Guignon, Charles. Review of S. J. McGrath's HEIDEGGER: A (VERY) CRITICAL INTRODUCTION. NDPR (March 2009).

McGrath, S. J. Heidegger: a (Very) Critical Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. S. J. McGrath's trim little book offers us an overview of Heidegger's life-work, with special emphasis on his political activities and his relationship to theology. The book is part of a religious series originating from the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, and McGrath is up front in announcing that he is a Christian humanist and a personalist. Though he is highly impressed by Heidegger (this is his second book on the subject), his religious commitments incline him to be "very" critical of Heidegger. The book is divided into five chapters. After a short introduction, there are chapters on phenomenology, ontology, axiology, and theology, with a brief conclusion on "Why I Am Not a Heideggerian." The chapters are of unequal quality and their titles do not really correspond to their subject matters. The chapter titled "Phenomenology" is actually about the early Heidegger, covering Heidegger's thought from his Habilitationsschrift of 1915 on Duns Scotus to his greatest work, Being and Time (1927). As a religious scholar, McGrath does not examine the debates on logic that motivated Heidegger's dissertation on psychologism of 1913, but he does a remarkably good job of explicating the Duns Scotus work and showing its relevance for all Heidegger's thought up to the magnum opus. This short chapter, only twenty-eight pages, provides a marvelously clear and thoughtful account of Heidegger's early thinking. McGrath is an excellent writer and his narrative is crisp, fresh and insightful. Instead of repeating the tired old clichés that make up so much of the Heidegger literature, he invents novel formulations and clear summaries of texts that illuminate Heidegger's work in interesting ways. With the exception of one important confusion about the texts, which I will turn to in a moment, this chapter provides a helpful and engaging summary of Heidegger's early work. The chapter titled "Ontology" is actually an account of the later Heidegger. The strange juxtaposition of titles and chapter contents results from McGrath's misunderstanding of Heidegger's conception of phenomenology, which leads him to think that phenomenology is abandoned in the later works, whereas the term "ontology" correctly captures the intent of the later works, an idea Heidegger would reject. Nevertheless, this chapter contains some helpful, if not very original, elucidations of the later writings. The chapters titled "Axiology" and "Theology," obviously McGrath's main interests, were rather disappointing in my view. The chapter on axiology repeats familiar criticisms of Heidegger for failing to provide an ethics to go along with his ontology. What this claim overlooks is Heidegger's critique of the then dominant "value philosophy." The term "value" that was introduced into philosophy in the nineteenth-century was borrowed from economic theory and therefore was loaded down with the assumptions of the science of economics. In line with his tendency to undercut counterproductive dichotomies, Heidegger rejected the dualism of fact and value and focused instead on formulating an account of our most "primordial" understanding of reality as "always already" suffused with what we today call "values." The conception of being as an "event" retrieves something like the older teleological understanding of reality as it is originally experienced by us, and it suggests that the modern distinction between factual and normative is derivative from this older experience of things. The axiology chapter also repeats the familiar charge that Heidegger was a "fascist" because he did not respect "liberal individualism," as though anyone who critically reflects on individualism is a fascist. The rather shrill, self-righteous tone of this chapter marks a strong contrast with the earlier, more temperate chapters. Finally, the chapter on "Theology" continues the critique of Heidegger by claiming that his avowed "methodological atheism" fails to account for the fundamental need for God that is characteristic of all human experience everywhere. In this chapter, Heidegger's betrayal of his Christian roots is explained in terms of what McGrath thinks is a deep incoherence in Heidegger's thought -- the inseparability of the "ontic" and the "ontological" -- which should require Heidegger to make faith central to his "existential anthropology." . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15545.