Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927 (review)

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Reviewed by: Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927 Richard Oxenberg Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, editors. Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927. Northwestern Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Pp. lxxiii + 534. Cloth, $99.95. What was Heidegger thinking? Heidegger's own writings suggest that the most fruitful approach to understanding them will be one that seeks to uncover the arché, or roots, of the central concern that motivates them. That they reflect such a central concern is testified to by Heidegger himself. As late as 1966, in an essay entitled "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," he writes: "The following text belongs to a larger context. It is the attempt undertaken again and again ever since 1930, to shape the question of Being and Time in a more primordial fashion." It is this thematic unity of Heidegger's life work, so easily obscured by the sometimes jarring shifts in terminology that occur throughout it, that makes Kisiel's and Sheehan's book so provocative and important a contribution to Heidegger studies. The book allows us to follow the progress of Heidegger's early thought in its formative stages, from his university days as a student of medieval theology in Freiburg to its culmination in the publication of Being and Time in 1927. In doing so it helps to illuminate the thread of concern that runs to, through, and beyond Being and Time. As Kisiel's introduction notes, Heidegger published nothing at all from 1915, when his Habilitationshrift on Duns Scotus first qualified him to teach at the university level, to 1927, when he rushed Being and Time into print in order to secure his position at the University of Marburg. When Being and Time finally did appear its sheer strangeness proved a source of consternation even to those closest to him. Edmund Husserl wrote to a colleague in 1931: "Certainly when Being and Time appeared in 1927, I was surprised by the newfangled language and style of thinking. Initially, I trusted his emphatic declaration: it was the continuation of my own research. I got the impression of an exceptional, albeit unclarified, intellectual energy, and I worked hard and honestly to penetrate and appreciate it" (401). After repeated readings, however, Husserl somewhat bitterly concludes, "his 'phenomenology' has not the least thing to do with my own, and I view its pseudo-scientific character as an obstacle to the development of philosophy" (404). Such bemusement over Heidegger's work—friendly and unfriendly—has not abated. As late as 2001, Thomas Sheehan proposed the need for a major paradigm shift in our understanding of Heidegger's corpus, requiring yet another reinterpretation of the purpose and thrust of Being and Time. For some time Heidegger was thought to have undergone [End Page 492] a fundamental change in thinking after Being and Time, from an emphasis on human freedom to a quasi-mystical emphasis on Being "writ large." What Sheehan observes, an observation consistent with Heidegger's own self reports, is that no such fundamental shift occurs. From the beginning Heidegger sees the human being as the "site" at which both truth and untruth occur, both ontic and ontological; of both personal and trans-personal significance; indeed, the two are inextricably wed. In bringing together Heidegger's "occasional" writings from this early, mostly silent, period of Heidegger's development, Kisiel and Sheehan provide a window on the young Heidegger's intensive engagement with the philosophical as personal. As early as 1911, for instance, as a 20 year-old theology student at Freiburg, Heidegger complains of the contemporary "connoisseurship in philosophical questions that has gradually become a sport." He speaks of the personal longing that "breaks out unawares . . . for fulfilled, fulfilling answers to the ultimate questions of being" (14). While still acknowledging the "eternal greatness" of the "basic truths of Christianity," he notes that academic lectures on theology can at best reveal "what the individual potentially has. The actual self-possession of this treasure of truths" will require "an undaunting, incessant self-persistence" (15). This intensive longing for "non-objectified" truth will find its...