Heidegger s thinking has an underlying unity, this book argues, and has cogency for seemingly diverse domains of modern culture: philosophy and religion, aesthetics and literary criticism, intellectual history and social theory. The theme of mortality finite human existence pervades Heidegger s thought, in the author s words, before, during, and after his magnum opus, Being and Times, published in 1927. This theme is manifested in Heidegger s work not as funereal melodramatics or as despair and destructive nihilism but rather as a thinking within anxiety.
Four major subthemes in Heidegger s thinking are explored in the book s four parts: the fundamental ontology developed in Being and Time; the lighting and clearing of Being, understood as unconcealment; the history of philosophy with emphasis on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Nietzsche interpreted as the destiny of Being; and the poetics of Being, explicated as the fundamental experience of mortality.
Neither an introduction nor a survey, this book is a close reading of a wide range of Heidegger s books, lectures, and articles including extensive material not yet translated into English informed by the author s conversations with Heidegger in 1974 76. Each of the four subthemes is treated critically. The aim of the book is to push its interrogations of Heidegger s thought as far as possible, in order to help the reader toward an independent assessment of his work and to encourage novel, radically conceived approaches to traditional philosophical problems.
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