Albert Hofstader's Heidegger

Albert Hofstader's translation of Heidegger's Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie comes with a lexicon which doubles as a partial index. We may have the National Endowment to thank for this as it was often not the norm with Indiana University Press.

Page 371 of the Lexikon offers us the Four Basic Problems of the "science" of being:

1. ontological difference
2. articulation of being
3. modifications of being and unity of concept of being
4. truth-character of being

All of these, we are told, arise from the one "question" variously posed as

What does being signifiy?
Whence can something like being in general be understood?
How is understanding of being at all possible?

What is baffling for a philosphical lexicon by a translator is that its entries are most often without the original equivalent in German.

The lectures come to us through Fritz Heidegger and F-W von Herrmann almost 50 years after they were delivered as lectures in Marburg in 1927. The German reader, without an index, had the one benefit that von Herrmann broke up many long passages into paragraphs.

On the basis that Sein und Zeit was completed in 1926, these pages offer some additions: pg 173 has Heidegger on Rilke:

Rilke versteht auch das Philosophische des Lebesbegriffes, den Dilthey schon ahnte und den wir mit dem Begriff der Existenz als In-der-Welt-sein faßten.

which Hofstader renders with

which Dilthey had already surmised

cutting the reader off from the satisfied tone of Heidegger. The distance from ahnen to vermuten would not have been lost on Heidegger if said of him and his works by another.

To ignore Heidegger's tone is to miss everything he says of Stimmung, Besinnung - especially when he speaks of concepts. In this regard, the tone taken in his letters to Jaspers is invaluable. By 1927 in Marburg Heidegger was not mincing his words as he had in the early days in Freiburg.

Jaspers is, however, absent in these lectures and receives no credit for this Begriff der Existenz. Shrewd foresight on Heidegger's part.  From the name of the lectures no one not present could guess that Kant and Aristotle figure more largely than Husserl, whom Heidegger is soon to replace in Freiburg.