Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24 : Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (review)

244 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Ehrlich finds notable traces of philosophic faith in such various recent philosophers as Wittgenstein , Buber, Marcel, and Tillich. However, it is Jaspers to whom he looks for full development and deployment of this concept in all the varied regions of philosophy. Indispensable to philosophic faith in Jaspers's thought is the concept of "ciphers," which constitute a "third language" beyond both traditional religion and modern criticism. Ciphers are "historically valid symbols," and in this third language transcendence gains effective human expression. Ehrlich's book is a reliable and valuable guide to Jaspers's philosophy. Yet it is also the work of a disciple. Notably absent are any fundamentallycritical perspectives on Jaspers. As I made my way through the sometimes tangled verbiage of Jaspers's philosophic system, I found new relevance in the critical demand by the linguisticanalysts that philosophic language should have clarity. Surely Jaspers's message--and it is an important and humane message in our tortured times--deserves the astringent benefits of such critical appraisal. JOHN A. HUTCHISON Claremont Graduate School Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24: Die Grundprobleme der Phdnomenologie. By Martin Heidegger. Ed. F. W. von Herrmann. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975. Pp. x + 473) For almost fifty years commentators have conjectured about the reason for Heidegger's failure to complete Sein und Zeit. Suddenly, with the appearance of Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie, lectures given in the Summer Semester 1927 at the University of Marburg, we have what amounts to a kind of "completion" of the third division of part one of Sein und Zeit. In a footnote on page one of Die Grundprobleme Heidegger refers to the lectures as a "New working-out of the third division of Part One of Sein und Zeit." But as we shall see, the lectures are both more and less than that. It is rather ironic that this set of course lectures, which in some sense "completes" Sein und Zeit, is itself incomplete. Of three projected parts, with four chapters each, we have only part one and the first chapter of part two. But what we do have is fascinating. As I said, the lectures are more than a new working-out of a missing division of Sein und Zeit, for Heidegger here approaches the question of Being (Seinsfrage) not by way of analyzing the Being of a being , Dasein, but by way of a radical analysis of four fundamental theses taken from the history of Western philosophy. Toward the end of Sein und Zeit Heidegger remarks, "One must seek a way of casting light on the fundamental question of ontology, and this is the way one must go. Whether this is the only way or even the right one at all, can be decided only after one has gone along it. ''t In these lectures, Heidegger strikes out on a new way toward the Seinsfrage. The analysis of the four theses in part one shows that they are mired in obscurity and will remain so until the question of the "sense" (Sinn) of Being and its relation to Time is answered. Heidegger returns to the theme of Sein und Zeit in part two, which tries to demonstrate that the unity of the manifold senses of Being lies somehow in Dasein's primordial temporality. From this it should be clear that, for Heidegger, the "fundamental problems of phenomenology" are in fact the crucial problems of ontology, which Heidegger here seeks to place on a "rigorous" (wissenschaftlich) basis. Heidegger clearly distinguishes his phenomenology from Husserrs, which never raised the Seinsfrage and which thus remained mired in the Cartesian-Kantian problem of "consciousness." Part one of Die Grundprobleme is divided into four chapters, each of which treats of a fundamental theme from Western ontology: (1) Kant's claim that Being is no real predicate; (2) the medieval claim that to the Being of a being belongs "what-being" (essentia) and "beingpresent -at-hand" (existentia); (3) the modern notion that Nature (res extensa) and Spirit (res ' Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)p. 487. BOOK REVIEWS 245 cogitans) comprise the only two modes of Being; and (4) the claim of logic...