The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon ed. by Mark A. Wrathall

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon ed. by Mark A. Wrathall S. Montgomery Ewegen WRATHALL, Mark A., editor. The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xxxviii + 867 pp. Cloth, $125.00 This colossal volume contains an impressive 220 encyclopedic entries on words and concepts perceived as being integral to Martin Heidegger's corpus. The entries are written by a veritable "Who's Who" of accomplished Heidegger scholars from diverse interpretive approaches and geographical backgrounds (though there are a few glaring omissions). The Lexicon also includes an extremely detailed biography, an exhaustive list of Heidegger's works, as well as a hearty bibliography of secondary scholarship. Although this substantial volume contains much of value for scholars of all levels, there are a few general shortcomings that the reader should keep in mind. To begin with, the inside flap boasts of a "comprehensive" collection of Heidegger's vocabulary. In claiming such comprehensiveness, the Lexicon gives the impression that only the words/concepts that were given individual entries mattered to Heidegger, and that other words/concepts that are not given entries are not as important to his thought. Such a structure, inevitable for a project such as this, runs the risk of deciding for readers which words/concepts are crucial to Heidegger's work, and which [End Page 611] are of secondary or tertiary importance. One might respond to this criticism by pointing out that no volume, no matter how "comprehensive," could consider every word/concept that was important to a thinker. But such a response proves the point of the underlying criticism: namely, that the very notion of a "lexicon" that would somehow comprehensively present the work of a thinker is bound to fall short in this respect. Second, although each entry is informed by extensive and often impressive familiarity with the secondary literature that pertains to the issue at hand, an engagement with that scholarship is largely missing from the entries themselves. Rather, most (though not all) of the entries are presented with dictionary like authority, as if the information being presented therein is somehow "definitive." (This is owed in large part to Wrathall's desire, as he explains in his preface, that each entry begins with "something akin to a definition" before delving more deeply into the issue at hand.) As such, the entries tend to lack the sort of dialogical exchanges typical of scholarly engagements (though there are many entries for which this is not the case). This issue is obviated a bit by the use of a "Further Reading" tab placed at the bottom of many (but not all) of the entries; yet, even with this, the impression remains that the entries are somehow settling the matter under consideration, rather than merely offering one scholar's informed understanding of it. This is perhaps less of an issue for the seasoned Heidegger scholar, who will likely already approach these entries with circumspection; however, it remains a risk for the tyro, who might mistake these offerings for the "last word" on the matter. In this way, Wrathall's intention that the Lexicon be used "both for a quick reference while trying to decipher Heidegger's prose, but also as a means to dive more deeply into scholarship on Heidegger's philosophy" succeeds on the first point but flounders somewhat on the second. The Lexicon thus presents itself as a comprehensive list of "key terms" that are "clearly and concisely" defined. In other words, it serves as a kind of standing-reserve of Heideggerian terminology, with the words neatly ordered and available for the reader's use. (Somewhat ironically, Wrathall uses the example of Zuhandenheit ["readiness-to-hand"] in order to show how subentries work, and this is precisely how the entries themselves come across within the volume: as neatly catalogued ready-to-hand definitions waiting around to be put to use by the Heidegger scholar.) In this way, the Lexicon can be seen as providing a kind of grid or frame—a Gestell, if you will—by means of which Heidegger's sprawling corpus is turned into, to draw on Wrathall's own definition of Gestell from the Lexicon, "a stock of goods" that sits "on call and...