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REVIEWS

God allows us to overcome the limits of reason —human frailty, evil,

injustice—, which threaten to subtract its meaning from life, thus colliding
with the possibility of ethics.

M. Soledad Paladino. Institute of Philosophy – Austral University

spaladino@austral.edu.ar

HAN, BYUNG-CHUL
The heart of Heidegger. The concept of “state of mind” by Martin
Heidegger, Herder, Barcelona, 2021, 327 pp.

Another book by the fashionable philosopher arrives. The truth is that I

am not a friend of fashion, and even less in philosophy, but... this thinker
has a good pen and never leaves me indifferent. I am interested in the
topics it deals with and the focus, although I cannot help but disagree
with the background of its exposition. I will try to explain it.

The subject of the book is states of mind, a difficult subject to

approach and one that I studied in German thinkers who, in my opinion,
faced the matter with more rigor than Han. But this is the vision of a
fashionable philosopher on another fi philosopher who since his death,
and even before, already had a certain halo of genius: Heidegger. The
moods, the heart, the moods, the fundamental attitude... are concepts
that are equated and depending on who is studying them, they draw
very different conclusions. Heidegger also dedicated himself to the
matter of the Gesinnung, of the inner attitude, of the heart, of the nucleus
of the states of mind.
The book consists of nine chapters. The first, as this author usually
does with titles—it must be admitted that he is good at putting provocative
titles—is The Circumcision of the Heart.
Very briefly, what Han is saying is that a lack of enthusiasm is what
undertakes the circumcision of the heart. The heart in Heidegger,
contrary to Derrida, is listening to a single voice, the voice of being —a
concept in which, in my opinion, Dietrich von Hildebrand goes much
deeper than Heidegger and Han.

PHILOSOPHICAL YEARBOOK 55/2 (2022) 433

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REVIEWS

same, but the luck of fashion was more with the latter than with the
former.
Heidegger's heart has to do with harmony, with the tempered,
the conjoined, the reunited, the collected, the contemplative, and all
this with the totality of hearts. Here the author makes Heidegger
dialogue with authors such as Derrida, Deleuze and Hegel, among
others. And the mood appears when the author conceives that the
heart and the world are somehow coextensive. And what constitutes
that architecture of the heart is the state of mind. Already at the end
of the chapter he talks about transcendental love in Heidegger, but
from a somewhat tricky perspective, in my opinion, since that
transcendental love is transsexual. This could be accepted, but later
he makes a turn typical of those who are drunk with fashions and even
ideologies and defends that both heterosexuality and homosexuality
would be nothing more than an ontic phenomenon.
It would not intervene in being. And he begins to speak of a neutral
sexuality. Finally, he attributes to Heidegger that the thinking of the
heart —paraphrasing Pascal— is dazzled by the magic of the tuning
world. Heidegger puts his heart in the world, but even today in
Heidegger's house the biblical sentence still hangs on the door: "Take
care of your heart more than anything else, because it is the source
of life", it is not it is open to or for the love of God.

The second chapter is titled The magic of there. It is about the

complexity of closeness. The there is the closeness, but the closeness
is not the caress. Proximity goes rather along the path of being in, or
being in the thing. It is about looking for a closeness that intentionality
does not objectively discover, does not see. This could be one of the
reasons why Heidegger distanced himself from Husserlian
phenomenology. He does not stay there in consciousness. For
Heidegger, according to Han, the facticity of the there becomes
accessible in affectivity, which cannot be located within the psychic
subject. The magic of there is not reduced to representations, but
rather consists in the fact that "there always already was" (p. 54).
Being there is always prior to consciousness, or to being conscious. The magic ther
Only this chapter does not delve into what precisely that gift is...

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It could be many things... but it remains a bit up in the air. Although

he recovers it in the next chapter.
The third chapter has a curious title: Goosebumps as a mental
image. For Heidegger, philosophy is a question that is understood
from an essential emotion of existence. And there's the mood again,
a fundamental mood of hers. What is given in the fundamental state
of mind is the gift, a gift that is repeated in thought. Here Han attacks
Kantian philosophy, because for Kant the philosophers of feeling do
not define philosophy as work, as the philosopher of Königsberg
liked. Kant defines presentiment as the interruption of an accumulation
of moral conscience, which must be restored so that what is
presentiment becomes known (p. 64). Nothing is further from what
Heidegger perceives by presentiment. This situates the presentiment
in the heart as an organ of non-economic knowledge. In Kant
everything is calculation, number... economy. Heidegger, ridiculing
Kant, opposes the thought of the heart to the mind that works
economically. That is why for Han, Heidegger's heart is in the place
of central knowledge. The beginning of philosophizing is precisely in
something alive, in the awakening of the fundamental state of mind.
He ends this chapter with a somewhat suggestive digression on
boredom.

I do not want to continue shredding the book by summarizing

or revealing the end. The characteristic of the “spoiler” is to steal the
opportunity to be surprised. Just mention the topics that the author
will deal with: the voice, the mood of the images, the trace of the
divine, the eccentricity, the pain and the beats for the whole. Still,
Han gives us a picture of Heidegger's heart.
Finally, I have missed more references to the thinkers, also
German, who, in my opinion, have more and better addressed the
subject of the heart and/or the state of mind (who do not identify
themselves at all), such as Pfänder , Dietrich von Hildebrand, Max
Scheler, Adolf Reinach... In contrast, I have been struck by the
author's extensive bibliography of authors who, also in my opinion,
have addressed the issue from shallow approaches, although easier
to read, such as by example

PHILOSOPHICAL YEARBOOK 55/2 (2022) 435

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Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Lyotard, Sartre... I think this gives clues
as to where philosophy is moving, always in the postmodern line of Byung-
Chul Han.

Alberto Sanchez Leon. University of Navarra

asanleo@gmail.com

PASCAL,
BLAISE Pensaments i opuscles, translated and edited by Pere Lluís
Font, Adesiara, Barcelona, 2021, 791 pp.

There are works that exalt a language. Pascal 's Thoughts , together with
the Provincial Letters, constitute one of the monuments of the French
language, one of the pinnacles of literature of all time. Its translation is
always a challenge, although when it is successful, the rare miracle of
communication occurs and the beneficiary language is equally enhanced.

This is what happens in this translation and edition by Pere Lluís Font
(1934), Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Autonomous University
of Barcelona.
The beginnings of Pere Lluís' relationship with the French thinker
go back to the middle of the last century. A good part of his work is
traversed by a dialogue with Pascal, be it from Montaigne and Descartes,
or towards Kant. After a lifetime of Pascalian (and Pascalizing) study, he
offers a very meditated work, refined by years of study, in which finesse
and géométrie appear well appraised, without leaving aside all the
theological dimension, which readers present tend to forget. His
comments are very appropriate, which allow us to realize the distance
that separates current thought from the Jansenizing Augustinianism of
Pascal, as well as his comments on biblical exegesis.

The Catalan language is exalted with this splendid edition, designed

to be read not only by specialists, but also by the "cultured" man (35, p.
129), which Pascal claimed.
Freshness, which captivates readers of all ages, is the trait

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