Abstract

Reason and World, a collection of lectures and essays, ranges in terms of the date of authorship from a lecture on Heidegger published while Marx was at the New School for Social Research to his Inaugural Lecture upon succession to Heidegger’s chair in Freiburg/br. to the Woodward Lecture at Yale in 1970. Although some of the papers were delivered in English, others are appearing here in English translation for the first time. The papers are reflections on German Idealism, Husserl, and Heidegger. They are not arranged chronologically but rather in terms of the history of philosophy, yet their order is not meant merely to reflect this history. What is at issue is rather what Marx, playing on Hegel’s phrase, believes to be the contemporary Bedürfnis der Philosophie. The subject of the initial paper is what constitutes this requirement or need for Hegel and how the Differenzschrift is crucial for an understanding of German Idealism. In a similar fashion, Marx holds that contemporary philosophy must come to terms with the requirement of its time. Through reflection of philosophy since Hegel, the contemporary period is depicted as one of transition. The need is to secure "the older thought in its domain" and to legitimize that thought in terms of the questions it asked while still remaining open for a new and different type of philosophy. The fact that the contemporary period is to be understood as one of transition finds expression in the sub-title of the book itself: Between Tradition and Another Beginning. Those two philosophical issues which Marx believes respectively to be the basis for the tradition and the other beginning are reflected by the title: Reason and World. This new beginning and the emergence of the world as a focal philosophical concern represent none other than the overcoming of tradition with its presuppositions of telos and logos. In his analyses of Heidegger, Marx discloses the world to be, in the last instance, the crucial problem of contemporary philosophy in its turn towards ateleological and pre-logical experience. Implicitly, the tradition was for him already called into question by Husserl insofar as the lifeworld together with its possible salutary effect on Western man became the subject of Husserl’s later philosophy. In this book Marx pursues the theme he first enunciated in Heidegger and the Tradition. In my opinion, however, the title of the present work might have been more accurately Reason, Language, and World. For, as Marx seeks to establish, the transition from traditional philosophy is characterized simultaneously by a change in our understanding of language. According to his interpretation of Hegel, Hegel thought of language as a "servant of logos"; on the other hand, contemporary philosophy "attributes power to language in the same measure as it denies it to logos." The question is, then, about the role of language in the emergence of world. In place of reason is the problem of the world and of the possibility of a poetic dwelling in it. The purpose of historical studies is to show via negativa the difference between the tradition and the other beginning proclaimed by Heidegger. In the latter regard, Marx contents himself with an immanent critique and asks simply whether Heidegger’s thought "has been conceived consistently and whether it has been thought through to the end." To be sure, this work is a significant contribution to the literature on Heidegger and its importance in this respect cannot be overlooked. On the other hand, the difficulty of the book lies precisely in its method. Heidegger’s claim for another beginning is itself never evaluated. Marx underscores the point that, if Heidegger is correct, traditional criteria are not applicable to the thought required by another beginning. We are left in the dilemma of simply being or not being Heideggerians. For those who are not, the only insight we gain is through a via negativa. Even if Heidegger’s thought should prove to be consistent and consequential, this fact would not suffice to establish its validity. And what are these if not traditional criteria?—A. G.