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edition will eventually comprise not only all of his previously published writings, but also a considerable number of unpublished manuscripts from various periods in his philosophical career and the lecture series that he presented at the universities of Marburg and Freiburg in the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).

Modern philosophy turns away from things in the world and zeroes in on the human self that grasps them in thought and transforms them in action. The self becomes the repository of both their truth and their ultimate purposes. By the same token, the human self is given the status of the self-grounding ground of reality. In this new and exalted status, the self ceases to be viewed as part and parcel of some independent order of things. Beginning with Descartes's cogito, the self withdraws from the world and falls back on its own experiences and thoughts. The subjectivity of the self supplies both the point of departure and the validating ground for various philosophical attempts at a reconstruction of our knowledge of the world.

One of Heidegger's aims in Being and Time was to question and to overcome this subjectivist tradition of modern philosophy. I hope to show, however, that in Division II of Being and Time Heidegger reveals himself as an heir to that tradition and to its model of the human self.

THE END OF A CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHER

It was just before Christinas Eve - Monday, December 23, 1918 - when the young Mrs. Heidegger, eight months pregnant, decided to brave Freiburg's bitterly cold weather, travel across town, and break the bad news to Father Krebs. Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at Freiburg University, was a close friend of her husband, the philosophy lecturer Martin Heidegger. In fact, Krebs had officiated at the Heideggers' Catholic wedding in Freiburg Cathedral on March 21, 1917.

At the time of that wedding Father Krebs had already been skeptical. It was a confessionally “mixed” marriage - Elfride Petri was a Lutheran, Martin Heidegger a Catholic - and even though the bride had solemnly declared her intention to convert to Catholicism and raise her children in the Roman faith, Father Krebs had had his doubts. Therefore, he was not entirely surprised when, a year and a half later, the 24-year-old mother-to-be sat across from him in his office and poured out her feelings:

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, man versus nature, male versus female.

Coming very near the end of Austen's last novel (1818), this sharp observation on the gender biases inherent in literary discourse has often been taken as a characteristically oblique expression of her feminism as well as a defense of her singular craft. Notwithstanding the truth that the passage reveals considerable self-reflection, the ironies (the pen is after all in Austen's hand) attending that traditional reading are manifold: it demands that we accept at face value what is, both in the novel and life, knowingly, wittily, undercut.

Prose fiction had and has an uncertain place in Romantic literature. During the Romantic period itself, from the last decade or so of the eighteenth century to the 1830s, most prose fiction was considered subliterary, suitable for children, women, and the lower classes. A few works were cherished by readers in all classes as childhood reading or “popular classics,”including centuries-old chapbooks such as Jack and the Giants, Valentine and Orson, and The Fair Rosamund and longer works such as The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and The English Hermit. Don Quixote and the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett were regarded as important works of literature, but were only commercialized as “classics,” along with certain poets, dramatists, and belletrists, after the ending of perpetual copyright in 1774. Most novels published during the period were dismissed by critics and even readers as “the trash of the circulating library,” to be rented, read quickly, and forgotten. Those “novels of the day” that did cause a stir were quickly cut down to sixpenny chapbooks for the new lower-class market in cheap fashionable novelties, founding the modern market for “romances”of all kinds.

Ages are marked by literary fashion as much as by their political settlements or upheavals. We speak commonly of Elizabethan drama or of Enlightenment prose, thereby defining the epoch generically and even temperamentally. The current preoccupation with “Renaissance self-fashioning” only puts a modern gloss on the conventional notion that it was an age for drama. The eighteenth century has long been conceived as inseparable from its monumental achievements in prose, works reflecting the massive organization and integration of European civilization - the French Encyclopaedia, Johnson's Dictionary, even, seemingly almost as long, Richardson's Clarissa. What is it, then, that makes us commonly associate British Romanticism with poetry? Why, indeed, until recently did we generally separate the writers of prose - except for literary theorists like Coleridge and Hazlitt - from the poets, pretending, for instance, that Jane Austen inhabited a world fundamentally different from that of Shelley rather than living at the same time and, indeed, about twenty-five miles from his birthplace, and writing constantly about families that easily could pass for Shelley's own?