616 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS A FINAL POSTMORTEM Herman Philipse: Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 555. $55.00. $24. paper.) Tha: Heidegger is a controversiai thinker and his philosophy deeply contested is commonplace. There are signs, however, that the controversy may come to an end and the “Heidegger case” be finally laid to rest. To be sure, there were previous postmortems and last rites; but they were never sufficiently mgorous and comprehensive in scope. Thus, the indictment pronounced by Victor Farias (and many others) of Heidegger’s notorious Nazi complicity still left dedicated Heideggerians with a loophole or consolation: while accepting the dismal character of Heidegger's politics, they still could cling to his sprawling work as a solid philosophical corpus. The main objective of Philipse’s book is to close this loophoie. Although not negiecting the issue of Nazi complicity, the book’s central target is Heidegger's philosophical teaching—which, by general consensus, is centered on the “question of being.” In Philipse’s own formulation (pp. xiv, xv1), the basic aim of his study is to develop a genuine “philosophical interpretation” of Heidegger’s work which is able to distinguish “the essential from the accidental, the center from the periphery.” Closely linked with this aim is the goal mentioned in the book’s subtitie: the goal of offering a “critical interpretation” —whose “critical” quality (deriving from the Greek krisis, decision) would induce in readers “a decision regarding Heidegger's question of being.” Both substantively and methodologically, the book’s twin purposes are pursued with firmness and professional rigor. Regarding methodology, Philipse takes issue with Heideggerian (and Gadamerian) hermeneutics which, in his view, treats method lightly and hence is not able to produce a genuinely “objective historical interpretation” (p. 66). To mark the point more clearly, he distinguishes between two types of interpretive approaches {p. 51): an “applicative” or practical and a “theoretical (objective, historical, critical)” approach. Whereas the former tailors exegesis “to obtain specific results,” the second is detached and concerned only with giving “a purely theoretical, historical, or epistemic” account. Using this distinction, Philipse chides Heidegger for harboring an “applicative bias,” whereas his own study aims at “truth or historical correctness” (pp. 59, 65). The emphasis on correctness has implications beyond the immediate issues at hand, by removing or greatly reducing the gulf between the so-called two cultures (natural science and humanities). In a later context, Philipse endorses a “hypothetico-deductive method of interpretation” (p. 375)—the same method which has been favored in natural science since the time of Descartes and Newton. Tobe sure, familiar with debates since Dilthey, he retreats somewhat froma “unity of science” doctrine, admitting that “explaining and predicting empirical phenomena on the one hand, and attributing meaning to texts on the other, remain two different activities.” Nevertheless, the difference isREVIEWS 617 marginal and should not be exaggerated: “In my view, the methodology of historical interpretation is globally the same as that of the sciences,” namely, hyothetico-deductive (pp. 376, 378). Relying on this preferred method, the study proceeds to uncover “the historical Heidegger as he really was” (p. 375). To aid in this effort of uncovery, the book advances a number of “interpretative hypotheses,” also called “leitmotifs,” which then are tested against available texts. In selecting his hypotheses, Philipse seeks to avoid two mistakes: those of excessive simplicity and excessive complexity—the first illustrated by Hubert Dreyfus’s reduction of Heidegger to American pragmatism, the second by the tendency to disaggregate the Heideggerian corpus into a patchwork of themes. The study’ leitmotifs are five in number and labeled as follows: ” “meta-Aristotelian”; “phenomenological-hermeneutical”; “transcendental”; “Neo-Hegelian”; and “postmonotheist.” While the first motif served as a launching pad for the “question of being,” the second and third motifs characterized Heidegger's early work (including Beng and Time) in the same way as the last two dominated his later opus. To provide a “motivational link’ between the early and later phases of Heidegger's thought, and thereby also to account for the so-called Kehre, Philipse introduces an additional hypothesis which he terms “Pascalian Grand Strategy” and which in many ways serves as the master key to Heidegger's entire cewore. As he writes (p. 240): “It is plausibie to assume that the Pascalian strategy . . . was not only a model that the later Heidegger used in order to unify his Denkweg by hindsight. He also followed this strategy when he was writing Sein wnd Zeit. This hypothesis unifies Heidegger’s Denkweg in a radical manner.” The study does not lengthily discuss the “meta-Aristotelian” motif, except to say that, in borrowing the question of being, Heidegger only “used AristoUle in order to criticize Aristotle” (on account of his logocentric metaphysics, p. 81). Ultimately, what Heidegger derived from Aristotle (beyond the being-question} was awareness of a tension between two poles— which Philipse calls “the pole of differentiation and the pole of unity” (p 88). During the early phase of Heidegger’s work, the former pole was represented by the “phenomenological-hermeneutical” theme and the latter by the “transcendental” motif, while in the later phase the two poles took the form of “Neo-Hegelianism” and “postmonotheism.” Regarding phenomenological hermeneutics, Philipse goes over the familiar terrain of Heidegger’s departure from Husserl, as manifest especially in Being and Time; in the same context, the “transcendental” motif is said fo be located in the special status of human Dasein—a status implying a “weak transcendentalism” different from that of Kant and Husserl and designed to serve as “a bulwark against philosophical naturalism” (p. 380). During his later development, Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology gave way. to a form of Neo-Hegelianism in which “Being” was historicized and dynamically encoded in such notions as Ereignis and Seinsgeschick. In Philipse’s presentation, Heidegger’s Neo-Hegelianism was actually a reversal of the Marxian brand; for instead of assigning ultimate determinism to economics, his version viewed metaphysics as “a conceptual articulation of the foundations of civilization” (p. 165). At the same time, Heidegger618 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS reversed Hegel himself, namely, by transforming “Hegel's optimism into pessimism,” the former’s notion of Hetlsgeschichte into a story of the “catastrophic type” (pp. 172, 381). Among the various leitmotifs and themes, the book accords primary attention to postmonotheism and the so-calied Pascalian Grand Strategy for a reason: both themes are found io reveal the ultimately antisecular and religious-theological character of Heidegger’s work. Postmonotheism here means a new and more radical version of the “Lutheran model”: just as the great reformer had attacked the church for betraying the true Christian message, so Heidegger assailed traditional or established Christianity as a defective or “falling tradition” obscuring an “original revelation of Being” (p. 185). In Philipse’s formulation, postmonotheism signifies “the attempt to replace the Christian religion by a different variety of religious discourse, the meaning of which is parasitic upon the monotheist Christian discourse that it mtends to destroy”; more specifically, it is “an attempt to rescue religion after the death of God” (p. 187}. Heidegger ’s religious leanings or sympathies have been noted, of course, by many readers; some (including John Caputo) have rebuked him for holding deviant or heterodox views. On this score, Philipse is (and can be) more radical, for he shares none of the above sympathies; his concern hence is not to rescue Christianity from Heideggenian deviance. As he confesses early in his study (p. xii), he had long been troubled in Heidegger's writings by passages echoing “traditional theological sayings,” some even approximating the “traditional sacrificium mtellectus in order to reach God in faith.” Later (p. 198) he complains about references to divine “madness” (Verruckung) and radical “leap” (Sprung) remumscent of the teachings respectively of St. Paul and Kierkegaard. Theological resonances of this type cannot be welcome news to someone who holds that “probably no intellectual tradition has contributed as much to undermining the virtues of clarity and critical discussion as the tradition of dogmatic theology” (p. 292). Such sentiments carry over into the discussion of the “Pascalian Grand trategy” unifying Heidegger's work. Basically, the strategy involves a two-stage argument whereby (ina first step) human life and the world are portrayed in the most dismal colors, only in order to be reactied for salvation by grace (in the second step). According to Philipse, Heidegger applied this two-stage strategy in his own Denkiveg, in a manner also elucidating his Kehre. The first stage, in Heidegger’s case, was the analysis of human Dasein in Beirig and Time which consisted of a purely secular, “religiously neutral ontology of human existence”; the second stage ushered in a “postmonotheist worship of Being” as an analogue of Pascal’s surrender to divine grace (p. 225). As in the case of Pasca!, only an initial portrayal of radical human fallenness and inauthenticity was able to prepare the ground for the later retrieval: “I am claiming then, that the confusions and contradictions in Heidegger’s analysis of das Man, Verfallen, and (inauthenticity are not accidental or due to a careless writing on Heidegger's part; rather, they are inherent in Heidegger’s Pascalian strategy” (p. 352). On the basis of this Pascalian reading, Phitipse is able to refute Dreyfus’s claim {in his commentary on Being and Time) that