Journal of the History of Philosophy

306 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:2 APRIL 1993 And Chapters 12, t4, and 15, the most philosophically fruitful parts of this book, deal with philosophical issues raised by Frege's philosophy of language--his conception of thought, especially his ontology of thoughts, and his conception of the priority of language over thought. SANFORD SHIEH Wesleyan University Hubert L. Dreyfus. Being-in-the-WorM: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time, D/v/s/on I." Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 37o. Paper, $15.95. This volume demonstrates, were demonstration needed, that there is no substitute for protracted restudy of major philosophical works. For many years Hubert Dreyfus circulated lecture notes for his longstanding course at Berkeley on Division I of Heidegger's Being and Time. He revised the notes annually to reflect his own cumulative insight, to respond to the comments of a succession of students and teaching assistants, and to bring to bear the new light shed on many difficult passages in Being and Time by the posthumous publication of lecture courses given by Heidegger in the yearsjust before and just after the publication of Being and Time. Following the transformation of these lecture notes into a draft of the present book, the draft was revised in response to comments from participants in two additional courses on Being and Time. The result of this remarkably sustained restudy and extensive solicitation of critical reactions is the best one-volume commentary on Division I we are likely to have for many years to come. As its classroom origins would suggest, the book's section by section commentary can serve as a patient and clear companion to students in their first encounter with Being and Time. Dreyfus has a great flair for restating Heidegger's arguments in a fresh and direct way and for situating them within the architectonic of Division I. Furthermore , for a number of key terms in Being and Time he has worked out jargon-free translations which convey the sense of their German originals better than the ternhs used in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation. And students who are approaching Heidegger with prior knowledge of recent American philosophy will find Dreyfus's comparisons of Heidegger's thought with that of Kuhn, Davidson, Rorty, and Searle very helpful. The likely success of this volume as a textbook should not lead scholars long familiar with Heidegger to pass it by. Its animated, simple, direct prose belies its probing and sometimes revisionary scholarship. Dreyfus takes on difficult interpretive challenges, which frequently arise from Heidegger's compressed expositions, and manages to clarify much that earlier studies of Being and Time had left obscure. A good example is his lucid exposition of the meaning of the forestructures of Dasein's understanding and the interrelation of understanding, interpretation, and assertion (Chapter 11). Another example is Dreyfus's perspicuous account of Heidegger's conception of truth (Chapter 15). Dreyfus's chief revision of the received interpretations of Being and Time consists in BOOK REVIEWS 307 what one might call his ultra-hermeneutical reading of Dasein's selfhood: Dreyfus sees the self of average everydayness--Dasein's public and social being--as the true self 051-69) to which Dasein owns up in authenticity. He is therefore critical (~4o-42) of Heidegger's other use of the term 'self' to mean the care-structure made up of Dasein's existenzialia--the self covered up in falling averageness to which Heidegger refers when he writes that "the one-self.., is an existentiell modification of the authentic self.TMDreyfus therefore has to claim that "in anxiety [where the public self of Dasein's average everydayness is in suspension].., there is no Dasein at all" (18o), despite the fact that Heidegger himself asserts that in anxiety "only the pure Da-sein... is still there. TM Therefore Dreyfus, in an appendix on Division II co-authored with Jane Rubin, finds Heidegger's treatment of anxiety, and his treatment of the "call of conscience " that summons Dasein to own up to its existenzialia as its ownmost possibilities, to be an existentialist deviation from Heidegger's real hermeneutics of public everydayness . Dreyfus attributes this alleged...