[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
that the understanding of being is always already worldly: in this sense, the
understanding of being cannot be understood as a scheme through which we
encounter the world.
As an example, consider Heidegger s remark in Being and Time (New York:
Harper and Row, 1962) that the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and
the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relation-
ship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it
is as equipment (p. 98). There appears to be little room here for the idea of
mediation, for the idea that our relationship to an entity can be only an indi-
rect one a relationship mediated by a meaning (p. 216). Lafont at many
points acknowledges Heidegger s hostility to the philosophy of consciousness
enshrined in Husserl s phenomenology, where a conception of human beings
as observers is paramount, but it seems that she does not take the lessons of
Heidegger s critique sufficiently to heart. For example, if the understanding of
being really were, for Heidegger, a mediating scheme, it would be unclear why
he rejects Husserl s idea of a phenomenological reduction. That the items we
take hold of and put to use must figure into an understanding of ourselves as
beings who understand suggests that we go wrong if we think about our rela-
tion to the world and its denizens in terms of access via a scheme.
Part and parcel of Lafont s reading of the understanding of being as a con-
ceptual scheme is the imagery of determination, that is, that the understanding
of being as world-disclosure concretely determines what we encounter in the
world (p. 110). When, however, Heidegger does talk in terms of determination,
it is often in the context of characterizing everyday Dasein s inauthenticity. The
distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity finds no place in Lafont s
account. Indeed, all of the existential themes of Division II are passed over in
her interpretation, but they are important to assessing the reading of
Heidegger she wants to give: in Being and Time, Heidegger often does charac-
terize everyday existence in straitjacket-like terms, but he also holds out the
possibility of Dasein s realizing its freedom, of its taking over the ground of its
being. On Lafont s account of the determinative effect of our prior under-
standing of being , there is no room for such a possibility. Early on in Being and
Time, Heidegger says that when Dasein s own being is thus interpreted pre-
ontologically in the way which lies closest , he cautions that this interpretation
cannot be taken over as an appropriate clue, as if this way of understanding
being is what must emerge when one s ownmost state of being is considered as
an ontological theme (p. 36). On Lafont s account of the determinative power
of the meaning pre-given in an understanding of being (p. 180), this caution-
ary remark on Heidegger s part makes no sense, since there is nothing else that
could be revealed apart from, or beyond, our pre-ontological way of under-
standing being .
I have tried to give voice to a number of worries concerning Lafont s orien-
358 Book Reviews
tation toward Being and Time. I want to enter one all-too-brief complaint con-
cerning her treatment of the later Heidegger. As mentioned, the idea that for
Heidegger meaning determines reference is perhaps the central interpretive
move Lafont makes. I find it difficult to map this idea onto Heidegger s later
remarks about language, and for more than one reason. First, the source of the
idea is technical philosophy of language, which is about as far from
Heidegger s approach to language as one can get: in applying such ideas and
distinctions to his philosophy, questions concerning the legitimacy of such an
imposition naturally arise. Second, and not unrelatedly, as Lafont repeatedly
acknowledges but never really tries to explain, Heidegger says in his later work
that the essence of language is poetry. This identification suggests that what-
ever referential functions belong to language are not of central importance:
poetic language calls the thing into nearness, but calling is not, or not obvi-
ously anyway, referring. Finally, Lafont at one point claims that if one wants to
do justice to [Heidegger s later] conception of language, the task it entails will
turn out to be impossible, namely, bringing language to language as language ,
as the later Heidegger puts it. This impossibility could be paraphrased, in con-
temporary terms, as the impossibility of constructing a theory of meaning (p.
89). But if this is so, if this impossibility is something Heidegger himself rec-
ognizes and accepts, in what sense can he be making, or even be committed to,
the theoretical claim that meaning determines reference ?
Lafont s book raises difficult and important questions, both for understand-
ing Heidegger and for general issues in the philosophy of language and
epistemology, and she is to be applauded for attempting to bring Heidegger
into conversation with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. However,
the extent to which she has succeeded in adequately framing that conversation
is certainly open to dispute.
Department of Philosophy david r. cerbone
West Virginia University
PO Box 6312
Morgantown, WV 26506-6312
USA
Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious
and Its Philosophical Critics, by Donald Levy. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1996. Pp. 200. H/b $35.00.
Professor Levy defends Freud s theory of the unconscious against the argu-
ments of four leading critics: Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and Adolf Grünbaum.
In chapter one, he takes on Wittgenstein, who held that psychoanalysis is
not a science but a mythology (p. 10). According to Levy, one reason that Witt-
genstein says this is that the sole criterion for the correctness of psychoanalytic
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]