Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics by John D. Caputo (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 477 incomprehensibility (p. 167). The theist must specify such points, but the reader of this text cannot be satisfied with this advice at this juncture . Ward has built his theism on explanatory force and final intelligibility . Had he structured his appeal with rigorous metaphysical scrutiny we might know the terms of silence. As it stands, his advice has the ring of indiscriminate fideism: What is simply explanatory and intelligible is supported with ultimate silence. This is a shame, for his image of the moral agent sets forth the true nobility of the religious life, and his "suggestion " that God is the free determinator of free determinant agency incites the best of met111physical speculation. WILLIAM MoF. WrLSON Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics. By JOHN D. CAPUTO. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Pp. 308. Clothbound and paperback. Heidegger's thinking has inspired many fine critical dialogues with the history of philosophy-Pierre Aubenque on Aristotle, John Sallis on Plato, Jean-Luc Marion on Descartes, Jean-Fran(,lois Courtine on Suarez, Gerard Granel on Kant-but a substantial study of Thomas Aquinas from a Heideggerian standpoint has yet to be produced. John D. Caputo performs an invaluable service of demystification in pointing out the various confusions from which Etienne Gilson, Johannes Lotz, Cornelio Fabro, Bertrand Rioux, John Deely, Gustav Siewerth and Max Miiller suffer in their differing efforts to situate Heidegger on a Thomistic map. He makes it clear that Thomistic thought falls under the rubric of what Heidegger calls onto-theo-logy and that the attempt to present Thomas as the unique exception to the general " forgetfulness of being " in Western metaphysics is based on an inadequate grasp of the phenomenological , or, as Caputo prefers to write, "aletheiological ", sense which the word "being" has for Heidegger. No doubt this has been pointed out before, for instance in Josef Van de Wiele's Zijnswaarheid en Onverborgenheid (Louvain, 1964), and in reviews of the above-named authors' works but Caputo's is perhaps the most lucid and meticulous treatment of the issue, providing a foolproof antidote to the tiresome misunderstandings which the interferences of Thomistic and Heideggerian diction can generate. Even more valuable than this critique of his predecessors is Caputo's nuanced account of the stages of Heidegger's dialogue with scholasticism, 478 BOOK REVIEWS from his early efforts " to bring the results of medieval logic to bear on the problems of contemporary German logic " (p. 21) to his critique of scholasticism from the position of Being and Time in 1928 and the more radical critique worked out in the Nietzsche lectures of 1941. Caputo's discussion of Carl Braig's influence on the young Heidegger (pp. 45-57) reveals how a blend of Schelling and scholasticism could nourish the project of a phenomenology of being, for instance when such words as the following are translated into phenomenological observations: " All the attempts to give Being conceptual determinations are defective and contradictory. Being is a 'position,' 'positing,' 'doing,' 'energy,' 'affirmation ,' ' ground of possibility ' : these and similar definitions mix up the primary characteristic marks found in beings with the essential character of Being" (Braig, cit. p. 51). Caputo suggests that the young Heidegger 's reflections on " the Being of meaning, the status and 'realm' of meaning" (p. 31) might have led to "a breakthrough in Scholastic thought comparable to the initiatives of Marechal and Rahner" (p. 17). But his quest for "a really philosophieal assessment of Scholasticism" (Heidegger, op. eit., p. 18) was abandoned during 1917-1918, years in which he sought "a fundamental clarification of my philosophical standpoint " (Heidegger, op. eit., p. 56) which made "the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me-but not Christianity and metaphysics (the latter, to be sure, in a new sense)" (ibid) . In 1928 Heidegger sees the obscurities in the scholastic discussion of existence and essence as arising from a failure to trace these concepts back to their foundation in experience. " On this account, Scholasticism is a species of objectivism; that is, it takes the products of thought to be things in themselves which have somehow entered our world without our cooperation" (p. 72). Heidegger finds the...