Customer Reviews

Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Okay, reading these reviews, I am frustrated... but, of course that is to be expected. Heidegger, more than most philosophers, lends himself to a multiplicity of interpretations.

Rather than add my own semi-detailed interpretation of this work and its historical importance to this list [which would just further frustrate others, I am sure], I would just like to recommend to anyone approaching this book for the first time that they keep in mind the central inquiry that Heidegger is engaging in: the meaning of Being... and, as he explicitly states, this book is a preparation for further exploration, and not to be read as a completed "system" in itself. While the influence of Kierkegaard is obvious, relating this work to Dostoevsky (as another reviewer has) I think misses the point entirely. For all of the talk of "authenticity" and the "psychologizing" of this work that later commentators have engaged in, Heidegger is intersted in re-grounding all philosophical inquiry... not in explicating some mere existential-humanistic outlook. Whether he suceeds or not is, to say the least, debatable.

I would also recommend giving a _very_ close and thorough reading to his essay "What is Metaphysics" before approaching _Being and Time_.

A final note on this translation-- I had already wrestled with the previous translation from beginning to end before purchasing this one. This translation was more than worth the price of purchasing the book again. Stambaugh's translation is simply masterful.

Being and Time (1927) is the magnum opus of one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century and arguably Western Philosophy. Spending 7 years writing this first of 67 books, Martin Heidegger turns Husserlian phenomenology (Husserl being Heidegger's main teacher) on its head and introduces to the Western tradition a whole new way of understanding ontology (the formal study of existentia). Being and Time is the first installment of a greater work that was to compromise two parts each with three divisions. Being and Time is only the first two divisions of Part One of that endeavor. For the continuation of Heidegger's overall project, readers must purchase "The Basic Problems of Phenomenology" and "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics." These three books together compromise the existing (though still not complete) totality of Heidegger's undertaking. "The Basic Problems of Phenomenology" is particularly helpful because it outlines all three Divisions of Part Two of the project. If you read Being and Time, I recommend these other two as well, though they are by no means an easy read folks. To read either of those books one will require a background in the history of philosophy, especially in Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant.

As for Being and Time itself, this is not a beginner's book. If you were just attracted to the title and have no background in philosophy, I do not recommend this book--you will be lost and hate it. This is not to say you are not an intelligent person, the problem is the language and understanding of Heidegger's worldview. This is not to say he doesn't have good ideas, they just take much time to acquire, a lifetime really. The language is difficult not because Heidegger is arrogant and not because German is generally that hard to translate into English. The true reason why Heideggerian text is so hard to comprehend is because there are no words that explain the thoughts that Heidegger is dealing with. He had to invent his own language becuase language was itself to confining to what Heidegger was conceiving. If you're serious about this fellow, it would be worthwhile to learn the major word-concepts one at a time: Dasein, authenticity, inauthenticity, care (Sorge), ontic/ontical vs. ontological, existentiell vs. existential, thrownness, being-in-the-world, fallenness, being-with, idle talk, disclosure, discoveredness, hermeneutic circle, ontic-ontology, Being of beings, being-in, pre-ontological, call of conscience, et cetera. This is not to discourage but to prepare for the huge undertaking that this book demands.

Personally I love this book. It is extremely hard and Americans in particular struggle with this German philosopher. Philosophy majors and even professional philosophers can find Heidegger to be extraordinarily difficult so be patient and reserve any judgment stemming from your frustration of the language. You will find many of Heidegger's books much easier than this one. I recommend George Stenier's book "Martin Heidegger" if you're new to him. Dreyfus' book Being-in-the-World is alright for terminology, but it is too epistemological and often misrepresents Heideggerian thinking. Skip over chapter 4 and the stuff on A.I. and "expert systems" et cetera. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger is excellent for undergrad. philosophy students. Look at chapters 4-7 in particular and the Introductory section. Re-read these chapters several times for it all to sink in, or else you'll miss stuff.

If you're still interested in Being and Time at this point and recognize the historical significance of Heidegger, here are some introductory remarks on the book itself. The book is broken down into two Divisions. Division I is often referred to as the "hermeneutics of everydayness"; meaning that humans interpret their existence through the way the world is disclosed to them via their day-to-day lives. As Heidegger says on page 42: "What is ontically nearest and familiar (i.e. our day-to-day lives) is ontologically the farthest, unrecognized and constantly overlooked in its ontological (i.e. existential) significance." Thus in order to understand the abstract existential problems of Being, we must first realize our human being essentially is. Heidegger uses the German phrase Da-sein (German for "being-there) to signify human being, or more specifically, the possibility of understanding Being through the disclosure of the "There".

Division II is often referred to as the "hermeneutics of suspicion" because this is Heidegger's attempt to break out of our everydayness and explain primoridally the existential underlying constructs of Dasein. The road to this understanding passes through death, because death is the ultimate possibility for all Dasein, for we are essentially temporal. The temporality of our being-in-the-world forces us to realize the fundamental truths of our existence. It should be noted that Later Heidegger rejected Division II of his book. Sartre and the existentialist movement misreads Division II and it eventually forced Heidegger to abandon that half of the work. But unlike what Dreyfus thinks, I still see the importance and relevance of that Division. But readers may want to note that most contemporary Continentalists emphasize Division I a heck of a lot more than Division II.

Hopefully this was useful. Best of luck friends.

Drake University

In case you've not already ordered the new translation of Being and Time -- I'm more and more dissatisfied with the terminology the translator has adopted. She's refused most of the hypenation of terms that kept Macquerrie closer to the German and adopted some weird coinages that don't lend themselves to tracking the network of concepts that Heidegger presented. The sentences seem to be a bit cleaner and less perambulating, but it seems at the expense of accuracy ...

I'm on page 71, and have decided to go back to Macquerrie for my second pass-through.

<gottlos75@mindspring.com> I am Germanless, but in comparing this translation to MacQuarrie and Robinson I find 1)Stambaugh is easier to read with a free flow in her English which however at times leads to indefinieness; 2) Stambaugh will sometimes come to a more definite and clearer conclusion than M&R, but then sometimes the reverse; 3) Stambaugh has an excellent index organized much like M&R's with a few headings M&R does not have BUT it has NO German index as M&R has; 4) Stambaugh has the later marginal comments Heidegger made that M&R does not. However, sometimes M&R has a formulation that seems more precise and more like Heidegger than Stambaugh. M&R also has footnotes on the translation that are sometimes crucial to understanding what is going on in the main text. And it English index has a few headings not found in Stambaugh as well as having a German word index. Having BOTH translations, and being able to compare them, can be an emense help in understanding Heidegger.

To me, Heidegger is one of the peaks of Western philosophy, his writing is very meaningful and enjoyable to me. If you get IT, this book (and his later writings) can change you life. This is difficult reading, but so very rewarding. However, Being and Time is not the place to begin reading Heidegger. There are several very excellent introductions: Steiner's Martin Heidegger,and Macquarrie's Heidegger and Christianity both are very excellent. When you read Being and Time (which is so much better than Sartre's more famous gloss, Being and Nothingness) you WILL need a commentary. I approached Heidegger as a Buddhist, so his main concept, dealing with the recognization of Being, was very familar to me. I found Heidegger to be wonderfully enriching in my own insight into the most essential question of philosophy. I studied German for 2 years in order to read Heidegger in his Original langauage (and also to read Rilke's poetry in it's original). The German source is very precise (a trait of the German language, which lends itself to precision of language with new word combinations to create new expressions). The terms are necessary to get us to see the meaning that would not be visible with out new expressions. For me this works, and put into words (as nearly as anyone has) some of the great "mystical" insights. If you are reading only in English, you must have a commentary and both translations; start with the Joan Stambaugh, it is easier reading; but you will need the older Macquarrie & Robinson translation for comparison. Some concepts are better explained in one, some in the other. Also recommended Basic Writings : From Being and Time (1927 to the Task of Thinking) and WHAT ARE POETS FOR? and Heidegger's writing on Kant and Holderin. If you enjoy philosophy, this has my highest recommendation. This is philosophy that will awaken you in this moment.

this translation made Heidegger far more available to me... although experts warn that this translation should be read with caution against the older one, there is no question that the lay person should go for this one in the first place.

In "Being and Time," Heidegger tackles the biggest and seemingly unanswerable question of them all: Why is there something rather than nothing?

In the introductory chapter, he narrows the focus of this ancient query: What significance does Being have for Dasein (human being), the asker of the question? He rejects analysis of the phenomena found "within" consciousness (as Heidegger's mentor Edmund Husserl prescribed) in favor of investigating the structure of human existence--how we exist. Heidegger claims that we exist as "thrown projections," that is, "thrown" into already-existent and distinctly historical nations, cultures, families; and always "project" a concrete future against a background of possibilities.

In Chapter three, he examines of the primary modes of "being-in-the-world." We are entangled in a world which has two possibilities: the "ready-at-hand" and the "present-to-hand".

The former state involves our mode of "taking-care-of-things" when we are in the flow of normal everyday activities; the "thingness" of beings is covered up, because we are absorbed in what we are doing.

The latter state is disclosed when a disruption in the flow occurs: we notice the thingness of things in the world; in this state, the background significance of our activities (the projection) recedes.

His analysis reveals that the second, "derivative" form of "existing-as" has lead to both philosophical problems and the scientific outlook, and in the course of his "deconstruction" Heidegger undermines the many readymade answers Western philosophy/science has used to essentialize reality. Fundamentally, Dasein is "always already ahead of itself," and this existential state cannot be encompassed by discourse, or symbolized in any way. Hence Heidegger's almost mystical idea of "silence" in the face of this state, which leads to the "call of conscience" which can bring a person to a state of "authentic being-towards-death" (my professor who taught "Being and Time" spent ten years trying to tease out a substantive doctrine to Heidegger's concept of authenticity. But there is none, and Heidegger admits it; to do so would contradict his idea of authenticity, for each person, always already thrown, must LIVE resolutely as the possibilities of life whittle away).

Part two of "Being and Time" was unfinished. There are several strains of mysticism throughout this work (Heidegger was trained as a theologian) particularly with regard to anxiety (angst) revealing the possibility of nothingness as our ground, a la Meister Eckhart.
"Being and Time" is a tough book to read, no doubt about it. Heidegger coined many torturously hyphenated phrases to express his concepts, and many questions remain unanswered, especially with regard to Part 2 on Temporality for which I've docked it one star (many of these threads are picked up and refashioned in Hubert Dreyfus's book "Being-in-the-World", an excellent intro to BT).

But with effort this is one of the most challenging philosophical inquiries ever written.

Some declare Sein und Zeit and Heidegger's other work as opprobrious epithet, including the scholars of the 20's-40's, until suddenly philosophers began seeing things in his ontological thought. What did they see? Something analagous to what Deleuze saw in NIetzsche, that shaped postmodernity, where thought can no longer be thought in terms of Hegelian dialectic, something so fundamentally accepted that philosophy had to be rewritten. Such a revolution is certainly present in the work of our favorite Nazi. Sure, he was a Nazi, and sure, he was morbid (anyone who says he isnt doesnt take death seriously; Heidegger is morbidity, and it never looked so resounding), but the gods be damned, he finally uncovered something only Cicero speculated; that "to philosophize is to learn how to die." Not that one need to even focuse on authenticity in the light of the horizon of being to find revolutions in our way of being, but it is for Being and Time, if one hopes to ask that continuous question, the question of the meaning of being. This question couldnt be more straightforward, being directly asked from the opening pages, and yet it couldnt be more difficult to grasp. Heidegger's style is, without a doubt, one of the most complex and hard to read proses ever created, with terminology that a native German couldnt follow. But Heidegger does nothing more if not a working in and through the traditions of philosophy (including the complication of language) in order to uncover primal grounds. It will probably take a person longer to get through this text than it took the author himself to create it. Thus, this is by no means a book to be read by a layman, nor by someone lacking time (?) and dedication.

Considering the massive numbers of poor interpretations that have arised in Heidegerrian analyses, one must remain skeptical before accepting what a college professor might offer up, if one were to take a class on Heidegger in hopes of discovering more than he would on his own. Just search the internet for class lecture notes to see what I mean.

As another reviewer mentioned, "Read Being and Time and skip Sartre, whose dumbed-down appropriation of Heidegger's ideas is one of modern philosophy's most egregious mistakes", many, including Heidegger himself, agree with this. One of the reasons Heidegger has been interpreted as proclaiming an ethics and transcendental understanding of Being is because Sartre twisted Heidegger's authentic Dasein into some unified self, whereby all future "existentialism" fell into place. "Existentialism" is almost as erroneous as former "postmodernity," which we all know was proclaimed a joke by none other than Rorty himself. Heidegger is not an existentialist, nor is he a transcendentalist. He is a phenomenologist engaged in an ontological investigation of being.

Stambaugh (which is misspelled by the amazon.com) does an excellent job of fixing a number of misleading translations by the more popular M&R translation. The only complaint I have is the lower-casing of Being when used as a noun; this was done so as to not put emphasis on being as some sort of transcendental figure, but a note of that would have sufficed and saved readers the even further complication of Heidegger, since now one must determine when it is being used as a noun and when a verb, which can be trickier than one might think inside a Heideggerian text. But still a better translation.

I took a graduate philosophy course a number of years back with Joan Stambaugh, in which we read what was then just the typescript of her translation, finally published by SUNY Press. Thank God!! It's so much better than the old MacQuarrie chestnut.

Absolutely, one of the touchstone texts of modern philosophy, and the source of so much postmodern critical thought -- Derrida, Lyotard, etc. etc. Get it, and READ it!!

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 this exact 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.