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How to Read Heidegger (How to Read)

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Written with genuine insight and astounding clarity, Wrathall's How to Read Heidegger is a perfect choice for anyone looking for a short introduction to Heidegger's thought. Proceeding chronologically from Heidegger's early to his later work, each of the book's ten chapters begins with a longish excerpt in Heidegger's own words, which Wrathall then clearly explains and contextualizes philosophically. The result is indeed a "master class" in close reading (as Critchley, the series editor, suggests). If this book is any indication, this series seems to me to be a wonderful, hermeneutic application of Marx's famous dictum: "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime." Wrathall won't just give you a reading of Heidegger, he'll help you learn How to Read Heidegger for yourself. As a result, Wrathall's book will be a succinct and eminently readable primer for those new to Heidegger and a thought-provoking refresher course for more experienced Heideggerians.

An interesting aspect to this book is that every chapter starts out with about a page of Heidegger's actual writing. I would read this dense prose before and after reading Mr. Wrathall's discussion of the chapter topic. After reading the author's interpretation I would go back and read Heidegger's words again, and find that I had a better understanding of the original.

I would assume that the main reason one writes a review of a book like this is not to critique the philosophy that it contains, but to inform the prospective reader as to the comprehensibility of the presentation of that philosophy. Mr. Wrathall performs admirably in this regard. As a relative philosophical novice I found that this book turned night into day.

The author covers the topic of Heidegger's views of our being in the world; how our place in the world creates our possibilities and our constraints. It discusses how our culture forms us and can limit us. Do we become authentic or inauthentic beings in terms of how much we conform to culture. Heidegger's views on technology are presented. He feels that we should be part of the earth, and not conform the earth to our every need. We should not view that earth as something that merely provides us with resources.

There is also a chapter on Heidegger's views of art and truth. I found that I had a harder time relating to his views on aesthetics, than I did with the rest of his philosophy.

This is an excellent book for those with limited backgrounds in philosophy and/or Heidegger's works. It might also be worthwhile to those who have encountered Heidegger in the past, and need a littler refresher to his works.

One final comment: The author is evidently fluent in German. He frequently disagrees with some of the German to English translations, and provides his ideas of what the German words really mean in English. I found this to be an added bonus

Quite simply this is by far the best introduction to Heidegger's thought I have come across. Dreyfus' books and lectures are highly insightful, Blattner's book on Being and Time is also a superlative work for those working through the text. But Wrathall will serve as a far superior introduction. His prose is friendly, lucid, and beautifully constructed, the book's structure is logical, and he presents Heidegger's thought not by translating it, but by letting it be understood in a straightforward manner.

If you are an academic venturing into Heidegger, begin here. If you are simply interested in his thought, you will be richly rewarded by countless insights. This is what academic writing SHOULD be.

To the chagrin of some and to the delight of others, Heidegger's influence seems to have bloomed in the past decade. No longer a mere hopelessly whimsical obscurantist, his once berated name even pops up in Analytic philosophy courses. None of this has made Heidegger's text easier to understand, of course. But anyone wanting to penetrate his spiny thicket of obscure and recursive prose in English can now find much more help. Guides for "beginners" have bred like rabbits recently. Additional volumes seem to fall from the sky every few months. Nonetheless, many of these "introductions" would probably not serve absolute beginners (i.e., those lacking backgrounds in philosophy) very efficiently. Heidegger's work remains notoriously difficult to distill into facile chunks, particularly in isolation from the long philosophical tradition his work addresses. Enter Mark Wrathall's "How To Read Heidegger." This short book seems to pinpoint those readers possessing virulent curiosity about Heidegger's ideas but not possessing extensive philosophical backgrounds. Of course this involves a tradeoff in overall depth and breadth, but the absolute newcomer will at least puncture that nagging question "what's all this fuss about Heidegger?"

Though this 118-page book only skims the surface of Heidegger's main ideas, it nonetheless covers a lot of ground. Both "early" and "late" Heidegger appear. First, a short introduction provides a defense against charges of illogicism (or even alogicism) while setting the overall context. It's important to understand that Heidegger did challenge the primacy of science (at least ontologically) but he never thought that science was misguided or should "go away." This challenge resonates throughout the book and Wrathall uses it as a framework for connecting many of the ideas discussed.

The first six chapters focus on Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus "Being and Time." Each chapter begins with a passage from that hulking work. Including these passages presents both opportunities and dangers. On the plus side, readers can get a clear sense of what reading Heidegger entails. On the downside, this very exposure may send them dashing in a frenzied panic away from Heidegger never to return. Panicked runners should know that Wrathall's follow-up text exhibits ease and clarity in contrast to those imposing hedgerows of turgid prose. And though this book does not illuminate Heidegger's actual words very much, it does provide a solid foundation upon which to build further understanding. As such, newcomers should not expect to leap into "Being and Time" on the basis of this book alone. Still, many of the main ideas in that text come to life here: "Dasein," "World," "mood," the "they" (which Wrathall translates as 'the "One"'), and "authenticity." Wrathall does tie Heidegger to "existentialism" a little too tightly, however (a penchant many Analytic commentators seem to have), but in this case it doesn't detract much from the discussion. Readers won't find extensive coverage of other main ideas such as phenomenology, time, "care," "falling," and others. These ideas are best left to thicker "introductory" books.

The final four chapters cover what's known as "the later Heidegger" (basically, everything following "Being and Time"). This phase was the bane of early twentieth-century Analytic philosophers and led to Heidegger's outright dismissal in Analytic circles. Many still consider this late phase too abstruse for use. Here Wrathall summarizes some main ideas contained in some of Heidegger's best know late essays, such as "On the Origin of the Work of Art" (in which "earth" is added to "world" and the notion of "truth" expands to "unconcealment"), "On the Way to Language" (language as a "showing saying"), "The Question Concerning Technology" (the making of everything into resources, convenient and efficient), and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (which introduces the "fourfold"). Heidegger found modern life wrought with dangers, which was arguably implicit in "Being and Time's" notion of "inauthenticity," but becomes fervently explicit in his late essays. Wrathall also discusses Heidegger's nefarious Nazism and its potential implications. This aspect also led to easy dismissal, particularly in the twentieth century.

"How to Read Heidegger" will not teach anyone how to read Heidegger, but it will provide a nearly ideal starting point for getting there. Those with little or no background will here find a springboard to more advanced work. The curious will whet their appetite without expending huge amounts of time (a notion that the late Heidegger may have cringed at). In short, "How to Read Heidegger" stands as one of the best starting places for infiltrating the ideas of this controversial philosopher whose influence continues to spread. In addition, those looking for elucidation of "the late Heidegger" will also find some guidance. We all start somewhere. Start here.

As a graduate student of psychology I found this book was quite useful as well as profoundly eloquent. Long finished with the class I often find myself coming back to read passages. This book speaks to me and does an amazing job of interpreting Heidegger's concepts. I especially find pgs. 60-70 moving as Wrathall deciphers how Heidegger and the existentialists recognize how death and one's anxiety over as an individualizing force in a one's life.
The best part is that Wrathall makes Heidegger's profound philosophy accessible to the lay reader.

This is a great book for those unfamiliar to Heidegger's thought. It goes through the major ideas, spending the most time on Being and Time, giving wonderfully chosen excerpts to begin each chapter, then expounding on those quotations and elucidating them for the reader. It also works as a great companion to someone reading Being and Time. Wrathall does a great job of clarifying some of the essentially Heideggerian concepts of phenomenology. If you are looking for a primer, a companion, or a refresher, I would definitely recommend this book. It's very enjoyable, erudite, and more than worth the small price tag. Additionally, I recommend Basic Writings.

This is the most lucid vade mecum to Heidegger I have found both for personal use and to recommend to students.

I have read other books in the "How to Read..." series and have found that they are quite uneven. Some have been really helpful and others have missed the mark. I would put this one somewhere between those two extremes. If you know absolutely nothing about Heidegger, you will profit from Wrathall's clear and simple exposition of the major concepts and terminology of this most influential thinker. Wrathall hits on many of the key elements of Heidegger's philosophy, concentrating, as one would expect, on Being and Time. Heidegger's writings are numerous, dense, and sprawling. For that reason, it is strange to find that such a short introduction to such a diverse thinker is often extremely repetitive. Wrathall takes every opportunity to reiterate the challenge Heidegger makes to scientific, objective, or empirical thought. It is clear the first time he makes the point and so the reiterations seem unnecessary. Wrathall could have limited his repetitions and covered much more territory. Granting all of the caveats that must go along with an "introduction," Wrathall's reading of Heidegger often feels reductive and overly simplistic. He really limits the existential aspects of Heidegger's thought, almost to the point of turning him, as does Wrathall's teacher, Hubert Dreyfus, into a pseudo-pragmatist. I recommend this book as a decent starting point, but I would caution the reader to exercise a little healthy suspicion toward Wrathall's facile interpretations. After reading ten chapters, I felt as though I had learned the same lesson ten times.

"How to Read Heidegger" unpacks and explains ten key extracts from books and essays by Heidegger (in particular, from "Being and Time"). Wrathall's exegesis is sensitive and lucid. He shows that Heidegger has important things to say. He almost inspires the reader to turn directly to Heidegger's works themselves for further illumination. I say "almost" because the impulse to read Heidegger disappears as soon as one reads (and re-reads...and re-re-reads) the passages selected by Wrathall. They are constipated, Teutonic, jargon-laden, and laughably contorted. Even after Wrathall explains what Heidegger was struggling to say (at least in translation), the texts seem like gibberish.

It's hard to imagine an ordinary reader slogging through anything by Heidegger unless it were material assigned for a class and on which a grade depended. Maybe a better name for Wrathall's book would be: "Don't Read Heidegger." Some enterprising philosopher would do the world a favor if, instead of writing the 101st commentary on "Being and Time," he wrote a readable paraphrase of the book, like one of those "modern" paraphrases of the King James Bible. There would be no sacrifice of eloquence for clarity, because nothing Heidegger wrote was eloquent.

I read this book for a graduate seminar on philosophy. Mark Wrathall'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.