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On the Way to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy.

Article Excerpt
Emad, Parvis (2007). On the Way to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy. Madison, Wi: The University of Wisconsin Press, xvii t 236 pages, ISBN 0-299-22220-9, $55.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Frank Schalow, University of New Orleans, aurhor of The Incarnality of Being: The Earth, Animals, and the Body in Heidegger's 'Thought.

Of all the volumes that comprise Heidegger's Complete Works (Gesamtausgabe), probably none is more challenging than Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), a manuscript from 1936-38 which was originally published in 1989. A decade after its publication, Parvis Emad (in collaboration with Kenneth Maly) translated this volume as Contribution to Philosophy (From Enowning). In On the Way to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, Parvis Emad brings to fruition his unique insights into the synergy between Heidegger's thinking and his language, the challenge of giving new expression to the most perennial of all philosophical questions, the question of the "meaning" of being. Just as Emad tackles a heraclean task with his translation of Contributions to Philosophy, he rises to the occasion once again in providing us with an illuminating interpretation of this exacting and decisive text.

The difficulties surrounding Contributions to Phihsophy stem from the grounding-breaking character of its language, the uniqueness of its composition, and the magnitude of the task that Heidegger undertakes in transposing his inquiry into being into the widest historical orbit. He characterizes this task as "being-historical thinking," which brings his twofold critique and appropriation of the philosophical tradition into the forefront of the inquiry into being. In undertaking this task, Heidegger does not denounce the hermeneutic-phenomenological path he forged in Being and Time, but, on the contrary, both broadens and deepens it by locating its place within the grearer historical expanse of being's possibility for manifestation. The manner in which being, through its dynamic of manifestation, yields itself to thought deter-mines the development, transformation, and, ultimately, the unity of Heidegger's method. As Emad states in his "introduction":

The "dialogue" within the thinking of being is shaped by the thrust of hermeneutic phenomenology, that is, by the self-transforming onefold of "what shows itself in itself," the "manifest," and "interpretation." Accordingly, one of the premises of these essays is that the transcendental-horizonal thinking of Being and Time as well as the being-historical thinking of Contributions to Philosophy, each in its own way, originates from within this self-transforming onefold. (p. 3)

By adhering to the singularity of the question of being, Emad avoids the misbegotten attempt either to bifurcace Heidegger's thought into "early" and "later" phases or to fragment it into different chronological periods.

Being-historical thinking reveals that what is most question-worthy comes to light by addressing the historical culmination of the philosophical tradition's neglect of being, namely, the onslaught of "machination." in Contributions, Heidegger considers the dynamic of being's nianifestation equally in terms of its tendency toward concealment, shifting attention to what becomes manifest in a one-dimensional way or beings themselves, that is, in terms of their instrumental uses. What Heidegger calls "machination" prefigures what he describes a decade later as...

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