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A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time

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If you're workin through B&T then you know you need help: where to turn. Depends, if you want themes laid individually, but not always making the big picture cohere and with further goals in mind (refuting certain analytic thoughts) Dreyfus is a must and probably necessary for any advanced philosophy student (if you don't want Heidegger to ultimately smell of spinach completely). If you want a Brit spin written pretty orderly but often focusing on specifics that show where the research interests of the author are, then Mulhall is a must. If you want someone without any axes to grind elsewhere, well laid-out and often willing to go back and reconsider earlier important areas in light of new important ones, then Gelven is your guy. Very level-headed and shows a sincere interest in B&T. I'm still leary of all things Heideggerian, but enjoy a good toil and Gelven allowed me that.

This book is about as accessible as you can get with Heidegger. Gelven not only manages to put across BT's basic concepts in a way which is understandable and jargon-free (though by the end of it the jargon starts to make sense), but also weaves them together into a reasonably coherent presentation of the work in general. So not only does each section make sense taken alone, but he also lets you see how they fit into the general picture. This is probably a better intro to BT than Dreyfus' book, which is in fact a re-hashed set of lecture notes. Contrary to one of the other reviewers, I would recommend reading this commentary before reading Heidegger's actual text. If there is some genius out there who can make sense of Being and Time without being fully versed in the phenomenological tradition, and can therefore makse sense of BT without any help, then I don't think Gelven's book is much help. But for mere mortals this book is indispensable. As for other commentaries, Mulhall's is a bit less clear and more heavy going, but a good follow-up to Gelven. Inwood's is maybe a bit too concise, but worth reading too. For the record, I'm a postgraduate researcher drawing quite heavily on Heidegger's philosophy, so have ended up spending a fair amount of time on this stuff. Life would have been much more difficult without Gelven.

Gelven transforms Being and Time from an opaque philosophical maze into an accessible and meaningful work. I have found most of the major translations of Being and Time, in english translation, to be obscure, inaccurate, and confusing. Gelven's work is a masterpiece of cogency.

I don't think I could have ventured too far into Being and Time or the rest of Heidegger's philosophy if not for having read this book. Gelven makes very clear and accessible, but without watering down, all of the major concepts, terms and ideas brought out in Being and Time, a book which can be extremely intimidating and confusing, especially in translation. This is perhaps the best work on explaining the project of Heidegger's philosophy. If you just want to read one book by Heidegger or wish to gain an understaning of Heidegger's philosophy, don't read a book by Heidegger, read this book instead. Gelven's text is a great starting point and handy reference. I'd highly recommend bringing this book to any class in which one is trying to teach or learn Heidegger.

Whether or not you should read this book will, in my opinion, depend on how serious you are about Heidegger and where you are in your education.

If you are a philosophically curious person and you would like to get some sense of what Heidegger is up to in Being and Time and you have no intentions of becoming a Heidegger scholar or studying Heidegger in graduate school this book is probably a good choice. Gelven is very readable. This is one of the most readable and accessible books on Heidegger I have ever read and by the end of it you should be able to make some sense out of Being and Time and talk about it intelligently.

If, however, you are serious about Heidegger and plan to study Heidegger in graduate school you have to be very careful with this book. I will tell you the experience that I have had to give you some indication of why I say that. I have been studying Heidegger for five years or so. I took classes on Heidegger as an undergraduate and I achieved a fairly solid basic understanding of what Heidegger is up to in Being and Time. I am currently in the middle of a graduate seminar on Heidegger and we are reading Being and Time along with some of Heidegger's other writings so I decided to read Gelven along with the readings we were doing in Being and Time. What I have found is that Gelven makes a lot of mistakes in his Heidegger interpretation which then have to be corrected by my professor in class. I eventually had to stop reading the book because it was doing more harm than good. So if you are serious about Heidegger I would skip this one unless you already understand Heidegger well enough to spot Gelven's mistakes on your own.

I think Gelven gets into trouble because he only distinguishes between 'das Sein' (usually translated as Being) and 'das Seiende' (usually translated as beings). In reality there are three terms that Heidegger wants to distinguish 'das Sein' (Being) ' der Seiendheit' (kinds of beings) and 'das Seiende' (beings). Because Gelven does not adequately make this distinction (or because he leaves out a term) he seems to think that providing an existential-ontological analysis of Dasein's manner of Being is the same thing as providing an answer to Heidegger's more general question about the meaning of Being. But Dasein is only one kind of being (mortals as opposed to earth, sky, and the gods in Heidegger's later formulation of the fourfold). Only Dasein understands Being and so Dasein is the site in which these other beings can show themselves as they are (not as they are categorized by the mind as Gelven seems to think) but it is incorrect to claim that these other Beings have the same kind of Being as Dasein, or exist in the way Dasein exists. The existential analytic does not, therefore, exhaust the meaning of Being.

It is very important to have an intermediate step between 'das Seiende' and 'das Sein' so that we do not generalize an inadequate notion of Being from one particular kind of being and make that the meaning of Being in general. This is essentially what has happened in the history of Western metaphysics since classical ontology drew its notion of Being from beings unlike Dasein and then applied that notion of Being to Dasein. Classical ontology moved directly from 'das Seiende' to 'das Sein' and wound up with an inadequate understanding of the meaning of Being in general. One of the reasons Heidegger begins with Dasein is to point out that classical ontology, based on a tacit understanding of Being as what is constantly present, is inadequate when applied to Dasein which means that 'constant presence' is an inadequate determination of the meaning of Being in general. Dasein is its possibilities but these possibilities are not present.

The fact that Gelven skips a step winds up leading to some misinterpretations on his part. I think Gelven makes some mistakes when talking about the ontological priority of the question of Being in relation to the sciences which are directly related to his failure to distinguish between the existential analytic of Dasein and the more general question about the meaning of Being. Heidegger's ontology is actually far more radical and revolutionary than I think Gelven realizes because he is not simply attempting to fill in a gap in our current ontology (the gap left by the fact that the Being of the cogito, or intentionality, has been left undetermined) but rather to challenge our understanding of the meaning of Being in general. The question of Being has ontological priority in relation to the sciences not simply because the sciences are ways for Dasein to be (which is certainly true) but because the sciences operate with a tacit understanding of Being and the delimitation between fields takes place based on that understanding of Being but this understanding of Being is never made explicit so there is a presupposition at work in all of the sciences. The sciences use ontological concepts which refer to the Being of beings (as opposed to other ontic entities) which means they rely on what Edmund Husserl called regional ontologies. Heidegger goes onto to argue that these regional ontologies (which is as far as Husserl goes) themselves depend on an understanding of the meaning of Being which means that the question of the meaning of Being has priority. If Heidegger were merely attempting to provide an ontological-existenial analytic of Dasein he would be engaged in a regional ontology and not fundamental ontology which is what he explicitly claims to be engaging in. I also think Gelven misunderstands the nature of the hermeneutical circle which is, again, directly related to his equation of the existential analytic of Dasein with the more general question about the meaning of Being.

I could point out some other errors Gelven makes which are not necessarily related to his failure to adequately address the problem of different 'Seiendheit' or kinds of beings (Gelven makes some strange statements like "existentials are the necessary ways in which the mind sees itself" (pg56) which are clearly incorrect) but I think anyone reading this review has probably already gotten the gist of my complaints with Gelven's account.

Gelven certainly does not get everything wrong and he has some interesting things to say but if you plan to study Heidegger seriously you are going to wind up with a bunch of mistaken interpretations from reading Gelven which you are eventually going to have to correct especially if you are still at the beginning of your education. So if you are serious about Heidegger I would recommend skipping this one.

There are a number of books on Heidegger I would recommend instead of Gelven's if you are genuinely interested in understanding Being and Time. Unfortunately none of them are as accessible as Gelven's but it is better to struggle with correct interpretations than to breeze through misinterpretations. A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) by Magda King would probably be a better choice for those who are looking for a commentary on Being and Time (I have not finished this one yet but I have not come across any obvious mistakes as of yet and Magda King does a good job of clarifying a number of aspects of Being and Time that I struggled with on my own). On Heidegger's Being and Time by Simon Critchley and Reiner Schurmann would also be a very good choice. It is a difficult book but you get the added bonus of getting two different perspectives on Heidegger from two top-notch scholars. Not all scholars agree about how to read and interpret Heidegger but Critchley and Schurmann are both solid scholars who are not going to make silly mistakes in their interpretations. Martin Heideggers Path/Thinking (Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and Literature) by Otto Poggeler is a personal favorite of mine. Otto Poggeler does not limit himself to discussing Being and Time but attempts to summarize the entire trajectory of Heidegger's thought but his sections on Being and Time are excellent and some of the most illuminating descriptions of Being and Time I have read. Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) by Jacques Taminiaux is another excellent choice since Taminiaux attempts to search out some of the hidden sources of Being and Time but Taminiaux (like Poggeler) does not limit himself to discussing Being and Time. The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time by Theodore Kisiel is a monster of a book and it is very dense. It definitely should not be the first book you read on Being and Time but it is, hands down, one of the best books on Heidegger around and if you are serious about Heidegger you will certainly have to read it eventually. And finally Plato's Sophist (Studies in Continental Thought) by Martin Heidegger himself is a really helpful book to read when approaching Being and Time. Heidegger gave these lectures on Plato's Sophist just a couple of years before he published Being and Time and a number of the themes of Being and Time are explored in depth (like truth as aletheia or unconcealment, and the different forms of disclosure, etc.). Heidegger was often a much more lucid lecturer than he was a writer so his lectures on Plato's Sophist are extremely helpful when attempting to understand Being and Time. Unfortunately there is a lot of untranslated Greek in the lectures so if you do not read Greek they will be a challenge. There is a superb glossary at the end of the book so even if you do not read Greek you can still make your way through them if you have the patience (I would recommend at least learning the Greek alphabet so you can look up the Greek words more easily).

I should also say a final word about Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. by Hubert Dreyfus. A lot of people recommend Dreyfus's book as a good introduction to Being and Time. While Dreyfus's book has undeniable philosophical value the scholarly consensus is that his interpretation of Heidegger is at least as problematic as Gelven's. I would not suggest starting with Dreyfus unless you are an analytic philosopher who wants to include some Heidegger in what you are doing. If you are looking for an accurate interpretation of Heidegger from the perspective of the Continental tradition of philosophy I would not start with Dreyfus's book.

All of the other choices I gave, however, would be better places to begin your study of Heidegger if you are serious about understanding Being and Time.

-Brian

Gelven makes reading Being and Time enjoyable and accessible for everyone. His section by section analysis includes wonderful examples that make crystal clear the important distinctions that Heidegger makes as he attempts to ask, and answer, the question of being. You will not need any other commentary for Being and Time apart from this!

I read this book for a graduate seminar on philosophy. Michael Gelven's book helps to illuminate one of the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time," which deconstructs phenomenology. Heidegger's kind of phenomenology has to do with the idea of phenomenon, which means something that appears and shows itself. His criticism of traditional philosophy is that it gets started with categories, concepts, and notions, departing from the way human comprehension of this world first shows itself. This is Aristotelian and Aristotle is an enormous influence on Heidegger.

Yet, there is something very radical going on here, and that is the idea of "being" is connected to meaning and negativity. In the history of philosophy, being has a positive concept, something that "is" thus, the opposite of being is none being. Heidegger wants to show how the meaning of being is distorted by this understanding of being as a purely positive concept, as a "thing" a full present entity. For Example, he also very much critiques in modern art, the modern conception of objectivity, the world is transformed into an object independent of art, of its significance, its meaning, or interest in it. This was due in large part because of modern science, and its strong sense of objectification converting nature into a set of mere objects, time, and space that are measurable and analyzable through scientific means. Meaning, importance, and significance for Heidegger equals value; science and nature have none of this as pure objects. Therefore, anything of meaning, and of significance would be transferred into the subject it would be simply the human estimation, nature itself has no meaning or significance in that respect.

Heidegger critiques this scientific model. As he says in his phenomenology, "Well how is it that human existence first understands itself? Here he is talking about things that are very ordinary and complex. We are in a world that has significance, it is meaningful to us, it matters to us, it fits into our interests in such a way that we are absorbed into its significance. So, when we come across the world, first and foremost it is not a mere object that is standing apart from us or our mind, but rather it has significant elements of our environment that fit into our lives. Some things are significant, or they are useful, or dangerous, or satisfying, etc. What Heidegger wants to say in his phenomenology is we have to pay attention to this way of being. Therefore, first and foremost he says "being" matters, it matters to us. "Being" is a significance, it is not just a bare object or a bare fact. Heidegger doesn't accept this idea of subject on one side and object on the other side, that means that when humans have their understanding of the world, it is not just a human projection, it is not just a human construction. It is a revealing way of seeing; it is world disclosive. The meaning of the world wouldn't happen without us, because we are the ones that find it meaningful. Therefore, it is most important to understand that for Heidegger there is no object subject distinction. The term he uses to illustrate his idea is "Dasien" which means "human existence," Heidegger chooses it because he doesn't want to deal with the subject, or mind or consciousness, he wants to use a word that does not subjectivefy things. He uses "Dasien" as "humans being there" in this world and not just staying apart from it.

Humans are a being in the world, a term he uses is, "we dwell" in the world, we don't come across it as some bare thing in the world we "dwell" in it. Therefore, "meaningfulness" is a primary notion of being. Secondly, the meaning of "being" is connected with the notion of negativity. This is the notion of "being" moving toward death, and anxiety. Thus, the way that humans understand being is in part because of opposite of non-being and death is a perfect example of that. Humans are distinct because we understand that we are mortal, that we die. We are aware of death even when we are not in danger, which means we understand being and our world. Heidegger made a lot out of the fact that the Greeks understood this, that they were mortals, and that was no accident he thought. That death is a primary aspect of what it means to be human. If you are aware of death as he says, then you can be aware of the meaning of life. The meaning of life comes to us because we understand that we are finite, that we are mortal and not in control.

Another way to understand Heidegger is a wonderful analysis of the idea that the word "being" has become a noun in philosophy, like first things of beings, or things that are. Yet Heidegger says in the Greek language and other western languages this idea of "being" grammatically in language is derived from a verb, the primary verb "to be." Moreover, as a verb it is tensed which means it has to do with time. All verbs are tensed, even Aristotle said, "That is the difference between a verb and a noun." The difference between a verb and a noun, a verb is something that has to do with time, not just action, but time. That is why all verbs are tensed as future, and past. The very fact that time is another perfect indication of negativity, because time is ever changing, ever moving, and when we are in the present, the past is time of negativity it is no longer. When we are in the present, the future is kind of negative it is not yet. Yet we understand these negatives as meaningful, that is why we can get upset about the past that it is not happening anymore, and why we can become excited about the future even though it hasn't happened yet, they have meaning to us.

Another important feature of Heidegger's book is where he takes on the notion of skepticism. Skepticism is a classic problem in philosophy, it is really fostered by Descartes and Hume, and it has to do with the subject/object division. Skeptics argue that the mind is on one side of the fence, the outside world is on the other side, and the mind is something that comes across the world and just processes it, according to its categories of thinking, this is a very common modern construction of skepticism. If this skeptical construct were true, then it is very possible for someone to ask the question; "well how do we know that our minds that are on this side of the fence can ever really know that it is accurately talking about what is on the other side of the fence? If it is separated like this, how can we be sure that what we think about is actually the case? Heidegger is not talking here about ordinary skepticism, like wonder or "I am not sure" kind of skepticism; but what Heidegger argues against is the kind of radical skepticism, which asks, can we be sure of any of our knowledge. This idea plays on two objects, the subject object divide if we are on this side of the subject how can we ever know we are accurately talking about something. Secondly, is the certainty because the skeptic is someone who says well, "I really want to find with 100% certainty, and if I can find any reason for doubt then I am not going to commit. Heidegger says this is a classic philosophical problem that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Because, no existing human self could ever radically call into question its environment and this world. It doesn't make any sense. You can call into question this or that aspect of it, but never the whole thing and never to say; "well it's possible that what humans say about the world may not have anything to do with the world." Even Descartes and Hume knew this was perverse, but they said this is what philosophy has to do. Radical skepticism is perverse to Heidegger. Skeptics like Descartes and Hume if right why are they writing to an audience. The very practice of skepticism undermines the idea of skepticism. Heidegger says, "Well if our practices betray the project of skepticism, which even Hume admits, he says I would go mad." You can't live as a radical skeptic. This skepticism can apply to things like morals and beauty values and artistic things, because they don't satisfy strict standards of knowledge and certainty.

To reiterate, it is important to know that Heidegger primarily wants to say that the meaning of being, is something that humans are involved with in a significant meaningful way, and it can't be either subjective or objective, those two ideas he says are polarizations that both account for how the world matters to us. The fact that it matters to us means it can't be a pure objective thing. Secondly, the fact that what matters to us is our world not just our opinions and our inner dispositions mean it can't be just a subjective thing. We are absorbed in the world; we are caught up in it. Heidegger's phenomenology wants to give voice to these notions rather than start with the modern categories of subjectivity and objectivity.

I recommend this work for anyone interested in philosophy, epistemology, and ontology.

As the subtitle, ¡®A section-by-section interpretation¡¯, implies, this book is a section-by-section exegesis on Heidegger¡¯s ¡®Being and Time¡¯. So you should not expect an abridged reproducing Heidegger¡¯s book, though each section¡¯s content is closely recaptured. This book is not intended to replace original text. If you don¡¯t read Heidegger¡¯s text, I think don¡¯t think you can get much with this book. This kind of book is needed when the text of philosopher is so inexplicable that it takes even several years to decipher line by line. German masters of philosophy, like Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, are notorious for their enigmatic writing style. That kind of style might be caused by the nature of the subject they deal with: they proposed not what the readers were accustomed to but what the author himself had not known the words to express their thought. So their books are littered with neologisms and mysterious expressions. Thus it¡¯s no wonder that there has been a plethora of exegesis on their works like this book.
Once you pick a work to read through, it would take time to reach the last page. So you could not remember what the author said in previous part, when you read other part. Then you have to read back previous part to understand the next part. But that previous part would ask you to remember the content of the other earlier part. Then you cannot but trace back to that part. It must end in endless circular flipping. But in that way, it must take a few years to read a work once at all! In that case, this kind of book is matchlessly helpful.
Another use of this kind of book is that you can peep into the summary of each section before you venture into that part. Yep, you can¡¯t capture real image with the brief summary. But it must be helpful and save your precious time. But for this kind of usage, I recommend to read another book at the same time: Dreyfus¡¯ ¡®Being-in-the-world¡¯. It has more depth than this book, though it does not cover whole line of the text; only Division I of ¡®Being and Time¡¯. And if you are seriously to delve into ¡®Being and Time¡¯, I recommend to read Kisiel¡¯s ¡®The Genesis of Heidegger¡¯s Being & Time¡¯. As the title implies, this book covers Heidegger¡¯s manuscripts written before publishing ¡®Being and Time¡¯.

I must have read this book about 15 years ago. It is easy to read and one might think they are actually learning something. However, this changes when you encounter people who really know this material. Check out Dreyfus's book Being in the World for some real depth into the first part of B&T. For an excellent introduction to Heidegger ,check out Polt's book.