Customer Reviews

Heidegger's 'Being and Time': A Reader's Guide

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

 

 

'Heidegger's Being And Time' by William Blattner is an instalment in the Continuum series of readers guides - intended as a companion to reading Heidegger's Being and Time.

This is a nice small text (under 200 pages), Blattner has a strong grasp of Being and Time and is particularly helpful in decoding much of the abstruse jargon used by Heidegger. Blattner also comments on some of language used in standard English translation of Being and Time by Macquarrie and Robinson. Being and Time has come to be recognised as one of the more important and influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century. Despite its importance, however, for the non-Heideggerian it can seem impenetrable - stylistically speaking, it represents some of the worst aspects of German philosophy writing; verbose, rambling and ambiguous.

I read this text in conjunction with Hubert Dreyfus's UC Berkley course and found it very useful - enjoying Heidegger more than I previously have. Dreyfus's Being and Time couse is available free at itunes/UC Berkley/humanities. Dreyfus also has a Being and Time commentary that is worth a look.

Analytic philosophers half a century ago would probably find the recent "acceptance" of Martin Heidegger into their ranks a base repugnance. But here we stand in the twenty-first century with proponents of the Analytic school researching, teaching, and writing books on this once scourged Continental outcast. This somewhat begrudging acceptance seems to originate with Heidegger's radical perspective on epistemological issues. William Blattner, author of this book, one of numerous reading guides to Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus "Being and Time," attended Herbert Dreyfus' Heidegger classes at Berkeley. Dreyfus penned one of the most acclaimed American commentaries on "Being and Time" and hails predominantly from the Analytic tradition. It should come as no surprise that one of his star students, Blattner, should approach Heidegger from within more or less the same framework. "Heidegger's Being and Time" shines brightest when dealing with aspects closest to the Analytic tradition.

The book comprises four main chapters. The first, "Context," contains a brief biography of Heidegger's life from his birth in 1889, his religious early years, his subsequent abandonment of theology in favor of philosophy, tutelage and mentorship under Husserl, "Being and Time," fame, his turn towards the "later Heidegger" in the 1930s, his nefarious affiliation with the Nazis throughout World War II, up to his death in 1976. Chapter two, "Overview of Themes," outlines Heidegger's attitude towards the subject-object philosophical tradition, which he depicts as a distortion of human experience. Here Blattner outlines the structure of Being and Time, namely, its two divisions. This reader's guide, he says, will cover the bulk of Division I, but only segments of Division II. Blattner finds Heidegger's view on temporality and being in that division "almost certainly unsuccessful." Later on he claims that most don't read past section 65 of "Being and Time" and calls the succeeding arguments weak, obscure, radical, and not influential. As such, those looking for help with Division II should look elsewhere.

"Reading the Text," the third chapter, makes up the vast majority of the book's content. In short, it's the meat of this guide. Blattner breaks this relatively enormous chapter down into seventeen sections, each dealing with salient Heideggerian themes: Heidegger's conception of Ontology, phenomenology, Existence (Dasein), "Being-in-the-World," The self and the "Anyone" (usually translated as "the They"), Disclosedness and the "There" (ontological versus geometrical distance), Disposedness (mood), Understanding and Interpretation (contrasted with cognition), Language (discourse and assertion), Realism and Idealism (Heidegger's responses to epistemological skepticism and the ontological problem, namely, does the world depend on our experience), Heidegger's notion of truth, the everyday, owned, and disowned life, falling, Anxiety, Death, Guilt and Conscience, and resoluteness and self-ownership. A short fourth and final chapter deals with Heidegger's reception in Continental (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer) and Analytic philosophy (debates with Cassirer, Carnap, and subsequent dismissal from the Anglo-American school over interpretations of Kant).

Within its Analytic framework, the book presents a great overview of Heidegger's basic ideas. Throughout, it gives valuable context and background on much of what Heidegger's philosophy reacts to. In this it excels. That said, some rough exigetical spots crop up when Blattner deals with what he calls Heidegger's "existential" side. The sections on ownedness (often translated as "authenticity"), fallenness, and anxiety suffer slightly from too much Analytic-speak. They also suggest that Heidegger fits more comfortably within the existentialist school than is actually the case. Plus, Blattner's equating "anxiety" with what we would today call "depression" may furrow some brows. Blattner also takes much umbrage in the sixteenth section of chapter three with Heidegger's dismissal of ethics, which he also finds potentially anti-semitic and burdened by the worst side of Nietzsche's thought (i.e., disdain for "the rabble"). Though not everyone will agree with his interpretations on these points, the bulk of the book remains a readable, challenging, and informative guide to arguably the twentieth century's most influential philosophical text, "Being and Time." Expect to work. Nothing about Heidegger, even introductory books about his work, resembles dainty strolls through the park. Sharpen the brain and dive in.

I read this book for a graduate seminar on philosophy. William Blattner'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.

What William Blattner attempts to do in this book is to enroll Heidegger in the left/liberal struggle, the very thing which Heidegger despised. I read this book two years ago during a course on 'Being and Time' but after long reflection I can now only look at the badness of this thing with astonishment. It should be taken as an encapsulation of the spiritual condition of the American/European Academy and of how Americanism has, astonishingly, embraced Heidegger.

Blattner does two things in this book. First, he defines the language of 'Being and Time', which is bad for two reasons. One is that in doing this Blattner goes against the very language of B&T. Reading Heidegger is sort of like learning another language, so defining it is only ever self-referential. Guides are for accessibility, and Heidegger ridiculed 'accessibility', as an example of liberalism and of what he called 'machination'.

Second, Blattner begins to interpret 'Being and Time' by contextualizing it in a presumably practical situation where theory and praxis are conjoined, so as to show what Heidegger 'does', so to speak. Blattner basically subordinates the truth of 'Being and Time' to the service of Gay Rights. Thats right, Blattner employs the 'rhetoric' of 'Being and Time' for yet more leveling and 'accessibility', but that Blattner elects Gay Rights makes this truly comical. America needs a Nazi to bolster its moral certitude. Something's up. Here one recalls all those vague remarks by politicians and moralists regarding how the Leftist Academy has fascist-ized identity politics.

I won't slog through the details of Blattner's hijacking, other than to remark that it hinges upon a pernicious treatment of one of the historical ecstases of the originary temporality, the past as 'has been'. This is actually Heidegger's early notion of historicity, which is supremely important for Being and Time. To put it crudely, it is the way Heidegger makes tradition eternally present, and thus futural, instead of something left behind in the 'past'. He does this to maintain unification, whether of a musical tradition, a philosophic tradition or a racial tradition where people only marry and live with their 'own'. Blattner of course passes over all this and never mentions anything like it. The temporal ecstases of the 'past', the 'has been', for Blattner is simply what happened a few weeks or months ago, maybe seconds as his only concern is to make Heidegger practical. It should be noted that Blattner is an ardent student of the postmodern/bourgeois/liberal Richard Rorty. As the another reviewer notes, there are omissions of entire concepts of B&T.

So Heidegger is now serving gay rights, which is to say, civil rights. He has already served black rights and feminism, so why not? All of this in order to make everything accessible for everyone, the embourgeoisie of the entire world, precisely what he and many other great men dreaded. In order to full comprehend the stakes of this astonishing event you must read Allan Bloom's book about the Universities. As a student of Heidegger, I don't agree with his Humanism, of course, but he is absolutely right about what happened to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Though he was a Neo-con, even he admitted that Heidegger's teachings are "the most powerful intellectual force of our times".

Instead of explicating the structure of the book, which is laid out thematically, not chronologically, I'd like to dive straight into what is wrong with this reader's guide and why it should be a last resort.

Firstly I wholly disagree with Blattner's interpretative methodology, which I'd like to explicate through textual citation later on. Blattner uses the Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Being and Time as a textual reference--which is universally acknowledged as the consummate translation of the book in the English speaking world--while wholly departing from Heidegger's pedagogy as defined in that translation. I'll cite a few glaring examples of this, beginning with an instance in Blattner's situational application of Heidegger's philosophy as found in Being and Time.

The situation that Blattner uses is a grossly political one, which by its nature, ensures that Heidegger will be degenerated from the get go, and this precludes another one of my grievances that I'll explicate later. Blattner uses the plight of a lesbian mother as situation in which to loosely apply the articulating structure of Heidegger's "Resoluteness". I'll follow this up with a negative analysis.

Basically, Blattner's lesbian mother has to go the extra round to ensure the solidification of her family life; she lives together with a lover and is raising a kid. Throughout the book Blattner lambastes the Republican party, George W. Bush, The Catholic Church and labels anyone who may question the American sense of "freedom" as "neo-nazi". Blattner claims he made the initial mistake of assimilating their situation within the confines of a "traditional family structure", yet somehow came to the understanding that this was erroneous, "It is the existentiell courage to stand by who one is in the face of the public's distantiality and abuse" [Blattner 163]. Ironically it never occurs to Blattner that his valuation of anyone who would question "freedom" as belonging to the evil margin of Neo-Nazism is itself a gesture of rhetorical abuse for deviating from the American norm: "freedom" = good, yet Blattner makes sure to apply this method of "reigning in deviance" to anything outside of the white/heterosexual margin and this is symptomatic of Blattner's book-long dismissal of Heidegger's existential structural, or, at the very least, the pernicious marginalization of it. However when one takes little glimpses like these into account, along with the entire example--same-sex marriage--as well as Blattner's stabs at everything religious or Republican then we understand that Heidegger's analysis of Authenticity/Inauthenticity is bastardized by being subordinated to the perpetual prattle of the Republican/Democrat political split in this country. Das-man is run through the mill of mendacity with the unsurprising result that the Left is authentic, thereby ensuring what is, at best, a domestication of Heidegger who emphatically declaring that there is neither causality nor accountability for Das-man "The-They", "These Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, a n y Other can represent them. The "who" is not this one, not the sum of them all. The 'who' is the neuter, they "they" [das Man]" (Heidegger 164).

Now back to the structural problem of "Resoluteness" that I deviated from. I will here cite Blattner from page 164 of his "guide", middle paragraph;

"What could it be for the situation itself to call upon her to abandon who she [the lesbian mother] is [conforming to traditional family structure]? If the situation is the space of factical possibilities--what she can do and who she can be here and now-then this situation can only call upon her to abandon who she is [her "false" self], if who she is not possible in this situation [being what she really wants]. That is, for the situation to call upon her to abandon who she has been is either for who she has been to have been outstripped by change or for her to have died to who she has been" (Blattner 164).

The problem here is Blattner's handling of "the situation" and "the call", which in Being and Time never issues from the situation, nor does the situation come in to Dasein in isolation and somehow purports itself. I will say why in the next paragraph. It is also important to mention that this lesbian-mother example is the consummation of Blattner's efforts in the book so far. Before Blattner interpreted--though he actually butchers--Heidegger to show you as much of Heidegger as is useful for his pragmatic impulse, and is now applying his annotations of Heidegger to see how Heidegger works, though what you see is how Blattner works with Heidegger.

Heidegger's anaysis explicitly states that after the nihilation of Dasein's existentiality by the appearance of existential-death, which vaporizes the entrenchment of Dasein's circumspective concern within the average-everydayness of das-Man, Dasein is, in a sense, struck by the "call of conscience" which presents to Dasein an understanding of its "ownmost" possibilities for being. After taking hold of these ownmost possibilities of being, Dasein reenters its proximal environment, which is itself defined by the ways of das-Man, that now becomes "the Situation" due to Dasein's "newly" authenticated projection of its ownmost potentiality for being onto that environment [das-Man], thanks to the force of death. Also existential-death is not to be understood as the biological end of ourselves that we may meet in a car accident or something. Heidegger's sense of existential-death is what Jaspers called a "limit-situation"; it is an existential boundary that defines Dasein's potentiality for-being. Heidegger best explicates this as "the utmost possiblity that is the impossibility of being-in-the-world". So there is a chain of circumstances that have to take place in order to arrive at "the Situation" which is basically Dasein's authentic understanding of its proximal environment because, in now understanding its ownmost possibilities, it can know what it really wants to do and "death" is its justification for now deciding to do such and such. To textually seal the process of the call I'll refer to the English:

"The possibility of its thus getting broken off lies in its being appealed to without mediation. Dasein fails to hear itself, and listens way to the "they"; and this listening-away gets broken by the call if that call, in accordance with its character as such, arouses another kind of hearing, which, in relationship to the hearing that is lost, has a character in every way opposite. If in this lost hearing, one has been fascinated with the 'hubbub' of the manifold ambiguity which idle talk possesses in its everyday 'newness', then the call must do its calling without any hubbub and unambiguously, leaving no foothold for curiosity. That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is the conscience" (Heidegger 316).

Instead of adhering to this elaborate structure of Resoluteness Blattner decides to just let the situation call to Dasein, a function that, again, Heidegger never subscribed to it for that would be a grave misunderstanding of what the-Situation is; "conscience" calls, though Heidegger has his own special understanding of what "conscience" is. So basically Blattner's crowning application of Heidegger is structurally defunct and he never high-lites this problem. Its as if the lesbian-mother scans the scene and just knows that she is in the right, which is kind of inline with Heidegger's enterprise, though this does not excuse dismissing half of Heidegger's structure and pretending that we can get along without its most integral pieces.

However, we really shouldn't pretend that this is some arbitrary problem. Throughout the entire book Blattner takes plenty of petty stabs at Heidegger. For example he joins in the predominantly liberal jamboree of chastising Heidegger for not engaging "moral philosophy" while equiprimordially understanding why Heidegger does not do so, "Existential phenomenology is concerned only with our being, and to put it rather baldly, the virtuous and vicious, the well0behaved and the ill-, are all Dasein" (Blattner 158).

Yet directly after this quote Blattner behaves as if he seemingly forgot what he just explicated and retreats to the mutual "righteousness" or messianic "justice" of moral philosophy by aligning Heidegger with Nietzsche's take on morality, and fortunately Blattner does not engage in the never ending Foucauldianization of Nietzsche but recognizes the essence of Nietzsche mission to "re-establish the order of rank". This is short lived however since Blattner acts as if Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and their influence on Heidegger can somehow be dismissed on the grounds of what is a mutual "danger"; the reader is made to understand that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were meanies. Unsurprisingly, Blattner thinks that some facets of Heidegger's enterprise were more tainted by this wrongness more than others despite Heidegger's continual reminders in Being and Time that every aspect is to be taken "equiprimordially" i.e. equally contributive and significant. This is why themes like existential-death, anxiety, "conscience", "being-guilty", "being-towards-death" are all censored by Blattner in the latter applicative half of the book. Also, later on after this routine stand-up for "moral philosophy" Blattner accuses morality as being one of the oppressive phenomenons that may discriminate against the lesbian-mother's ownmost possibilities. Infrequencies like this around are abound, as with Blattner's treatment of Heidegger's freedom. Throughout Being and Time Heidegger explicitly states that "freedom" is a transitory presentation of one's ownmost possibilities for attestation; i.e. his freedom is not emancipation but rather an existential reintegration for "taking action"--i.e. a freedom-FOR not a freedom-FROM in the Nietzschean sense. Blattner never makes this distinction but his leftist inclined examples speak loud enough , along with what he calls a "range of freedom", which I suppose is the non-Neo-nazi sense. What we are essentially left with is another doctrine of "tolerance". Blattner thinks that Heidegger needs to be saved but the appropriation is costly.

As an antipode I refer you to an academic by the name of Gregory Schufreider, whether it be his 4948 Phenomenology course at LSU or his writings on Heidegger which are available on the web. I have also found Leo Strauss's two essays "Existentialism" and "The Problem of Socrates" to be quite interesting, both can be found for free on the web. The only reason I didn't give this "guide" one star is because Blattner apparently possesses enough integrity to halt his political mission in order to clearly and cogently define all of Heidegger's terminology. This much can be of great help to anyone.

Edit--9/7/2010. Just to incorporate the dangling comment I left.

What I was aiming at is how Blattner stridently adheres to an overt, perhaps even mutually doctrinal, mode of optimism and progressivism amidst something like "Being and Time" while flatly ignoring all the breath-taking crevices that Being and Time opens; he even makes gestures like "this is beginning to sound rather dark", as if the grit is still incomprehensible to him . It is this idea that in the "end" "everyone" still has their rights, that "everyone" still equally deserves these and that Heidegger will reinforce all of this, which becomes embarassingly naked when Blattner basically transforms "das-Man" into a psychological disorder that can be cured by having an "open-mind", which means that Heidegger then becomes a new therapeutic "world-view" or even a therapy all on its own. This can all be seen in the "pragmatic" example that Blattner blunderingly attempts to encompass Heidegger with. Despite what one would be lead to believe amidst the academic idolatry of Derrida and Foucault, the catalyst in Being and Time is really what we could call, to use a little psychologism myself, an "emotional" one; if you do not really understand pain, then you will miss the gravity of Heidegger. Being and Time is not something you just walk into and "understand" with the help of some trite political tract that happens to have a little middle-European whip on top. To hearken back to Schufreider, who himself was referring to a former mentor, one has to have spent "forty years in the desert" and that is the truth.

Ultimately, this book by Blattner, and his other which indulges in the same inquisitional treatment of MH--falling, curiosity, and distraction become "pragmatic temporality"--is a prime example of what Allan Bloom was talking about when he said our academies are singing a tune that they themselves cannot hear.

Being and Time definitely requires introductory and supplementary materials for a fruitful study. The problem here is that the reader's guide designed to provide these resources does a very poor job at selecting widely, ordering logically and applying instructively the tools it gathers. If we learn anything from a perusal of even the first few pages of Heidegger's text, from the first, our terms are of utmost importance. Blattner, however, applies throughout a sloppy cobbling together of his own unreflective language, conceptual dumming-down through reductive explication, sophmoric generalizations, and facile comparisons. One would do well to read this guide in order to feature, by contrast, the ease, clarity and transparency of reading Heidegger's text. It's not a bad ancillary or otherwise miscelaneous resource, but as a primary interprative tool, it's just plain awful. There's got to be a better way.