The Young Heidegger – Rumor of the Hidden King Hardcover - 1994

Hannah Arendt wrote that Martin Heidegger's reputation as a thinker and teacher during the early 1920s traveled throughout Germany "like the rumor of the hidden king". In The Young Heidegger, John van Buren offers a new reading of Martin Heidegger's youthful thought leading up to Being and Time (1927) and its subsequent development in his later writings. Part One deconstructs Heidegger's later autobiographical accounts of his early period, demonstrating that the philosopher's famous "turn" after Being and Time was in fact also a re-turn to his youthful thought. Part Two examines Heidegger's student years, showing the influences of Scholasticism, medieval mysticism, Neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology on his thinking during this period. Part Three focuses on Heidegger's early Freiburg period, sketching his project of demythologizing metaphysics and effecting the end of philosophy. Part Four traces the young Heidegger's anarchic, personalist formulations of his new postmetaphysical beginning. Van Buren employs Heidegger's youthful thought to work out strategies for demythologizing problematic aspects of his later thought (such as the eclipse of the personal Other, essentialism, ethnocentrism, genderism, and anthropocentrism) and to liberate its more radical countertendencies within contemporary debates.