Journal of the History of Philosophy

270 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY about the characterization of technicity (e.g., after quoting Heidegger's vitriolic attacks on technology, its leveling effects, its conversion of all beings into things, etc., Macomber says that Heidegger is not hostile to contemporary technocentrism, p. 208), and, finally, his claim that Heidegger has a philosophy of history even though one searches in vain for such an account and finds instead pronunciamentos about history. Macomber has presented a study which is rich in detail, occasionally provocative, and a conscientious attempt to deal with Heidegger's vision of truth as sympathetically as possible. He denies the Kehre in Heidegger's thought, but does not explicitly show why he thinks there is no turn from Sein und Zeit to the later essays. He does, however, suggest this by pointing to analogies between the writings of the 'early' and 'later' Heidegger, sometimes stretching them beyond their limits. All in all, however, Macomber has handled a difficult problem with competence and with flashes of original insights. In closing this book one wonders if it is not time for a 'turn' against Heidegger 's more extravagant assertions or pronouncements, for a critique of a thinker who is as profound as he is obscure. GEORGE J. STACK State University College at Brockport Political Philosophy and Time. By John G. Gunnell. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1968. Pp. x+314. $10) Employing a rich ("magisterial," to use the jacket's term) metaphoric-symbolicphilosophical language and rhetoric bequeathed us chiefly by Cassirer, Langer, Heidegger , Jaspers, et al., Gunnell has produced a fascinating essay---or a series of essays --centering on the idea of time and political experience. Contrasting mythic and modern "time" he finds that Western man first became politically and culturally conscious , with all the adventure, risk and hope that implied, around 800 B.c. in the Peloponese at the end of the Bronze Age; and that from then on, human life broke into a new condition, a "distinctively human condition" with its now typical modes of present-past-future thinking and its "problems of existence." The moment that the eternal present of the primordial time of the myth was lost, a sense of temporal distance intruded into the psyche, and this inner distance, which was the foundation of the awareness of the self and its unique life, furnished the ground of conscious speculation. With the eclipse of the myth, the self became an object of reflection and the inner distance or time became not only a condition of thought but a problem of existence. (p. 12) The author dwells on this contrast throughout the work bringing with it a vast knowledge and scholarship in ancient and modern sources. Political philosophies are one response to the challenge to find a home for man in the world "once it became apparent his time was not primordial time," and to them, as they developed in Greek thought, Gunnell gives most of his attention in his last four chapters. Another and different response occurred in the Hebrew and early Christian experience but here it was one which represented a "flight from political space" into a "space" more analogous to history. Essentially Gunnell wants to demonstrate a relationship between political order and time(s), such that the first varies with the second and such that the two chief sorts of time, mythical and chronological, strongly condition the political orders of BOOK REVIEWS 271 prehistory and history. A crisis arose in the passage from prehistory (or early history) and primordial time to history proper and ordinary temporality. The fate of the city was open toward an undisclosed future pregnant with the threat that society might be alienated from heavenly authority, that it would be detached from the orbit of the cosmos and plunge into the abyss of historical time. The pressure of temporal differentiation which taxed the mythic consciousness was effecting a crisis of the intellect which would cause man to begin a journey into the depth of his own being in search of a new vision of order.... (p. 49) While political philosophy (particularly early Greek political philosophy) was not the only solution, nevertheless, the author focuses most of his attention on the orders created by...