Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I.

Rating:
Summary: The clearest account of Heidegger's thought to date.
Review: BEING-IN-THE-WORLD : A Commentary on Heidegger's 'Being and Time,' Division I. By Herbert L. Dreyfus. 370 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, Eighth Printing 1999 (1991). ISBN 0-262-54056-8 (pbk.)

Anyone who attempts to study Heidegger's commentators will quickly discover that many of them can be even more difficult than Heidegger himself. One notable exception is George Steiner, whose 'Martin Heidegger' (1989) is such an interesting book that one wishes it had been two or three times longer. As a general introduction to Heidegger's life and thought, however, it can only take one so far, and those wishing for a fuller treatment would be well advised to take a look at the present equally lucid and stimulating study by Dreyfus.

He explains that he has limited detailed treatment of 'Being and Time' to Division I of Part One (i.e., the first half), because he considers this "the most original and important section of the work, for it is [here] that Heidegger works out his account of being-in-the-world and uses it to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology" (p.vii). Division II, though containing important material, is marred by "some errors so serious as to block any consistent reading" (p.viii), though it is taken up in a 57-page Appendix.

In his brief but extremely interesting Introduction, Dreyfus sets out to answer the question, 'Why study Heidegger?' If I have understood Dreyfus correctly, what he seems to be saying is that Western thought has been fundamentally in error since the time of Plato : "Plato and our tradition got off on the wrong track by thinking that one could have a theory of everything.... Heidegger is not against theory. He thinks it powerful and important, but limited" (p.2).

Heidegger, in other words, although accepting a reasonable use of reason, has seen through the folly of that worship of reason which leads to its unreasonable and excessive use. Dreyfus tells us that Heidegger seeks to clear away five main false assumptions :

1. Explicitness. "Heidegger questions both the possibility and desirability of making our everyday understanding explicit" (p.4). There are and always will be many things in life that cannot be made explicit, that cannot be explained, that are not amenable to "critical reflection," things, for example, such as human skills.

2. Mental Representation. "Heidegger questions the view that experience is always and most basically a relation between a self-contained subject with mental content (the inner) and an independent object (the outer)." For him "there is a more fundamental way of being-in-the-world that cannot be understood in subject/object terms" (p.5).

3. Theoretical Holism. Heidegger "insists that we return to the phenomenon of everyday human activity and stop ringing the changes on the traditional oppositions of immanent/transcendent ... subject/ object ... explicit/tacit ... etc." (p.6).

4. Detachment and Objectivity. "From the Greeks we inherit not only our assumption that we can obtain theoretical knowledge of every domain, even human activities, but also our assumption that the detached theoretical viewpoint is superior to the involved practical viewpoint" (p.6). Heidegger, following the insights of Nietzsche, Peirce, James and Dewey, denies these assumptions.

5. Methodological Individualism. Heidegger, "in his emphasis on the social context as the ultimate foundation of intelligibility [shares with Wittgenstein] the view that most philosophical problems can be dis(solved) [sic] by a description of everyday social practices" (p.7). In other words, they are pseudo-problems.

If Heidegger were only clearing the ground of 2,500 years of sheer wrongheadedness, he would of course still be an extremely important and valuable thinker. But, as Dreyfus explains, he goes further, for "he has a positive account of authentic human being and a positive methodological proposal for how human being should be systematically studied" (p.8). His influence, which today extends into many areas, has been and continues to be enormous as more and more specialists and experts and technicians of every kind begin to appreciate the fruitfulness of his way of thinking in contrast to the often dismal results produced by their own.

Heidegger's 'Being and Time' is a notoriously difficult book, and Dreyfus' commentary is to be welcomed as the first study that succeeds in making it both intelligible and exciting, even to the non-specialist reader such as myself. As one of the clearest accounts of Heidegger's thought to date, it belongs in the library of anyone who is at all interested in this revolutionary and amazing thinker.

Rating:
Summary: The clearest account of Heidegger's thought to date.
Review: BEING-IN-THE-WORLD : A Commentary on Heidegger's 'Being and Time,' Division I. By Herbert L. Dreyfus. 370 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, Eighth Printing 1999 (1991). ISBN 0-262-54056-8 (pbk.)

Anyone who attempts to study Heidegger's commentators will quickly discover that many of them can be even more difficult than Heidegger himself. One notable exception is George Steiner, whose 'Martin Heidegger' (1989) is such an interesting book that one wishes it had been two or three times longer. As a general introduction to Heidegger's life and thought, however, it can only take one so far, and those wishing for a fuller treatment would be well advised to take a look at the present equally lucid and stimulating study by Dreyfus.

He explains that he has limited detailed treatment of 'Being and Time' to Division I of Part One (i.e., the first half), because he considers this "the most original and important section of the work, for it is [here] that Heidegger works out his account of being-in-the-world and uses it to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology" (p.vii). Division II, though containing important material, is marred by "some errors so serious as to block any consistent reading" (p.viii), though it is taken up in a 57-page Appendix.

In his brief but extremely interesting Introduction, Dreyfus sets out to answer the question, 'Why study Heidegger?' If I have understood Dreyfus correctly, what he seems to be saying is that Western thought has been fundamentally in error since the time of Plato : "Plato and our tradition got off on the wrong track by thinking that one could have a theory of everything.... Heidegger is not against theory. He thinks it powerful and important, but limited" (p.2).

Heidegger, in other words, although accepting a reasonable use of reason, has seen through the folly of that worship of reason which leads to its unreasonable and excessive use. Dreyfus tells us that Heidegger seeks to clear away five main false assumptions :

1. Explicitness. "Heidegger questions both the possibility and desirability of making our everyday understanding explicit" (p.4). There are and always will be many things in life that cannot be made explicit, that cannot be explained, that are not amenable to "critical reflection," things, for example, such as human skills.

2. Mental Representation. "Heidegger questions the view that experience is always and most basically a relation between a self-contained subject with mental content (the inner) and an independent object (the outer)." For him "there is a more fundamental way of being-in-the-world that cannot be understood in subject/object terms" (p.5).

3. Theoretical Holism. Heidegger "insists that we return to the phenomenon of everyday human activity and stop ringing the changes on the traditional oppositions of immanent/transcendent ... subject/ object ... explicit/tacit ... etc." (p.6).

4. Detachment and Objectivity. "From the Greeks we inherit not only our assumption that we can obtain theoretical knowledge of every domain, even human activities, but also our assumption that the detached theoretical viewpoint is superior to the involved practical viewpoint" (p.6). Heidegger, following the insights of Nietzsche, Peirce, James and Dewey, denies these assumptions.

5. Methodological Individualism. Heidegger, "in his emphasis on the social context as the ultimate foundation of intelligibility [shares with Wittgenstein] the view that most philosophical problems can be dis(solved) [sic] by a description of everyday social practices" (p.7). In other words, they are pseudo-problems.

If Heidegger were only clearing the ground of 2,500 years of sheer wrongheadedness, he would of course still be an extremely important and valuable thinker. But, as Dreyfus explains, he goes further, for "he has a positive account of authentic human being and a positive methodological proposal for how human being should be systematically studied" (p.8). His influence, which today extends into many areas, has been and continues to be enormous as more and more specialists and experts and technicians of every kind begin to appreciate the fruitfulness of his way of thinking in contrast to the often dismal results produced by their own.

Heidegger's 'Being and Time' is a notoriously difficult book, and Dreyfus' commentary is to be welcomed as the first study that succeeds in making it both intelligible and exciting, even to the non-specialist reader such as myself. As one of the clearest accounts of Heidegger's thought to date, it belongs in the library of anyone who is at all interested in this revolutionary and amazing thinker.

Rating:
Summary: The essential companion to the challenge of Heidegger
Review: I am amazed that this book has not been reviewed. For 30-odd years Hubert Dreyfus has been the beloved guide to Heidegger and Continental philosophy for thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, first at MIT and then at Berkeley. This book is constructed from the courses he taught on Heidegger's work, Kierkegaard, and especially that difficult centerpiece of Heidegger's opus, Being and Time. For the beginner and the expert, he opens Heidegger's questions and claims in distinctive, poignant, simple, accessible ways. I cannot imagine attempting to grasp Heidegger's thought without Dreyfus at my side. Dreyfus' account shows Heidegger in the middle of the struggle with those who came before him as he attempts to make sense of the question of what a human being is. I strongly recommend this book as a helpmate. If you are interested in confronting Heidegger's thought and work, get and read Dreyfus.

Rating:
Summary: The essential companion to the challenge of Heidegger
Review: I am amazed that this book has not been reviewed. For 30-odd years Hubert Dreyfus has been the beloved guide to Heidegger and Continental philosophy for thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, first at MIT and then at Berkeley. This book is constructed from the courses he taught on Heidegger's work, Kierkegaard, and especially that difficult centerpiece of Heidegger's opus, Being and Time. For the beginner and the expert, he opens Heidegger's questions and claims in distinctive, poignant, simple, accessible ways. I cannot imagine attempting to grasp Heidegger's thought without Dreyfus at my side. Dreyfus' account shows Heidegger in the middle of the struggle with those who came before him as he attempts to make sense of the question of what a human being is. I strongly recommend this book as a helpmate. If you are interested in confronting Heidegger's thought and work, get and read Dreyfus.

Rating:
Summary: For those concerned with "living life at its best"
Review: I got to this book after reading "Disclosing New Worlds" by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, a very profound work that tries to recover our abilities to make sense of each of us as historical beings, helping us to "live life at its best."

Reading Being-in-the-World has had a great impact on the way I now understand our everyday life in terms of the practices that we pick up -as Heidegger puts it- from the society we are brought up in and not in terms of abstract theories that try to relate our specific actions to mental states. As a management consultant, it guides me away from trying to specify precisely, say, the 'things' a salesman should say and do in a conversation with a client. I'd be better off if I can find another salesman that exhibits the results I'm interested in, and managing a "learning-in-action" program, so that the first salesman learns from the more experienced salesman. As a father, it guides me away from getting my son to hold on to vast amounts of information -the purpose of our modern educational system- but to situating him in an environment where he can pickup successful practices for dealing with diverse situations- including technical and interpersonal problems.

Being-in-the-World was not an easy read for me, since my background is in Computer Science and Management (I had to do some research in the philosophical traditions and problemas that Heidegger was attacking). However, Dreyfus' commentary is most relevant to people in Computer Science and Management - guiding them away from the utopias of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems.

I recommend this book to anyone willing to make an effort in understanding one of the deepest thinkers on what it means to be a human being "living life at its best."

Rating:
Summary: For those concerned with "living life at its best"
Review: I got to this book after reading "Disclosing New Worlds" by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, a very profound work that tries to recover our abilities to make sense of each of us as historical beings, helping us to "live life at its best."

Reading Being-in-the-World has had a great impact on the way I now understand our everyday life in terms of the practices that we pick up -as Heidegger puts it- from the society we are brought up in and not in terms of abstract theories that try to relate our specific actions to mental states. As a management consultant, it guides me away from trying to specify precisely, say, the 'things' a salesman should say and do in a conversation with a client. I'd be better off if I can find another salesman that exhibits the results I'm interested in, and managing a "learning-in-action" program, so that the first salesman learns from the more experienced salesman. As a father, it guides me away from getting my son to hold on to vast amounts of information -the purpose of our modern educational system- but to situating him in an environment where he can pickup successful practices for dealing with diverse situations- including technical and interpersonal problems.

Being-in-the-World was not an easy read for me, since my background is in Computer Science and Management (I had to do some research in the philosophical traditions and problemas that Heidegger was attacking). However, Dreyfus' commentary is most relevant to people in Computer Science and Management - guiding them away from the utopias of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems.

I recommend this book to anyone willing to make an effort in understanding one of the deepest thinkers on what it means to be a human being "living life at its best."

Rating:
Summary: Heidegger for ambitious Beginners
Review: I ordered Hubert Dreyfus' "Being-in-the-World", and I am cheerfully cruising through it at one chapter per day, and I am getting a lot out of this reading experience. If you are not a philosophy specialist, this is the right place to start on Heidegger.

Best thing is that Dreyfus provides life-examples that Heidegger would never trouble himself about. Also, he fills in the conceptual voids created and ignored in Heidegger's text.

Thanks to the other reviewers, I am going to check out Dreyfus' other books. Think about it: It does not necessarily follow that a brilliantly creative person (like Heidegger) is even a passable communicator of his own ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Best Available Secondary Source on Heidegger
Review: Ignore the preceding anomalous review: this is indisputably the best secondary source on Heidegger's early philosophy available in English. It may not be the last word on all points, but it sets the standard for clear and honest philosophical assessment of Heidegger's achievement. Dreyfus is the most important Heidegger scholar in America, one of the most important in the world. His work will continue to inspire generations to come.

Rating:
Summary: not a bad book but........
Review: it is rather disingenuous on Dreyfus' part to present this as some kind of authoritative interpretation of Heidegger (I fully agree with the negative review below on this), for so much of this book is filled with his own personal polemics against the artificial intelligence community, which are simply irrelevant to an introductory discussion of Heidegger.

And despite Dreyfus' own claims to the contrary it is not at all clear whether Heidegger adequately answers the traditional problems of philosophy, since Heidegger is not at all interested in (unlike Wittgenstein, say) actually engaging with them. Rather his point is closer to just trying to bypass them because they're not the truly important questions in life. I fully agree with such sentiment, in fact. However it is disingenuous to pretend that Heidegger's project is somehow fully continuous with the contemporary philosophical discussions involving holism, anti-realism (and the likes of Donald Davidson, John Searle, Rorty, etc.) and such.

Also Dreyfus has an annoying habit of presenting Heidegger's arguments (against Cartesianism, psychologism, etc.) as somewhat unprecedented in the history of philosophy, for he very well knows antipsychologism in meaning and logic, and repudiation of the primacy of epistemology (in fact, the medievals beat Heidegger to it!!!) are the perennial themes of the 20th Century philosophy.

But Heidegger is not a negligible thinker-in fact he is an extraordinarily powerful writer in terms of phenomenological descriptions, presenting history of the Western philosophy (particularly the Presocratics, who are the REAL philosophical kins of Heidegger-and Wittgenstein) and last but not least, being a cultural critic, which makes discussing his political career all the more (not less) necessary (which "anaytic" readings of Heidegger are prone to avoid).

For truly "introductory" (but stimulating) writings on Heidegger, I think one can do much better by reading the short pieces by people like Thomas Sheehan and Michael Inwood which are much more judicious and sensitive than the faux-rigorous Dreyfus-Charles Taylor-rehashed books like those by Guignon, Polt, etc.

Rating:
Summary: A highly misleading interpretation of Heidegger
Review: There's no getting away from Heidegger; most of the intellectual life of the later 20th century is a series of commentaries on or arguments with Being and Time. But the book is almost as difficult as its reputation would have it. Most of us need some help.

Probably the best short summary of its thesis came from Samuel Johnson: "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." But Johnson died about 140 years before the book was published, so he didn't actually get to read it. Those of us born after its publication could use a more detailed guide to Heidegger's dense and unwieldy work. This, unfortunately, isn't it, in spite of Dreyfus's decades of teaching and the testimonials on the back cover from Charles Taylor and other luminaries.

Dreyfus, who teaches at UC Berkeley, reduces Being and Time to a neutral quasi-psychology in which "being-there is doing something it makes sense to do given the public situation, and given already taken-over public for-the-sake-of-whiches." And that's all, folks. Dasein (Heidegger's term for us human folk) and the world are knowable only through everyday public practice, and according to Dreyfus the point of Division I of this two-part work is to show how it's possible to get through one's day without thinking about it and how that provides the only basis for knowledge.

After being criticised for his failure to address Division II, Dreyful admitted that he had "overlooked warnings, scattered about in Division I, that the average intelligibility desribed there would later be shown to be an inferior form of understanding." Well, duh. Those aren't hints; they're screaming tirades. Dreyfus not only undervalues the importance of Division II; he is deaf to the emotional character of the whole work, which conveyed as much by its literary qualities as by its argument.

Although he tossed in a few half-hearted denials that he's doing anything more than ontology, Heidegger clearly loathed the world of everydayness, the inauthentic being of the "they," and he longed for its supercession. "Existential analysis," he said, "has the character of doing violence, whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness." (H 311) In retrospect it's clear how this position led to his embrace of Hitler--not that one can read Nazi ideology off from the book, but because its hopes and fears were just those played on so expertly by the Nazis. Heidegger saw Hitler as the truly authentic man who could be the conscience of the nation. (He tried to cast himself in a similar role at Freiburg, with results that would be comical if anything about that time could appear humorous.)

But one doesn't need literary sensitivity to see what's wrong with Dreyfus's Heidegger. Why would young German intellectuals have flocked to his lectures if he were simply showing them that everyday skills were the be-all and end-all? It's simply impossible to imagine this spectacled epistemologist as "the secret king of philosophy," the charismatic magus who captivated the young Hannah Arendt in presenting "the thinking that springs as a passion."

Dreyfus's book contains a long Appendix on Kierkegaard, authenticity, and Division II; but its conclusions are just as bathetically deflationary as the main text. Here, too, Heidegger comes across as a multiculturalist liberal. Authenticity is supposed to make available a salad-bar of "marginal practices," a phrase which appears nowhere in Being and Time and which is not supported by the citations adduced. Instead of a stoic and joyful acceptance of one's fate--one of the themes that leads Heidegger to Nietzsche--Dreyfus sees merely a free choice of commitment from the social resources available and a concomitant choice of a role model like Jesus or Florence Nighingale.

And Dreyfus knew Heidegger. No doubt the sage listened politely to whatever he had to say and took it as further proof that Americans had no culture.