Customer Reviews

Heidegger for Beginners

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HEIDEGGER FOR BEGINNERS. By Eric LeMay & Jennifer A. Pitts. Illustrated by Paul Gordon. 120 pp. New York : Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1994. ISBN 0-86316-172-3 (Pbk).

It's difficult not to be impressed by the audacity of the Heideggerian enterprise. Here is a philosopher who, at the outset of his career, decided that Western thought had been fundamentally in error about everything for the last two thousand years, and who set out single-handedly to rectify matters by showing us, not only how we ought to be thinking, but also what things were really all about. If he was right about the West being all wrong, and there are excellent reasons for supposing that he was, he clearly becomes someone we ought to know something about. But where to begin?

The Heidegger opus is MASSIVE, and consists of upwards of a hundred or so volumes, none of them easy. His German is notoriously obscure, even for native speakers of that language, and translation does little to improve it. And the works of his commentators, which in 1989 ran to over four thousand books and articles and today numbers considerably more, can often be even more obscure than Heidegger himself. Happily authors LeMay and Pitts, with the collaboration of Paul Gordon, have come to the rescue of all of those dazed and bewildered beginners out there with their extremely well-done illustrated treatment of Heidegger's basic thought.

The illustrations are both effective and amusing. The thought is authentic Heidegger and, so far as it goes, accurate. The treatment, while witty, is respectful. The book concludes with some good advice about Further Reading, a basic Bibliography, and a brief anthology of key extracts : 'Martin Heidegger : In His Own Words' - On the Essence of Truth; On the Subject; On Being; On Authentic Existence; On Technology, etc. The aim, in short, seems to have been, while not overburdening the beginner with too much of Heidegger's radically different style of thinking, to give him or her enough to stimulate a desire to know more. In this I think the authors have been successful. 'Heidegger for Beginners' will be enjoyed by many who are new to Heidegger, and perhaps by at least some who are not so new.

Purists, of course, will shriek that beginners would be far better off reading Steiner, or Poggeler, or Safranski, or even Heidegger himself. Of course they would! But purists have a curious tendency to forget that they too were once BEGINNERS (i.e., persons who know nothing but who would like to know something), and that prior to having become self-appointed 'experts,' they might have taken a less snooty attitude to the book under review, a book which - I repeat - is for beginners who may not yet be ready for something more substantial.

My advice to beginners would be to forget about the purists (who rarely know as much as they like to pretend), and to curl up for a few good hours of fun and edification with LeMay and Pitts. You'll be amused. You'll certainly learn 'something' about Heidegger. And some of you will be left with a desire to know more. For those who would like to know more, details of one of the finest available conventional Introductions to Heidegger for the general reader are as follows:

MARTIN HEIDEGGER. By George Steiner. 173 pp. University of Chicago Press edition, 1987 (1978). ISBN 0-226-77232-2 (pbk.)

Don't kid yourself and pretend you're too good to read these '... For Beginner' books. They're an ideal way to gather together and encapsulate the key ideas of the primary texts to which they refer. They read quickly, have a sense of humor, and are great little summaries of key concepts.

It goes without saying that they're no substitute for the real thing. That's a given. But Heidegger is difficult. (Are as most of the philosophers that these books deal with. Anybody who says otherwise is lying -- or has read so much Heidegger that he/she has started to get brain-blur.)

The great thing about this Heidegger book (and all the books in the series) is that they present the key ideas in simple terms. And bear in mind that there's nothing wrong with simplicity. Good 'simplicity' is a lot more difficult than one might think. Writing simply and thinking critically is what these books are all about -- and for these reasons, I can't recommend them enough.

I'm a few years out of graduate school, so I feel myself 'out of the loop.' These books are a great way to refresh key concepts, get a good solid fix on Heidegger's so-called project, and give you space enough to dive in (or at least poke about) in 'Being and Time'.

Plus, they make Heidegger's difficult ideas ('Being' 'Dasein') accessible -- and, quite frankly, that's what learning (and reading) is all about. Yeah, they're no substitute for the real thing -- and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken -- but they're great contextualizers -- and for that reason, they're quite valuable.

Besides, everybody has hang-ups about the 'difficulty' of modern philosophy. What these books do is to say: Look, the ideas *are* difficult -- don't kid yourself -- but just because they're difficult doesn't mean they should be *inaccessible*.

And that's what you want a good teacher to say, right? You want someone to clomp you on the back, tell you not to worry, and assure that if you just keep at it -- keep reading, keep grappling -- you'll do fine. That's what these books do. They're the teacher clomping you on the back, telling you not to worry.

This book is an extremely poor and misleading introduction to Heidegger's thought. Neither Heidegger's hermeneutical-phenomenological interpretive method, nor the "being" question as he understood it, nor his philosophical roots are even tolerably depicted. The special kind of inner coherency, rigor, and "feel" for the structures of "human experience" that makes Heidegger's thought stand out are mostly ignored here, and instead we are given a bizarre selection of decontextualized tidbits from Heidegger which, when interpreted in the sloppy and cliched way these authors prefer, almost make him look like some granola-crunching New Age guru. If you have read this book, please do not judge Heidegger by it. If you have not, don't- instead try the equally clear and much more accurate introductory texts written by Polt and Dreyfus.

Very simply, this is a wonderful introduction to Heidegger's works. As I have found with all 4 of the "for beginner" books I have read, it offered a sizable yet digestable summary of his major themes and ideas, as well as tracing his historical development.

The beauty of this book from my perspective is that it puts all of his major ideas in one accesible, entertaining, and SHORT book, so the reader can grasp each idea in relation to the others.

In reading Heidegger's original works, as well as his interpreters', one must wade through detailed analysis of minute points and one often loses the big picture in the process.

This "for beginners" has actually given me a useful framework in which to hang my previous understandings, and in the process, given me a much firmer grasp of Heidegger's work and value.

The one challenge I have with the book is that, unlike "Sartre for beignners", there is no glossary at the end of the book, which would have been enormously useful (as it was with Sartre). Fortunately, this is an easy problem to solve in future printings.

Kudos to your book, and may each additional philosopher be treated with equal care and generosity.

I wish I had found this book before starting on Heidegger in a class. It is a simple (simplified) overview of the complex and integrated thought of Heidegger. But I believe it will give beginners an overview of what to expect as they dig deeper. Then the digging will be less painful and more profitable.

In our class, it became known as the "Heidegger Coloring Book", but others were eager to borrow my copy.

A good starting point, no matter how serious you are or are not.

For my American Literature Class, I have to choose a philosopher and then find examples of his ideas throughout 20th Century Noble Prize Winning American authors' novels. Having first read about Heidegger in a World History class while studying nazi Germany, I had always been interested in his ideas. This book served as a nice and entertaining overview of his philosophy and influences. For people just looking to expand their philosophical horizons or learn more information without having to read a boring text, I suggest this and practically any book in the "For Beginner" series.

+ okay, maybe I wasn't that clueless about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, but I was suffering a serious deficit of clues as to what he was all about. This book provided those clues and gave me enough information to decide whether I want to pursue the matter any further.

+ And that is the goal of this series of beginner's books. I've seen them criticized as the sort of thing shallow people read so they can appear knowledgeable at cocktail parties. Hello? What kind of cocktail parties are these people being invited to where people are standing around over their aperitifs and mini-hot dogs chatting about Martin Heidegger? The last cocktail party I went to the most intelligent person in the room was talking about his new lawn mower. Furthermore, if you're amongst company who is familiar enough with a philosopher like Heidegger to know or care to discuss him, or to listen to you prattle on about "throwingness" or "framing" is anyone really stupid enough to think they can impress such a person with knowledge gleaned from a book such as "A Beginners' Guide to Heidegger"?

+No, the point of this book is to give you a general lay of the land that will fill in the gaps in your overall knowledge of philosophy. Let's face it, unless you're a professional philosopher, and even then, chances are that you just cannot find the time to read the complete works of every philosopher from Heraclitus to Derrida and still have time to brush your teeth or use the toilet. So how much less time is there for someone who isn't a professional philosopher but a bricklayer or a graphic designer or a poet or a wholesale butcher?

+ What "Heidegger for Beginners" does so well is condense in the scope of one easily readable, often humorous, and yet succinct way the important bullet points of Heidegger's huge body of work. Curiously enough, what you come away with after reading this book is a knowledge of Heidegger probably not a lot different from what you'd end up remembering if you'd read all of Heidegger's work, once, ten years ago in school. In other words, you remember the important points, the general drift, and if you have any natural intelligence at all, you can actually fill in the rest yourself, as well as be able to challenge the inconsistencies and premises of Heidegger's thinking.

+ As I've noted elsewhere, the Beginner's series seems to vary in quality from book to book. *Heidegger for Beginners* is one of the good ones; I highly recommend it.

Book makes a terrific power-point presentation in the undergraduate classroom. Takes about 2.5 hours to explain Heidegger in all the basics. An excellent teaching tool.

I read the Foucault book in this series. And I am just as pleased that my husband got this book for us to read. Being "deprived" of a deeper education in Philosophy in college, these books have allowed me to enter into the world of Philosophy with some basic understanding of what these philosophers wanted to say. For those intimidated by just picking up a volume by Heidegger or any philosopher, this is a "friendlier" way to making their intellectual volumes accessible to "novices" like myself. It's also a lot easier to read on a bus ride, or infront of a warm fireplace.

I've read a hand full of the Beginners book and have liked them all so far. I'm a philosophy major and have found them to be helpful to use along with the original text at times, but this one is just bad. Its extremely short, I read through it in one sitting. I feel like I learned about as much as I could have from a Wikipedia article. Try the "Introducing" Heidegger over this book.