THE LIFE OF Dante is such a tangle of public and private passions and ordeals experienced over the fifty-six years he lived that it has always been a source of inexhaustible fascination. It is as if everything about his life – its innumerable defeats and its occasional and yet enduring triumphs – belongs to the romantic and alluring realm of legend: a love at first sight that was to last his whole life and inspire lofty poetry; the long, cruel exile from his native Florence because of the civil war ravaging the city; the poem he wrote, the Divina Commedia, made of his public and private memories; the turning of himself into an archetypal literary character, such as Ulysses, Faust, or any of those medieval knights errant, journeying over the tortuous paths of a spiritual quest, wrestling with dark powers, and, finally, seeing God face to face.

Many are the reasons why generations of readers have found the story of Dante ’s life compelling. His relentless self-invention as an unbending prophet of justice and a mythical quester for the divine are certainly two important reasons. The fact that in his graphic figurations of the beyond (rare glimpses of which were available in only a few other legendary mythmakers – Homer, Plato, and Virgil) he was an unparalleled poet also greatly heightens our interest in him.

OF THE THREE otherworldly kingdoms which the Divina Commedia represents, Purgatory is Dante's most original creation. Hell and Paradise were already well established places within the medieval imagination. Each possessed a standard set of topographic and iconographic attributes which, accrued in the course of many centuries of patristic tradition, rendered them instantly recognizable to prince and pauper alike. Hell was a dark, subterranean place where eternal torments were administered by demons under the guidance of Satan, the ruler of the underworld. Paradise was Hell's positive counterpart: a luminous celestial palace where eternal blessings were administered by the angels under the guidance of God, the emperor of the universe. In both cases the author of the Commedia felt called upon less to alter preexisting traditions, than to extend and systematize them: establishing, for instance, a much more precise hierarchy of the degrees of damnation or blessedness endured or enjoyed by souls in the afterlife; and finding a place for specifically Christian categories of error, like heresy, within an Aristotelian moral system.

DANTE'S FIRST BOOK (his libello, or “little book,” as he calls it), marks the beginning of a tendency that will dominate his literary career as a whole – the tendency to edit the self. All of Dante's major works – the Vita nuova, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, and of course the Divina Commedia – share this pattern of self-commentary on the part of an author who, for some reason, was never content merely to write poetry, but who also felt the need to instruct his reader about how that poetry came into being and how it should be read. Dante's work has been taken seriously by his readers over the centuries, to be sure, but it is fair to say that no one has ever taken it more seriously than the author himself.

The most striking aspect of the Vita nuova, for those who do not merely take its canonical stature for granted, or whose perception of the work is not mystified by the fact of its authorship, is the utter seriousness with which the author sets out to dignify and solemnify the rather innocent (and often mediocre) lyric poems that he composed in his youth.

NO POEM HAS ever drawn the attention of so many exegetes as has Dante's Divina Commedia. It is probably fair to say that any young student of poetry who was aware of what is required of a dantista would happily choose to remain an amateur in respect to the poem, would choose to own it privately, only as it speaks to one's own eyes and ears. Dante himself is so much richer and deeper than we who write about him are, and allow him to seem, that the defender of the uses of the commentary tradition may be expected to display a certain hesitation. That tradition is so vast that those who decide to devote themselves to the study of it tend, understandably enough, to lose sight of the poem upon which this huge and unwieldly corpus sits. Nonetheless, we should probably observe that the originary fault lies with Dante himself. For no other poet has more evidently hoped to have a commentator at his margins. (Boccaccio, rightly, was so worried that no one would ever contribute a commentary to his Teseida that he supplied his own; and it was probably the existence of his own marginalia which encouraged at least two later and now mainly forgotten studiosi to supply their own.)

UNDERWRITING THE entire world in which Dante lived is a single book, the Bible. Believed to be authored by a God who chose human scribes to speak his word, it had an authority quite beyond any human text. For this reason it was the most studied book in the Middle Ages, both the primer on which the young clerk learned his alphabet, and the “sacred page” that dominated every branch of higher learning. Not that the power of the Scriptures was limited to school or to the literate. As the holy book of the church, it informed not only liturgy and preaching, art and architecture, but also constituted a vast and complex symbolic network that was intelligible, on whatever level, to all classes of society. Far more than Latin, the Bible itself was the universal “language”of Christian culture.

It is not surprising, then, that when Dante's writings are considered as a whole, the Christian Scriptures should be the source of more reference and allusion than any other work: by one count there are 575 citations of the Bible in Dante, compared with 395 to Aristotle and 192 to Virgil.

DANTE IS HEIR to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provençal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry - based on the notion of the lover's feudal service to “midons” (Italian “madonna”), his lady, from whom he expects a “guerdon” (Italian “guiderdone”), or reward - were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo, which became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence's contentious political poetry, which was left behind. The “leader” (or “caposcuola”) of the Sicilian School was Giacomo da Lentini, most likely the inventor of the sonnet (while the Provençal canso was the model for the Italian canzone, the sonnet is an Italian, and specifically Sicilian, contribution to the various European lyric “genres”). Giacomo signs himself “the Notary,” referring to his position in the imperial government; this is the title Dante uses for him in Purgatorio 24, where the poet Bonagiunta is assigned the task of dividing the Italian lyric tradition between the old – represented by Giacomo, Guittone, and Bonagiunta himself – and the new: the avant-garde poets of the “dolce stil novo” or “sweet new style” (Purgatorio 24, 57), as Dante retrospectively baptizes the lyric movement that he helped spearhead in his youth.

Division I of Being and Time contains the complete account of early Heidegger's quarrel with and departure from the philosophical tradition. In spite of the attempts by many, beginning with Husserl, to incorporate Heidegger's insights into a more traditional framework, that departure was a radical one. For Heidegger the tradition that began in ancient Greece finds what may be its ultimate expression in Husserl's phenomenology.

As Føllesdal and his successors have argued, Husserl's phenomenology can be understood as the joint product of two influences. From Brentano he took the insight that the defining characteristic of consciousness is its intentionality - that is, its “of -ness” or directedness toward some object. But the model he uses for understanding this intentionality or directedness is essentially the same as Frege's model of linguistic reference, with the basic notion of meaning or sense (Sinn) suitably generalized so as to apply to all acts of consciousness, linguistic and nonlinguistic. As Figures 1 and 2 suggest, just as Frege distinguishes the sense of a linguistic expression from its referent, so Husserl distinguishes the meaning of a conscious act from the object it is about. For both, the meaning is that in virtue of which we can refer to or intend objects.

In 1975, just a year before his death, the publication of a complete edition of Heidegger's works began. This edition will eventually comprise not only all of his previously published writings, but also a considerable number of unpublished manuscripts from various periods in his philosophical career and the lecture series that he presented at the universities of Marburg and Freiburg in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Since the first volume of this edition appeared, a considerable number of these lecture series have been published, and they constitute a resource of the first importance for anyone interested in the evolution of Heidegger's thought. This is especially the case for those lecture series that fall into the period in which Heidegger was working out the position he presented in Being and Time (1927), as well as those presented in the years immediately thereafter. In a recent study of Heidegger's thought I draw extensively on these new publications, and it is the main thesis of that study that I present in this essay.

As my title indicates, that thesis has to do with the unity of Heidegger's thought; by this I mean the unity of his thought through the “turning,” or Kehre, that is usually supposed to separate the thought of the later period from that of Being and Time. It has become common practice among interpreters of Heidegger's philosophy to base themselves mainly on the writings that follow this turning, and even to push the divorce of the later from the earlier writings to the point of consigning Being and Time to a suppositious "Cartesian and Kantian" period in Heidegger's philosophical career.

One common view of the history of twentieth-century Continental philosophy is as follows. At the beginning of the century Edmund Husserl, disturbed by what he saw as the increasing relativism and historicism of Western culture, introduced the phenomenological method as a way to ensure that philosophy would arrive at final, incontrovertible truths. Phenomenology means primarily description - description of the things presented in our experience and description of our experience of them. The phenomenological movement was heralded by Husserl's cry, “Back to the things themselves!” Because phenomenology “brackets” or suspends belief in, all metaphysical constructs in order to focus solely on what shows up as it presents itself in our experience, its findings are supposed to be apodictic, beyond all possible doubt.

According to the standard story, the early Heidegger came along and raised questions about the viability of Husserlian phenomenology by taking an “interpretive” turn. What is most important about Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology, so the story goes, is his recognition of the significance of the finitude, worldliness, and historicity of our human predicament - the recognition that our access to things is always colored and preshaped by the sense of things circulating in our historical culture. The story then concludes with poststructuralists and various postmodern thinkers detecting a nostalgia for metaphysics even in such Heideggerian concepts as worldliness, finitude, and history. Jacques Derrida especially points out that Heidegger still seems to be trapped in essentialism and totalization, twin sins of the very “metaphysics of presence” that his hermeneutic approach was supposed to displace.

It may remain forever a matter of debate how much truth there is in the old claim that every important thinker has essentially one fundamental idea. In the case of famous philosophers, its vindication may oblige us to summarize the “one great idea” in such broad terms as to make it almost meaningless. What can probably be claimed with more justification is that for most great minds there has been one question that guided their thinking or research. This certainly applies to Martin Heidegger, and the question that fascinated him throughout his long philosophic life can be stated simply: what is the meaning of being? Ontology, in the widest possible sense, was his main concern throughout his life. This does not mean, of course, that he was forever looking for an answer to the same old question. As his thinking evolved, the meaning of the question changed; but Heidegger to the end of his life remained convinced that the “questionability” of the Seinsfrage was the main thrust of his life's work (cf. GA i 438).

As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is increasingly clear that Heidegger will stand out as one of the greatest philosophers of our times. His writings have had an immense impact not only in Europe and the English-speaking world, but in Asia as well. And his influence has been felt in areas as diverse as literary theory, psychoanalysis, rhetoric, ecology, and theology. The recent explosion of interest in Heidegger has come as a surprise to even his most ardent admirers. In the fifties and sixties it was still possible to consign Heidegger to the “Phenomenology and Existentialism” bin of the philosophy curriculum, treating him as the student of Husserl and precursor of Sartre. His talk about angst, guilt, death, and the need to be authentic seemed to place his work well outside the range of topics making up the mainstream Anglo-American curriculum. Though he was read in France, he was largely ignored in the English-speaking world.

Heidegger's importance lies partly in the fact that he is perhaps the leading figure among that small list of twentieth-century philosophers who have helped us emerge, painfully and with difficulty, from the grip of modern rationalism. Others on the short list would include Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. But one might claim some preeminence for Heidegger, in that he got there first. In the case of Merleau-Ponty, the breakthrough plainly built on Heidegger's work.

The emergence these philosophers helped us toward has, alas, been only partial and is still very contested; indeed, it is always menaced with being rolled back - hence the continuing relevance of their works, some of which appeared more than half a century ago.

In this essay, I shall discuss Heidegger, though with a side-glance at the others from time to time. I shall try to formulate the way in which his thinking takes us outside the traditional epistemology, using the notions of engaged agency and background.

What Gustav Bergmann christened “the linguistic turn” was a rather desperate attempt to keep philosophy an armchair discipline. The idea was to mark off a space for a priori knowledge into which neither sociology nor history nor art nor natural science could intrude. It was an attempt to find a substitute for Kant's “transcendental standpoint.” The replacement of “mind” or “experience” by “meaning” was supposed to insure the purity and autonomy of philosophy by providing it with a nonempirical subject matter.

Linguistic philosophy was, however, too honest to survive. When, with the later Wittgenstein, this kind of philosophy turned its attention to the question of how such a “pure” study of language was possible, it realized that it was not possible - that semantics had to be naturalized if it were to be, in Donald Davidson's phrase, “preserved as a serious subject.” The upshot of linguistic philosophy is, I would suggest, Davidson's remark that “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers . . . have supposed. . . . We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to cases.“ This remark epitomizes what Ian Hacking has called “the death of meaning” - the end of the attempt to make language a transcendental topic.

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE QUESTION OF THE GOOD LIFE

Heidegger's influence on psychotherapy in the English-speaking world has followed a convoluted path. The Swiss physician and therapist Medard Boss tells us that Heidegger expressed the hope that “his thinking would escape the confines of the philosopher's study and become of benefit to wider circles, in particular to a large number of suffering human beings.” His participation in Boss's seminars for medical students and therapists from 1946 on was motivated by this concern. Yet when his writings became more widely known among professionals in the field, it was less through this route than through the impact of existentialism in the fifties and sixties. As a result, though Heidegger's thought is often treated as the cornerstone of existential psychotherapy, what one usually finds is a Heidegger refracted through the lens of the far more accessible writings of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus. In the mouth of this “existentialized” Heidegger, the ideal of authenticity is pictured as the stance of the rugged individualist who, upon experiencing anxiety in the face of the ultimate absurdity of life, lives intensely in the present and creates his or her own world through leaps of radical freedom.

Heidegger's thought was from the start deeply interwoven with religious and theological concerns. We have recently learned from the searching historical investigations of Hugo Ott the details of Heidegger's early upbringing and education in the Catholic church. Heidegger was born in the conservative, Catholic farmlands of southern, central Germany, and his father was a sexton in St. Martin's Church, which stood across a quaint little courtyard not fifty yards from the Heidegger house. The Heidegger family was steadfastly loyal to the church in the controversy that followed the First Vatican Council when “liberal” Catholics rejected the proclamation of papal infallibility. The youthful Heidegger, brilliant and pious, was marked from the start for the Catholic priesthood. Through a series of scholarships funded by the church, one of which was intended for students seeking to do doctoral work on Thomas Aquinas, the poor but gifted young man was lifted out of these rural farmlands into the eminence of a German university career. Hugo Ott has discovered that Heidegger's earliest publications appeared in 1910-12 in Dei Akademiker, an ultraconservative Catholic journal that toed the line of Pope Pius X.

Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, is usually considered the culminating work in a tradition called existential philosophy. The first person to call himself an existential thinker was Soren Kierkegaard, and his influence is clearly evident in Heidegger's thought. Existential thinking rejects the traditional philosophical view, which goes back to Plato at least, that philosophy must be done from a detached, disinterested point of view. Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to reality is through our involved action. The way things show up for a detached thinker is a partial and distorted version of the way things show up to a committed individual.

Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that relates itself to itself. That means that who I am depends on the stand I take on being a self. Moreover, how I interpret myself is not a question of what I think but of what I do. I have to take up what is the given or factical part of my self and, by acting on it, define who I am. I understand myself as being a student, a teacher, the lover of a specific person, or the follower of a specific cause. Thus, the self defines itself by taking up its past by means of present actions that make sense in terms of its future. For Kierkegaard, then, the self can be understood as a temporal structure.

The closing decades of this century have been marked by a wideranging, multidisciplinary exploration of the theory of interpretation and its practical implications. To speak of a revolution in the history of thought is perhaps too grand, but certainly there has been a general movement that can be called the “hermeneutic turn.” This turn has taken various forms, including poststructuralist cultural studies, deconstructive literary studies, interpretive anthropology and social science, and critical legal studies. Of course, the specific turns taken in each of these fields are reactions to older ways of practicing each discipline. But in each case the emphasis on interpretation is used as an antidote, usually to objectivistic conceptions of the discipline's methods. However, none of these particular turns would have been imaginable without a dramatic change earlier in this century, the change brought about in philosophy by Martin Heidegger in 1927 in Being and Time. Heidegger's hermeneutic turn is taken most explicitly in Sections 31 and 32 of that book, where Heidegger makes interpretive understanding the central mode of human existence (or Dasein).