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BOOK REVIEWS 247 Heidegger on the Divine : The Thinker, the Poet and God. By James L. Perotti. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974. Pp. 134. $7.50) Those familiar with Heidegger will wonder how his infrequent and often oracular observations concerning "the holy," "divinity," "God" and "the gods," could inspire a booklength manuscript. However, this slender volume is even slimmer than it at first appears (perhaps this will help relieve that puzzle). Of 134 pages, 17 are footnotes (generally of the German text), 9 are a bibliography, 3 constitute the index. Of the remaining 105 pages, more than two-thirds "prepare" the topic. What we really have, then, is a rehashing of Heidegger's metahistory of philosophy for the purpose of showing why "after the overcoming of metaphysics, after the abandonment of the god of philosophy, Heidegger's thinking can properly be called god-less" (p. 117). Is it unfair to wonder why one would devote a book to a subject concerning which its author says, with reference to Heidegger's thought: "It is a kind of thinking which makes no claims about the divine and has no desire to speculate about this matter. Another way to characterize this thinking in regard to the divine is to call it a silence, a thinking that makes neither affirmation nor denial about god" (p. 117)? Given Heidegger's studied silence concerning "the divine," what is the book's point? The point and utility of Perotti's book seems to me to consist primarly in collecting Heidegger's scattered remarks concerning the divine and fitting them into a coherent and textually correct frame of reference. His thesis, stripped of nuances, is that Heidegger's putative overcoming of metaphysical thinking and speaking is simultaneously an overcoming of traditional theological ways of thinking and speaking. The god of theology is metaphysical, and "even if theology begins with an experience of its god, it remains metaphysical exactly because of its own metaphysical response to that experience" (p. 64). And of that response the later Heidegger has said: "Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god" (Identity and Difference). After a brief orienting chapter ("The Way of Martin Heidegger"), chapters 2, 3 and 4 place a gloss on Heidegger's familiar attempts first to provide a foundation for metaphysics and then to overcome it altogether. Chapter 5 paraphrases Heidegger's mythical approach to Being, an approach which follows quite naturally from his (to my mind lamentable) abandonment of "representational" (i.e., philosophical) thinking. With the abandonment of discursive speech we are left with poetry. And, again quite naturally, Perotti's penultimate chapter, "The Poet and the Thinker," is really an account of Heidegger on H61derlin. Whatever the strengths of Perotti's~book, its defects far outweigh them, in my opinion. I shall mention only a few here, for reasons of space. First, the scholarship is misleading. Often it is deficient. The early chapters are written as if no one had ever spoken to Heidegger's relation to the tradition. Werner Marx is never mentioned, for example. Taken independently , there are better books readily available for each chapter's theme. I have already mentioned Marx. Beda Allemann is better on Heidegger and H61derlin. He, too, is never mentioned. Considerations of scholarship apart for the moment, there is a second deficiency. Perotti's brief account often fails to explain. It merely paraphrases. The central failure of the book, however, is that it is totally uncritical. This will endear Perotti to Heidegger enthusiasts who imitate the master's "way of thinking" by mindless "explication" and for whom criticism is metaphysical original sin. But for philosophers the sins are oracular pronouncements and revivalist ontologies. One illustration may help. In paraphrasing Heidegger's account (in Logos) of Heraclitus's Fragment 50, Perotti writes: "The usual superficial translations understand little of what is said here; many translators term ambiguous his richness of meaning. A typical translation runs: listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are...

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