Customer Reviews

Heidegger in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)

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Paul Strathern makes a promising beginning. He tells us about Heidegger's early tendencies of mind, recounts the overriding events and the challenging philosophical situation of his time, and explains the philosopher's original philosophical project and some of his key concepts.

But Strathern goes astray in the latter part of this short book, offering a glib and sarcastic rebuttal to Heidegger's thought, making light of his style of writing, and devoting far too much space to his Nazism, as though only heroic persuasion could keep us from embracing Hitler.

No serious thinker deserves this kind of treatment. It insults not only Heidegger but also the readers, who are evidently expected to adopt Strathern's opinons as final rather than forming their own. The impression you end with, whether he intended it so or not, is that Heidegger was just too wrongheaded and obscurantist for us to bother ourselves with him.

If the pages wasted on Strathern's reactions had been used to give us more Heidegger information and to integrate that with the previous material, the book would have been worth the money and the hour and a half.

As indicated by the title, this is a very quick overview of Heiddeger. As such it is interesting and well written. However, I was more interested in the philosophy than the man, and so was a bit disappointed in the relatively little attention given to Heiddeger's ideas, as opposed to his life. Some terms are not explained clearly for a beginner. An example: the author assumes that the meaning and origin of the term "phenomenology" is transparent and self-evident. The last portion of the book is very negative about the man, but does not show why this would negate the value of the philosopher's ideas. (I don't like Picasso much as an individual, but am entranced by his paintings....) In spite of my reservations, I went from almost no knowledge of Heidegger to a place where I'm ready to learn more; I'm glad I read it (and it did take just about ninety minutes to do so).

The very notion that one could get something called "Heidegger" in 90 minutes is profoundly ridiculous. As any one who has studied Heidegger for (apparently) more than 90 minutes can tell you, Heidegger's thought is extraordinarily complex, and often impenetrable even to the seasoned student of philosophy. More to the point, Heidegger himself is famous for railing against the superficial "chatter" of the industry of letters; yet few philosophers (aside from Nietzsche perhaps) have been subjected to as much useless chatter as has been Heidegger.

My advice - dispense with the "industry" of philosophy altogether, and especially its pathetic popularized forms. If you're not up to trying to read Heidegger (or any philosopher, dead or alive) himself, then just stay out of philosophy altogether.

Good as an audio book. You could call books in this series a combination of philosophy and (verified) gossip, a rare blend. This one was enough to show me that Heidegger will never be a priority on my reading list. Heidegger may have been a smart guy but it seems like he was pursuing dead ends, searching for cosmic significance in the word or concept of "being". He could have used some Wittgensteinian therapy.

If you must have a comicbook introduction to Heidegger, then buy Heidegger for Beginners, which is not terrible. But you would be much better served by picking up a secondary text published by a good university press. Better yet, why not bite the bullet and read Heidegger himself? (Start with Pathmarks, which is excellent, or Basic Writings, which is still very good.) Stay away from cheap nonsense like "Heidegger in 90 minutes" (this is absurd, as the other reviewers say!) and Heidegger's Confusions, which will only confuse you.

It would be easy to look down on any book that offers to inform someone about Heidegger in "90 Minutes," yet Paul Strathern's book provides some good perspective on a philosopher hailed by some as the greatest of the twentieth century. As a former philosophy student who spent a semester on Heidegger's supposed masterpiece Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), I do not share that assessment of Heidegger. Strathern rightly raises the fundamental question whether the jargon or verbiage of Heidegger is meaningful at all (p. 33). My own personal conclusion matches that of the psychologist Jung who referred to Heidegger as the "master of complicated banalities" (p. 75). Only in a nihilistic world that has lost all faith in logical and clear thinking as a way to the truth can the absurd verbiage of Heidegger be hailed as a philosophical advance.

Strathern also rightly raises the active and eager Nazism of Heidegger in the thirties that was indeed related to his philosophical ideas (p.62), although Strathern chivalrously tries to salvage the pure core of Heidegger's ideas from Nazi affinity. Finally, Strathern does not shrink back from recounting the failure of integrity and character seen in Heidegger's turning his back on his Jewish philosophical mentor Husserl during the Nazi era (p. 60) and from recounting the deception involved in Heidegger's lengthy adulterous relation with his much younger student Hannah Arendt (pp. 35-40).