Engaging Heidegger by Richard Capobianco (review)

Richard Capobianco gives us a clearly written book for specialists in Heidegger studies that is often exemplary in marshalling textual evidence, in its appreciation of contextual nuance, and in the circumscription of its project. Engaging Heidegger opens its first chapter establishing a polemic, on the one hand, against those (a) who suggest Heidegger’s focus changed over the course of his career from “Being” to something else (Ereignis); and, on the other hand, against those (b) who contest the “standard version” of Heidegger (that there is a shift in his thinking from Dasein as the occurrent place of Sein to thinking das Sein selbst) by suggesting not only was there was no historical evolution, but that Sein was never Heidegger’s focus. Thomas Sheehan, an exponent of the latter view, serves as Capobianco’s foil for advancing a version of the standard version; namely, that throughout his career “Being” was the “Ur-phenomenon” for Heidegger, that “he named and renamed [it] again and again over the course of his lifetime of thinking,” that “the abundant variety of names that he put into play succeeded in bringing into view the varied features of this one, simple phenomenon” (4). Capobianco’s project is “intra-textual,” and, notwithstanding a few remarks regarding linguistic formulations, offers no critical assessment of Heidegger’s thinking.

The first chapter sets the stakes: “The Fate of Being” draws the line between proper and improper readings of Heidegger according to the determination of what truly was die Sache (“the matter”) of Heidegger’s thinking: ‘Sein,’ which Capobianco defines as “the temporal-spatial, finite and negative, appearing of beings in their beingness, which calls forth and even compels from the human being (Dasein) a correspondence in language that allows both what appears—and appearing itself—to be made manifest meaningfully” (4).

Capobianco’s argumentative method engages and parries two strategically different “differences”—one (a) is a difference in die Sache due to Heidegger’s evolution, and the other (b) a difference that abjures the standard version of Sein as Heidegger’s Sache—so as to bind Being and beings, Being and appearance, Being and the “event” (Ereignis) that opens up the clearing (Lichtung) and lets beings appear and be the beings they are, so tightly as to afford no meaningful place for either (a) or (b).

So, for example, Capobianco meticulously argues that, while Sein is das Sein des Seienden (“the being of being”), it must not be confused with die Seiendheit des Seienden (“the beingness of being,” metaphysics), and thereby he binds Sein absolutely to Seienden without reducing the former to the latter. Or, when he addresses a passage of Heidegger about the giving (Es gibt) of Being often read to indicate Sein must be thought apart from Seienden (21), Capobianco sees this only as evidence that Sein is die Sache and dismisses its “separability” from beings. “Ereignis: (Only) Another Name for Being Itself” continues this rejoinder to (a) and (b) which see Ereignis as what “gives Being,” insisting that “Being itself [should] be thought as Eriegnis” (49).

The core of Engaging Heidegger (chapters 3–6) offers us compelling surveys of Heidegger’s thinking about being “at home,” Angst/astonishment, and Lichtung/light that adduce evidence of a change in Heidegger’s thinking. Here Capobianco is at his best; for example, chapter 3 artfully leads us from Heidegger’s early identification of Unheimlichkeit (“uncanniness”) with Dasein’s relation to Being, to the middle Heimkehr (“return home”) revolving around readings of Sophocles, to the later, untroubled Heimat in Gelassenheit (“home in letting-be”). This coheres well with the chapter “From Angst to Astonishment,” which details a similarly nuanced movement from the anxious self-alienation of the early to more pacific, joyful later Heidegger. Similarly, in two chapters on Lichtung (“light”), Capobianco shows the early Heidegger’s move, by way of the Greeks, from Da-sein as the lighting of Being to the later, non-photic clearing of Being, where ‘clearing of Being’ is read subjectively, rather than objectively (which would...