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Summary: Definitive Text of 20th-Century Philosophy
Review: This book simultaneously gave voice to and shaped some of the central ideas of 20th Century thought and culture. Few books can equal it in importance. It is very hard--don't imagine that you can pick it up and read it on your own--but it is immensely rewarding of serious study. Heidegger criticizes the view of the person that we have inherited from the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution--the view that people are isolated individuals, defined solely by the self-conscious possession of a rational mind--showing especially the crucial role that emotion, other people, and practical know-how play in human experience. Much of the most interesting philosophical work of the last hundred years, and many of the most interesting cultural and political developments, have come from a focus on precisely these Heideggerean themes. Though a new translation (by Joan Stambaugh, published by SUNY Press) has appeared, I still use this Macquarrie and Robinson translation as my primary text for teaching this book. Though this translation can be awkward and perhaps sometimes puts a misleading light on certain notions, I believe that it is overall more helpful for allowing the reader to enter into Heidegger's thought than the Stambaugh translation is. (Of course, it would be better to have both, and I have taught the Stambaugh translation with success as well.) This book is an essential text for any serious student of philosophy, the humanities or 20th-Century thought in general, and this is the translation I recommend.
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Summary: Not the place to start
Review: This is not the place to start if you want to understand Heidegger.If you want to understand Heidegger, you (happily) need to read a much shorter piece -- namely, chapter 1 only of _An Introduction to Metaphysics_. It's all right there. After you get through that tight little essay, you will understand the important things about who Heidegger was, what he was doing, and where he was going with it, intellectually speaking. Then you will be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not you wish to continue, one that is based on your own opinion, rather than the (many and strong) opinions of others. Heidegger is a highly controversial figure. Even his fiercest critics, however, acknowledge that his importance in philosophy is huge. (I am speaking of those critics of some stature, and disregarding the childrens' prattle found here.) Heidegger is important because he found a gaping and defining hole in every philosophical argument from Plato to the 20th century. Nietzsche had looked for it, and had suspected that something was there, something huge, but Heidegger nailed it once and for all. He deserves credit for this, and if you want to know what the hole was, see the citation above. It is what *else* Heidegger did that is the source of so much of the controversy and all of the criticism. Having produced a critique that laid the philosophical tradition of the west essentially to waste, he was vexed with the difficult problem of what to do next. He made some initial, obscure, vague, and frustratingly tentative attempts to construct something in its place. _Being and Time_ is the prime example of that effort. It was an openly acknowledged failure. It was to be preliminary to a much larger work that Heidegger soon after admitted the impossibility of himself or anyone else ever undertaking with any success. Nevertheless, this first stab at it is interesting for the same reason that Plato's first stabs at what has come to be traditional philosophy, also ultimately doomed, were interesting and continue to be valuable and worthwhile, regardless that they were failures. Most of the rest of Heidegger's work falls under two categories. One is the category of _Being and Time_ containing works that are similar except that they are even less systematic, impossible to understand in English, more tentative, and increasingly preoccupied up with German as a language. The other category consists of imaginative attempts to redeem part of the philosophical tradition he destroyed by re-reading the presocratics, Aristotle, Plato, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, et al. Most of these attempts were also failures, but they were fascinating failures by virtue of their imaginativeness and extreme care and rigor. It was clear that, though he fumbled around a great deal, was politically naive and morally inept (perhaps requirements for excellent philosophizing), he had opened a door. And that door opened on to something much, much bigger.
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Summary: Gibberish, or worse
Review: This is the worst instances of that old Germanic tradition of philosophy-by-obfuscation. The formula is always the same: take a simple idea based on sentiment rather than logic, and then take several hundred pages to present it as obscurely as possible, with as many compound words, hyphenated terms, and dependent clauses as the page can take, until the result is completely unreadable. Then those who are ashamed to admit that they understood nothing will praise the work to the skies, and academics will make a good living by lecturing on the subject to students similarly unwilling to admit their confusion. As far as I can tell, there is nothing more to this book than the very old anxiety we have all felt over unanswerable (and logically meaningless questions) like, 'Why I am who I am rather than someone else or no one at all?', 'Why is now the moment it is rather than any other moment in time?' and so on. The book, of course, offers no answers (there are none), just plenty of obfuscation. Furthermore, Heidegger was a very questionable character, a man who enthusiastically embraced Nazism and persecuted Jewish scholars during his tenure as rector of Heidelberg, who later dishonestly denied his philosophy's ties with Nazism when his reputation and career were at stake, a thinker who detested science and reason and whose solipsistic philosophy was never concerned with ethics. Don't waste your time with this. I recommend as an antidote Popper's wonderful little essay "Against Big Words."
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Summary: The Daddy Mack of Ontology, or Mack Daddy, if you will.
Review: This is what space fans have been waiting for since the dawning of time: a clear, concise and fun to read ontology of the human kind of being. I was tired of feeling like a fist class dum-ass at all the high-brow existentialist socail functions, as I'm sure you are as well. Now I can rub elbows with the best of um. Everyone backs their big ass up when they see me comin'. If you read this book... I promise i will change your life. I couldn't put the dam thing down - A real "page-turner." In fact, I couldn't sleep for days after finishing it. Proximally and for the most part, this book really blows my load.
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Summary: What does it mean to be?
Review: This review is with regards to the Robinson and Macquarrie translation of _Sein und Zeit_, the only one I've read. This book is perhaps the most pretentious single volume ever written, with Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ coming in a close second, vying in a power battle with Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_. One is simply taken aback by the sheer audacity of a man who would dare to "raise anew the question of the meaning of Being". [In the outside world, such an individual would be rightly locked away safely in an asylum for the insane, but in the hallowed halls of academia such an individual is able to spend his whole life "searching for the meaning of Being".] He believes that this question of Being has been forgotten by the philosophical tradition, and in order to reconsider it, he must first deconstruct that tradition and bring it to light once again. And, he proceeds from there using Husserl's phenomenological method ("to the things themselves") as a basis for conducting his fundamental ontology. And, so it goes. In order to answer this question of the meaning of Being, Heidegger considers the Being that man is, Dasein (literally "being-there"). He explicates Dasein's being as Being-in-the-World, and distinguishes two different modes of such being, the authentic and the inauthentic. In the inauthentic mode of being, man is "fallen" in the They ("das Man"). As such he engages in idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Heidegger then proceeds to search for an authentic Being-towards-death. And, he explicates time as the transcendental horizon for the question of the meaning of Being in the second division. The book is incomplete. Many have spent a good part of their lives trying to decipher this man's intentions, making excuses for his Nazism (or the other alternative saying there is no excuse for his Nazism), carrying forth his work on out into the wilderness, or more likely simply engaging in posturing exercises to impress their friends (note the many examples of such reviews here). Unfortunately, a sorry point is missed in all this. And, that point can be put succinctly thus: What's the point? Sure metaphysics may be fun, we may feel ourselves in contact with another world, it's great for the "high IQ challenge", and such lofty endeavors carry on the philosophical tradition and make us "great men". But, has Heidegger really gotten at the meaning of Being? Hell no. And, what does Heidegger even mean by a "search for the meaning of Being"? Perhaps, this is nothing more than a disguised quest for a kind of belief in God. Something to think about. Or, more appropriately, something to not think about. -an anti-intellectual
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Summary: Not for the weak-minded
Review: Those who wish simple, clear instructions on how to be an Enlightened Robot should look elsewhere. Granted it is not for the under-trained, but how can a book/philosopher that was taken seriously by the likes of thinkers as diverse as Wittenstein, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Derrida (let alone MB's students: Arendt, Marcuse, Gadamer, Habermas) NOT be considered important for at least getting us to look at the problem of existence and how Western thinking has slavishly adhered to its subject/object distinctions which just appear false on the face of them with but casual consideration. If you want to understand 20th century philosophy and why 80% (a slavish tendency to always estimate on my part, my sin, I apologize!) of it is in reaction to this book/philosopher, then this is a must read. Otherwise you will NOT be able to understand and appreciate much of 20th century philosophy. MH clearly doesn't care if YOU do or don't get it. If you wish to refute it, fine, but you'd BETTER understand it rather than just dismiss it as "unintelligible" ("oh, I spent a morning reading this"...wow, that's real intellectual effort for some I guess) and it will take you a lifetime (ok, maybe 20 years) to really understand much of its implications (let alone the other 70-some volumes in MH's Collected Works (in German!)...what have YOU written that shook up everybody's way of thinking about things? not much, I guess. Like Kant's CPR (ditto all this for Kant's CPR, btw!) NOT for the faint-hearted, easy listening types out there.
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Summary: An Indubitable Masterpiece
Review: Though Being and Time is often spotted from a glance with a hint of disdain (perhaps because of Heidegger's affiliations), its pursuit is nonetheless quite admirable. I would suggest, however, that one first read the likes of 'Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KPM)' in order to prepare themselves for BT. I myself did not require a reading guide to fully understand and appreciate (and scrutinize!) BT, but I had been utterly immersed in every Heideggerian work I was able to get my hands on, in addition to a wealth of other Philosophers from whom he drew. Additionally, much of the discussion of BT shies away from a chief doctrine of all Existentialist thought: contingency; this is yet another reason to read 'KPM' prior to BT. If you are at all inclined in the direction of utterly complex but utterly rewarding thought, and possess a capacity to understand the likes of Heidegger, delve; delve as deeply as you wish, for beneath the question of Being lies an answer only Dasein may disclose: the endless possibilities are daunting, but wondrous.
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Summary: Brilliant and well-written
Review: Unfortunately, I had already read Habermas, which kind of ruined the ending.
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Summary: WAS IS SHALL BE
Review: What can you say about BEING AND TIME? It was, is, and shall be.
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