Heidegger, Being, and Truth (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 383 vii, Buber treats of "the inner rooms of knowledge, love, art, and faith" (p. 163), the work of the artist as the result of an intercourse of being with the artist's being, out of which "forms" arise (158). Professor Friedman's Introductory Essay, clear and systematic as it is, repeats or reformulates perhaps too much of the text itself. Correctly the collaboration between Martin Buber (1878-1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886--1929) and the analogy of Buber's and Gabriel Marcel's views of interhuman reality has been indicated (p. 12). There is a danger of defiguration when "the between" is put into ontological terms (p. 20), and the promised elucidation of the significance of Buber's essays "for other fields of thought" is hardly apparent . The statement that Buber should be characterized as a "philosophical anthropologist" (p. 11) is open to challenge and still requires justification; this reviewer would never detach Buber's vision of man from his religious views. Two of the essays have been translated by Professor R. G. Smith ('Glasgow), the translator of Between man and man (1947) and I and Thou (1950, 19583 with postscript by the author). Professor M. S. Friedman is known for his translations of Eclipse o] God (et al., 1953), Pointing the way (1957), Hasidism and modern man (1958), The origin and meaning oJ Hasidism (1960), and Daniel, Dialogues on Realization (1964, with Introductory Essay). lie is the author of Martin Buber: the Li]e o] Dialogue (1955) and co-editor of The Philosophy o] Martin Buber (1963), for which he compiled a Bibliography of Buber through 1962. Other books of Buber have been translated by others. Concerning this translation, the rendering of "Schau ist figurierende Treue zum Ungekannten" by "Vision is figurating faithfulness to the unknown" (p. 159), and of "den abgearteten abendliindischen Geist" by "the degenerate Western spirit" (p. 108) does not convey correctly the meaning of the original. In the Index, the name of C. G. Jung is missing (pp. 25, 124, 125). Several studies about Martin Buber already exist and, hopefully, more will follow. We are fortunate that the three-volume Werke (1962-64: Schri]ten zur Philosophie, Schri/ten zur Bibel, Schri]ten zum Chassidismus) and the Der Jude unvl sein Judentum (1963) are now available~ and that the Neue Verdeutschung der Schri]t has been completed. With the Hinweise (1953) and Nachlese (1965) it is the legacy of Martin Buber to following generations : "...einander reichen die Menschen das Himmelsbrot des Selbstseins" (Werke, I, 423).1 jACQUES WAARDENBURG University o] California, Los Angeles 1"It is from one man to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed". The Knowtedge of Man, p. 71. Heideeqer, Being, and Truth. By Laszlo Vers4nyi. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965. Pp. vii + 201. $1.45.) In this lucid and critical analysis of I-Ieidegger's later thought and his conception of truth, Professor Vers~nyi approaches Heidegger's philosophical investigations in a spirit which can only be described (in Kierkegaard's phrase) as a "sympathetic-antipathy." In his first chapter, Vers~nyi describes the fundamental structure of the Heideggerian phenomenological analysis of Dasein's mode of being-in-the-world and the conception of truth as disclosure. Next, he turns to a discussion of Heidegger's critique of that tendency to subjectivism, humanism, and nihilism, which has been, according to tteidegger, the characteristic n/sus of Western metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche. In a number of tantalizingly brief sections Heidegger's interpretations of Plato's theory of truth, Cartesianism, Kant's critique, and Nietzsche's metaphysics are summarized. Although these brief discussions are of interest, they can only be described as reports on Heidegger's extremely ambitious critique of Western philosophy, a critique which has, for some reason, been tacitly accepted (with some exceptions) by those who have bothered to comment on it. Nevertheless, in his analysis of the "meta- 384 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY physics" of Being and Time, Verse%nyi argues, with remarkable economy of expression, that Heidegger himself had, in Sein und Zeit, presented a form of subjectivistic-humanistic philosophy which he thought was characteristic of those thinkers who...