A Critique from an Enlightenment Humanist: A Review of Tze-wan Kwan’s The Way betwixt Being and Man: On Heidegger’s Philosophical Detours
Author：Tak-Lap Yeung
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Tze-wan Kwan’s The Way betwixt Being and Man: On Heidegger’s Philosophical Detours contains a total of eleven long essays, the most notable of which are the three long essays that have never been published. All three articles deal with Heidegger’s entire intellectual career, but in terms of philosophical orientation, they focus mainly on Heidegger’s later interests. Therefore, they are worth reading and discussing as a whole because of the continuity in content.
Through the exposition of the three new essays, it can be seen that this book does not discuss Heidegger’s philosophy merely for the purpose of interpreting his concepts and statements. After sorting out the various themes and meanings in Heidegger’s philosophy, which are extremely diverse and even close to esoteric, the theoretical consequences are revealed concretely and objectively, and, in addition, the author provides an extremely comprehensive, profound, and severe critique of them. The overall criticism of Heidegger is mainly about two points: first, Heidegger’s criticism of subjectivity is too strict and, consequently, he underestimates the personal responsibility constituted by individual spontaneity; second, Heidegger is too distrustful of human reason. These two points, while more explicitly stated in some chapters, animate the whole book. I argue that the criticism comes from the perspective of a humanist with the spirit of modern enlightenment.