The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

by John van Buren

Hannah Arendt wrote that Martin Heidegger's reputation as a thinker and teacher during the early 1920s traveled throughout Germany "like the rumor of the hidden king." In The Young Heidegger, John van Buren offers a new reading of Martin Heidegger's youthful thought leading up to Being and Time (1927) and its subsequent development in his later writings. Part One deconstructs Heidegger's later autobiographical accounts of his early period, demonstrating that the philosopher's famous "turn" after Being and Time was in fact also a re-turn to his youthful thought. Part Two examines Heidegger's student years, showing the influences of Scholasticism, medieval mysticism, Neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology on his thinking during this period. Part Three focuses on Heidegger's early Freiburg period, sketching his project of demythologizing metaphysics and effecting the end of philosophy. Part Four traces the young Heidegger's anarchic, personalist formulations of his new postmetaphysical beginning. Van Buren employs Heidegger's youthful thought to work out strategies for demythologizing problematic aspects of his later thought (such as the eclipse of the personal Other, essentialism, ethnocentrism, genderism, and anthropocentrism) and to liberate its more radical countertendencies within contemporary debates.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography

448 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

John van Buren is Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Environmental Studies Program, and Advisor in the Architecture Program at Fordham University.

He is an internationally recognized expert in the thought of the German philosopher of nature Martin Heidegger, 20th & 21st century European philosophy, and contemporary environmental philosophy & ethics. He is currently working on questions of the interface of hermeneutics and environmental history, environmental justice, climate change ethics, and theories of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.

His doctoral work, completed in 1989, was at McMaster University in Canada and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany. He was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa in 1989-90, also completing a postdoctoral fellowship there in environmental studies in the Geography Department in 1990-91. He joined the Fordham philosophy department in 1991. He has served as the founding Director of the Fordham University Environmental Studies Program since 2001. He served as Associate Director of Urban Studies in 2009-2010 and 2010-2011.

Reviews

[A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Profound interrogation of Heidegger's juvenilia. Rises above the important philological work that it presupposes in order to argue against the 'later Heidegger' using the pre-Sein und Zeit Heidegger. The second chapter provides a somewhat-dense but fully intelligible exposition of the main themes of Heidegger's thought - the influence of Schürmann and Derrida is quite apparent. The book really sets itself apart in its documenting with admirable clarity and detail the early Heidegger's preoccupations with worldview, the philosophy of life, and Christian religious experience. The final part presents a virtuoso argument that ties these early concerns to the more familiar themes of Heidegger's thinking, particularly the 'question of being', arguing vigorously for the contention that the early Heidegger, i.e. the Heidegger still under the influence of Dilthey, the 'practical Aristotle', and Christian theology, addresses the 'question of being' in ways that are perhaps superior to those Heidegger employs after the publication of Sein und Zeit. While this contention is not entirely persuasive, the author succeeds in demonstrating that, at the very least, the early Heidegger has much to teach students of a Heidegger who has perhaps become a little too familiar. Thus, this book serves as a useful corrective to portraits of Heidegger that, by focusing exclusively on Heidegger's later attempts to ask 'the question of being', render the origins of that question and its significance altogether murky. By showing how the early Heidegger came to his 'one thought', we become more attuned to why Heidegger thought it was so important, and, for us readers of the later Heidegger, who surely face a daunting challenge, why Heidegger felt it necessary to pose this question in an increasingly vexing manner.