Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger Author(s): John Wild Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 60, No. 22, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, Sixtieth Annual Meeting (Oct. 24, 1963), pp. 664-677 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2023514 Accessed: 08/07/2009 14:28
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THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY SYMPOSIUM: MARTIN HEIDEGGER THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER
*

only after considerable doubt and hesitation that I decided to write this paper and to present it here at this time. For Heidegger is a philosopher-in deference to his own usage I should say a thinker-of the first rank who has challenged the whole tradition of Western philosophy with new conceptions of surprising depth and originality. From the year 1931 when I sat in his classes at Freiburg, I have read what he has published with all the concentration I could muster, and I have learned many things from him. Hence any attempt to compress the lifework of such a man into a half-hour discourse of this kind at a public meeting for which he would have only slight respect, if any, seemed to me, from the first, to run the risk of producing a mere dead summary, and thus a caricature of living thought, maintained through the years by concentrated study and still on its way. At first I felt that it might be more fitting to present a single theme in greater detail. But the ideas of a thinker who has ceaselessly devoted himself to the overarching question of Being (Sein) must be understood together. So I soon abandoned this plan. In understanding Heidegger's way toward being, it is a question of trying to convey some sense of the whole way or nothing. So I have reluctantly decided to attempt this, with a deep sense of the risks involved. I am now facing these risks with the hope that, in spite of the inadequacies of this summary account, some of you may be led to a more serious consideration of the issues raised by Heidegger's challenge. As a result of these considerations, the paper that I shall now present will be divided into two major divisions: (I) a summary account of Heidegger's way of thinking; (1) his destruction of Western ontology, (2) the new analysis of human existence presented in his early work Sein und Zeit, and (3) the later development of these ideas in the later works, especially Holzwege; and finally (II) a critical discussion of the issues raised by this challenge.
I. HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY

IT was

1. The Destruction of Western Ontology. Heidegger introduced his revolutionary analysis of human existence in Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, by a brief section entitled The Destruction
* To be presented in a symposium on "Martin sixtieth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Division, on December 28, 1963. Heidegger" Association, at the Eastern

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of Ontology, in which he suggested a new interpretation of the history of Western philosophy. Since that time, he has supported and enriched this interpretation by many further detailed historical studies, including his Kant book, his studies of Greek philosophy (in Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935; Vortrdge und Aufsitze, 1954; What Is Philosophy?, 1956; and Der Satz vom Grund, 1957), his essay on Hegel (in Holzwege, 1946), and his recent work on Nietzsche. He has also made it very clear that by destruction he does not mean a purely negative attack, as the title might suggest, but rather an uncovering of the roots of this history in order to understand the basic decisions that have determined its whole course and to open up other alternatives. A crucial phase in this challenge to the central tradition of Western thought is Heidegger's reinterpretation of the so-called "pre-Socratic" thinkers. In the very title Heidegger finds a certain patronizing suggestion that these thinkers are crude and undeveloped in relation to later thought, which is borne out by the rather crude and overly simple interpretations that have been read into their fragments through the centuries. At the very beginning of his active career Heidegger rejected these easy readings, and since then he has devoted his full powers of perception and his real command of the Greek language and literature to working out a more authentic and subtle interpretation of these fragments. There is no time here for a detailed and exhaustive analysis. I must be content to single out a few major points for bare mention. Pre-Socratic thinking is open to the overarching horizon of being, without dividing it into the separate regions of the objective anid the subjective. This division came later. The Romans mistranslated phusis as natura, meaning physical change or organic birth. But while this special interpretation was prepared for by Plato and Aristotle, it fails to convey the full scope of the original Greek meaning-to come into being, that is, for things not only to emerge and endure, but also to appear as what they really are in the light of the logos which gathers them together into a world of meaning. Thus being is not opposed to appearing. To come into being is to appear, to be revealed. This is the meaning of Parmenides' saying that being and knowing are one and the same. Truth happens in and through human activity. But it is not a property of propositions in a subjective mind. It is also in the things, whatever and wherever they may be, when they are revealed as what they really are and brought out of the shadows where they are hidden into the unhiddenness of truth (aletheia). But the light of being cannot reveal beings without concealing itself. Hence Heraclitus says that phusis (being) loves to hide.

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According to Heidegger, the truth of this prophetic saying has been verified by the whole future course of Western philosophy down to the present time, from which being has effectively hidden itself. The first step in this decline came with Plato, who lost contact with the world of being, and analyzed it into a number of separate things each having its own visible aspect or whatness (eidos). In this way being was reduced to beings. Then, in each of these, the fixed and changeless eidos was sharply distinguished from another factor (me on) which becomes and appears to the senses. But the real thing never becomes, and never appears. Furthermore truth no longer consists in the revealing of the whole concrete thing in the field of being. This field has been forgotten. Truth consists rather in the correspondence of a psychic assertion with a pure idea in which an apparent thing only participates. Our attention is turned away from the world in which we are (being), and right thinking is determined rather by certain rules coming from a separated realm of ideas. Truth becomes correctness, and the way is prepared for the dominance of logic over insight. This trend was carried further by Aristotle, the inventor of formal logic, who identified truth with a property of propositions in the mind, not in things, though traces of the original pre-Socratic view can still be found in the Aristotelian texts. As Heidegger sees it, Christianity is founded on faith and the authority of the Church, which clearly have no place in philosophical thinking. Hence the coming of Christianity exerted no essential influence on Western philosophy. It is true that the idea of creation ex nihilo introduced the idea of nothingness in a new context, and contradicted a well-established principle: that out of nothing comes nothing. But this nothing is still conceived merely as the opposite of beings, what they are not, and is never thoroughly thought through in relation to being itself, with which it is closely allied. Even at its very pinnacle, the doctrine of God, Christian theology never penetrated through to the ground of being itself, but merely took this for granted and presupposed it. For the Christian, divinity is not being itself, but only a highest being. In the Middle Ages, philosophy was placed under the guidance of the Church in a new institutional framework. But this led to no new ideas, no really new way of thought. In fact, the idea of a Christian philosophy is as impossible as that of a round square. So no important advance beyond Plato and Aristotle was made in the Middle Ages. Philosophy remained concerned with beings rather than with being, and being, though constantly presupposed, remained forgotten. Descartes continued this rationalist tradition, but carried it

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forward by making intellectual certainty and security the object of his quest. He found it in himself as an isolated thinking subject cut off from the world and facing the beings around him as objects, now subject to a detached observation which could measure them, calculate, and master them. This subject-object schema soon led, on the objective side, to the appearance of modern technology and science, which are essentially interdependent and have, therefore, developed together. It also led, on the subjective side, to the appearance of idealism, which traces the process by which objects are projected and finally assimilated by a spirit working in man. After the collapse of idealism, it has finally led to those modern forms of existentialism which reduce the whole of philosophy to anthropology, among which certain critics have placed Heidegger's early work Sein und Zeit. The last stage of this historical development is Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power, in which all ends are subordinated to a process of willing which, like the Kantian good will, is selfjustifying. The final acceptance of this willing for the sake of willing leads to the doctrine of the eternal return, which reminds us, on a cosmic scale, of the cyclic revolutions of a machine. According to Heidegger, this philosophy of the will to power, whether we are aware of it or not, expresses the ethos of the age in which we live, the atomic age, as it is called, the age of power. It seems strange that a time we think of as advanced should be named for the releasing of a blind, subhuman energy. Nevertheless, this name is appropriate, for though we are not yet sure how it will be used, this is the age of unprecedented power. Our sciences and technology have at last succeeded in mastering the energies of nature and in subduing the earth to human subjects, though precisely to which ones is not yet clear. In order to decide this issue, the powers of nature are being employed in a game of power politics for the human mastery of the world. Even intelligence is no longer sought for its own sake, but has been reduced to a tool for the will to power. The peoples of the earth have become masses, human life has been leveled down, and the Gods have fled from this darkening world. This is not a sudden new development. Heidegger sees it rather as the culmination of a two-thousand-year history, beginning in ancient Greece with the thought of Plato and Aristotle and ending with Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power and the atomic age. This, of course, is only a bare summary of an interpretation of Western history that is supported by many searching studies of the pre-Socratic thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and the recent two-volume book on Nietzsche. It is only by

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an over-all interpretation of this kind that we may understand the historic roots of the world in which we are living and may become open to other possibilities, so that we may responsibly and freely face our situation. The basic source of this historical development toward an egocentric humanism, according to Ileidegger, lies in a forgetting of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) inaugurated in the thought of Plato and Aristotle and continued through the ages until it reached its last expression in the thought of Nietzsche. An understanding of this history suggests, as an unexplored alternative, the return to being. What might be meant by such a return, and what is the meaning of being? Heidegger has devoted a major part of his energies to these questions, which arise from his historical studies. His investigations have led to certain revolutionary suggestions expressed at two stages in his career, first in his influential work Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, which is primarily concerned with the first question, and second in his later writings, which are largely concerned with the second. Let us now turn to these suggestions in the order named. 2. The Analysis of Human Existence in Sein und Zeit. Human existence is always concerned with its own being. It desires to be. According to Heidegger this means that man has a peculiarly close relation to being itself and that traditional thought has been mistaken in deriving its ontological categories primarily from an analysis of subhuman things rather than from human existence and its basic modes. Heidegger does not arrive at being in Sein und Zeit. But by approaching man with being in mind and inquiring about human existence and its different modes, there is no question that Heidegger has opened up new perspectives and has shed much-needed light on basic aspects of the human world. In this investigation, he uses the phenomenological method, which, in his view, is concerned with the phenomenon, anythina that shows itself, in attempting to find linguistic expressions that will reveal this phenomenon precisely as it shows itself to be. By using this method, Heidegger shows that man is not merely a special kind of thing, or substance endowed with distinctive properties, but that he exists in a peculiar and distinctive way that sharply marks him off ontologically from nonhuman beings. Heidegger calls these peculiarly human ways of existing existentials to mark them off from the traditional categories that characterize nonhuman things. The most basic of these is being-in-the-world. This belongs necessarily to human existence, which Heidegger calls Dasein (being-there or beyond) because of his self-transcendence. There

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is no man without a world, and no world without Dasein. Man is not in the world as a smaller object, like a drop of water, is contained in a larger object, like a glass. He is in the world by dwelling in it as a field of care, as a soldier is in the army, or a doctor is in medicine. This world-field is the widest horizon in which all special regions and types of object are found. But it is centered in man and his projects. Hence this horizon of our engaged existence is neither purely subjective nor purely objective, and differs radically from the objective frame of a pure spectator. We encounter persons and things that are absolutely independent of us. But the horizon of meaning in which we place them is determined a priori by human existence and its projects. This is the position of Sein und Zeit. In this work, Heidegger gives penetrating descriptions of the peculiar, oriented space of this Lebenswelt, as Husserl called it, which is markedly different from any purely objective or geometric space, and its peculiar lived temporality, which differs markedly from the now succession of what we may call "clock time." He also considers the self who is in the world, and the different modes of being that constitute the structure of human care. It is rather the impersonal one (das Man, not the they) who takes over and for the most part dominates the world of public life. According to Heidegger, authentic personal existence is attainable only in part by a struggle against these impersonal attitudes of das Man, who runs away from his own anxiety, his own death, and his own concerns, to lose himself in technical business and the things that anyone interchangeably can do. This kind of life lacks historical, temporal continuity, for it is constituted by functions dependent on objects that are present before the mind and the senses, and that succeed each other like the nows of clock time. This present now takes precedence over the other ecstasies of time (past and future), so that the future is regarded as a not-yet-now, and the past as a no-longer-now. Such existence, like Kierkegaard's aesthetic way of life, degenerates into a set of separate functions and phases that run off like discontinuous processes, and lacks any temporal integrity of its own. Heidegger's account of how authentic existence may be achieved through the facing of my anxiety, the anticipation of my own death here and now, listening to the call of my conscience, and resolute choice of my last possibilities up to the very end, is both suggestive and revealing. By such a choice, which is open to me at this moment, I may commit the whole of my defective and guilty past to a project for which I really care. In this way I may attain a certain integrity which holds the different ecstasies of time

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(future, past, and present) togetL. r in a flexible and open pattern that is nevertheless coherent and self-identical through the changes of time. These sections of Sein und Zeit have already exerted an important influence on psychiatrists, like Binswanger and Boss, and even such severe critics as L6owith agree that the last sections of the book, concerned with lived time and human historicity, are both strikingly original and profound. 3. The Role of Being in the Later Writings. In Sein und Zeit it is a human world that is revealed as being organized around human projects. But in the later writings a radical change has occurred. Heidegger now rejects such a position as too subjectivistic and anthropocentric. It is Being that projects the world from beyond, and man is merely the place of this projection. His highest function is to act as the guardian or shepherd of being. In the course of this new turn of thought, Heidegger's critical attitude toward traditional metaphysics has sharpened in intensity. In the article "What Is Metaphysics?" (1930) and in the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) hope is held out for the development of a new conceptual metaphysics of being from the destruction of the old. The latter work carefully traces and analyzes the gradual impoverishment of the meaning of Being beginning in Greek times. In this gradual thinning process, first becoming, then appearing, then thinking, and finally oughtness were removed from the meaning of being and opposed to it. But by a recovery of the sense of being as understood by the preSocratic thinkers, these lost children of being may be restored to their parent, and a new and authentic metaphysics inaugurated. In the essay entitled "Wissenschaft und Besinnung" (in Vortrdge und Aufsitze), however, it is said that historical scholarship can no longer build on the basis of the tradition, and in the next essay, entitled "The Overcoming of Metaphysics," it is stated that modern metaphysics is not even aware of its own ground, that it has reached its end, though this ending may occupy a protracted interval of time. These remarks are accompanied by critical comments on the meaninglessness of modern mass existence which at times become not only harsh but somewhat shrill. Heidegger has recently published a large number of brief but penetrating historical essays and reflective studies of contemporary themes. Many of these are concerned with technology which, he believes, is the controlling power in modern life. In his interesting book on the principle of sufficient reason (Der Satz vom Grund, 1957) he shows how the so-called "efficient cause," even

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in later Greek thought, meant much more than the blind activity of later interpretations. If we read the Aristotelian texts carefully, we find that it is rather the revealing insight of the artisan, who gathers the various causal factors (material, formal, and final) together in a meaningful project, that constitutes the "first source" of the technical enterprise. Heidegger then shows how this is true not only of ancient but also of modern technology, which is not merely an activity that gives us control over natural forces but a whole perspective, a way of revealing things in terms of causes and effects, means and ends. This scientific, calculative mode of understanding, thoroughly grounded and prepared for by the whole course of Western metaphysics, has now become dominant in our time, and is making exclusive claims for itself as the only sound and verifiable way of looking at all beings, including man. These absolute claims, however, are unjustified, for objective science has limits. For example, it cannot understand itself. There is no science of science. Furthermore, it is closed to being, and to global world meanings. Hence it is incapable of giving us an adequate grasp of our existence in the world. It is blind to what is essentially human and, if left to itself, will destroy us. Nevertheless it has certainly come to stay, and it is absurd to dream of its disappearance. The only hope lies in the development of another mode of revealing which Heidegger sometimes calls besinnen, persistent reflection on the meaning of things, and The scientific technician can sometimes simply Denken-thinking. reckon and calculate. He can predict and control natural forces. But he cannot think. The thinker is not interested in achieving mastery or control. He is seeking only to understand what he himself and other beings really are. He is, therefore, open to the appeal of being and, at any given time, tries not so much to realize any particular result as to answer this call of being and to move in its direction. Sometimes in his more sustained and penetrating analyses, like that of the work of art and Van Gogh's painting of the peasant woman 's shoes in Holzwege, one gets the feeling that this Denken is very close to what Heidegger called phenomenology in Sein und Zeit. But at other times it merges on the poetic and even the mystical. Thus Heidegger says that the thinker and the poet are very closely allied, and he seems to feel that many things he wishes to say were better said by Hloderlin than by any possible philosophical discourse. Heidegger is still on the way, and his work is not finished. But as he nears the end, he seems to be wearying of philosophy and the struggle for conceptual clarity.

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Being is separate from the world, and absolutely transcends us. We cannot grasp its meaning. We can only try to listen. Those few who may be able to hear its voice may be able to tell us something of the world to which it is now destining us. But they can do this only in the language of poetry or of a semi-philosophical mysticism.
II. CRITICISM

Let us now turn to the task of criticism. First, what are we to think of Heidegger 's over-all interpretation of the history of Western thought? His views of the pre-Socratic philosophers are often supported by a profound understanding of the Greek language and the cultural background. They are always original and highly suggestive. But as several commentators have pointed out, doubts arise as to whether Heidegger is not reading more of his own thinking into these fragments than the actual evidence will bear. One wonders, for example, if the messag,e of these texts is as unified as Heidegger seems to suppose and if any of them can be so readily harmonized with a twentieth-century German philosophy that is basically historical in character and oriented toward the future. So far as our Western tradition is concerned, is it not true that this historical, eschatological mode of thought comes from Biblical rather than from Greek sources? This leads to further questions concerning Heidegger's rather oversimplified interpretation of the general history of Western philosophy. According to him, it is essentially Greek in origin and development, and can be characterized, after its great beginning, as a growing forgetfulness of being, adherence to the subjectiveobjective pattern with an increasing emphasis on the objective point of view, the dominance of logic, and a neglect of existence. While this broad description may be justifiably applied to several influential trends of Western thought, it certainly does not apply to philosophical rebels, like Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, who have been deeply moved by Biblical concepts and attitudes. In Sein und Zeit Heidegger refers to them, though in a rather patronizing tone. Now, however, he seems to dismiss them as Christian philosophers who do not think for themselves (cf. Introduction to Metaphysics, 7; What Is Philosophy?, 31) and whose ideas, therefore, do not need to be taken seriously. That this is the expression of an incidental bias rather than of a grounded historical judgment is indicated by certain sections of Sein und Zeit, like the account of oneness (das Man) and anxiety, which clearly reveal the influence of Kierkegaard. As Plato eloquently and cogently argues in the Phaedrus (275), ideas may

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indeed be disqualified by the actual evidence, but not by a mere mentioning of its historical sources. A theory is not necessarily false simply because it was inspired by Biblical sources. I believe that Sein und Zeit is the most disciplined attempt that has yet been made to explore the human Life-world and its existential structures. But it still suffers from many omissions and defects. Much is said about the human life-space, but nothing at all about the lived body. This is a serious omission. Much is said about the self-transcendence of man, but nothing about the notion of radical transcendence and its derivation. In view of the important role played by religion in all known cultures and in human history, this also is a serious omission. The structures described in Sein und Zeit presumably belong to all men everywhere. What is said about tools and technical regions certainly holds true of modern European man. But, as Zuurdeeg asks, does it hold true of the primitive New Guinea smith who worships his forge? Are we then to presume that he is not human? Heidegger maintains that being-with-others (Mitsein) necessarily belongs to human existence. But he develops this notion only to a minimal degree, and what he says of the attitude of oneness (das Man), which "dominates" our public life, leaves the impression that social life is always unauthentic. This is borne out by the fact that, while he has much to say about authentic individual existence, Heidegger never in his published writings deals carefully and effectively with social and political issues, nor does he ever raise serious questions concerning the nature of a just society. The most serious difficulty with Sein und Zeit as it stands is the abstractness of the conception of the world as it is written (die Welt and in-der-Welt-Sein). I understand from Walter Biemel that in his class lectures Heidegger has considered concrete, historical worlds, such as the world of a primitive people, the Greek world, and so on. But no such concrete descriptions are given to the reader of Sein und Zeit. In view of emphatic statements to the effect that ontological structures appear only in and through individual ontic facts, this whole approach would seem to be onesidedly ontological and abstract. A few historical examples would have brought the whole discussion down to earth, and might have clarified certain distinctions that are actually required but never really made. For example, the public world needs to be distinguished from the world of the responsible individual, and both from the single world that transcends and yet ineludes them all. But in Sein und Zeit all of these are simply confused together under the single

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term the world (die Welt). This has helped to produce certain further confusions in Heidegger's peculiar use of the term Being in his later writings, to which we shall now turn. As Heidegger hints in Sein und Zeit, the concept of Being is in certain respects similar to that of world. But the two meanings are not equivalent. The relation between them calls for clarification. And yet at no point in Heidegger's voluminous writings is this delicate relationship carefully considered. It is not surprising, therefore, that at different stages of Heidegger's argument it is conceived in very different ways that are consistent neither with each other nor with the actual evidence. Let me now try to indicate briefly the nature of these confusions. Heidegger often speaks of Being as that which gives meaning and which enables beings to appear in the light of truth. While certain usages may suggest this, it is not strictly true and cannot be reconciled with Heidegger's assertions (cf. Sein und Zeit, 227) that beings can simply be hidden in the darkness without being revealed. When he speaks of being as the source of truth he is actually identifying being with the notion of world which gathers beings together and gives them meaning (Cf. Introduction to Metaphysics, 62). But this is a serious error. Being is a universal or transcendental concept of which particular beings are instances. World, on the other hand, is a ground on which figures may be meaningfully placed. For something to be in the world is not to be an instance of the universal concept world. There are also other differences. For example, there are radically different versions of the world, such as an Eastern world and a Western world. But while Being may be more or less clearly conceived, it has no versions. There is neither an Eastern nor a Western being. Being and world are closely related, but they are not the same-as Heidegger himself recognizes in certain passages. But with no careful nor adequate clarification of the complex interrelations of the two, this difference is expressed in Heidegger's later writings in a highly exaggerated way for highly inadequate and even distorted reasons. One of these we have already suggested. Having confused the world in Sein und Zeit with human versions of the world (personal and public), be saw the need of freeing himself from this and other anthropocentric types of existential philosophy. Looking for an independent factor transcending all human meanings and projects, and unable to find this in an anthropocentric version of the world, he identified this with Being itself, now viewed as a transcendent field of meaning entirely separate from and beyond the world and its human versions. He

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was aided in taking this step by another sense of being that he had long recognized (cf. Sein und Zeit, 227), namely, that which is without being revealed, which resists our meanings, and simply is an opaque and recalcitrant fact. These two senses are joined in Heidegger's later thinking. Being is now conceived as an independent center of meaning to which the human mind has access and which is also responsible for the brute facticity of man and things, throwing them into their bare existence and dominating this by a mysterious fate. In this way, being becomes the condition for ontic, factual beings as well as the source of all meaning and understanding, both together in one, with the latter (ontological) dominating the former (the ontic) in a traditional idealistic manner. Thus in the late Heidegger, Seinsvergessenheit, not Weltvergessenheit, becomes the ultimate philosophic sin. Intelligible world meanings are nothing but egotistic constructions, which are fated by a mysterious Being quite separate from the world, though incorporated in its ontic facts. No intelligible escape from the absolute domination of objective reason and technology, to which Western metaphysics has led, is possible. Understanding has fatefully become contaminated at its very source, and the only escape lies in poetic thinking and a strange mythology of Being (Sein). This is an authentic challenge to the central traditions of Western metaphysics which now underlie our ways of thinking and our ways of life. But Heidegger's diagnosis is sounder than his suggested remedy. In working out his own answer, he has fallen into several avoidable errors. In his historical existence man encounters independent things, agencies, and powers which exist in their own right independently of him. By the revealing power that belongs to his active existence as he struggles with them for life, he gathers them together in a world frame around him which brings them into the light and gives them meaning. Being is a universal concept which strictly refers to each of these entities in so far as it is or can be allotted a place in this world horizon that manifests its meaning. But the range of this concept, being, extends beyond these beings in the world, for a being can be without being revealed. Thus it also covers those aspects of manifested beings which are as yet opaque, those brute facts which resist our meanings, and those vast ranges of being which we know that we do not know. All these are without being known. Of course, in referring to these fields of obscurity as beings, we already allot them a minimal meaning-that they will turn out to be something, with a real sense and place in the world. But

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this is the expression of a vital hope, not of an access to being as such that is a priori and certain. Meaning is created and found only at the cost of resolute daring, struggle, and risk. Thus the two terms 'being' and 'world' have radically differing references. 'World' is the more primordial. It refers to the revealing horizon of human existence that gives and finds meaning. Being, on the other hand, refers to the different beings, one by one, in which meaning is already found or expected. The two notions are diverse in structure, priority, and range. But this does not mean that being can be separated from the world and its versions. It is only by finding its place in the world horizon that we discover what a being really is. And even the things without sense and those which reject our meanings have this privative significance in relation to the world order. This world and our versions of it are always found together. We have no direct access to the world, but only through our finite versions of it, and no access to these versions except in and through the particular ontic facts and events that bear them. Nevertheless we are open to the world from the beginning. It is the horizon of our manifesting power, and, without this, there would be no versions. Finally, without these versions of meaning, the brute facts and beings would remain empty of meaning and would never come into the light and really be. In this ontological (revealing) order it is clear that world is prior to being, for it is this world which develops the possible being of things and makes them truly to be. From this point of view we can say that being is the first dawning of truth and that truth is the full emergence of being into the light. If this is so, the great error in the history of Western thought has been not the neglect of being, but rather the neglect of the world horizon, which an increasingly atomistic and objectivistic thought has reduced to its component regions, and these to the objects within them. The revealing light that gives meaning and truth has been darkened and restricted, and the world neglected and dehumanized. But we are not fatally bound to continue in these errors. We are not restricted to poetry and mythology alone as the only correctives. With the tools of phenomenology, which Heidegger has apparently abandoned, we may investigate the different ontic versions of the world to which we have direct access, and the basic structures of life-space, lived time, being-with, care, responsible choice, death, and transcendence, which they share in common. An understanding of these may provide us with a sound basis for speculation concerning the world which transcends

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them all and into which they all open, unless they become closed and fanatical. Here we are now faced with two extreme contrary views. The first, which we may call the subjectivistic extreme, maintains that what we have been calling the world does not exist at all, only a meaningless abyss into which man has projected his own meaningful orders and versions. This view is taken by many of the influential existential thinkers of our time. And for the most part, aside from certain undeveloped hints, this is the substance of Sein und Zeit. The second, which we may call the objectivistic or realistic extreme, maintains that the world exists independently of us, either already formed or building itself through us in history. This is the view of the later Heidegger, which I believe is an overeorrection. Though I have no time to develop this assertion, I think that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes, in a third position with a distinctive structure of its own, which I have tried to suggest indirectly in this criticism of Heidegger's ontology.
JOHN WILD
YALE UNIVERSITY

WILD ON HEIDEGGER

of his understandable reluctance, Professor Wild has succeeded in presenting an illuminating survey of the main themes in Heidegger's thought from Sein und Zeit to the period of Iolzwege (1946). It seems to me, however, that Heidegger's position is both more defective and more defensible than Wild allows. In his account of Sein und Zeit, Wild leaves the listener with the impression that Heidegger rejects the Cartesian concepts of homogeneous space and clock time without giving any account of how we come to suppose the applicability and validity of such mistaken and dangerous notions. It is important, however, to note that Heidegger does not simply reject the traditional attempt of philosophers to describe space and time as they are in themselves, independent of our self-centered Lebenswelt and its concerns. Rather, as Wild hints in his description of clock time as the time of the inauthentic life, Heidegger claims to be able to derive the traditional conceptions, based on detachment and objectivity, from
* Abstract of a paper to be presented in a symposium on "Martin Heidegger" at the sixtieth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, December 28, 1963, commenting on John Wild, this JOURNAL, 60, 22 (Oct. 24, "The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger," 1963): 664-677.

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