Abstract

This book contains two essays by Pöggeler, one forty-five pages long with the same title as the book, the other some thirty pages long entitled "Heidegger’s Topology of Being." In the first essay, "politics" is taken in an admittedly wider sense than usual, because it refers to the establishment of a sense of life for a people over a historical period; it is a Politik des Volkes. The agents of such political action are the poets and thinkers who found a new age. Pöggeler examines Heidegger’s analysis of our own period, the place of technology in society, and the question of how authentic appreciation of being can still occur. The question of politics is then moved beyond that of a people, to "politics in the horizon of this world-civilization". In treating this subject Pöggeler analyzes many other themes in Heidegger with his customary skill and lucidity. The second essay is an examination of the questions Heidegger raises in regard to what stands beneath any division of kinds or areas of being. There are fifteen long footnotes which fill almost fifty pages. They are very interesting and cover much literature about Heidegger, and also examine at some length Heidegger’s attitude toward National Socialism in 1933 and in the years following. The chief question one can address to Pöggeler and to Heidegger, of course, is whether human association on the scale of a Volk or on the scale of world-civilization is still political in anything but a metaphorical sense.—R.S.