Abstract

White’s book, which is a reworking of a doctoral dissertation at Toronto, concerns the relationship between poetizing and thinking in Heidegger. The topic is important and well chosen. White takes Heidegger to be neither a pure poet, nor a pure thinker, but a thinker-poet who is "primarily thoughtful" and hence primarily susceptible to a philosophical analysis. White gives his readers fair warning in his introduction that he intends to "reformulate" what Heidegger has to say in more traditional ontological language, and that failure to do so renders Heidegger’s work a closed book. This warning is disconcerting to one who is sensitive to Heidegger’s language and to his critique of onto-theo-logic. For example, when White says, in connection with the poet George, that one needs to get "the correct ontological slant" on "renuntiation," one’s Heideggerian hair stands on an end—for Heidegger rejects all onto-logic, overcomes truth as "correctness," and would regard getting a "slant" as horizonal-representational thinking. The reader must decide for himself just how far White can get with this procedure. For myself I find the book tightly reasoned and written with the terse crispness which makes Anglo-American hearts flutter, but I frequently fail to recognize Heidegger in the midst of these "arguments," "strategies," and "alternate hypotheses." White needs to face the question of the possibility of reformulating in propositions what is only accessible nonpropositionally.