Appropriating Heidegger (Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, And the Greeks) (Book Review‪)‬

Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, by Charles Bambach, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. 400 pp. IN 1922 MARTIN HEIDEGGER wrote a rather brief, yet particularly signal essay entitled "Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation." (1) Intended as an introduction to a larger--though, never-to-be-completed--monograph on Aristotle, the essay attempts to lead the reader into a kind of philosophical comportment within which Heidegger's phenomenological research will be undertaken; that is to say, it seeks to offer a way by which Heidegger--and the reader along with him--may affect a disposition not only toward the work to be interpreted (in this case, Aristotle), but also toward one's own "hermeneutical situation" in and through which reading always takes place. For the Heidegger of this early path-mark on the way to Being and Time (1927), a philosophical reader always encounters the hermeneutical problem of interpreting works through the "conceptual resources" that the researcher brings to the text.