What is it in the drama of Heidegger's existential query that keeps us so busy, nearly a century since its introduction into the philosophical discourse? Is it its darkness? Or is it the absolute demand for a dangerous “opening to the world” while shutting down any possibility for self-disclosure? Or maybe, just maybe, it is Heidegger's critical self-reflection, a stance as remarkable as his refusal to take responsibility and practice self-restraint when considering his own biased views and complacency with the Nazi regime?
Perhaps, beyond all those questions, which are specific to Heidegger's system and life, what intellectual history could and should pay attention to is the use of hyperbolic oppositions and circular rhetoric that so characterized his rhetoric and conditioned the reception of his thought. Heidegger's language skillfully expresses a simultaneously rapturous yet expectant world, which he depicts so much better than his liberal humanist rivals. In contrast to others’ hopeful voices, Heidegger's philosophy communicates a hermeneutics of destruction and the primary existence of “being-towards-death,” a whiff of negativity he communicated through the revival of ancient Greek terms and early patristic vocabulary. The future, he showed, will only open from the depths of our particular past—even that past we keep hidden or negated. Indeed, Heidegger negates every progressive application of terms, or any representational mode, other than his own. Hannah Arendt, in a swift but efficient blow, described his vocabulary as an investment in self-referentiality: “He cites himself and interprets himself, as though he had written a Biblical text.”Footnote 1 As both authors discussed below demonstrate, Heidegger saw himself also as his own best and most radical critic, his own opening to another Heidegger, not less authentic than the first.
The two books under review introduce the most recent insights in this field of Heideggerian inquiry. And the insights are ambivalent and ecstatic at the same time. Both Ryan Coyne and David Farrell Krell dive into the dichotomies, paradoxes, neologisms, and “shortness of breath,” to borrow a term of Jacques Derrida's reading of Heidegger—both Coyne and Krell quote it in their analysis—in order to extract a possible post-Heideggerian future for philosophy; both plunge into the eye of this philosophical–political storm in order to extract from it a possible humanist lesson and try to save its value, in the age after the recent publications of the scandalous Black Notebooks in 2014.
Those Black Notebooks, covering Heidegger's private considerations from 1931 to his death in 1976, exhibit, as David Krell wrote in a review essay, the repetitive expressions of rage and resentment “in which thinking plays no role.”Footnote 2 In his short postscript about the Notebooks, Peter Trawny, the editor of Heidegger's complete works, wrote (beautifully) about Heidegger's “unleashing his wrath” against the (humanist) world, the Jews, the West, but also forming a new language, a new drama: “What emerges in such a drama is a topography in which the true and the untrue together form the possible, the actual, and the necessary.”Footnote 3 After all, and here Trawny, Coyne, and Krell seem to agree with Heidegger, “He who thinks greatly must err greatly.”Footnote 4
Coyne and Krell seem to be motivated by a similar philosophical instinct, but they use quite divergent methodological strategies to analyze Heidegger's writing. While Coyne examines Heidegger's engagement with Augustine from the perspective of a philosophy of religion, Krell examines his concept of ecstasy and the first three Black Notebooks as a critical theorist. If the first reads Heidegger from within the Heideggerian system, the latter reads him in an intertextual framework. In spite of the opposite strategies of reading and writing, both seem to meet in their mutual admiration of Jacques Derrida. This is where the close philosophical reader meets with the comparativist, and where very different (opposite?) critical analyses seem to agree that a thorough comprehension of the object of critique is the condition of its possibility. In short, both Coyne and Krell seem to approach Heidegger via Derrida, and while using Derrida's ambivalent reading as a starting point for reading Heidegger in the present.
Viewing both sophisticated books from a historical perspective implies a slightly different stress on language than the one examined by philosophy of religion or by critical theory. While agreeing with both authors, and with Derrida, about the need to “complain about [our] language to the master and, one supposes, in the master's language,” a historical approach could and should examine it from the outside, weighing its impact and effect, contributions and blind spots.Footnote 5 The recent publication of the Black Notebooks, with its long list of masterful slurs, raised this need even more urgently. What Scott McLemee called a “Heidegger scandal 5.0” should indeed lead to a more balanced and specific history of reception.Footnote 6
DEMYTHOLOGIZING HEIDEGGER
Ryan Coyne's Heidegger's Confessions follows a set of concepts as they evolve, repeat, and transform in Heidegger's early seminar “Augustine and Neoplatonism” from 1920–21, his lectures in 1930–31, and finally a few of his late texts from the 1940s and early 1950s. This constellation of concepts, Coyne argues, revolved around those three moments in Heidegger's career in which he reflected explicitly on his relation to theology and metaphysics, and in which he transposed concepts and de-theologized them. The three periods mentioned above are organized around two waves of de-theologization as Coyne depicts them. While identifying the dynamo of this organization and movement with Heidegger's anti-metaphysical argument, Coyne also follows the history of philosophy as Heidegger divides it and adapts it: as Coyne shows, the different concepts are attached to their roots in the thought of Paul and Augustine on the one hand, or with Aristotle, René Descartes, and Edmund Husserl on the other. At the center of it all shines the great light of German thinkers like Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Heidegger himself, of course.
The book is written in the Chicago theo-manual style, and I mean here not the codified guideline for academic writers but the style that has turned the University of Chicago Divinity School into an avant-garde religio-philosophical school, stressing the theo-ontological interpretation of temptation, desire, and the onto-theological, adapting a post-Heideggerian, neo-Pauline, antiliberal stance as the core of contemporary religious forms. Its best-known member is Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946), who studied with Derrida and who adapted Derrida's vocabulary of hospitality, gift, giveness, and dissimulation to a post-Heideggerian interpretation of patristic sources. His work, which started from a close reading of Husserl and Heidegger during the 1970s, became known thanks to his Augustinian understanding (or so he claims) of a “God without Being” and a “post-metaphysical theology” that was based on Nietzsche and deconstruction as much as it was quoting from the fathers of the church.Footnote 7 A series of translations of Marion to English, during the 1990s, spread his name among the disciples of American deconstruction and those interested in continental philosophy. To the acclaimed Marionite collection of Heideggerianisms influenced by Derrida, Coyne adds an important close reading of Heidegger's interpretation and adaption of Augustine. That said, Coyne distances himself from Marion's more affirmative view of Heidegger and the re-theologization of his ontotheology. It is interesting to read the two thinkers side by side and pay attention to the similarities and differences between them, especially where Marion pays homage to Heidegger's reading of Augustine as an “erotic figure of truth” at the center of his In the Self's Place, which Coyne portrays as a work of destructive instincts.Footnote 8
Coyne's method, as he explains it in the conclusion to the book, follows Heidegger's system of immanent critique, examining the philosophy of religion as “illogical” but pointing out that “though Heidegger dismissed the philosophy of religion on this account, its illogicality counts for us as its real strength” (242). And indeed the book traces the dialectical course of critique and affirmation not only in relation to the objects of Heidegger's investigation, be it Augustine, Heidegger's Dasein, or the theological sources of concepts, but also in Heidegger's reconsideration of his own system, and his ability to view it with an eye to “phenomenological destruction” (28). Coyne explains this critical movement by demonstrating the different contexts and meanings of “destruction” in 1920, its reappearance as principle of renunciation in 1930 and of retraction and restraint between 1936 and 1938, and after the “turn” (Kehre)—as a clear de-theologized destruction of “‘borrowed’ categories that the Western tradition since Aristotle has applied to factical life” (112). Indeed, Coyne argues, Heidegger's system is dedicated to the “hermeneutic of destruction”: sitting on top of the “original negation,” Heidegger is reading into the finality of the Dasein a form of negation that marks for him the “meaning of destruction occurring in the transition to the other beginning” (cited at 203).Footnote 9 The “other beginning” of death is, of course, birth (or as Arendt would call it after Augustine and Heidegger, natality), and Heidegger's negation proposes to bring the two together as the two opposite sides of the same negative view of life. This particular skeleton, we note, is swallowing its own tail like the mythical autophagy.
If the chronological order above sounds historical enough, then this is not Coyne's reflective method of investigation. Rather, Heidegger's Confessions is built like a two-part triptych, whose negative—third plate—center is the acclaimed Being and Time (1927). From Coyne's perspective, a first wave of de-theologization during the early 1920s led to the stress of Being and Time on an ontology of care (Sorge), which ignored, in turn, its own theological roots. Heidegger realized his mistake in neglecting de-theologization only during the last part of Being and Time—the part Derrida calls “short of breath”—and therefore, Coyne hints, deserted the promised third part of the book, and instead turned to a renewed effort to de-theologize the language of fundamental ontology.
In other words, the era before Being and Time prepared the way for the period after. After leaving Being and Time, or the notion of care, behind, Heidegger marked his new understanding of Sein by turning into the archaic Seyn (Beyng). More specifically, during the early 1920s Heidegger created the scheme of the hermeneutic destruction on the basis of an Augustinian “relation of veritas and vita” (57) and Pauline eschatological forms: “Heidegger reads [Paul's] texts as drawing attention to the very ‘center of Christian life: the eschatological problem’” (30). Without explicating the Pauline tradition too much, Coyne explains that both Paul and Augustine enabled Heidegger to engage and then destroy Descartes and his cogito. That way, Heidegger was able to confront the system of Western metaphysics that the Cartesian system helped disguise under the appealing rational and scientific explanation of the world. Needless to say, for Heidegger that Cogito was where all evil was rooted, and where the West lost its primordial sense of Beyng, or any ability to ever retrieve it. The post-1927 texts portray “the matrix into which Heidegger introduced de-theologized terms derived from Augustine” and turn this work of exposure and destruction into the leading principle of Heidegger's oeuvre as a whole, now aimed at himself (121).
Coyne's reading follows the convention that reads Heidegger's philosophy on the basis of a separation between “before” and “after” the 1927 Being and Time and the ensuing turn during the early 1930s, but it also rebels against that convention, in his focus on Augustinian concepts as precursors to and antecedents of Heidegger's Being and Time. His “early” and “late” Heidegger is not just a “turn” during the 1930s, which shifts the direction of the Heideggerian missile from course A to course B, but rather one that identifies 1925–7, the years of Being and Time, as the exception to the post-Augustinian, de-Christianization rule.
Coyne's stress on de-theologization allows discussion of Heidegger's classic work in the negative, even in those areas in which the semantics seemed to be affirmative. This is a brilliant, if complex, strategy to explain. Take, for example, the Augustinian notion of fruition: “It is Augustinian fruition, surprisingly, which enables us to decipher the root meaning of the earliest word for Being in Western metaphysics, opening a path for grasping an archaic meaning of Being . . . Augustinian fruition names how Being itself ‘presences’ (west) or how it stands toward beings” (188). In other words, Coyne argues, the Augustinian term, related genealogically to frui (use) and the German fruchten (to enjoy), marks “the point of contact between the end of metaphysics and the earliest saying of Being” and “signifies the act of taking hold of something while releasing it, having it on hand (praesto habere) by renouncing it” (189). In his Contributions to Philosophy of the Event, written between 1936 and 1938, Heidegger ontologized the renunciation and retraction, making them “the real destiny of hermeneutic destruction in the context of the Turn in his thought” (195).
It is then, during the second and explicit de-theologized period, that Heidegger develops his notion of Gelassenheit (letting-be) as a correction to the false sense of direction and “crude temporality” he finds in philosophy since Descartes. Indeed, the very core of ontology is framed in that negative way: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? Is the opening line of the course manuscript that Heidegger identifies, in 1933, as ‘the first of all questions?’” (200)
The question of temporality, which troubled Heidegger all along, and certainly since his Concept of Time in 1924, became the heart of his revolutionary rhetoric, extending his anti-Cartesianism into an anti-Kantian rhetoric of ecstasy. In other words, the “totality, unity and development of those fundamental structures of Dasein which we have hitherto exhibited . . . are all to be conceived as at bottom ‘temporal’ and as modes of the temporalizing of temporality” (179). As Heidegger explains in his 1928 Basic Concepts of Philosophy, this means that “the original unity of being-outside-itself that comes-toward-itself, comes back-to-self, and makes present. In its ecstatic character, temporality is the condition of the constitution of Dasein's Being,” which implies, Coyne explains, “that the dispersal of Dasein's being as it is stretched in three directions is never enough” (179). Indeed, a desire to reach further into the nothingness, and a whirlpool-like movement, are the marks of this powerful vocabulary.
The undeniable force of Coyne's own argument lies in its dense and focused concentration on the gravity of Heidegger's de-theologization and dramatic centrifugal movement. Reading Heidegger on the basis of the hermeneutics of destruction allows Coyne to work from within the corpus of Heidegger's concepts rather than engage with a broad context of “secularization” which would have required a wide comparison between Heidegger and other forms of secularization of Western thought. Coyne's method, in this sense, is a conscious choice to narrow any critical mode to Heidegger's own discursive boundaries and his philosophical vortex.
For this reason, Coyne's approach is not to attack Heidegger from the outside, but rather to expose those arguments that are worthy of our attention, as well as those that fail to achieve their full philosophical potential or to prove Heidegger's own biases, especially where Heidegger depicts himself as a designer of a brand new philosophical system. And yet, as Coyne shows, Heidegger stays within the boundaries of the same transcendental tradition he was trying to ruin. Heidegger's use of Augustinian terms in an “authentic,” non-ironic way keeps trapping him in the same circular paradox he was trying to break away from; and paradoxically, such use makes him more relevant for the study of the religion he was so adamant to leave behind. Unlike Nietzsche, who kept undermining his own truth-claims by using rhetorical devices such as irony and an unreliable narrator, Heidegger fails here to subvert and undermine his own rhetoric, falling instead into believing his own claim that “every philosophy is in-humane [un-menschlich] and an all-consuming fire” (cited in Krell, 145).
ECSTATIC AMBIVALENCE
Did Heidegger's system of polarized and radical opposites fail his own system of critique? According to David Krell, it might have been his lack of Jewish humor that disabled his capacity to reflect on his self-referentiality. This failure is, if I may testify to it, a well-known academic disease that Krell does not share with many of his esteemed colleagues. Krell, who publishes short stories, and often confesses the failures or mistakes within his own texts, does not seem to consider humor an obstacle in his trade. Indeed, the texts collected in this volume demonstrate a light and easy delivery that does not reduce its sophistication and depth.
The first part, based on the four Brauer Lectures that Krell gave at Brown University in 2014, proves the thicker section and one that brings his expertise in Heidegger and Derrida (Krell has published acclaimed books about both thinkers) to the fore. The second part contains his preliminary reflections about the first three volumes of the Black Notebooks, which came out while he was preparing his lectures. Like Coyne, Krell reads Heidegger with a critical eye. In fact, the texts in this book foreground this critical stance quite openly: “Critique, κρισις, κρινειν [krisis, krinein]—these words mean the capacity to distinguish, to differentiate. What good is giving-over if the giver cannot separate the strands, make careful judgments?” (124). This searching or questioning estimation of the value of such sophisticated systems runs parallel to the highest possible admiration of Heidegger's intellect, an intellectual–emotional mixture that Krell affiliates with his teacher, Hannah Arendt, who “insist[ed] that I stop at a pharmacy on our way to Heidegger's house in Zähringen: ‘One does not go with a runny nose to see the greatest thinker of the twentieth century’” (109).
Krell stands very close to Coyne's evaluation of the Heideggerian system, even if from a different—sometimes the opposite—methodological perspective. Much like Coyne, his final verdict is that Heidegger failed to jump off his own explosive anti-metaphysical cart and be rid of the Judeo-Christian tradition. If the first part of Krell's book plunges, in medias res, into the thick of Heideggeran terms, the second seems to take a step back and reflect about Heidegger's motivation and ability (or rather inability) to cope with the political context of his time. The progress of Krell's argument seems to lead from a close reading of Heidegger's last sections of his Being and Time to Derrida's interpretation of those, and from Derrida to Heidegger's “polemics,” a term Krell rejects in a short “interlude” he positions exactly halfway through the book.
The lectures retrace and build on much of the work Krell has already done on the Heideggerian corpus during the past few decades. Much like Coyne he focuses on the reading of Heidegger's ecstasy (ek-stasis) as the essence of temporalization. The opening to the first chapter reads Heidegger's “ecstatic interpretation of temporality” in all three of its dimensions—future, past, and present. According to Krell, this is the principle of the second part of Being and Time, and one that Heidegger turned against during the mid-1930s, when “‘ecstatic temporality’ no longer plays the role it did,” and which Heidegger does not explain beyond the recurrent use of the metaphor of the Shipwreck and a change from the rhetoric of rapture to the rupture (3). At the end of the book, Krell returns to this change and explains it in the following way:
Whereas existence is characterized in the earlier work as temporal in the sense of the three temporal ecstasies, namely, future, having-been, and present, and whereas “rapture” in the earlier work refers to the rapid motion and interplay of these three equipromordial extases, in Heidegger's later thinking all these words refer to the unified and singular thrust of human existence into the clearing and openness—the truth—of beyng. (130)
The book follows this course from ecstasis to aletheia (Heidegger's label for truth, “unforgetting” or “unconcealing” in the Greek original) and with it from Heidegger's work with and against Aristotle and Augustine to his reflections about Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and F. W. Schelling, who receives special attention here, especially for the understanding of the later Heidegger. In the first part, Krell traces the etymological sources for Heidegger's early interest in ecstasy as the core of temporality as well as the very notion of Augustinian ecstatic rapture:
Could it be Augustine? Here again Heidegger does not reveal the source of his Entrückungen [“suddenness”], either in terms of the verb rapere, “to seize,” or the adverb raptim, “rapidly, suddenly,” even though at one point he himself “translates” the German Entrückung with the Latin word raptus. When Heidegger refers to Augustine's Confessions in his 1924 lecture, The Concept of Time, he cites the passage . . . [in which] Augustine speaks of “the times that I measure in my mind.” (29)
Indeed, it seems as if Heidegger often played, or hid, his own intertext, especially where it threatened to confuse his antimetaphysical argument. Whether for the sake of de-theologization, as Coyne argues, or for the sake of what Krell identifies—after Maurice Merleau-Ponty—“a general flight outside the self,” “these centrifugal movements, or, as Heidegger says, an ‘ek-stasis’” (cited at 77), all roads lead back to this playful game of opposites, shifting between concealment and unconcealement of meaning.
The second part of the book is dedicated to unconcealment, albeit in an easier and more openly political manner. Discussing a few curious passages from the Black Notebooks, Krell considers the post-1930s Seyn—the archaic reconfiguration of Being (Sein) after the turn of the 1930s—in relation to Heidegger's failure to distance himself quite far enough from the Hegelian “world-historical task” that stood in front of the German people or his half-hearted treatment of the corruption of “world Jewry” (141). (As Krell shows, the anti-Jewish rhetoric is not only racist, but also sloppy in philosophical terms). Similarly, Heidegger digs deeper and deeper his authoritarian and patriotic grounding of the Seyn in an attempt “to stand our ground” (bodenständig zu werden) (131) against the groundlessness of Judeo-Christianity.
Exposing his own sources of inspiration, Krell dips the discussion of a contemporary Heideggerian unconcealement, grounding, and ecstasy in his own reading of Derrida's first seminar from 1964–5, titled “Heidegger: The Question of Being and History.”Footnote 10 This seminar is coming out in English, this year, for the first time, and Krell is using the opportunity to explain “the language [that] is already that of the Gramatology” (96). According to Krell, a deeper understanding of Heidegger implies also a better understanding of Derrida, who, much like Heidegger, estimates that “it is ek-stasis and not presence that is the fundamental origin of temporality” (translated and quoted in Krell, 96). Why is this claim interesting to us, readers of both the anti-Semitic German and the French-speaking Jewish philosopher? Because “it is here that the notion of ecstasy, precisely as ecstasis—displacement, departure, withdrawal—becomes important . . . Ecstasis is the dérobement, withdrawal, that can only be traced, never signified as such” (96, original emphasis). In simple words, Derrida extends the Heideggerian interest (obsession) in primordial forms of being into the core of its critical activation. Indeed, Derrida's lesson is one of a critical adaptation; Krell puts much weight on this reception by showing that Derrida would later turn this realization of Heidegger's ecstasis into his own system of dissimulation: “If dissimulation of being means the revealing of being, and the other way around, it follows that all the concepts derived from them . . . signify the same and their contrary’” (cited at 97). This realization turns to be the core of Derrida's analysis of αινος (ainos), the enigmatic and the aporetic.
In temporal terms, such a realization supports Derrida's definition of the present “not as the horizon of all experience and backdrop of all evidence, but as ‘the past of the future’” (cited at 99). Understanding the present in this way also means a different understanding of tradition and heritage: moving away from the archaic forms into the mechanism of transmission, in the mode of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault: “If time and tide wash onto the short bits and pieces of what has been, bleached and sanded down perhaps, but otherwise in good shape, then heritage is simply a matter of waiting and then beachcombing” (101, original emphasis). To conclude this section, Derrida marks for Krell the point of departure for any serious consideration of Heidegger, be it in the context of a close reading or the context of a critical reception of his ideas. His conclusion unpacks this argument in clear terms: “If Heidegger himself damaged his thinking—massively, even tragically, catastrophically—it is up to his readers, chastened and chagrined by these failures, to magnify what is thought provoking in it even as they decry its failings. Perhaps that is not schizophrenia but a regimen for health” (191).
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
What is the value of Coyne and Krell's books for the present? What makes their contributions significant for intellectual historians? After all, neither of these books emerges from within the field of intellectual history and neither of them is interested in history as such. Yet both raise important claims for the intellectual historian who is interested in Heidegger, his reception, and the relevance of his thinking.
Coyne and Krell teach us how hard it is to keep one's distance from Heidegger, and how captivating his intellectual system is. Even a critical reading of his texts finds him already standing at any and every turn, often those turns one wouldn't like to make. Both texts were written during the period of the publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks and both attempt, and succeed, in finding a way to discuss their relevance to the overview of Heidegger's system as a whole. In a way, both seem to respond very well to Peter Trawny's argument that “Heidegger has no philosophy, no doctrine, that could become the model for an academic school,” by exactly connecting Heidegger's neologisms to a specific academic doctrine and school.Footnote 11 Furthermore, both seem to propose a balanced and a critical view of the great thinker and his errors in light of their impact on Derrida.
Coyne's text does so only implicitly by pointing out, and radicalizing, the resistance of Heidegger to none other than Nietzsche's notion of iustificatio (justice) (216) and his gradual construction of an anti-Nietzschean “language of ground” which flourished after the 1930s “turn,” and peaked during the 1940s and 1950s (234). Other texts such as the 1936–7 lecture series about Nietzsche—translated into English by none other than David Krell, which won the attention of well-known commentators such as Theodore Kisiel, Hugo Ott, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Otto Pöggeler—or Heidegger's 1960s lectures about Heimat could have added a necessary dimension to those questions and tilt the analysis more towards the dependence on metaphysics and the transcendental or territorial.Footnote 12 More critically, such texts might have forced Coyne to admit that during the mid-1930s, at least, Heidegger saw himself as Nietzsche's successor rather than rival.
Coyne is correct to point out the use of spatial metaphors characteristic of the 1957 “Onto-theo-logical Constitution”: “All modes of reflection on Being invoke metaphors of entrance and exit, distance and proximity, advent and incarnation, withdrawal and arrival, passing or remaining. That is, it recapitulates what Heidegger takes to be reason itself, by showing that these metaphors signify the minimal representationalism necessary even to pose the question of Being as such” (240, original emphases). However, such spatial dichotomies were in use by the common philosophical discourse of the time, identified as life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie). A closer look at Heidegger's engagement with this tradition, extending from Nietzsche and Wilhelm Dilthey to Henri Bergson and to Heidegger's closest allies in the Nazi state, would have revealed as much about his anti-idealist and antimetaphysical leanings as would his critique of Husserl, which occupies here a central place. To state it in rather simplistic terms, Heidegger did not invent the temporal critique of metaphysics. He just did it better.
A growing corpus of Heidegger's earlier and later writings exposes that these are issues that engaged him all his life, even if the interpretation of many of them changed as he continued to develop his own system.Footnote 13 As Heidegger's earliest texts about the philosophy of time demonstrate, the metaphysical question was inherently connected to this terminology already in 1915, if not also to its philosophical implications.Footnote 14 It is in that early context that Heidegger attacked Ernst Troeltsch's “recent study of Augustine,” which adopted the Augustinian view and notion “that Augustine was ‘in fact the conclusion and culmination of Christian antiquity, its last and greatest thinker, its intellectual practitioner and people's tribune.”Footnote 15 Heidegger pointed out the limitations of such a historical conception from the perspective of a Lebensphilosophie that he would later criticize: “It can be said that the principle of concept-formation in history shows itself even in the beginning of time-reckoning: a relation to values.”Footnote 16 Understanding Heidegger's early 1920s seminars in relation to his editorial work in the Dilthey Nachlass exposes a similar critique of Judeo-Christian values alongside a growing stress on facticity and ecstasy, which transposes the linear historicist approach to the ontological have-been of being. It is surprising that Krell does not mention this contemporaneous and consistent engagement with ecstasy, lived experience (Erlebnis), and what he calls “the nexus of life” (Zusammenhang des Lebens), which he frames instead in the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (92).
This broader context does not negate or contest Coyne or Krell's analyses or conclusions, but its scope enables a clearer understanding of Heidegger's aims and method from within. A historical context does not negate the later stress on Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, either, only forces another short detour, and one that is more grounded in Heidegger's own demand “to stand our ground.” If Heidegger resisted the easy temporalization of Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages, and other life-philosophers of the 1920s and 1930s, he still applied its decisionist and authoritarian logic.
Coyne and Krell write about the same concepts and often mention the same texts, but move in opposite directions. As mentioned above, both meet in their mutual admiration of Derrida. However, as Peter Szondi once proposed, the roots of the post-Heideggerian post-structuralism of the 1970s–1980s are buried deeply in the system of polar opposites, and their transgression, a mechanism developed by Dilthey and radicalized by Nietzsche and his followers, during early 1900s.Footnote 17
Limiting oneself to Heidegger's own vocabulary, in Coyne's case, is a brilliant move, but it also shrinks the book's self-reflective tone. It will be fascinating to see where Coyne takes this argument next. Krell's easygoing discussion of Heideggerianisms seems to propose a different route that prepares the ground for a deeper view of the reception and revision of those concepts, a lineage one sees nowadays with the new and radical thought of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek, Peter Sloterdijk, and their disciples. The later post-Heideggerianism is still waiting its due analysis. Indeed, a new form of present nihilistic politics seems to require this renewed attention and balanced view in the post-Heideggerian and post-Derridean age.
