Being and Time

Martin Heidegger's (1889 -- 1976) "Being and Time" (1927), together with Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" is one of the seminal philosophical works of the Twentieth Century. The work still remains difficult, obscure, and highly controversial. The book, and its author, provoke wildly varying responses. This translation, by Macquarrie and Robinson dates from 1962 and appeared in paperback only in 2008 with a useful introduction by philosopher Taylor Carman. Another translation, by Joan Stambaugh, appeared some years ago; but the Macquarrie and Robinson version, for all its difficulty, has become the standard version in English.

Heidegger spent his early years in a seminary but abandoned Catholicism in 1917-1918. His interest in and ambivalence toward religion permeates "Being and Time." Heidegger was a friend of Edmund Husserl, the founder of the philosophical movement known as phenomenology. "Being and Time" is dedicated to Husserl and includes several laudatory references to him. Heidegger was Husserl's assistant at Freiburg, but he wrote "Being and Time" when he had assumed a position at Marburg. He became Heidegger's successor at Freiburg upon Husserl's retirement in 1928. Before writing "Being and Time", Heidegger was regarded as a brilliant scholar and a charismatic teacher. But he had published little. "Being and Time" made him famous, virtually a celebrity, an accomplishment rare for a philosopher. Heidegger remained in the public eye through what became a notorious life through his political involvement with Nazism, and through a long life after WW II in which he did not expressly repudiate his earlier politics.

Even though Heidegger turned Husserl on his head, the phenomenological influence in "Being and Time" is pervasive. Husserl's background in mathematical logic (and Heidegger's too in his early years) also plays more of a role in "Being and Time", I found, than I first thought when I read the book many years ago. In "Being and Time" Heidegger wrestles with many major philosophers, including Descartes, Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Hegel, among others.

Heidegger never completed "Being and Time" as he had originally conceived the work. The book as we have it consists of a long introduction, a section called Part I, titled "The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality, and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being." Part I has two large Divisions each consisting of many subchapters. The first Division, very simply, develops Heidegger's understanding of "Dasein" and of "Being-in-the-World". The second, and much more emotively charged and difficult Division, deals with temporality, resoluteness, and death. Heidegger completed a third division of Part I, but rejected it as unsatisfactory and never published it. A projected part II of "Being and Time" never appeared, as Heidegger abandoned his original lengthy project for the book.

"Being and Time" is a book that requires substantial patience and concentration to read. The reader must be extraordinarily careful with Heidegger's definitions, as the author invents much of his own terminology and uses familiar terms in unusual ways. Beyond that, the style of the book is extraordinarily dense. Unsympathetic readers and critics find Heidegger wilfully obscure. Some see the book as little more than gibberish. Obscure it is, but not gibberish. While portions of the writing seem to me to resist understanding, study will be rewarded. The form and style of the book are an integral part of Heidegger's teaching, as he encourages the reader to delve deeply into what might be regarded as simple, even trivial, matters and to see things that are close in a new light. The writing is heavily metaphorical with figures derived from theology and terminology that is suggestive of violence and sexuality in many places.

The book does not offer arguments in the sense of a traditional philosophical study. Rather Heidegger follows Husserl in trying to get the reader to see and to look at things afresh. Husserl studied ideals of consciousness while Heidegger turns his message to look at being through man's place in the world. There is a tension in the book, it seems to me, between seeing the world primordially, without the encrustations that have accrued from the Greek way of seeing things, and interpreting the world. Heidegger appears to do both.

Heidegger draws a distinction between ontics and ontology. Philosophers, scientists, and most lay people have thought only ontically -- about existing things. Heidegger wants to open up the question of being -- and draws what is a critically important distinction between existing things and reality -- which does not have the concept of thinghood. He attacks the Aristotelian concept of substance which is basic to much Western thought and the dualism of Descartes. Much of the book is an attempt to dissolve philosophical questions resulting from a substantialist metaphysics.

The book challenges the primacy most thinkers have accorded to the concept of reason and asks its readers to understand "being-in-the-world" and activity as the source of life from which subsequent concepts of reasoning arises. Although Heidegger had disdain for American philosophy, I found that a hard pragmatism underlies much of "Being and Time".

In its concepts of historicity, commitment,the people, and perhaps in its derogation of reason, "Being and Time" could be read as laying a philosophical basis for the Nazism which Heidegger actively supported during the 1930s. This aspect of the work should not be minimized. But neither should the power, originality, and insight of "Being and Time" be denied.

When I began to study philosophy many years ago, the discipline was essentially divided between "analytic philosophy" and "continental" or "existential" philosophy. That division remains today. But some readers have seen parallels between the two broad schools. For me these parallels, particularly the rejection of Cartesianism and of substance metaphysics, come through stronger after the distance of the years. It is worth considering how much changes and how much remains the same in philosophy.

Readers with a good background in philosophy will probably be in a better position to struggle with "Being and Time" than those with little exposure to the subject. On my most recent reading of the book, I read it through and then read a commentary -- there are many excellent studies of "Being and Time". For most philosophical texts, I think the reader should first go to the work itself and try to make sense of it rather than to get one's perspective on the book fixed by a commentary. But study can be done in many ways.

While higly critical of Heidegger for his political activities, the philosopher Karl Jaspers said of him: "In the full flow of his discourse he occasionally succeeds in hitting the nerve of the philosophical enterprise in a most mysterious and marvellous way. In this, as far as I can see, he is perhaps unique among contemporary German philosophers." "Being and Time" is an important book.

Robin Friedman

There are two English language translations of Heidegger's "Being and Time" (B&T) this one, and one by Joan Stambaugh. Both are good, and both have their weaknesses. Whichever you pick, if you are new to Heidegger (whether or not you're new to philosophy) I strongly recommend that you keep two commentaries close by: (1)"Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I," by Hubert L. Dreyfus; (2) "Heidegger: An Introduction," by Richard Polt. In my opinion, these are the best and most readable introductions to Heidegger available in English. In fact, I would read each commentary in turn, and use "Being and Time" to flesh out the commentary. Both commentaries make good references to the relevant passages in B&T. If you know German, then by all means use the original, "Sein und Zeit." Heidegger has a way of playing with the language, and no translation out of German into any other language can do full justice to it. Moreover, understanding this word-play is essential to getting a good grip on what Heidegger is doing.

True, you can start with and muddle through the primary source. And some professors of philosophy would advise you to proceed in this way. But you'll have many false starts, and probably burn out before you even begin to appreciate the magnitude of Heidegger's achievement. However you choose to do it, by all means learn Heidegger. If you manage to gain even a rudimentary understanding of him, you'll be light years ahead of most contemporary philosophers. If you think philosophy is a word game, then you'll probably be content to limit your reading to contemporary analytic philosophers. But if you believe that philosophy really has something to say about the human reality and the human condition, you'll want to find out what the Continental thinkers have to teach us, and Heidegger is foremost among them.

When you get into Heidegger, you'll learn that the logical empiricists and their contemporary progeny have no monopoly on an aversion to speculative metaphysics. (In fact, it started long before Heidegger, in the work of John Calvin.) Heidegger too, sought to liberate philosophy from the dead weight of metaphysics, and he did it far more effectively. He showed that we don't need metaphysics to ask, and try to answer, the ultimte questions. Contemporary analytic philosophers much beholden to logical positivism and logical empiricism discard the baby with the bath water. What they're left with is a sterile, lifeless enterprise which is called "philosophy," but which doesn't take seriously its own mission.

On the other side, we find those who will never be able to resist the siren song of speculative metaphysics, and insist upon engaging "reason" to create grand speculative monuments in the clouds. In her monumental work "The Life of the Mind," Hannah Arendt (who knew Heidegger personally) observes: "Kant's insights had an extraordinary liberating effect on German philosophy, touch off the rise of German idealism. No doubt, they had made room for speculative thought; but this thought again became a field for a new brand of specialists committed to the notion that philosophy's "subject proper" is "the actual knowledge of what truly is." Liberated by Kant from the old school dogmatism and its sterile exercises, they erected not only new systems but a new "science"--the original title of the greatest of their works, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, was "Science of the Experience of Consciousness"--eagerly blurring Kant's distinction between reason's concern with the unknowlable and the intellect's concern with cognition. Pursuing the Cartesian ideal of certainty as though Kant had never existed, they believed in all earnest that the results of their speculations possessed the same kind of validity as the results of cognitive processes."

In this respect, Heidegger's fate is similar to Kant's. Many will insist upon doing philosophy as though Heidegger never existed. But those who are willing to plunge into the thicket of Heidegger's thought and not count the cost will learn in due course that he is more than worth the effort.

Having waded into Heidegger's tome on previous occasions, and subsequently leaving even more confused for the effort, I will share a clarifying couple of paragraphs which help explain that experience--

"As a way to begin thinking about the most challenging problems of pure philosophical ontology, we shall critically consider a famous exposition of the metaphysics of being. Martin Heidegger's theory in _Being and Time_ (originally published in 1927 as _Sein und Zeit_) (Heidegger 1996) offers to answer the question of being. Although we reject Heidegger's conclusions and his methodology on their own terms and as antithetical to the analytic philosophical perspective we develop and on which we rely, it is worthwhile to examine closely Heidegger's ontology for the sake of the questions he raises and the general terms in which he proposes to seek answers. We need not enter deeply into this thorny text to see that Heidegger's understanding of ontology is similar in its divisions of subject matter to the distinctions among two of the four meanings of "ontology" that we have drawn. Heidegger distinguishes much as we have proposed between pure and applied ontology, which he refers to as ontology and the ontic sciences.

"The extent to which it may be necessary to disagree with Heidegger's methods and conclusions in ontology will become clear as we proceed. The main problem turns out to be Heidegger's betrayal of his own conditions for a pure philosophical ontology, and his confusion of its requirements with those of applied scientific ontology or the ontic sciences, condemning Heidegger's ontology in _Being and Time_ and the related writings into committing what we shall call "Heidegger's Circle". Despite these difficulties, Heidegger's statement of what he calls the question of being seems perfectly correct. We have adopted and shall continue to use the same phrase, which is meant in the same sense as in Heidegger. We further concur with Heidegger's distinction between ontology as the study of the question of being and the ontic sciences, described in related terms as the distinction between pure philosophical and applied scientific ontology. We can explain the proposed approach to the problems of pure philosophical ontology by contrasting them with Heidegger's. This makes it useful to examine what Heidegger seems to be saying, and his overall design for investigating the concept of being."

From pages 17-18 of _Ontology_ by Dale Jacquette.

Reading Jacquette's treatment of Heidegger helped me understand what Heidegger was getting at. So I was glad I was already acquainted with the work.

Even better, however, was the ability to move beyond Heidegger's self-contradictions into an understanding of ontology and its intrigues. That is, I can recommend reading this book, and then Jacquette's as a follow on.

Being and Time is not a book you can pick up off the shelf and read unless you have a sufficient understanding of the philosophy that came before its publication in 1929. One should not even attempt this book without an understanding of such philosophers as Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche among many others. Also, Being and Time is so difficult because Heidegger was running up against the limits of language while writing. Hence, one has to learn an entirely new language to make sense of what he is saying because he is describing something for which language does not exist. What comes out of this is that this is a very slow read because certain words must be fully understood before moving on or else you will not understand what you are reading. For instance, I read this book so slowly that every page felt like ten pages, or the 488 pages felt like 4,880. In the end though, this book was only comprehensible by reading several books about the book. William Blattner's Reader's Guide to Being and Time is particularly good as well as anything from William Wrathall and Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus also has his lecture courses on Being and Time posted as a Podcast on itunes.

This is an excellent foundation to modern positions that provide an alternative to the objective-relative debate in philosophy. While terribly difficult and challenging to understanding without hours of work and dialogue with others, this is the best translated version. When you examine philosophy you must understand it through it's historical growth, and this book is a major branch in that evolution.