Heidegger and Aristotle.

McDonald, Peter

Sadler, Ted. London and Atlantic Highlands. Athlone Press, 1996. xii + 250 pp. Cloth, $90.00--Mr. Sadler offers two reasons why the juxtaposition Heidegger/Aristotle constitutes a particularly fruitful and indeed necessary line of inquiry. First, Heidegger's own analyses of Aristotle penetrate with singular precision and insight into the Stagirite's thought (pp. 12-13). Second, it is essentially Aristotelianism that Heidegger seeks to overcome, even in his writings on other major philosophers (pp. 17-8).

In an extensive introduction, Sadler investigates possible sources for Heidegger's Seinsfrage: his Catholicism and the influence of Brentano, the tutelage of Husserl, the impact of Dilthey, Hegel and Luther, Plato and the Presocratics. Having thus laid the groundwork for closer investigation into Heidegger's confrontation with Aristotelian ontology, the author turns (chapter 1) to what he terms the "ousiological reduction": Aristotle reduces the question "What is Being?" to the "more scientific" question "What is ousia?" (pp. 47-8). Moreover, Aristotle's emphasis on problems of motion and change make sensible ousia the focal point from which both the hypokeimenon and the theos as prime mover must be understood (pp. 55-9, 67).

Sadler continues: Heidegger maintains that by suppressing and evading the Seinsfrage, Aristotle's onto-theological metaphysics gives implicit testimony to the pervasive phenomenon of Seinsvergessenheit. Nevertheless, the Seinsfrage does not remain simply unanswered by Aristotle, for ousia ultimately means presence (pp. 50-8). Remaining implicit, Aristotle's answer--Being=presence--conceals that it is derived from and properly applicable only to a particular class of beings. Yet Sadler is silent regarding both the manifold ways of being as modifications of existentia, and the unified concept of Being which underlies these modifications. Suspecting a parallel between Heidegger's Sein and the "supra-metaphysical `absolutely other' God of Neoplatonism" (p. 167), he instead contends that it is the overlooking of "supra-ousiological realities" that Heidegger criticizes in Aristotle (pp. 81-93).

In his second chapter, Sadler turns to questions of truth and method. Heidegger's rejection of an "Aristotelian," propositional or correspondence theory and his own interpretation of truth as revealing are fundamentally motivated by his desire "to be `phenomenological', i.e. to bring the things themselves ... into view" (p. 114). Nevertheless, Aristotle, too, proceeds phenomenologically and takes recourse to pre-theoretical understanding by turning to ordinary language (p. 110). The theme of method is taken up again in the third and final chapter when Sadler highlights differences between Sorge and the phronesis of Aristotle's practical philosophy. A discussion of religiosity and a re-examination of time conclude the work.

Temporal analysis is a crucial theme in Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotelian ontology (p. 68). In perhaps the weakest section of the book, Sadler claims that Aristotelian time, "as the dimensionality of movement is an a priori principle" (p. 183) and "a condition of physical thingliness" (pp. 70, 189). In consequence of this distortion, the author comes to regard Heidegger's `world-time" and `ecstatic-horizontal temporality," the proximate and the ultimate ontological foundations for "now-time," as subjective over against the objective, physical time of Aristotle (p. 193).

The merit of Mr. Sadler's study lies in his emphasis on the Seinsfrage as the abiding core and focus of Heidegger's thought. Sadler devotes considerable attention to secondary literature and a search for historical parallels. More textual immanence might have better served his objective of providing "a useful preliminary orientation to the problem `Heidegger and Aristotle'" (p. 21).