Heidegger and the Tradition [Book Review]

Review of Metaphysics 25 (2):359-360 (1971)
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Abstract

With the publication of this translation the quality of Heidegger literature available in English takes a quantum leap forward. No book--save perhaps Otto Poeggeler's--can match Marx's for its depth of insight into Heidegger's thought. The central theme of the book is as follows. Hegel's claim to have consummated the Western "tradition" is accepted by Heidegger. The foundations of this tradition are in Greek ontology. Marx locates the classic formulation of the basic tenets of Greek ontology in the Aristotelian doctrine of ousia. Being as ousia is the perduring, necessary and intelligible. The Hegelian idea of Being remains within the Aristotelian perspective because it determines Being as the unfolding of the self-same substance according to necessary law and so as to develop into a stage of maximum intelligibility. Being is more radically temporal, of course, for Hegel but this stays within the perspective of the Greek notion of eternity, because the Hegelian "substance" is relentlessly working out an eternal pattern of categories which is inscribed in its very essence, and which the Logic articulates. Heidegger's philosophy seeks to "overcome" the "tradition," and so the whole metaphysics of "substance and subject." Being is even more radically temporalized, for Heidegger does not think time on the "model" of eternity. Being as time is not the movement of the self-same through time but time itself--as Being. The necessity and lawfulness of Being, moreover, is replaced by the "play" of the "fourfold." And the radical intelligibility of Being is overcome in Heidegger's thought by the interplay of concealment and unconcealment. Finally, against the Aristotelian-Hegelian teleology Heidegger posits the hope of a "new beginning" of history whose coming to pass--by a "turn" on Being's part--can only be obscurely intimated and at best "awaited." Not the least among this book's merits is the refreshingly critical attitude of the author to Heidegger--the book he says was prompted by a reflection on Heidegger-critic Lowith's [[sic]] work on Heidegger. His criticism of Heidegger in the conclusion of this book sets out important objections which the usual commentator ignores or evades or attributes to a "fallenness" into "calculative" thinking.--J. D. C.

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