Being and Time

There exists a dichotomy when it comes to Heidegger. People either loathe him or adore him as a thinker (as person, I think there a few that can admire him, thinking of his Nazi past). I definitely belong to those that celebrate his thinking. Reading Sein und Zeit has opened reality in an entirely different way to me.

What Heideggers tries to do, is creating an ontology of our Dasein within a phenomenological approach. The strenght of this is approach is that it does not make pre-assumptions about reality, but tries to view what is real in the way it reveals itself to us. Sein und Zeit is a taxonomy of our Being, revealing how we try to escape our loneliness and fear of death by fleeing into culture and others. As a (semi-)Buddhist I show more can relate to this.

Since Heidegger does not use external arguments for his theory, I can imagine scientists will have trouble accepting the things he does. Rationality, logics, etc. are not of primary value in his research. Heidegger reveals the structures of being primarily by finding the right words to describe our way of being-in-the-world. This makes certain paragraphs almost a sort of poetry, which I think was exactly Heideggers intention.

The result of this, is a very personal, existential approach to reality. His theory has to resonate, you have to be able to find yourself in his taxonomy, otherwise there is nothing that can convince you of its truth. But if you do, if you often find yourself thrown back on your own, if you have trouble accepting an external reality as more 'real' than the way the things appear to you, then Sein und Zeit is a book that will give you a new way in which you can think. show less

An obvious work of genius and I think Bourdieu is more than right to describe it as polyvocal in being able to be read both in the context of Heidegger’s Nazism and in spite of/abstracted from it. I’ve gotta say though that I only comprehended about a third of it (if that) and the temporality stuff from the second half has really got me in a bind. Another book to be read for the rest of my life though and it is one of the bigguns in the field.

Good luck with this one. One of the "greatest philosophical works" of the 19th. How much of that rep is due to the fact that most people struggle to read it? (I know I did.) It's hopelessly convoluted and esoteric, even frustrating, and when you do cut down to his points they're hardly more than wordplay. Sartre would go on to continue some of that legacy, but with easier sentences and/or an involving fiction.

One shouldn’t forget that Pythagorean cryptic utterance: “Do not cut in two what is on the road.”

Philosophy indeed, it seems, is a road. The utterance means then: choose that philosophy and that road to wisdom in which you will not ‘cut in two’, in which you will propound, not contradictions, but firm and unchanging truths. Yet with the introduction of that scission dividing the ontic and the ontological, we find ourselves sitting at the very road cut in two we swore would be untouched. As the philosopher too concerned with the psychophysical, we begin and end with the wrong tools and placements of anything through which one cannot work out of. When Heidegger begins to enter ‘in-the-world’ we begin to see this as a show more precedent to ramble upon the endless infinite variations that prompt themselves to the physical—a Pollock painting of verbs serving no philosophical use. Through the obvious obfuscation only evident in the confused and the obscuring of Daoist origins do we finally understand the relevance of the entire deviation of authenticities and inauthenticities that permeates a portion of this book. That play of words that becomes the archonic instrument breathing dualisms finds itself losing its charm after every verb is a proverbial transmitting, charioteering, boomeranging (and so on) into new fractal amorphous verbs. The modalities are endless for all and Heidegger gets lost in the complexity while ultimately not doing metaphysics, but rather displacing common orderings of semantics. The case of the phenomenologist who identifies with his phenomenology. Though one may disagree with the book in its entirety, partially nod along or frown with foul intent, one must admire the beautific simplicity of Dasein, the self-reflexive meta-fictionalized Reader whose thoughts are splain in real-time and whose splaying is thought of in itself—though these “places” may not be of use. It’s format certainly is. The book ends with an unfinished question mark. Or rather, a concretized question mark with no discernible answer since the Aletheia of such inquiry would result in absolute blissful theurgy.

That demiurgic intellect placed in the crux of the theurgic One. I solemnly weep, won’t you respond? I am you. Be. show less

This is one of the most rigorous and methodically constructed treatises you will find anywhere in philosophy. Heidegger is known for his difficulty, but this book holds an added challenge due to its cumulative dependence. What I mean is, you cannot possibly come to fully grasp the later sections of the book without grasping earlier sections. Every bit of the author's impressive terminology (whether it be a common term imbued with new meaning or a clever neologism) is systematically chosen, introduced, questioned, and developed as the text moves along. If you have never read Heidegger before, expect to reread certain paragraphs at least twice before their meaning begins to dawn on you. If you are persistent, the meaning of his precisely show more formulated sentences will cause you to perceive the world in entirely new ways. I recommend - at least at first - taking this book in small doses. If you feel your mind wandering at all just stop and go back to it later. If you are looking to scan this book for tidbits of wisdom you will likely be disappointed. Alternately, I would plan on a commitment of at least a few months if you want to glean anything at all from the text.

For those who have read Heidegger before: this book is definitely his magnum opus. Within it he establishes a point of departure for all of his later thought and works. It is also the most engaging and enlightening read you will encounter in his repertoire. Compared to Heidegger's post-kehre writings, you will find the material and style in Being and Time to be far more precise and clear [a very difficult feat indeed considering the elusive nature of the subject matter]. Also, reading this book more than once is a must! Do not be surprised if after the first read you feel as though you are missing something - you probably are. show less

Books Not To Leave To Read Until One Week Before The Essay's Due In, Part One: Sein und Zeit

Being and Time, opus of rampant Nazi and all-round right-wing bastard Martin Heidegger, will cause the most voracious and determined student a sharp intake of breath when its five hundred densely-written pages (plus abundant appendices) lands in their reading-list, causing audible squeaks from the books beneath it.

Heidegger's themes are in an incredible number of ways similar to Nietzsche's. Your brain will therefore, finding that Nietzsche said roughly equivalent things in more interesting and memorable ways, find gripping onto what Heidegger actually said rather like wrestling a single, specific greased eel in a pit of identical greased eels. show more But at the time he wrote Sein und Zeit he didn't think much of Nietzsche, so getting them mixed up is a Bad Idea. Similarly, the existentialists, feminists and various other twentieth-century schools of Continental philosophy adapted his terminology with profligate glee, and so unless you've ignored everything coming out of that tradition you'll find yourself mixing up Heidegger's concept of the Other with what de Beauvoir means by the term, and so on.

Speaking of which, old Martin was of the opinion that conceptual thought needed to be destroyed in order to reattain authenticity in one's relation to oneself and the world, and his vocabulary-building shenanigans are a somewhat less pleasant way of achieving this than a pickaxe to the back of the head. Much labour must be spent sorting out the distinctions between ontic and onological, and gaping at words like 'ownmost' that result from Heidegger's over-the-top love of the tendency, shared by both Germans and philosophers, to create a completely new term, nuanced and difficult to grasp, by violently shoving words up each others' arses.

Add to this the fact that he's generally translated by people who believe the only thing anybody could be interested in when reading Heidegger is the translation itself. You're assumed to have a working knowledge of German to really understand why the hell 'existential' and 'existentiell' are being used for different things, and the (not infrequent) Latin and Greek you're assumed to be able to deal with yourself, without the aid of footnotes. (There are appendices, supplied by Heidegger himself, but these just point you to the relevant Latin or Greek work). While doing all this, you have to work very hard to keep control of your general feeling of being creeped out by the Jew-denouncing revolutionary-conservatism underlying everything.

Don't get me wrong - there are excellent, valuable, important ideas in here. But they're very carefully obscured, so as to protect them from non-philosophers.

The good news: it's only about 40% of what the bastard was originally planning to publish. show less

As one of my philosophy professors put it, "whether you like it or not, Heidegger was the clearest thinker of the 20th century." Great choice of words -- not the most important, or most original, or whatever other epithets are printed on the back cover. Heidegger had a very clear notion of what his philosophy was and what it aimed at, in all of its intricacies and subtleties, and that clarity (I mean the clarity of the author's own thought for himself) bursts forth from every page. Whether that clarity is reproduced in the reader's apprehension probably depends on one's background in 20th century phenomenology, Aristotelian metaphysics, and the German language. Having none of these "ready-to-hand," I don't think I'll be attempting a show more second read. show less