Customer Reviews

Being and Time

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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.

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.

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

One important shortcoming of this translation is that while all of the German text is translated to English, Greek and Latin passages quoted by Heidegger are left untranslated. The Stambaugh translation on the other hand provides both the original Greek and Latin quotations and an English translation, so in the very likely event that you do not know both Greek and Latin you will need a copy of the Stambaugh translation in addition to, or instead of, this one.

I am afraid people might get a little confused by the other reviewer's comments. It basically boils down to this: if you are adequately grounded in the most rigorous european and eastern philosophical systems you will probably understand what Heidegger is doing in this book, but if you aren't you won't. It's not for everybody, but it is for those who want to see how far they can go with 20th century philosophy. The book is hard to read, the concepts are hard to grasp, the work is in my opinion worth it if you're asking the questions in the first place. It is not positivism, which is to say it is not easy, which is not to say that it is unintelligible. Some parts may not work for some people, but you'll never know which parts those will be for you unless you read it. Obviously german philosophy doesn't work for everybody, especially for those in the anglo/american 'tradition', since it requires both intense work and intense discipline to get through it. Philosophy was never supposed to be easy. Don't be fooled by those who fall by the wayside then crawl into their holes preferring candlelight to the sun. It's the best book of philosophy written in the 20th century, which is why it's been the most influential.

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.

Easily the best of the available English translations. The attention to detail and to footnoting in this text make referring back to the German text as well as translating and, therefore, transliterating Heideggerian technical language a palpable task. Philosophy frequently makes much of the loss of meaning and the loss of significance that translations affect, however, Macquarrie and Robinson do there utmost to be consistent and connected with the German without getting mired in it. Consulting the glossary and the index in the back of the book is a must for beginners in Heidegger. The translators' use of "ready-to-hand" as opposed to "present-at-hand" seems to fit better than other translations which reverse their definitions. Being and Time is, while unfinished, a stunning work that has everything to do with how modern humanity involves itself in, comports, and reveals the world. Among the book's goals are the usurping of Metaphysics and the reformulation of all that is ontological under the scope of phenomenology. While it can be argued as to how closely Being and Time comes to subjectivism, this work nevertheless has influenced the Existentialist, Hermaneutic, Deconstructionist as well as Structuralist philosophical schools and their proponents. THough this book may be designated a "woodpath," a dead end, it has certainly raised the questions of being, identity and truth in a way that post-modern thought has struggled to improve upon or overstep ever since.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

Being and Time

(first German edition 1927)
Two translations into English:

John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 589 pages
(ISBN:
(Library of Congress call number: B3279.H48S43 1962a)

Joan Stambaugh
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996) 487 pages
(ISBN: 0-7914-2677-7; hardcover)
(ISBN: 0-7914-2678-5; paperback)
(Library of Congress call number: B3279.H48S43 1996)

For many years, this book was said to be "untranslatable"
because of the extreme difficulty of Heidegger's language,
including the number of new expressions
and new uses of old words that he introduces.
The careful reader will benefit from reading both of these translations.
But if you must choose only one,
use the Macquarrie and Robinson version.

John Macquarrie might be the foremost Heidegger scholar in the world.
The Macquarrie and Robinson translation conveys the meaning of Heidegger
into English better than the Stambaugh translation.
But the Stambaugh translation is easier to read in English
because she has avoided creating new technical expressions in English
for the more difficult of Heidegger's concepts.
However, some of Stambaugh's choices are simply puzzling.
For example, why is the expression
usually translated as "beings-in-the-world"
sometimes rendered by Stambaugh as "innerworldly beings"?

No matter what translation one uses,
Heidegger remains a very difficult philosopher to read.
I recommend giving a careful reading only to those parts
that the reader finds meaningful.
The other parts can be left to the professional philosophers.
For example, some parts of this book
deal with the question of being as such,
which Heidegger says is central to his philosophy.
But here Being and Time
is being reviewed as a book of existentialism.

Now that I have read both translations carefully and aloud,
I have decided to adopt a new practice for my own references to B&T:
I have created my own paraphrases, drawing on both translations.
This practice makes Heidegger
more accessible to the English-speaking reader.
Scholars can read the German original
and all translations they find helpful.

One example such a combined paraphrase
will be found in presenting Heidegger's concept of Authenticity.
Search the Internet for the following precise expression:
"AUTHENTICITY (Philosophy)---Heidegger's vision of becoming more Authentic".

The most important ideas for existentialism
explored in Being & Time are:
existential anxiety as distinct from ordinary fears,
existential guilt as distinct from moral conscience,
being-towards-death or ontological anxiety
as distinct from the fact of biological death
and our fear of ceasing-to-be,
discovering ourselves as creatures conditioned by time:
the past, the present,
and--most important--the future we project.

The beginning reader of Heidegger
should probably not try to read this book
by beginning at page one and attempting to read thru to the end.
Such an approach will probably cause you to give up too soon.
Read first the parts that seem most interesting to you.
These best parts are worth many readings in any case.
Then go back to pick up the parts your skipped
if you are still interested.

If you can't understand Heidegger by reading him directly,
read some other books about Heidegger first.
Once you have the proper orientation and conceptual framework,
you may find Heidegger a rich mine
of new insights into human existence.

Heidegger will be studied and studied
as long as there are humans who can think.

James Leonard Park, existential philosopher.

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.

Heidigger's "Being and Time" is one of those books that students of philosophy feel they really ought to read, if only to say they've read it. But reading it and understanding it are two different things. Given that Heidigger, like his fellow Germans Kant and Hegel, was a better philosopher than he was a writer, one will find that digging into his magnum opus can be a rather strenuous and perhaps ultimately unrewarding experience. The prose is so dense as to be all but impenetrable. I had to read this with a printout on hand of Heidiggerian terms (about 30 pages worth!). Even so, I got very little out of this book and would have been better served had I grabbed an "introduction to Heidigger" text instead.

If you're a specialist and you enjoy torturing yourself with this awkward madness, knock yourself out. If you're looking for a philosopher who knows how to make himself understood, try Nietzsche or Schopenhauer.