Martin Heidegger by Marjorie Grene (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 427 Martin Heidegger. By MARJORIE GRENE. New York: Hillary House. 1957. Pp. 1!(!8. $!(!.00. This little book sets itself a rather big task. It is not, as the unwary might expect, an " introduction " to the thought of Heidegger, another of that wearisome genre of neutral presentation followed by timid and tentative hints as appraisal. Our author intends to tell us what Heidegger is worth philosophically. Unfortunately, she begins on a belligerent note and concludes with this savage remark: " Perhaps it is the voice of a seeker after dim and distant goals-but a not quite honest seeker, a lover of intellectual notoriety who knows that this scathing rhetoric will be accepted and admired." (p. 125) Perhaps Mrs. Grene's own rhetoric will make her book acceptable to those who will not, as she obviously has, devote themselves to the study of Heidegger. Mrs. Grene's charge of dishonesty is based in large part on her inability to see continuity between the early and late writings of Heidegger in terms of "ontology." When she does find herself able to praise him, it is Heidegger the existentialist and not the Heidegger who would be a metaphysician that she admires. And, of course, Heidegger has denied (dishonestly?) ever being an existentialist in the usual acceptation of that term. By an analysis, necessarily truncated, of Sein und Zeit, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik and Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, our author moves inexorably towards the conclusion we have quoted. This discussion of S. u. Z., because it sets aside the ontological intent of the work, is on the whole sympathetic. Indeed, in chapter three, Mrs. Grene sees this work as calling attention to factors usually absent from existentialist studies of ethics,.but she balks at calling the" existential analysis of dasein" ontology. Rather, it is, as Sartre has suggested, philosophical anthropology. One can easily agree that S. u. Z. is not ontology in any usual sense of that term, but one must ask if this is claimed for the book. Mrs. Grene refers to the notion of fundamentalontologie, but she does not seem to appreciate the relevance it might have for the ontology she is interested in. I should like to return to this. The analysis of Heidegger's- book on Kant is a very interesting one, although our author is too impassioned to understand what Heidegger may mean by time as the horizon in terms of which being appears to us. Here as later when speaking of the Einfuhrung, she relates the familiar criticisms of Heidegger's excursions into Greek etymologies, discounting without discussion his own defense of his procedure. Her final estimate of Heidegger is that, despite himself, he has earned a niche in history thanks to the 428 BOOK REVIEWS existentialism he disavows, but that his ontology is only mystification, rhetoric, an intentional confusion of issues. Since her book is quite brief, many of our author's conclusions will seem precipitous and hasty. This reviewer would agree with many of them while wishing they had been arrived at more cogently. To return to a previous implication, what is lacking in this book is the step beyond criticism, the philosophical assimilation of Heidegger's efforts. There is hardly a hint in this direction. Heidegger is seen as " a petulant and over-anxious self-apologist: concerned to tell us that this high, unintelligible search is all he has ever· undertaken-that what he did achieve he never intended or achieved at all. Were it not for his arrogance, it would be a tragic story: the tragedy of an artist who has destroyed his own work." (p. 125) One can easily agree that Heidegger has contributed to the study of man as moral agent, but does this recognition entail treating his aspirations towards metaphysics as dishonest? The Thomist who agrees with Fr. Isaac, 0. P. that the philosophy of St. Thomas is to be found in his commentaries on Aristotle, will be interested in the Aristotelian flav~r of many of Heidegger~s emphases. Perhaps a sympathetic reading of Heidegger from another point of view, kis point of view, would indicate that his writings have relevance, not for a metaphysics, but...