Many commentators have remarked on the affinities between Heidegger's thought and East Asian traditions such as Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism. In this essay, I shall examine critically some aspects of the apparent rapport between Heidegger's thought and Mahayana Buddhism. One reason for recent interest in Heidegger's thought and in Buddhism is that both are critical of and claim to offer an alternative to the anthropocentrism and dualism that some critics say is responsible for today's environmental crisis. According to such critics, Western humankind is particularly anthropocentric. Regarding humanity as the source of all meaning, purpose, and value, humans justify doing anything they want with the natural world. Western humanity also thinks in terms of dualisms and binary oppositions, such as mind versus body, reason versus feeling, humans versus nature, male versus female. Those possessing the “privileged” properties (mind, reason, human, male) allegedly have the right to dominate those possessing the “inferior” properties (body, feeling, nature, female). In an attempt to gain godlike security and power for humankind, modern Western ideologies call for transforming the earth into a titanic factory, thereby threatening to destroy the biosphere on which all life depends.

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).

A complete, up-to-date bibliography of works by and about Heidegger would be a vast undertaking. Hans-Martin Sass's 1975 bibliography, which covered the period from 1917 to 1972, included entire chapters called “Heidegger in Japan” and “Literature on Heidegger in the Soviet Union” and already contained more than 3,700 entries! Fortunately, some excellent bibliographies are available. The bibliography offered here is therefore quite selective, emphasizing recent books and collections in English most likely to be helpful to students and nonspecialists.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

1. Franzen, Winfried. Martin Heidegger. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1976. (This volume provides a thorough overview of Heidegger’s work in German, with carefully selected bibliographies arranged by topic.)

2. Groth, Miles. Translating Heidegger. Amherst, NY: Humanities, 2004. Professor Groth also provides an exhaustive bibliography on his Web page (http://www.wagner.edu/departments/psychology/grothpubs).

3. Nordquist, Joan, ed. Martin Heidegger: A Bibliography. Santa Cruz, CA: Reference and Research Service, 1990.

4. Sass, Hans-Martin. Martin Heidegger: Bibliography and Glossary. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, Philosophy Documentation Center, 1982.

5. Sheehan, Thomas, ed. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Chicago: Precedent, 1981. (This valuable collection contains, in addition to important works by Heidegger and by scholars writing about him, a bibliography matching original writings to translations and a detailed bibliography of writings about Heidegger.)

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.

As the enthusiasm for existentialism has waned over the past two decades, however, so has the initial motivation for thinking that Heidegger has something important to contribute to therapy. The decline of existentialism can be attributed, I believe, to the growing suspicion that its image of the human condition is too limited to capture the concrete realities of actual existence. The conception of “terrible freedom” found in the French existentialists, for instance, seems to conceal the sense we have of being embedded in a world where not all things are possible.

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.

My use of the term “rationalism” at the beginning of this essay could be contested, even by people basically sympathetic to the current of thought I am trying to articulate. There are a number of ways of formulating the outlook, more a set of semiarticulate assumptions, that Heidegger helped “deconstruct.” It has a number of features, and we can argue which are most fundamental. In speaking of “rationalism,” I am supposing that a certain conception of reason played a determining role.

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 1 438).

Impressive as such single-mindedness may seem, the phrase “meaning of being” on careful examination seems so vague that philosophers and nonphilosophers alike may wonder what kind of question this is. The meaning of being? Does this refer to all beings, to whatever we may say that it is – rocks, trees, clouds, colors, sounds, dreams, or irrational numbers alike? Or does the question presuppose some high-flying metaphysical concept like Being as such, as seems to be indicated by the fact that English translations usually capitalize the letter “B”? Heidegger made it his task to show that there is a meaningful concept of the being of all beings, a conception that underlies all our understanding of reality. As he saw it, this conception has been the aim of all metaphysical thinking, even if it was not always properly understood. The search for an answer remained a search for a clarification of the question, as Heidegger’s reference to “the changing questioning” in the epigraph to this chapter shows.

Among the many mysteries surrounding “the fourfold” is the almost total absence of any attempt by Heidegger scholars to explain what it is. Usually the topic doesn't even make it to the index, and even when it does, it does so only in virtue of statements like “this conception [of the fourfold] is developed in a way one can only call mythic, and its philosophical import is therefore far from clear,” which is not really very helpful. Baffled by Heidegger's poetic brevity, commentators have consigned it to the silence of the too-hard basket.

Yet without understanding the fourfold - the fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals - one can understand almost nothing of later Heidegger. Heidegger says that “dwelling,” as he calls it, is the human “essence” (QCT 28, P 257, PLT 213 ff.). But to dwell is to “belong within the fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities” (QCT 49; compare PLT 149). He also says that the fourfold is what “we call the world” (PLT 179). Without understanding the fourfold, therefore, one can understand neither later Heidegger's conception of the human being nor his conception of “world.”

As the twenty-first century begins, it is increasingly clear that Heidegger will stand out as one of the greatest philosophers of all 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 continuing 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.

In the past decades, however, a number of events have brought about a wider appreciation of the achievement of this fertile and complex thinker. First, in North America, the writings of such influential figures as Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, and H. L. Dreyfus have helped us to see Heidegger as the seminal figure in what David Hoy calls a “hermeneutic turn,” a new orientation with profound repercussions for such issues as the nature of the human sciences, the possibility of artificial intelligence, and the prospects for a postfoundationalist culture. As such respected theorists as Clifford Geertz, Thomas Kuhn, Michael Walzer, and Roy Schafer come to describe their approaches as “hermeneutic,” there is a greater tendency to go back to the seminal texts that shaped contemporary hermeneutics.

A central issue in Heidegger's thought, both early and late, is the nature of truth and its basis in what Heidegger calls “the essence of truth” or “unconcealment.” Unconcealment or aletheia (the Greek word for truth) is, Heidegger writes, “the matter of thought, ” that is, “what is first of all to be thought, [but] to be thought as released from the perspective of the metaphysical representation of 'truth' in the sense of correctness.”

As this passage intimates, Heidegger's thought on truth involves both a critique of traditional accounts of truth, and an inquiry into the unconcealment that is prior to truth as correctness. On the critical side, Heidegger argues that the tradition has misunderstood the nature of the relationship between intentional contents and the world. When a belief or an assertion is true, it is because the holder of the belief or the maker of the assertion has succeeded in directing her thoughts or words at the world in such a way that they capture the way things really are. But what does it mean for a proposition to capture the way things really are, and how can assertions and beliefs accomplish such a feat? Heidegger's thought on propositional truth as uncovering offers an alternative to traditional ways of exploring such matters. In the first section of this chapter, I review his account of a nonrepresentational form of correspondence as the uncovering of a state of affairs.

HEIDEGGER AND KANT’S “COPERNICAN REVOLUTION”

In Section 4 of Being and Time, Heidegger proposes that in order to answer the question what being means, we must first investigate the nature of our own existence. But why should this be so? At first blush, it is highly counterintuitive. After all, being is, in the words of Being and Time, “what determines entities as entities” (SZ 6). Being is whatever is characteristic of anything simply in so far as it is. Ontology is a general account of being. To do ontology, one might therefore naturally think, we must survey the full range of entities and generalize to an account of what all entities have in common. In other words, ontology could be an intellectual discipline parallel with biology and philology: a direct study of some domain of objects. Whereas biology studies objects in so far as they are alive, ontology would study them in so far as they quite simply are. Now, we do not have to do a preliminary investigation into our own existence in order to do biology; so, why should such a procedure be called for in the case of ontology?