Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning

In a few pages I would like to express and to justify my admiration for the exceptional book of Jeffrey Barash. His training as an his torian, complemented by that of the philosopher, has served him richly, not only in the discovery of rare texts and of unpublished correspondence but in the reconstruction of the philosophical landscape at the beginning of the century, and then in the period between the two wars. Standing out in the foreground of this land scape are the two mountains constituted by Sein und Zeit and Hei degger's work following the Kehre. This reconstruction by no means intends to establish 'influences' in the mediocre, mechanis tic sense, but rather subterranean continuities between Heidegger's work and his intellectual environment in order to enhance, by the effect of their contrast, the specific intelligibility of this work. In order to appreciate the consequences of continuity as well as of discontinuity, it was necessary to identify and to emphasize a touchstone-question, endowed with the quality of great per durability, and to summon before it all of the protagonists, in cluding Heidegger himself, in an intellectual combat dating back nearly a hundred years. Announced in the title of the work, this question concerns historical meaning. By this term the author wanted to designate the stubborn ques tion, most exactly approximated by the term coherence in its ap plication to history.

Inhalt
I.- I The Emergence of a Problem of Historical Meaning in Nineteenth-Century German Thought.- II Metaphysics and Historical Meaning in Heidegger's Early Writings.- III Existence and History: Heidegger's Radical Turning-point between 1918 and 1923.- IV The Theological Roots of Heidegger's Notion of Historical Meaning.- V Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time.- II.- VI Anthropology, Metaphysics, and the Problem of Historical Meaning in Heidegger's Interpretation of the Kehre.- Conclusion.- Selected Bibliography.