, Heidegger stressed the `order of rank', the division of human Being into masters and slaves - the conventional, stupid view.

In a 1949 lecture, he said, "Agriculture is today a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps." This is not so much Holocaust-denial as Holocaust-normalisation.

Those whom Heidegger has influenced have imbibed all too much of his nihilism. Many of his French supporters have become Holocaust-deniers: one becomes what one defends. Jean Beaufret, his most stalwart advocate in France, is a Holocaust-denier who has defended Robert Faurisson, the French `historian' who denies the existence of gas chambers and the Holocaust. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, one of the most important of his French students, wrote, "Nazism is a humanism."

Highly Suspect
Mr Wolin has a pathological disdain for Mr. Heidegger. He went so far as to claim that Heidegger used his extraordinary reputation to help the Nazis consolidate power in Germany. This is hatred generating delusional thinking. Such are Wolin's motives that philosophy, indeed Heidegger's extraordinary philosophy- extraordinary at every level, and from start to finish- again, Wolin's motives are simply too base to offer a thoughtful consideration of both the philosophy and the issues around Heidegger's involvement in politics.

Reader beware.

some background
Just wanted to provide a little background for this book.The animus between Wolin and Derrida, which the first reviewer perceived, is real.Wolin reproduced (in the first edition of this book) Derrida's "the Philosophers' Hell" without permission and in a poor, often misleading translation.(Derrida cites many of these errors in "Points..." pp. 440-444. The editor of that text cites more of them on pp.486-487.)For these reasons, Derrida requested that it be excluded from subsequent printings.There is also an exchange consisting of several letters and articles from the various parties printed in The New York Review of Books in the Spring of 1993.

good selection, but
First let me start of by saying that this is a good edition of articles on Heidegger's nazism and also provides the reader with first hand literature on Heidegger's participation in national socialism (ie, letters, addresses, etc, etc).This is definitely a book that one must look towards if they are doing any serious study of Heidegger's participation in nazism (unlike that shame of a book by Farias).However, I was discouraged by the editors introductory remark as I feel he incoporates too much of his own agenda and is just all together off.For example, rather that speaking about the text as a whole, he goes on a rather large tangent about how Derrida would not allow him to publish one of his essays for this edited volume and then progresses to kritik Derrida's texts on Heidegger for what appears to be somewhat personal reasons.I was left shaking my head and asking why this made it into the text.Next, I find that his attempt retrieve the importance of biraries ultimately disabling, which may cover over a hidden agenda the editor has.For example, Wolin says that we need to keep the binary between nazism and non-nazism distinct.The problem with this is that it is in keeping this binary open in the manner he does that he ultimately participates in a good/evil binary which is so often used in our philosophical and political tradition to either legitimate forms of violence or call to the inherent evil in other non-legitimated forms of violence (ie, vietnam/'native american' genocide v Nazism).Its violence no matter how you spin it and it appears to me that underneath the fluff this is a part of the agenda that this book participates in.

A Different View than that of the Revisionist Reviewer
This is a fine documentation of the Heidegger controversy, containing a fair and broad selection of views.Two points in the previous review I found infuriating.Firstly, Marcuse, although strongly influenced by Marx, was not a Communist, or at least in any form that the Communist parties of his time could accept or understand.He took very independent stands on many issues, and managed to infuriate both the hard left and the hard right at various times of his life.In fact, I found Marcuse's response to Heidegger's fairy tale--the beginning of the Nazi period looked wonderful, but then the Nazi leaders proved stubborn, close-minded, etc., especially because they refused to heed Martin H.--one of the most moving and devasting replies of all:the beginning was already
the end, at least of all humanist and humane values in Germany.
Secondly, nobody has an exact body count yet for the Soviet Union, but no serious historian has contested that the rate of the Nazi killing--at least 20 million killed in six years of war, about 5 million Jews within abouttwo years at the end of the war, plans for further ethnic cleansing throughout Europe and Asia should they have won the war, and so on--far outmatched that of the Soviet Union, even at its worst.The deaths caused by lousy planning, famine, destruction of the environment, irradiating their citizens, and so on, are more difficult to tally, but this is not the same as systematically killing non-combatants on a scale perhaps never before seen in history.I beg the reviewer not to trivialize this issue. ... Read more

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"Caputo offers a compelling plea for a reinterpretation of Heidegger that will make us more humane, and more attuned to the call of justice and mercy than to the call of Being."  -- Christian Century

"There is no other book that focuses on the religious significance of the many 'turnings' in Heidegger's thought, nor that addresses the question of Heidegger's politics textually rather than autobiographically." -- Merold Westphal

A readable chronological consideration of Heidegger's texts that assesses his achievement as a thinker, while pointing to the sources of his political and ethical failure. Caputo addresses the religious significance of Heidegger's thought.

Customer Reviews (1)

Don't read Heidegger until you've read this book!
It wouldn't be too much to say that this book has forever changed the way I think about Heidegger and his work. And it's made me take him even more seriously than I ever have before. I'm convinced that it's possible to understand any great thinker better than he/she understands (or understood) himself/herself. And Caputo surely does understand Heidegger in this way. The magnitude of his achievement is even better appreciated when one realizes that it's hard enough to understand Heidegger at all (even if you read German, because he has a way of playing with the language that would elude anyone but a native speaker of the language).

And if you take philosophy seriously, you MUST make an attempt to understand Heidegger. He has changed the way we in the West think about philosophy, what it is, and what it does (and what it shouldn't try to do). To get into Heidegger, I would recommend you buy, in addition to Caputo's book, the following books (two of which are available at significant discounts on Amazon):
(1) Heidegger, "Being and Time." (There are two English translations, I use the Macquarrie/'Robinson.)
(2) Hubert Dreyfus, "Being in the World:A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I."
(3) Heidegger, "Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond." (Ed., John Van Buren.)

(3) may be harder to find. But it's worth the effort. You may want to directly contact the State University of New York Press, Albany.

Now, start with the Dreyfus book, and refer to "Being and Time" as necessary. Dreyfus provides all the citations you need. But whatever you do, DON'T try to do "Being and Time" cold turkey. Unless you're a product of the European education system with a major in philosophy, you won't understand it. I've found that the essays in "Supplements" are much more readable than "Being and Time." But what's most important is that they give us an insight into Heidegger's early work and intellectual development. And this is precisely the work on which Caputo's book focuses. The only other source of Heidegger's work is the multi-volume Gesamtausgabe, which you won't find at Barnes or Borders. In fact, our university library doesn't even have it, even though it has a very respectable collection of books on philosophy. And even if you find it, unless you read German, it won't help you. I'm personally very grateful to the translators of "Supplements" for making these early works by Heidegger available.

What Caputo does is to focus on this early, youthful work of Heidegger, and showhow it can take the serious thinker in a direction very much different from that taken by Heidegger himself. And this is the true value of Heidegger.If he had died after publishing "Being and Time," no one would be talking about his unfortunate association with the Nazi party. So the question is this: does his later work, whatever its inspiration or political associations, vitiate his early work? I think not. Over time, Heidegger developed what one might call a "mythology of Being," which is not present in his earliest work. (Although it's Caputo's opinion that it's also present, in nascent form, in "Being and Time.") In the early work, Heidegger focuses on the hermeneutics of facticity, which, in my view, is a dimension of the human reality which one simply doesn't find in the discipline which most interests me, philosophical theology. Theologians, traditional and contemporary, view man as an object, like any other natural object. Beholden to their modernist legacy, and true to their quest for apodictic certainty, they want to construct a theology that looks like science. The result: a proliferation of "Christian worldviews," which tell us a lot about the people who construct them, but very little about God or man. As another peerless scholar, Merold Westphal, has observed, what they're doing is not theology, but onto-theology. (I would also recommend a book by Westphal, "Overcoming Onto-theology," also available at Amazon.)

Caputo's great contribution is that he understands that we don't need a single, totalizing myth to understand the human reality. The problem with the later Heidegger is that he gives us just such a myth. So do the Christian-worldview theologians. If we study Heidegger's early work carefully, and read Caputo (who, by the way, has written many other books, all of which are well worth reading, especially "Radical Hermeneutics"), we begin tosee a way to deconstructing traditional theology, and to building a theology based on an understanding of man rooted in factical life. Unless Christian theologians get a grip on facticity and transcendence, andfew of them do (I don't know any), they will continue doing what they have been doing, and building sand-castle worldviews, which may make them feel that they've made the world safe for the gospel, but which don't really convince anyone except people who already believe, and thus, don't need them.

Pick up any contemporary work on Christian theology, and you'll look in vain for anything resembling an in-depth discussion of Heidegger. Some authors mention him in passing, but reveal that they have little more than a Philosophy-101 understanding of him. And this is true of even the more intellectually-competent authors like Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen, and others. Nowadays, "post-modernism" is a four-letter word in the pulpit, but even among the serious theologians, who should know better. Post-modernism is not the enemy of biblical faith: modernism is. It is the Cartesian legacy, after all, which informs most if not all contemporary theology. And this is fatal to theology, because it posits man as intellectually and spiritually self-sufficient, thus negating the proposition that man is wholly dependent on God. Whatever any theologian may say, it simply isn't possible to to accept Scripture as the sole source of revelation and at the same time embrace the epistemology of modernism, let alone its ethos.

This is what I've learned from reading Caputo's work, and Heidegger in the light of it. Caputo may think I've gone too far. But then again, it IS possible to understand a great thinker better than he understands himself. And he wouldn't want it any other way.
... Read more

Product Description

One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger was primarily concerned with the 'question of Being.'However, recent scholarship has tended to marginalize the importance of the name of Being in his thought.Through a focused reading of Heidegger's texts, and especially his late and often overlooked Four Seminars (1966-1973), Richard Capobianco counters this trend by redirecting attention to the centrality of the name of Being in Heidegger's lifetime of thought.

Capobianco gives special attention to Heidegger's resonant terms Ereignis and Lichtung and reads them as saying and showing the very same fundamental phenomenon named 'Being itself'.Written in a clear and approachable manner, the essays in Engaging Heidegger examine Heidegger's thought in view of ancient Greek, medieval, and Eastern thinking, and they draw out the deeply humane character of his 'meditative thinking.'

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Excellent Tome - Definitely Recommend!!
Engaging Heidegger is a must read for any student or scholar interested in Martin Heidegger.There is something here for many readers, from advanced scholars of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics to those simply interested in architecture; for those interested in contemporary philosophy to students of psychology.

The Foreward was written by Boston College professor William J. Richardson, who for decades has been the recognized authority on Heidegger.

Over eight chapters, Professor Capobianco lucidly describes the nature and experience of Being in its various manifestations.Capobianco understands the complexity of Being and carefully and perceptively, through text and context, leads the reader to an understanding of Being as the time and space flow of all beings.

Analysis is driven by the examination of Heidegger's writings and lectures and a thorough knowledge of the original German with insightful translations.At times, the analysis focuses on specific words and the context within which those words were used, to delineate Heidegger's intended meanings.Other times, Capobianco indicates that Heidegger himself conveyed different meanings for particular key words over the course of his life of thought, such as with the term die Lichtung.

Perhaps most importantly, Capobianco elucidates the concept of ontological "anxiety" which further advances the idea of our authentic unsettledness in living and being in the world.Anxiety is a multi-faceted concept with elements of fear, dread, wonder, perplexity and perhaps even acceptance."Angst" is problematic because it is not simply dread and Capobianco engages the Heideggarian commentariat to demonstrate the difference.

Other chapters deal with a Heideggarian philosophy of the lived space (including architecture as well as our internal and external lived spaces), Plato's "light" and the phenomenon of the "clearing," among others.

Heidegger continues to be vital to philosophical thought today and this book is an important stepping stone on that journey toward a better understanding of the work of this great thinker.
... Read more

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This concise and accessible dictionary explores the central concepts of one of the most significant figures in the history of thought. The author traces the history of 100 concepts from 'aletheia' to 'world' through Heidegger's entire career, from the earlier lectures to his later essays and seminars - including many that are not yet translated. The book is extremely user-friendly, containing a full index of the words and concepts discussed, and an introduction explaining Heidegger's use of language. A Heidegger Dictionary enables the student to read Heidegger's immensely rich and varied works with understanding, and assigns him to his rightful place in both contemporary philosophy and in the history of the subject. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A brilliant, highly competent work with a host of inexplicable printing errors
There are a couple of absolutely baffling reviews here.One suggests that someone other than Michael Inwood should have been asked to write it, preferrably "someone more familiar with Heidegger."This suggestion would surely baffle any Heidegger scholar, since Michael Inwood is regarded as a leading authority on Heidegger.If Michael Inwood is regarded as a major Heidegger scholar by the world's other leading Heidegger scholars, I presume that no reasonable person would question his familiarity with Heidegger's work.

The fact is that this book is enormously erudite and Michael Inwood both has a profound understanding of Heidegger's work and an unusual ability to express that understanding clearly.I'm not quite sure what the two reviewers who gave this outstanding work low ratings were looking for (I have other volumes in Blackwell's series of philosophical dictionaries as well), but this certainly didn't disappoint me in any way.It is very similar in format to the other volumes so that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.The articles may be a tad longer, but in large part that is because, unlike Rousseau or Descartes, Heidegger uses words in highly unusual ways.He employs a very large number of neologisms and even familiar words are employed with unique or highly developed meanings.In flipping through the pages, I could not find a single entry that I felt was too long.Just as I could not find a single one that didn't reflect either a lack of familiarity with Heidegger's work or a difficulty in explicating it.

In short, this is a must-own study guide to any and every serious student of Heidegger.

The book does, however, had a rather serious flaw.It is perhaps the worst-printed book that I have ever seen.The other five-star reviewers alludes to this.Dozens and dozens of characters are simply missing.The article on "Being: An Introduction" is printed " eing: An Introduction."The one on "Life and Biology" becomes "Life andiology."The article on "Subject and Object" is rendered "Su ject and O ject."The headers at the top of the page for the entire "B" section is missing the initial "B" as are many of the "M" headers.Luckily, the text in the articles is pretty complete.But occasionally you will stumble over what section you are reading.You can puzzle it out, but given the cost of the book and the usual reliability of Blackwell as a publisher, the printing errors (I call them printing errors rather than misprints because the latter are usually the result of proofreading errors, while the mistakes in this book are the fault of the printers) are rather baffling.I've taken to writing in pencil the correct letters, but I've never had to do this in a book before.Still, while this is irritating -- indeed, sometimes highly irritating -- it does not diminish the value of this book.It belongs on the shortest of short bookshelves of important books on Heidegger.

Misprints Beware
Exceptional product--on part with Inwood's Hegel Dictionary.Entries start with etymologies, then history of usage in philosophy, then Heidegger's use(s) of a term.
Unfortunately the printing by Blackwell is corrupted. Capital "B"s missing in headings throughout. So e.g. Heidegger's major work comes out as " eing and Time". Amazon could not replace. Very annoying and disappointing. Agreed to a six-dollar refund since the error stems from the publisher.

Wost of the series
Anyone familiar with the Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries series will be disappointed by this edition from Michael Inwood.As far as I know, Inwood is primarily a Hegel scholar, and the lack of information (breadth anddepth) on Heidegger demonstrates that this edition could have been betterserved by someone more familiar with Heidegger.

Now, Heidegger wrote alot of books and Inwood doesn't do justice to the rest of Heidegger'soeuvre apart from Being and Time.For example, why is there no section onHeidegger and Leibniz? or Aristotle? or Heraclitus? and so on.

I wouldimagine that a dictionary of Heidegger should consist of far more pagesthan this volume which falls well short of 300.For example, Cygill's KantDictionary is replete with numerous entries and references to specifictexts.

This edition of the dictionary series is in need of a dramaticoverhaul.

Heidegger, who was so careful about his works, deserves a farbetter treatment than we have before us.This edition amounts to no betterthan a glossery of terms: terse and in many cases uninformative. ... Read more

Product Description
Contributions is an indispensable book for scholars and students of Heidegger, but it is also one of the most difficult because of its aphoristic style and new and strange words. In the Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, an international group offourteen Heidegger scholars shares strategies for reading and understanding this challenging work. Overall approaches for becoming familiar with Heidegger's unique language and thinking are included along with detailed readings of key sections of the work. Experienced readers and those coming to the text for the first time will find the Companion an invaluable guide to this pivotal text in Heidegger's philosophical corpus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Co-Thinking the Ab-Grund
We are enveloped in this book by an Introduction and thirteen masterful essays, on and in the Heideggerian movement of enowning, a.k.a. the event of appropriation (Ereignis).I use the word "enveloped" with care, as this book is not a presentation that the reader can enact on her or his own as if it entails simply gathering the meanings of key terms and 'ideas.' This is so because the English rendering of Heidegger's key terms is itself an act of enowning that pulls in the reader to re-experience the space between these two great philosophical languages.I have never accepted the absurd claim that English is inferior to German in its philosophical power, scope, and richness.I would venture to say that translations of the terms and sentences of the astonishing text that is the subject of these essays, namely, "Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning," struggle to exhibit the power of English not only to faintly mimic Heidegger (an insulting idea of the Germanophiles), but to move into other and equally profound momenta of language that bring English to the test of its own resources.
The writers of the essays in the book all have a long-time deep familiarity with Heidegger's key work in the period of the so-called turning (late 1930s) where the Dasein-problematic of "Sein und Zeit" becomes internally transfigured into and with the gifting of time-space, which opens out the reticent ground (ab-grund) that in turn can judge and measure the ungrund of our technological culture.
Rarely does one find a gathering of secondary, yet primary, essays of such high caliber as in this anthology.The "Companion" probes into generic and 'structural' issues as well as into such themes as: the last god, the leap, be-ing (seyn or beyng), beings as a whole (the Greek conception in the first beginning), and things in being.The essays elucidate the tensions between the first ancient beginning and the other beginning that is yet and not yet enacted within the provenance of the first beginning.
For an absolute beginner in Heidegger studies, this is not the place to even attempt a movement of encounter, yet for the advanced novice, this book is accessible on different levels and in different ways.It has opened my eyes to new ways of re-enacting my previous readings of "Contributions to Philosophy," as well as deepening my relationship with one of my most insightful and overturning/re-tuning interlocutors.This anthology is indeed a rare treasure in a decidedly mediocre period in the history of foundational or grounding philosophical query.It is, dare I use the cliche, a must read/encounter. ... Read more

Product Description
One of Heidegger's most important works, this text gives a thorough explanation of what is arguably the most fundamental and abiding theme of his philosophy, namely the difference between truth as the "unhiddenness of beings" and truth as the "correctness of propositions". For Heidegger, it was by neglecting the former primordial concept of truth in favour of the latter derivative concept that Western philosophy, beginning with Plato himself, took off on its "metaphysical" course towards the bankruptcy of the present day. This book consists of a lecture course delivered by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg in 1931-32. The first part is a detailed analysis of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" in "The Republic", while the second part gives an exegesis and interpretation of a central section of Plato's "Theaetetus". As always with Heidegger's writings on the Greeks, the point of his interpretative method is to bring to light the original meaning of philosophical concepts, especially to free up these concepts to their intrinsic power. ... Read more

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Heidegger's Confrontation with Plato
This is an excellent introduction to Heidegger's thoughts on Plato. Although much has been written about the way Heidegger sought to overcome the Western Metaphysical tradition, relatively little has been written about the way he sought to bring about a deeper, or in some cases, reinterpretation of Plato's Republic. Here, Heidegger goes into the very heart of Plato's Republic to discover an account of truth that is not grounded in some metaphysical subject that is opposed to some object, but one that is grounded in "unconcealment" itself. This work, when read together with Heidegger's The Origins of the Work of Art offers one a penetrating insight into the very grounds of Heidegger's disagreement with the received philosophical tradition.

The Insubstantiality of Being (a cave-in)
Being as clarification (unhiddenness) v. correctness (propositional validity). 3. Beholding the Ideal contained in flux.

As far as throwing light upon "Being", Heidegger's 'clearing' consists only in the aperture of the cornea that is

formed around the iris: it does not go deeper into 'it'. Heidegger's idea of leaving the cave consists in facing

the light and seeing what is 'nakedly'. This might be adequate if what occurs in the eye is not mere sense, but

also the faculty of judgement; the case is that sense impressions are subject to judgement (interpretation, if

you like) prior to their becoming SUBJECT to our awareness. That is, 'direct consciousness' of objects is

mediated by the understanding, and it is a misnomer to speak of consciousness as being 'direct' in any SENSE

whatsoever. As for the Will, Being is only directly conceived through [carpe diem] it in the process of

becoming [panta rei] preciselyWHEN one surrenders the status of compos mentis as a 'true' entity for that

which makes for a greater awareness through intuition (i.e. knowing, and not a greater 'proximity' to Being

which in any case would be only another state achieved and not a 'field of vision' gained). This expresses the

paradoxical nature of truth, of Dasein as Werdens; as neither Being nor Nothing. The concept of truth as

unhiddenness of Dasein remains problematic given its visual nature, which is in no way adequate a model of

the understanding, or even Will to remain tenable: unhiddenness is not disclosure, and if the error was

one of judgement in the first place it is not a question of sight which unveils, but insight that discloses the

'nature' of things-in-themselves (Beings, if you will) as they are, from which we can reason back and

distill what we receive first as sense datum,to the pure Idea which is beholden to us (it as necessary and dear

to us, as we to it).

The Essence of Truth'
One of Heidegger's most important works, The Essence of Truth, bears witness to a shift in emphais, in which truth and by extension, being, no longer happens through the agency of Dasein, but in the 'open' in which Dasein is uncovered. By a slow and careful reading of Plato's allegory of the cave, Heidegger shows how truth ceased to be 'unhiddenness' and became mere 'correctness', beginning the degeneration of thought about being into metaphysics. ... Read more

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Explores the cross-cultural endeavors of Rorty and Heidegger, particularly how this work addresses the possibilities of comparative philosophy itself. ... Read more

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Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern Thinkers
Though this is far from light reading, it is well written and reveals an understanding of the importance of noting details and linguistic clues in advancing cross cultural awareness. Anyone interested in hermeneutics and cross cultural insights between East and West will learn a lot from this slim volume. ... Read more

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THE INTIMATE HEIDEGGER
After reading this excellent memoir I find myself on more intimate terms with Martin Heidegger! The author, a close friend of Heidegger for many years, clearly loved and respected him. This is not an "unbiased" or critical recollection of the philosopher; it is a loving and detailed portrait.

I learned much that I didn't already know. For example, I had no idea that Heidegger liked Frederico Garcia Lorca, or that he identified with the character of Don Martin in Lorca's "Dona Rosita." He also loved Karl Orff's opera "Antigone" and Mozart's the "The Marriage of Figaro." While Heidegger was no film buff, he liked Kurosawa's "Rashomon." I hadn't appreciated quite how much Heidegger loved Cezanne, either.

Aside from Heidegger's cultural and academic interests and influences, this memoir interestingly recounts several "encounters and dialogues" that the author had with Heidegger, as well as conversations the philosopher had with others (such as Clara Rilke, Jean-Paul Sartre, and a marvelous exchange with a Tibetan monk who visited Heidegger at his home). Petzet often jotted down Heidegger's conversations, either while they happened or just afterwards when they were still fresh in his memory.

The book also sheds light on Heidegger's day to day activities, describing home and workplace, as well as life at his famed "hut." It goes through the different stages of Heidegger's life. Many have criticized Heidegger's brief and unfortunate involvement with the Nazis, but Petzet claims Heidegger and the Nazis were enemies. The Nazis spied on Heidegger via the Gestapo, blacklisted, and harshly censored him. They even prevented him from lecturing and traveling.

Petzet's memoir is truly an intimate portrait, fleshing out the historical Heidegger and showing his very tender relationships with people from all over the world and from many walks of life. My only warning to readers is that the book contains a flood of names that are more well known in Germany than elsewhere. Also, those who want to read about Heidegger's philosophy should look elsewhere, as this book concentrates more on the man than on his thinking.

STIRRING AND PROVOCATIVE RECOLLECTION OF TIME WELL SPENT
Heinrich Petzet and his family cultivated a lifelong friendship with Martin Heidegger and his family, and thus this recollection presents an insider's view of who in fact Martin was and where he stood on issues political, philosophical, poetic, and even soccer. While this is neither a guide to Heidegger's pathways of thinking, nor an apology, nor even a biography as such, it none the less is an eyewitness account of what Martin said, did, felt, believed in the depths of his thinking, and at those cross roads at which he has been unjustly vilified.
In no uncertain terms, this sets the record straight on the assault on Martin's character by those who would like to capitalize on the sins of Nazi Germany. From an ethical standpoint, which is worse? In any case, Petzet makes it clear how and why Heidegger's rectoral address was misinterpreted - consider who stood to gain - why the Nazis were pissed at him and put a Gestapo tail on him, forbidding him to publish and restricting his travel, and then moves on to what in fact are very enlightening and humanistic snapshots of a life spent in friendship and dedication between these two men. Heidegger, for his part, never endorsed the idea of a biography - he was never into the cult of personality, which in itself was a sublime rebuke to those who sought to crucify him. He was first and foremost about the pathways and contributions to thinking and recovering what was lost after the epoch of Parmenides and Heracleitus and Sophocles.
Through the course of this wonderful book, Heidegger's interest in Carl Orff, Picasso, Klee, and especially world cup soccer are also presented. Those who were his friends and colleagues knew what the real man was like, and this is a glimpse of him. Like Socrates, he took the hemlock of opinion because he knew his efforts would stand on their own merit. He was a caring and compassionate friend who suffered the loss of friends and neighbors like so many others in WW2, who was more or less under house arrest, whose family was threatened because he steadfastly refused to espouse and embrace the Nazi racist ideals, and in fact, as rector at Freiburg, Heidegger demanded that anti-semitic banners not be displayed. No other German intellectual put his life on the line as Martin did. This sets the record straight. Anything else you have heard or read is a lie. I remember reading an incredibly stupid and libellous retard by Woody Allen when Heidegger died, and it struck me then that there was an industry about demonizing those one couldn't refute on their own terms. Unlike Allen, Heidegger walked the walk. He was the genuine article at a time in history when such authenticity was extraordinarily dangerous.
As his life drew to a close, Martin Heidegger never lost his sight of how endearing his family and friends had been to him, and his final words to Petzet are both heroic and deeply touching. We should all muster such nobility, dignity, respect and grace. The last giant left us in 1976. There will never be another quite like him. We are fortunate to have Petzet's account. We would all do well to take up the path of thinking Martin pointed to. In the end, that is what is most sacred about being. ... Read more

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Explaining Heidegger's ideas on spatial phenomena simply and succinctly, this book will be provocative and invaluable to anyone interested in space and spatial theory. The author gives incisive, informative, and compelling analyses of Heidegger's overall philosophy and of his changing ideas about space, spatiality, the clearing, places, sites, and dwelling. This study also charts the legacy of these ideas in philosophy, geography, architecture, and anthropology and includes a bibliography of select works that examine or are influenced by Heidegger's ideas on space. ... Read more

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A comparison of Heigegger's later thought to Meister Eckhart
John Caputo investigates the claim of many modern philosphers that Heidegger became a mystic in the latter part of his life. Caputo performs a careful analysis of this claim by looking at the writings of Heidegger as they relate to a true German mystic, Meister Eckhart.Does Heidegger's relationship between being and Being equate to Eckhart's soul and God? Does his use of "Gelassenheit", a term of Eckhart's meaning detachment, show a common belief?Caputo's book works on many levels.It brings together two of the great "book ends" of Germany philosophy, spanning the 14th to 20th centuries. And, just as Caputo does a wonderful job of conveying Heidegger's thought, so, too, he captures the mysticism of Eckhart.It was this which actually appealed to me more, and I believe the book can be an excellent introduction into the thinking of one of the greatest mystics of all time -- Eckhart. ... Read more

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Intent on letting the reader experience the pleasure and intellectual stimulation in reading classic authors, the How to Read series will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon.Martin Heidegger is perhaps the most influential, yet least readily understood, philosopher of the last century. Mark Wrathall unpacks Heidegger’s dense prose and guides the reader through Heidegger’s early concern with the nature of human existence, to his later preoccupation with the threat that technology poses to our ability to live worthwhile lives.

Wrathall pays particular attention to Heidegger’s revolutionary analysis of human existence as inextricably shaped by a shared world. This leads to an exploration of Heidegger’s views on the banality of public life and the possibility of authentic anticipation of death as a response to that banality. Wrathall reviews Heidegger’s scandalous involvement with National Socialism, situating it in the context of Heidegger’s views about the movement of world history. He also explains Heidegger’s important accounts of truth, art, and language.

Extracts are taken from Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, as well as a variety of his best-known essays and lectures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Illuminating.
This is the most lucid vade mecum to Heidegger I have found both for personal use and to recommend to students.

Fantastic, Clear, and Concise
This is a great book for those unfamiliar to Heidegger's thought.It goes through the major ideas, spending the most time on Being and Time, giving wonderfully chosen excerpts to begin each chapter, then expounding on those quotations and elucidating them for the reader.It also works as a great companion to someone reading Being and Time.Wrathall does a great job of clarifying some of the essentially Heideggerian concepts of phenomenology.If you are looking for a primer, a companion, or a refresher, I would definitely recommend this book.It's very enjoyable, erudite, and more than worth the small price tag.Additionally, I recommend Basic Writings.

If you haven't started yet, start here...
To the chagrin of some and to the delight of others, Heidegger's influence seems to have bloomed in the past decade. No longer a mere hopelessly whimsical obscurantist, his once berated name even pops up in Analytic philosophy courses. None of this has made Heidegger's text easier to understand, of course. But anyone wanting to penetrate his spiny thicket of obscure and recursive prose in English can now find much more help. Guides for "beginners" have bred like rabbits recently. Additional volumes seem to fall from the sky every few months. Nonetheless, many of these "introductions" would probably not serve absolute beginners (i.e., those lacking backgrounds in philosophy) very efficiently. Heidegger's work remains notoriously difficult to distill into facile chunks, particularly in isolation from the long philosophical tradition his work addresses. Enter Mark Wrathall's "How To Read Heidegger." This short book seems to pinpoint those readers possessing virulent curiosity about Heidegger's ideas but not possessing extensive philosophical backgrounds. Of course this involves a tradeoff in overall depth and breadth, but the absolute newcomer will at least puncture that nagging question "what's all this fuss about Heidegger?"

Though this 118-page book only skims the surface of Heidegger's main ideas, it nonetheless covers a lot of ground. Both "early" and "late" Heidegger appear. First, a short introduction provides a defense against charges of illogicism (or even alogicism) while setting the overall context. It's important to understand that Heidegger did challenge the primacy of science (at least ontologically) but he never thought that science was misguided or should "go away." This challenge resonates throughout the book and Wrathall uses it as a framework for connecting many of the ideas discussed.

The first six chapters focus on Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus "Being and Time." Each chapter begins with a passage from that hulking work. Including these passages presents both opportunities and dangers. On the plus side, readers can get a clear sense of what reading Heidegger entails. On the downside, this very exposure may send them dashing in a frenzied panic away from Heidegger never to return. Panicked runners should know that Wrathall's follow-up text exhibits ease and clarity in contrast to those imposing hedgerows of turgid prose. And though this book does not illuminate Heidegger's actual words very much, it does provide a solid foundation upon which to build further understanding. As such, newcomers should not expect to leap into "Being and Time" on the basis of this book alone. Still, many of the main ideas in that text come to life here: "Dasein," "World," "mood," the "they" (which Wrathall translates as 'the "One"'), and "authenticity." Wrathall does tie Heidegger to "existentialism" a little too tightly, however (a penchant many Analytic commentators seem to have), but in this case it doesn't detract much from the discussion. Readers won't find extensive coverage of other main ideas such as phenomenology, time, "care," "falling," and others. These ideas are best left to thicker "introductory" books.

The final four chapters cover what's known as "the later Heidegger" (basically, everything following "Being and Time"). This phase was the bane of early twentieth-century Analytic philosophers and led to Heidegger's outright dismissal in Analytic circles. Many still consider this late phase too abstruse for use. Here Wrathall summarizes some main ideas contained in some of Heidegger's best know late essays, such as "On the Origin of the Work of Art" (in which "earth" is added to "world" and the notion of "truth" expands to "unconcealment"), "On the Way to Language" (language as a "showing saying"), "The Question Concerning Technology" (the making of everything into resources, convenient and efficient), and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (which introduces the "fourfold"). Heidegger found modern life wrought with dangers, which was arguably implicit in "Being and Time's" notion of "inauthenticity," but becomes fervently explicit in his late essays. Wrathall also discusses Heidegger's nefarious Nazism and its potential implications. This aspect also led to easy dismissal, particularly in the twentieth century.

"How to Read Heidegger" will not teach anyone how to read Heidegger, but it will provide a nearly ideal starting point for getting there. Those with little or no background will here find a springboard to more advanced work. The curious will whet their appetite without expending huge amounts of time (a notion that the late Heidegger may have cringed at). In short, "How to Read Heidegger" stands as one of the best starting places for infiltrating the ideas of this controversial philosopher whose influence continues to spread. In addition, those looking for elucidation of "the late Heidegger" will also find some guidance. We all start somewhere. Start here.

Ten Chapters, One Idea
I have read other books in the "How to Read..." series and have found that they are quite uneven. Some have been really helpful and others have missed the mark. I would put this one somewhere between those two extremes. If you know absolutely nothing about Heidegger, you will profit from Wrathall's clear and simple exposition of the major concepts and terminology of this most influential thinker. Wrathall hits on many of the key elements of Heidegger's philosophy, concentrating, as one would expect, on Being and Time. Heidegger's writings are numerous, dense, and sprawling. For that reason, it is strange to find that such a short introduction to such a diverse thinker is often extremely repetitive. Wrathall takes every opportunity to reiterate the challenge Heidegger makes to scientific, objective, or empirical thought. It is clear the first time he makes the point and so the reiterations seem unnecessary. Wrathall could have limited his repetitions and covered much more territory. Granting all of the caveats that must go along with an "introduction," Wrathall's reading of Heidegger often feels reductive and overly simplistic. He really limits the existential aspects of Heidegger's thought, almost to the point of turning him, as does Wrathall's teacher, Hubert Dreyfus, into a pseudo-pragmatist. I recommend this book as a decent starting point, but I would caution the reader to exercise a little healthy suspicion toward Wrathall's facile interpretations. After reading ten chapters, I felt as though I had learned the same lesson ten times.

Wrathall:5 Stars.Heidegger:1 Star
"How to Read Heidegger" unpacks and explains ten key extracts from books and essays by Heidegger (in particular, from "Being and Time").Wrathall's exegesis is sensitive and lucid.He shows that Heidegger has important things to say.He almost inspires the reader to turn directly to Heidegger's works themselves for further illumination.I say "almost" because the impulse to read Heidegger disappears as soon as one reads (and re-reads...) the passages selected by Wrathall for exposition.They are constipated, Teutonic, jargon-laden, and laughably contorted.Even after Wrathall explains what Heidegger was struggling to say (at least in translation), the texts seem like gibberish.

It's hard to imagine an ordinary reader slogging through anything by Heidegger unless it were material assigned for a class and on which a grade depended.Maybe a better name for Wrathall's book would be: "Don't Read Heidegger."Some enterprising philosopher would do the world a favor if, instead of writing the 101st commentary on "Being and Time," he wrote a readable paraphrase of the book, like one of those "modern" paraphrases of the King James Bible.There would be no sacrifice of eloquence for clarity, because nothing Heidegger wrote was eloquent.
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The commentaries of Martin Heidegger on the lyric poems of German Romantic poet, Friedrich Holderlin are an extraordinary encounter between poetry and the penetrating thought of a powerful philosophical mind. The writings included here reveal much about Heidegger's innermost thoughts on poetry, language, and how we think. This is the first English translation of this important work. ... Read more

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Infinite Dialogue
The philosophy of Martin Heidegger has the poetry of Holderlin as one of its nucleus of inspiration. The immnse difficulty of translating this wonderful text by Heidegger into English can only be appreciated by those who are familiar with the German language and have read the original German text. While the dialogue between Heidegger and Holderlin is often intense, dificult and complex, it is at the same time illuminating in terms of deliniating the task of the philosopher and the work of the poet. Dr. Hoeller's translation consitutes an authentic, rigorous and meditative re-creation of Heidegger's thinking. If there is any doubt regarding the faithfulness by the translator to the text the reader should start with the essay, "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry," which is the most accessible of the essays. Dr. Hoeller has not tried to force the heideggerian text into the limited conceptual of the English language. On the contrary Dr. Hoeller has been able to maintain Heidegger's thinking alive and challenging.

Heidegger on Holderlin
The present volume is a translation of Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Volume 4 (1981) of the German Collected Edition of Heidegger's works.It contains six essays written between 1936 and 1968, which are supplemented by two brief, related texts and an "Afterword" by the editor of the German edition, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.Only two of the essays have already appeared in translation: "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry" (1936) and "`Homecoming / To Kindred Ones'" (1943) were among the first Heidegger translated into English.In 1949, they were published, along with "What Is Metaphysics?" and "On the Essence of Truth" (to which they are related) as Existence and Being.The remaining essays appear here for the first time in English: "`As When On a Holiday . . .'" (1939), "`Remembrance'" (1942), "Hölderlin's Earth and Heaven" (1959), and "The Poem" (1968).Of the two supplementary texts presented in Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry, Heidegger's "Preface to the Repetition of the Address `Homecoming'" (1943) had already been translated (in Existence and Being).The other short text is Heidegger's "Preface to a Reading of Hölderlin's Poems" (1963), which can be heard on the phonograph recordingHeidegger liest Hölderlin (Pfullingen: Neske).
There is also "A Glimpse Into Heidegger's Study," which consists of photographic reproductions of several pages from one of Heidegger's copies of Hölderlin's poems which show Heidegger'smarginal notes to Hölderlin's poem "Griechenland."Perhaps the most accessible of the essays is "Hölderlin's Earth and Heaven," in which Heidegger meditates on this poem.Written by Heidegger when he was almost eighty years old, nearly all of the themes of the earlier essays are revisited in it: the forgotten question of the meaning of be[-ing] [Sein], our intimacy with nature and its mystery, the poet's calling, the provenance and essence of language, the sense of the holy on earth, the uniqueness of human presence among things, the spiritual core of experience, the omnipresence of the Greek philosophical tradition in Western sensibility, the primacy of thinking in existence, the meaning of belonging to a cultural heritage, and human historical destiny.
These essays are not literary criticism in the ordinary sense, although they have by now inspired a generation or two of scholars (beginning most notably with Jacques Derrida) who undertake various forms of textual analysis of works of philosophy and literature.As Heidegger notes, the essays "do not claim to be contributions to research in the history of literature or aesthetics.They spring from a necessity of thought" (p. 21).What, then, are these commentaries?They are not explanations of Hölderlin's poems, prose versions of his poetry; rather, they are Heidegger's efforts to get at Hölderlin's thought, which, like anyone's thought, he believes, remains and must remain a mystery.According to Heidegger, "we never know a mystery by unveiling or analyzing it to death, but only in such a way that we preserve the mystery as mystery" (p. 43).We should also note that, for Heidegger, authentic poetry is not a literary genre alongside drama and the novel, but is rather "the founding of be[-ing] in the word" (p. 59).The nature of poetry, Heidegger says, is ontological, not linguistic; its source is remembrance [Andenken] or "reflecting on something, [which] is a making firm . . ..Remembrance attaches thinkers to their essential ground (p. 165).In another place, Heidegger call this making firm or thickening of thought in recollection or reflection writing [Dichten] in the basic sense or "poetizing thinking," which Heidegger further characterizesas an activity of that special individual, the poet's poet (p. 52), who is situated "between" (p. 64) human beings and the gods.The poets, whom he calls demigods (p. 126), are analogous to the chthonic gods Heidegger finds reference to in the fable " Cura" (Hyginus), which he cites in Section 42 of Being and Time.In that text, we recall, Heidegger finds an early preontological reference to Sorge [minding, also translated as care], which he takes to be the fundamental feature of existence.
For the existential analyst, however, the most remarkable passages are found in "`Remembrance,'" where Heidegger presents a brilliant, albeit brief, phenomenology of shyness or retraint [Scheu] [ (p. 153).The context of the discussion of restraint is Heidegger's description of the nature of the poet, who thinks back to the origin of the rivers, that is, to the origin of the poets themselves, those unique individuals who mediate between what is of this earth and the gods (p. 126).The poet is characterized by restraint.What is restraint?It is not bashfulness [Schüchternheit] or timidity, Heidegger explains, nor is it based on insecurity.Instead, restraint is a keeping to oneself that is marked by a concerted reserve in the face of that about which one might easily be facile.Restraint is a keeping to oneself that guards something precious, for which one feels great affection.What evokes restraint first causes the poet to hesitate and withhold what he or she might be tempted to make available without further ado.The heart of restraint is forbearance [Langmut].Restraint is a model of what human presence might aspire to.In an age when self-assertion and "attitude" are accorded pre-eminence among the behaviors associated with success, fulfillment and self-realization.It contrasts with childish demands for immediate gratification and the unwillingness to postpone gratification.It is also seen in the capacity to wait-for answers, for a solution to life's everyday demands, for resolution to the congenital ambiguity of life on this earth, and for change in psychotherapy.
"Restraint is that reserved, patient, astonished remembrance of what remains close, in an intimacy that consists solely in keeping at a distance what is far off and thereby keeping it ever ready to arise from its source."The references to intimacy and distancing are familiar from Heidegger's other writings, where they are associated with be[-ing] [Sein] and its source.Given the relation of thinking and be[-ing], restraint is "knowing that the origin [of be[-ing] in its source] does not allow itself to be experienced directly."As Heidegger understands it, the fundamental tone of restraint, then, is humility with respect to our grasp of what is going on."Restraint determines the way to the origin" of be-[-ing].It is both our way out of inauthenticity and the way in to the source of be[-ing].Moreover, Heidegger adds, restraint is "more decisive than any sort of violence"--including interpretative violence in psychotherapy.
Finally, there is Heidegger's notion of recollection, which is not a retrieval of the past, as it is in psychoanalysis.Instead it is way of moving into the future by taking over one's destiny, authentically and with resolve.The poet's experience, once again, provides the model of this kind of recollection, which might serve all human beings, who, as Hölderlin says, "dwell poetically on this earth."

Heidegger on Holderlin
The present volume is a translation of Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Volume 4 (1981) of the German Collected Edition of Heidegger's works.It contains six essays written between 1936 and 1968, which are supplemented by two brief, related texts and an "Afterword" by the editor of the German edition, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.Only two of the essays have already appeared in translation........The remaining essays appear here for the first time in English....Of the two supplementary texts presented in Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry, Heidegger's "Preface to the Repetition of the Address `Homecoming'" (1943) had already been translated (in Existence and Being).The other short text is Heidegger's "Preface to a Reading of Hölderlin's Poems" (1963), which can be heard on the phonograph recordingHeidegger liest Hölderlin (Pfullingen: Neske).
There is also "A Glimpse Into Heidegger's Study," which consists of photographic reproductions of several pages from one of Heidegger's copies of Hölderlin's poems which show Heidegger'smarginal notes to Hölderlin's poem "Griechenland."Perhaps the most accessible of the essays is "Hölderlin's Earth and Heaven," in which Heidegger meditates on this poem.Written by Heidegger when he was almost eighty years old, nearly all of the themes of the earlier essays are revisited in it: the forgotten question of the meaning of be[-ing] [Sein], our intimacy with nature and its mystery, the poet's calling, the provenance and essence of language, the sense of the holy on earth, the uniqueness of human presence among things, the spiritual core of experience, the omnipresence of the Greek philosophical tradition in Western sensibility, the primacy of thinking in existence, the meaning of belonging to a cultural heritage, and human historical destiny.
These essays are not literary criticism in the ordinary sense, although they have by now inspired a generation or two of scholars (beginning most notably with Jacques Derrida) who undertake various forms of textual analysis of works of philosophy and literature.As Heidegger notes, the essays "do not claim to be contributions to research in the history of literature or aesthetics.They spring from a necessity of thought" (p. 21).What, then, are these commentaries?They are not explanations of Hölderlin's poems, prose versions of his poetry; rather, they are Heidegger's efforts to get at Hölderlin's thought, which, like anyone's thought, he believes, remains and must remain a mystery.According to Heidegger, "we never know a mystery by unveiling or analyzing it to death, but only in such a way that we preserve the mystery as mystery" (p. 43).We should also note that, for Heidegger, authentic poetry is not a literary genre alongside drama and the novel, but is rather "the founding of be[-ing] in the word" (p. 59).The nature of poetry, Heidegger says, is ontological, not linguistic; its source is remembrance [Andenken] or "reflecting on something, [which] is a making firm . . ..Remembrance attaches thinkers to their essential ground (p. 165).In another place, Heidegger call this making firm or thickening of thought in recollection or reflection writing [Dichten] in the basic sense or "poetizing thinking," which Heidegger further characterizesas an activity of that special individual, the poet's poet (p. 52), who is situated "between" (p. 64) human beings and the gods.The poets, whom he calls demigods (p. 126), are analogous to the chthonic gods Heidegger finds reference to in the fable " Cura" (Hyginus), which he cites in Section 42 of Being and Time.In that text, we recall, Heidegger finds an early preontological reference to Sorge [minding, also translated as care], which he takes to be the fundamental feature of existence.
For the existential analyst, however, the most remarkable passages are found in "`Remembrance,'" where Heidegger presents a brilliant, albeit brief, phenomenology of shyness or retraint [Scheu] [ (p. 153).The context of the discussion of restraint is Heidegger's description of the nature of the poet, who thinks back to the origin of the rivers, that is, to the origin of the poets themselves, those unique individuals who mediate between what is of this earth and the gods (p. 126).The poet is characterized by restraint.What is restraint?It is not bashfulness [Schüchternheit] or timidity, Heidegger explains, nor is it based on insecurity.Instead, restraint is a keeping to oneself that is marked by a concerted reserve in the face of that about which one might easily be facile.Restraint is a keeping to oneself that guards something precious, for which one feels great affection.What evokes restraint first causes the poet to hesitate and withhold what he or she might be tempted to make available without further ado.The heart of restraint is forbearance [Langmut].Restraint is a model of what human presence might aspire to.In an age when self-assertion and "attitude" are accorded pre-eminence among the behaviors associated with success, fulfillment and self-realization.It contrasts with childish demands for immediate gratification and the unwillingness to postpone gratification.It is also seen in the capacity to wait-for answers, for a solution to life's everyday demands, for resolution to the congenital ambiguity of life on this earth, and for change in psychotherapy.
"Restraint is that reserved, patient, astonished remembrance of what remains close, in an intimacy that consists solely in keeping at a distance what is far off and thereby keeping it ever ready to arise from its source."The references to intimacy and distancing are familiar from Heidegger's other writings, where they are associated with be[-ing] [Sein] and its source.Given the relation of thinking and be[-ing], restraint is "knowing that the origin [of be[-ing] in its source] does not allow itself to be experienced directly."As Heidegger understands it, the fundamental tone of restraint, then, is humility with respect to our grasp of what is going on."Restraint determines the way to the origin" of be-[-ing].It is both our way out of inauthenticity and the way in to the source of be[-ing].Moreover, Heidegger adds, restraint is "more decisive than any sort of violence"--including interpretative violence in psychotherapy.
Finally, there is Heidegger's notion of recollection, which is not a retrieval of the past, as it is in psychoanalysis.Instead it is way of moving into the future by taking over one's destiny, authentically and with resolve.The poet's experience, once again, provides the model of this kind of recollection, which might serve all human beings, who, as Hölderlin says, "dwell poetically on this earth."

Language, poetry & philosophy
A finely crafted translation of a pivotal book in contemporary European thought, phenomenology, post-modernism, and literary theory.The book is a must read for those interested in the relation between poetry and philosophy, not only in Heidegger, but also as this conflictual pair of terms moves through recent 20th century European theory and literature.Although one may criticize Heidegger's investment in Holderlin's writing and life as partial, and perhaps as conceptually manipulative, the book offers a fascinating engagement with the life of words.

Philosophy, poetry, and language
A finely crafted translation of a pivotal book in contemporary European thought, phenomenology, post-modernism, and literary theory. The book is a must read for those interested in the relation between poetry and philosophy, not only in Heidegger, but also as this conflictual pair of terms moves through recent 20th century European theory and literature.
Although one may criticize Heidegger's investment in Holderlin's writing and life as partial, and perhaps as conceptually manipulative, the book offers a fascinating engagement
with the life of words. ... Read more