Heidegger's Use Research Articles

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Ethics and Religion in Continental Philosophy

Déjà Vieux: Derrida's Late Conjuration of de Man

Déjà Vieux: Derrida's Late Conjuration of de Man

Essays on Boredom and Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Essays on Boredom and Modernity Brendan J. Balint (bio) Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Edited by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 232 pp. $71.30. In the introduction to Essays on Boredom and Modernity, editors Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani argue that the invention of the term "boredom" in the seventeenth century signals "the emergence of a new rhetoric of experience" in nascent modernity. With the appearance of a vast number of novel stimuli and a general shift in the individual's relation to time, modernity's industrialization, urbanization, and mass communication allow for the incorporation of boredom as a factor in the construction of experience and the construction of the experiencing self. Providing an insightful historical account of the topic by rehearsing the etymological connections between ennui, acedia, melancholy, spleen, and taedium vitae, among others, Dalle Pezze and Salzani make clear that describing boredom as inherently linked to modernity is of primary importance: "This connection must be made explicit," they tell us, "especially because boredom's nihilism tends to see itself as a timeless feature of the human soul and to efface its historicity" (7). This historical contextualizing of boredom is necessary because the term only appears when it does to describe a shift in epistemology: "The 'invention' of the new concept of boredom in the eighteenth century allowed for the articulation of new ways of understanding the world" (11). At issue here is a historicizing of the modern subject and the constitutive role of boredom in this process. We are prepared to read the essays that follow as arguments for apprehending the significance of boredom for a modern worldview. Following this line of inquiry, several essays in the collection provide particularly insightful commentary on the function of boredom in various moments of modernity. In his "Metaphysics and the Mood of Deep Boredom," Matthew Boss provides an impressively clear description of Heidegger's use of the concept of boredom in his phenomenology of time. Though more far-reaching connections to fields beyond philosophy are not specified, Heidegger's extensive influence on twentieth-century thought [End Page 129] implies an important cultural function for boredom and other "moods," in contrast to the more traditional emphasis on logic as the grounds of metaphysics. Salzani's "The Atrophy of Experience" provides a similarly rigorous analysis of Walter Benjamin's division of experience into the premodern sense of Erfahrung and the more fragmented immediacy of Erlebnis, a symptom of modern society and a condition in which boredom becomes inescapable. For Benjamin, Salzani contends, boredom in modernity takes on "a redemptive potentiality that makes of it an instrument of revolution" (144). Here, the symptom of boredom as ineluctable passivity in modernity becomes a means of individual agency. This gesture toward a more broadly affective description of boredom is carried over in Marco van Leeuwen's "The Digital Void," which extends Benjamin's discussion of aura to the mass digitization of contemporary culture. In contrast to the often readily accepted notion that the aura is dead, van Leeuwen suggests that auratic experience is both subjective and constructed rather than essential or "authentic." Like Isis I. Leslie's "From Idleness to Boredom," which convincingly links boredom to the contemporary loss of political, public selfhood, van Leeuwen's essay treats boredom as an "ailment" in direct contrast to Salzani's and Boss's essays. Though the essay relies perhaps too heavily on essential distinctions (real/virtual, authentic/inauthentic) in a context that has called into question the value of such distinctions, van Leeuwen's investigation of aura as persistently evolving in contemporary culture establishes an important line of interrogation. Taking a term such as boredom as the focus of what the editors describe as a "multidisciplinary" and "heterogeneous" collection (though five of the nine contributors work in the field of philosophy) poses a number of problems, not the least of which is the difficulty in defining the term in a way that provides a viable interpretive figure. Several essays here rely on seemingly incommensurable definitions; this is telling, particularly as nearly all the essays discuss boredom in some implicit or explicit connection to metaphysics. Rachel June Torbett's "The Quick...

The beast & the sovereign

The Beast and the Sovereign, II is the latest entry in the University of Chicago Press' ambitious series of translations of Jacques Derrida's previously unpublished written lectures. Picking up where the previous volume left off, Volume II extends Derrida's exploration of the fascinating connections between animality and human sovereignty. In the second part of this seminar, originally presented in 2002-3, Derrida focuses on what at first appear to be two markedly different texts: Heidegger's The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Daniel Defoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe. Shuttling back and forth between the two works, Derrida investigates a number of key concepts and provides ingenious interpretations of both texts. Sovereignty remains his primary concern as he reflects on the political history of the dominion of humans over animals in Defoe's England and on diverse readings of Robinson Crusoe through the centuries and, in particular, from Heidegger's Germany in the 1930s. Solitude provides another connection between the two books as Derrida links the indivisible uniqueness of a king with Crusoe's solitary plight. Both consolidating and broadening Derrida's deconstructive critique of sovereignty, The Beast and the Sovereign, II is a rich repast, offering everything from striking insights into Heidegger's use of language to surprising digressions that reveal the contours of a lively intellect deeply engaged with the world.

Cultural Leadership: Mobilizing Culture from Affordances to Dwelling

Developing from histories of arts administration and arts management, “cultural leadership” has recently become a focus within the cultural sector and the creative industries of the UK. This article interrogates a basic question—what is cultural leadership? Beginning with secondary sources (historical summaries, policy documents, arts/cultural grant applications), we contextualize the developments and practice of cultural leadership as an outgrowth of the discourse around arts/cultural administration and management reoriented to leadership practice in the face of significant crises (financial, administrative) in major British cultural institutions. Drawing upon primary survey and interview data from twelve cultural leadership practitioners, we then reflect upon whom cultural leaders are (career history, motivation, etc.). Turning to practice, we consider cultural leadership as advocacy for, and facilitation of, cultural activity. This is largely based on culture's perceived ability to cultivate individual and group potential. More specifically, we define leadership through descriptions of effects by cultural leadership practitioners, specifically where it taps into affordances (Gibson 1966; Greeno 1994; DeNora 2000) of cultural products (material and otherwise) for world-making activity. We join recent leadership theorists in making use of Heidegger's “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (Ladkin 2006; Carrol et al. 2008) to contextualize cultural leadership as activity-enabling engagement with cultural artifacts and activities. Through advocacy for, and facilitation of, cultural engagement, cultural leaders are involved in projects that invite others to situations outside “everyday experience that which is from the outset ‘habitual’’ (Heidegger 1975, 147), in attempts to emerge positive affordances from cultural interactions for world-dwelling. Cultural leadership is an activity more explicitly centered around encouraging engagement with various cultural activities, practices, and artifacts in the belief that such engagement may have positive social benefits for those engaged. It is an activity focused on emerging the emergent from cultural interactivity.

Beauvoir-in-America: Understanding, Concrete Experience, and Beauvoir's Appropriation of Heidegger inAmerica Day by Day

This paper reads Simone de Beauvoir's travel journal America Day by Day for its philosophical content. I argue that this work provides a unique approach to feminist, embodied philosophy, one that has been overlooked by the categorization of her writing into philosophical works and feminist ones. Such an approach, I contend, is enacted here through her use of Heidegger's concept of the everyday to inform her own treatment of understanding and experience.

John Paul II's Call for a Renewed Theology of Being: Just What Did He Mean, and How Can We Respond?*

In this article I explore the contemporary relationship of theology to philosophy through the call for a `renewed philosophy of being' by Pope John Paul II. I argue that in fact three understandings of being appear in this call: the first, phenomenological , appears as the bringing to description of the situation of contemporary nihilism, exemplified by Nietzsche both in his published works and his Nachlaß ; the second, metaphysical , can be understood as the moralistic voice taken up by contemporary theologians in addressing philosophy. This voice, I argue, is the voicing of the subjectivity of the (Cartesian) subject, and can be understood as the unfolding of the being-historical of the subject, explained in Martin Heidegger's use of the term `history of being' or Seinsgeschichte . This voice arises out of the `modernity' of the eighteenth century up to the present: it is a voice of extreme nihilism, but expressing itself as an imperative — not what `is', but what `should be'. This voice is also to be found in John Paul II. The third understanding is a possibility only arising out of the extreme nihilism encountered in the first two understandings of being. This understanding makes possible the genuine asking of the `question of being', the Seinsfrage , also laid out by Heidegger. As such, the question of being, when genuinely asked, alters the human comportment to God. Inasmuch as being presses in on man through a lack, an emptiness, that reasserts the fundamental orientation toward the future that unfolds from out of the being of beings, so the region of concealment and the withdrawal of the nihilating of the nothing, which is the region proper to divinity, can be understood and seen all over again.

Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770–1815 (review)

Maike Oergel, Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770-1815. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2006. viii + 297 pp. The concept of (Geschichtlichkeif) has played a central role in German philosophy and historiography of the post-war period, extending its influence into literary scholarship via the work of Hans Robert Jauss, among others. Yet despite the prevalence of this concept in both primary and secondary literature dealing with phenomenology, literary theory and historiography there exist (outside Germany at least) very few works that apply the concept of Geschichtlichkeit directly to canonical literary texts. Here one should not conflate the eminently philosophical and (if one follows Heidegger's use of the term) ontological sense of Geschichtlichkeit with the various and diffuse discourses on New Historicism in Anglophone literary scholarship, since the former concern themselves not primarily or exclusively with the relationship between literary texts and their specific socio-political contexts, but rather with how an awareness of the historically mediated character of normative values determines ideas about human progress in the late or post-Enlightenment era (1750-1850), otherwise known (thanks to Reinhart Koselleck) as the Sattelzeit. Maike Oergel's interesting and ambitious book deals with a slightly shorter period (1770-1815) than that highlighted by Koselleck and other practitioners of Begriffsgeschichte, yet its central theoretical premise is similar to that found in the introduction to the Lexikon on Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: namely, around 1800 and especially in the wake of the French Revolution and Kant's critical philosophy, German thinkers began to be aware of the historicity of values, including moral and philosophical categories (4). The realization that normative values are historically conditioned rather than universal leads, in turn, to an to integrate change into any new value system, and this notion of change is more often than not dialectical (4). The central dialectic here is the relationship between the ancient and the modern, a relationship which, following the querelle des anciens et des modernes of the early eighteenth century, was reconfigured in Germany no longer as a thoroughgoing opposition, but rather as an attempt to relate perceived elements of classical aesthetics to the modern crisis of values (18). Oergel proposes that when considered in this way, the period 1770-1815-which spans the traditional periodizations of Sturm und Drang, Klassik and (Fruh-) Romantik-becomes an intellectually coherent phase in terms of the intellectual problems addressed and intellectual and cultural objectives to be achieved (3). Herder, Goethe, Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel all concern themselves, according to Oergel, with the relationship between the so-called naive or natural poetics of ancient Greece on the one hand, and the tendency toward reflexivity, relativity and (in Schiller's sense of the term) sentimentality that characterizes modernity on the other. The result of this dialectical process is an attempt to conceive a modern German identity through the assistance of classical notions of form: German poetry uses purportedly classical notions like the naive or the mythic not as objects of pure mimesis, but rather as structural ideals that provide a heuristic guide for how to be modern. For this reason, the attempts of Herder, A. W. Schlegel and Fichte (among others) to establish a modern German identity should not be seen, according to Oergel, in a narrowly nationalist light; rather they express a central issue within the crisis of modernity per se: how to ground a national culture upon values and norms which are historically conditioned and subject to change. …

Heidegger’s Etymological Method

ProQuest: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.) The role of etymology in Heidegger's curiously under-studied. In the English-language Heidegger literature, there are currently no book-length studies devoted to it, and discussion of surprisingly absent from books on Heidegger's on language. Frank Schalow's Language and the Etymological Turn of Thought1 apparently the only article to appear as yet that takes the philosophical significance of Heidegger's etymologies, though does not address the etymological method as such. What I want to do in essay, then, look at what Heidegger doing when he does etymology, so that we might see how and why we might do it, too. Lack of reflection on Heidegger's etymological method seems to have left philosophers with two default attitudes toward his etymologies. On one hand, for those generally hostile to Heidegger, the etymologies may come across as the kind of pretentious, inconsequential hand-waving that Plato seems to be sending with the spurious etymologies in the Cratylus-in other words, they may come across as if there were no method to them at all. On the other hand, for those generally sympathetic to Heidegger, his use of etymology may be linked to his supposed goal of retrieving the concepts of earlier times. This essay will argue that there indeed a method behind Heidegger's use of etymology, but that the purpose of method not to replace degraded modem concepts with purer archaic ones. Rather than seeking to discover an original meaning, I argue that Heidegger's etymologies seek to recover the whole range of historical meanings of a word. The etymological method's purpose-in contradistinction to the purpose of philosophical analysis-is to open the to overcome the tendency for the meaning of words-which also to say, their ability to present to us the being of beings-to become restricted over time. Whereas the function of analysis to tighten up and narrow our sense of a term, to precisely define its limits and eliminate equivocation so that we know precisely what at issue in a philosophical investigation, the function of etymology rather the opposite. In the midst of and by way of contrast with his exposition of the etymological links between thinking and thanking, Heidegger warns that academic philosophy-that is, analytic philosophy, broadly speaking-has done its share to stunt the word, that conceptual definitions of terms, while necessary for technical and scientific purposes, are by themselves unfit to assure, much less advance, the soundness of language.2 Of course, one of the later Heidegger's theses that in the current epoch, which he calls the epoch of das Ge-Stell or the be-setting of things by technological enframement, technical and scientific purposes are the only ones that ordinarily can show themselves. Thus when Wittgenstein tells us that language simply a tool, a means of advancing our purposes, he correct, but only for the current epoch (just as, in Heidegger's view, Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power a profoundly acute diagnosis of the times rather than an absolutely true metaphysics).3 But not only in the current epoch that words become less meaningful through their restriction for practical use. It necessarily the case that we almost always do not hear what words say; when so, our discourse takes the form of what Being and Time calls Gerede, talk. In Being and Time, Heidegger tells us that Gerede the mode of discourse belonging to entangled (verfallen) Da-sein-that is, that caught in the practical pursuit of its various everyday endeavors-and that usually so entangled. Heidegger writes that Gerede is the mode of being of the uprooted understanding of Da-sein and that this uprooting constant.4 In idle talk, language does not fulfill its role of bringing us into contact with the being of beings: talk the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation [Zueignung] of the matter; it omits going back to the ground [Boden] of what being talked about. …

Reliability, Earth, and World in Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art"

This brief essay will be narrow in focus, its aim being to present a careful exposition of the concept of "reliability" as it is treated in Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art."1 Since in this essay's famous discussion of a painting of shoes by Van Gogh, Heidegger maintains that it is the revelation of the "equipment-being" of the shoes that is the singular achievement of the painting, and since, in turn, this equipment-being is determined to be "reliability," it behooves us to secure a firm grasp of what reliability is, in order to understand more completely the nature of the disclosure effected by the painting. Too often, I think, reliability is understood, based on loose readings of Being and Time, to be a sort of inconspicuousness that characterizes the being of equipment in its everyday use. Equipment, the story goes, only becomes conspicuous in "breakdown" situations, where that "for which" it has its being comes into view as what has suddenly become impossible. Since being reliable seems to be precisely "not breaking down," reliability is associated with a sort of "default" inconspicuousness. The "Origin," essay, however, clearly asks us to think of reliability in a rather different way. It would be very odd, I think, if Van Gogh's painting of shoes, which supposedly discloses to us the equipment being of a peasant woman's shoes (or Van Gogh's own shoes, as the case may be), only offered to us, in this disclosure, their inconspicuousness-something like a "not having been noticed before." Surely, the very being of equipment is not exhausted by its inconspicuousness, but is rather more fundamentally determined by something else, and it is that which becomes inconspicuous. This would certainly make a great deal more sense; and, indeed, Heidegger offers us, in the "Origin" essay, a framework within which to think of equipment-being on its own terms, not merely as inconspicuousness. Even before indicating that the being of equipment lies in its reliability, Heidegger gives this being a different name-"protected belonging." At the end of the much-discussed passage in which Van Gogh's shoes "speak" of the tiresome tread and wordless joy of the peasant woman, Heidegger writes that "This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself" (34; italics mine). In the paragraphs that follow, this resting within itself is renamed "reliability" Reliability is that in which the "repose of equipment resting within itself [die Ruhe des in sich ruhenden Zeuges] consists" (35). In this reliability, "we discern what equipment in truth is" (ibid.). These two formulations, reliability and protected belonging, point to the same thing-that by which the equipment has its self-sufficiency; that by which the equipment can be as equipment; in other words, the equipment-being of equipment. So we must come to understand this affiliation between reliability and protected belonging. First, what is reliability? Heidegger is clear about what it is not. He argues that while the equipmental quality of equipment consists in its usefulness, this usefulness itself rests in "the abundance of an essential being of equipment" (34), which he calls reliability. Reliability, then, is to be distinguished from usefulness, as its more essential source. How are we to understand this? How to understand Heidegger's use of these two concepts-usefulness and reliability-and their relation to each other? Using and Relying in Everyday Speech In order to understand the difference between "usefulness" and "reliability," I suggest we need to pay attention to the words "using" and "relying-on" as they occur in ordinary speech. Heidegger of course does not adhere strictly to the commonplace understanding of reliability, but meaningful observations can still be made in this way.2 One clear distinction can be observed at first glance. …

The “Happening of Being” and the Horizon of Being. Enowning of the Understanding of Being in Korea

I have spent 20 years preparing for the translation of Heidegger's Being and Time. In these 20 years, I spent 10 years in Germany writing the master and doctoral thesis on Heidegger in order to understand Heidegger's thoughts properly. Later on I spent other 10 years teaching Heidegger's philosophy at university while translating Being and Time into Korean. At that time, there were already 4 different translations of Being and Time in Korean. But because these translations were based on Japanese translations, many concepts and terms were ungraspable by ordinary Korean people. Impressed with Heidegger's use of the ordinary words as important philosophical concepts, I also did my best to translate Being and Time using ordinary Korean words.

Heidegger into D(e)ut(s)ch

In this contribution the author sketches his main motives for translating Sein und Zeit into Dutch. First, the author argues that Heidegger's text - and its translation - can clarify its notions better than most of Heidegger's interprets can do. Then, the author shows that Heidegger's method, being hermeneutics, has intrinsically to do with translation. Referring to the genesis of his translation, the author points at some general peculiarities of Heidegger's use of language, insisting upon their meaning for the translation of Heidegger's work into Dutch.

Heidegger and Truth as Correspondence

I argue in this paper that Heidegger, contrary to the view of many scholars, in fact endorsed a view of truth as a sort of correspondence. I first show how it is a mistake to take Heidegger's notion of 'unconcealment' as a definition of propositional truth. It is thus not only possible but also essential to disambiguate Heidegger's use of the word 'truth', which he occasionally used to refer to both truth as it is ordinarily understood and unconcealment understood as the condition of the possibility of truth. I then show how Heidegger accepted that propositional truth, or 'correctness', as he sometimes called it, consists in our utterances or beliefs corresponding to the way things are. Heidegger's objection to correspondence theories of truth was not directed at the notion of correspondence as such, but rather at the way in which correspondence is typically taken to consist in an agreement between representations and objects. Indeed, Heidegger took his account of unconcealment as explaining how it is possible for propositions to correspond to the world, thus making unconcealment the ground of propositional truth. I conclude by discussing briefly some of the consequences for Heidegger interpretation which follow from a correct understanding of Heidegger's notion of propositional truth.

The liquidation of material things

Thomas' paper and manuscript are ambitious. He aims at nothing less than opening up for discussion fundamental concepts which have informed archaeological writings to date. While in principal laudable and exciting, the chosen concepts – time, culture and identity – are broad, each one on its own of daunting complexity. The vastness of the project is handled by setting up an opposition at the outset between the Cartesian and modernist reading of these concepts adopted by archaeology and an anti-Cartesian and anti-modernist reading facilitated by Heidegger. At issue is less the validity of Heidegger's writings or their deployment in contemporary theory-making, a fact which the author is at pains to defend, though leaving the novice at pains guessing what his writings are actually about; at issue is whether the future of archaeology should rest on developing an anti-Cartesian theory in the first place. The mind/body dualism associated with Descartes has been the subject of much critical work, so much so that it seems at best unnecessary to have to revive Heidegger to give Cartesianism the final blow. One may further question the opposition itself; is it not Kant who is the foundation of post-Enlightenment thought, rather than Descartes, and would thus not his writings be the point of departure for any rethinking of theoretical assumptions that may have guided archaeological theory and practice? A third reservation may be voiced about the validity of the interpretative approach itself; it rests on the assumption, also known as the logocentric paradigm, which holds that a relation exists between an object or image and a narrative description of it which is ‘found’ outside the object and thus may vary according to the context in which the object is seen. The most serious criticism to this assumption is that it ignores the immediacy of understanding which allows images to play a fundamental role in social transmission. Thomas' use of Heidegger's notion of Being appears to strive towards precisely such an immediacy of understanding, yet fails to do so by leaving accounted for the materiality of images. In advocating the interpretative approach, Thomas sets out less a new direction for archaeological theory than captures post-modernist writing which dominated across disciplines for the past decade and left a whole generation of scholars trained during this period ill-equipped to deal with artefacts in more than an exemplary manner. In the late 90s, however, due to advances in cognitive psychology and our day to day experience with cyberspace, this neglect of the image, material and conceptual, and its role in transmission has become glaringly obvious and unacceptable. Critical in their inception, however, paper and manuscript are intently thought provoking, stimulating and timely in calling for a rethinking of archaeological theory to accommodate the contemporary perception of material things. In my discussion I aim to both paraphrase the main points of Thomas's paper and manuscript and to offer comments and questions.

THE HEIDEGGERIAN BIAS TOWARD DEATH: A CRITIQUE OF THE ROLE OF BEING‐TOWARDS‐DEATH IN THE DISCLOSURE OF HUMAN FINITUDE

Abstract: In this paper I take issue with Heidegger's use of the concept of death as a means of disclosing human finitude. I argue that Being‐towards‐death is inadequate to the disclosure of Dasein's thrownness which is necessary for the kind of authentic historizing that Heidegger describes and furthermore leads to a reading of authenticity which is preclusive of Being‐with‐Others, I suggest that this difficulty may be alleviated through increased attention to the opposite boundary of Dasein's existence, namely its birth. Although I do not pursue the project here of conducting a phenomenology of birth, I suggest some directions for proceeding with that task, and I illustrate that a greater emphasis on Dasein's beginning will increase the richness of our understanding of our Being‐with‐Others.

What constitutes our understanding of a patient?

A number of approaches to the search for methodology in the human sciences are reviewed. Heidegger's use of Husserl's phenomenology led to his exploration of the background practices on which he believed all our understanding is based. This use of phenomenology was adopted by Sartre and R. D. Laing, and existential psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in their emphasis on the here-and-now encounter between the patient and the therapist, along with various embellishments and emendations on Heidegger's notion of what it meant to live authentically or inauthentically. Foucault maintained that there is a politics embedded in all the human sciences such as psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and this politics revolves around the use of power and its operations, including the actual use of the human sciences in the culture and what the different theories imply in the way of an ideology. Lacan emphasized this when he challenged the prevailing ideology of United States psychoanalysis, in which adaptation was seen as the crucial task of the ego. The existence of background practices and outer horizons required for any understanding in the human sciences leads to a situation that questions the use of empirical methods to establish what is accepted as "truth" in the human sciences. A predominant alternative, that of hermeneutics, has gained acceptance by eminent analysts such as Gill and certain interpersonal theorists. But the term hermeneutics is used in many ways by many authors and runs the danger of a relativism and a nihilism. This leads to a discussion of the value of various philosophical positions in throwing light on our search for a methodology in the human sciences. A review of arguments invoking the "end of philosophy" such as those of Rorty reveals that they are paradoxical and based on premises which in turn represent a philosophy. This debate remains unresolved. In general the postmodern view sees "truth" as more relative and emphasizes the role of social and cultural aspects of prevailing ideologies in constituting and determining what we call truth and understanding, including the "understanding" of a patient in psychotherapy. An example of the postmodern blend of philosophy and psychoanalysis is presented by Arlow's emphasis on unconscious fantasies and his insightful comments on how these unconscious fantasies organize and determine what we experience from the very beginning of life. This I believe is most consistent with Rescher's philosophical notion of "conceptual idealism," also briefly reviewed in this paper.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Literature as Philosophy

The question of whether literature can be read as philosophy depends perhaps more upon our conception of philosophy than upon our conception of literature. The more logical, argumentative and systematic we take philosophy to be, the less likely we will take literature as serious philosophy. The more intuitive, evidentiary, fluid and visionary we take philosophy to be, the more likely we will take literature as serious philosophy. I think it unlike ly that we will get wide agreement about the validity of literature as philosophy through the use of transcendental deductions (though Marjorie Grene thinks otherwise1) or through the place of such a claim in a grand metaphysical scheme. Those who believe that literature has important philosophical relevance are better off trying to cite specific examples of how this relevance can be cashed in with the hope that enough examples will win others to this belief. It is this purpose which prompts me to offer Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer as an excellent example of a work of imaginative literature which has philosophical relevance. In order to do this I want to tie it to a text of philosophy which is generally admitted to be quite influential in the twentieth-century dialogue of philosophy, Heidegger's Being and Time. My claim is that The Moviegoer helps to clarify certain technical terms in Being and Time; that it amplifies the philosophical claims contained therein; and that it adds an independent voice to the assertion of those claims. If it does this, it functions as a philosophical journal article might, and thereby earns the respect of the philosophical community. The Moviegoer has been acknowledged as a philosophical book in asmuch as its theme deals with the meaning of life as a whole. In addition, critics have compared it with philosophical writings, in particular, the corpus of Kierkegaard.2 Percy admits his debt to Kierkegaard, but his direct connec tions with Heidegger are more tenuous. He has read most of the European existentialists, and undoubtedly knows something of the thought of Heideg ger. In spite of the fact that The Moviegoer was completed two years before the first English translation of Sein und Zeit, it is impossible not to think of Heidegger as Binx Boiling, the main character in the book, describes his no tion of everydayness. Whether or not Percy picked up the word from Heidegger, its function in his fictional world is a perfect match with Heideg ger's use of the term.

On Reading Heidegger

In his article in Mind October I975 (pp. 548-566), Paul Edwards claimed to 'expose' the 'trickery' involved in the chapter on death in 'Being and Time', this supposed trickery revolving on a change of meaning in Heidegger's use of the term 'possibility'. I am not a Heideggerian, but neither do I believe that Heidegger is a simple-minded Hinterweltler who writes 'hocus-pocus'. I am in complete sympathy with what Mr. Edwards has to say about most of the Heidegger-interpreters he quotes, but as far as Heidegger himself is concerned, I must, as a reader of 'Being and Time', disagree with just about all that Mr. Edwards says about this chapter, which I think rests on a complete misreading of the text. Part of the trouble is simply caused by Heidegger's language. He exploits some of the peculiarities of German in such a way that he is well-nigh impossible to translate, most attempts at doing so resulting in tortuous-sounding approximations to the original: reading him in German is a lot easier than reading him in English. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Mr. Edwards has misinterpreted certain terms, more, probably, because of his philosophical views than because of any weaknesses in his knowledge of German, which, if he went to High School in Vienna, must be good. He refers to Heidegger's term 'ausgezeichnete M6glichkeit' (p. 55i) and says that it has been translated by Macquarrie and Robinson 'weakly and inaccurately, as our distinctive possibility and for which a more accurate translation would be splendid or distinguished possibility'. (p. 55I.) He adds in a footnote that 'ausgezeichnet' means 'excellent' when applied to schoolwork amongst other things (which is true) and writes: .... and if Heidegger meant anything less than splendid or excellent possibility, he certainly picked a most unfortunate word.' Now 'ausgezeichnet' certainly has positive connotations as Heidegger uses it, but one meaning of the verb 'auszeichnen', from which it comes, is given in the Duden 'Bedeutungsw6rterbuch' as: '(durch etwas Besonderes) von anderen deutlich unterschieden sein.' [i.e. 'to be clearly differentiated from other things (by something particular.)]' Its meaning comes close to 'special', and as an example of the use of the adjective in this way, with no suggestion of 'splendid' or 'excellent', I quote this phrase from p. I3 of Einfiuhrung in die Moderne Logik by Kut$schera and Breitkopf: 'In den Wissenschaften spielen Argumentationen.... eine wesentliche Rolle, und unter den wissenschaftlichen Argumenten kommt den Beweisen eine ausgezeichnete Rolle zu.' ['In the sciences, arguments play. . . an essential r8le, and amongst scientific arguments the r8le assigned to proofs is of special

Heidegger and Language

Heidegger's thought has recently been made more available to English readers by the publication of two books: one a translation of one of Heidegger's works, the other, by Thomas Langan, an American scholar, described as a critical study of Heidegger. Heidegger's philosophy has had little or no influence in England; and this seems a good opportunity for considering whether this neglect is merited, or whether some defence can be offered of Heidegger's curious manipulations of the German and Greek tongues. Since An Introduction to Metaphysics philosophises on a basis of Greek, though it purports to be philosophy, not history of philosophy, most of this article will be concerned with Heidegger's use and abuse of that language. I shall suggest, however, that the same conclusions hold good of Heidegger's use of German.