Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision (review)

136 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY lapsing into a philosophy of fixed immutable things, thoughts, or laws. If process categories are more nearly adequate to the knowledge we have, we owe Dewey our gratitude for a long hard try at pushing toward a recognition of that fact. Dewey truly believed in the ideal (not the actuality) of democracy, and democracy is essentially a matter of interaction. Marxism saw the economic structure of the modern world with a commendable clarity, as Dewey says in chapter 4 of Freedom and Culture, but as he also says, it seems inevitablyto tend to freeze that vision into what Peirce termed a one-idea'd (hence inadequate) philosophy. George Novack's book, simply by means of its candor, makes that distinction between Marxism and pragmatism very obvious. DARNELL RUCKER Skidmore College Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision. By J. L. Mehta. (Honolulu: The Univeristy Press of Hawaii, 1976. Pp. xvi + 510) This invaluable and scholarly book is a successful attempt to chart out the totality of Heidegger's thought, a rather formidable task performed with admirable clarity and thoroughness. In his preface, Mehta himself calls it "a beginner's book," and it could be called that in the sense that it is a journey through all of Heidegger's works, a journey demanding little previous knowledge on the part of the reader and refusing to get bogged down in idiosyncratic speculations about some particular aspect at the expense of others. In other words, it does not, for example, play off the earlier Heidegger in favor of the later, as some interpreters have been prone to do; rather, it traces the underlying unity and structure of all of the works. And yet, the so-called advanced scholar as well can profit from this book. It is replete with fresh insights, the kind of insights that can be gained only through a long, intensely patient study of the whole of Heidegger's works. The book is divided into three main sections: Heidegger's Way of Thought; Being and Time; and the Roots of Metaphysical Thinking. Thus, the reader is presented in the first section with an analysis of Heidegger's "method," which is, of course, not something akin to a scientific method in terms of causal explanation applied to a pregiven subject matter but, literally, a path along which the subject matter emerges as we follow the way. The way is not merely a method; it is a part of the matter of thinking itself. The title of the book indicates that what is sought is not a new terminology about either an old or a new preexistent subject matter. Instead, the author seeks to push beyond to a nonterminological, nontechnical relation to what thinking is about. In order to accomplish this, we must abandon the unexamined metaphysical concepts that have distorted and falsified our basic life-experience, overtly in the history of Western philosophy and less obviously in the filtering through of these metaphysical concepts to the level of everyday experience. Mehta clarifies the much discussed "turn" in Heidegger's philosophy as a continuous, integral movement from first approaching Being through the openness and transcendence inherent in man, to defining man in terms of Being. This movement by no means signifies an abandonment of the basic aim of Beingand Time; it seeks, rather, to abandon the language of traditional metaphysics, its unavoidably representational and conceptual thinking, and its belief in the necessity of a rigid methodology. The second section consists of a straightforward, extremely lucid analysis of the basic concepts of Being and Time. This particular section should, indeed, be of great help to beginning students since it succeeds in reformulating the ideas in an accessible language without losing the intrinsic meaning. Here, as throughout the book, the translations are the author's own. They often deviate from existing translations, but they are always thoughtful and thought-provoking, particularly for the reader who is aware of the problems involved in BOOK REVIEWS 137 getting Heidegger into coherent English. Here, we should cite the author's remark (p. 57) that Heidegger "requires to be read literally." The reader must, therefore, be constantly alert and attentive to the precise...