Studia Phaenomenologica

It is well known that Heidegger described his Nietzsche lecture courses as confrontations with National Socialism. Traditionally, this sense of resistance was seen firstly in the fact that Heidegger read Nietzsche at the level of metaphysics and explicitly rejected those ideological appropriations which attempted to reduce Nietzsche’s philosophy to the level of biologism or mere Weltanschauung. This essay argues that the way in which Heidegger framed his interpretation of will to power in his first and second Nietzsche lecture courses can be seen to contain a more explicit critique of the contemporaneous “official” Nietzschebild than has customarily been said.

The author argues that in Sein und Zeit Heidegger speaks about knowledge only in negative terms (as Ent-weltlichung) and thus he is missing the possibility of a synthesis between our being-in-the-world and our knowledge of objects. Consequently, the discussion of all instruments, ready-to-hand for knowing something, does not take place. All measuring instruments represent exactly the link between the pragmatic and the theoretical level of human existence. The essay comes to the conclusion, that the lack of any positive description concerning the ontological possibility of the synthesis between existential and categorical analyssis is the reason for the gap between Heidegger’s philosophy and the world of quantifying sciences.

The three books recently published by C. Romano reconsider the phenomenological senses of world and time starting from the event as original phenomena. This review-article explores the new method that he propose, called “evenimential hermeneutics”, as applied to the relation to ourselves, to the world and to the general sense of being. These analyses lean upon an original way of thinking time, as born in each “sudden” moment. The paper also draws comparisons with Heidegger, Husserl and Lévinas, while proposing a critical point of view on Romano’s thesis, concerning the relationship between the novelty of the event and the past, and its relation with desire and otherness.

François RAFFOUL, A chaque fois mien. Heidegger et la question du sujet (Servanne Jollivet); Jean GRONDIN, Le tournant herméneutique de la phenomenologie (Paul Marinescu); Alexander SCHNELL, La genèse de l'apparaître (Denisa Butnaru); James R. MENSCH, Ethics and Selfhood. Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation (Horaţiu Crişan)