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Introduction to Metaphysics (Nota Bene)

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First let me set the expectation right because the title lends itself to expectations quite varied from the intent and purpose of the book. This book pertains to ontology rather than metaphysics in a wider sense. (Ontology is regarded as one of the branches or subjects of inquiry comprising metaphysics).

And this is in no way a textbook on metaphysics or an introduction to the subject of metaphysics (I picked it up when I did not know who Heidegger was and wanted a quick introduction to 'metaphysics' about which I was hazy then. But I ended up loving this book for a different reason).

This however does not discount the value of the book. The book asks and seeks to answer the question 'Why are there beings rather than nothing?' (in the older transaltion -- beings = essents). It then moves on to the questions like what is Being, what is the meaning of Being, what are the limits of Being, what are the etymological origins of Being (not the etymology of the word, but of the concept - including Greek and Latin equivalents) etc.

The book explains the sense of 'limitedness' latent in the concept of Being through etymological connections with terms like polis, for example.

In the last chapter, Heidegger dileneates Being from its four boundary conditions - thinking (as contrasted with existing), becoming (changing into another being), appearance (being as perceived by another being) and ought (abstract goal for being).

This book clarifies many essential concepts like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph by delineating them from a lot of muddle that has been written about them by many other philosophers. If there were to be an alternative title for this book,'The Concept of Being' captures it best.

This translation is a long overdue revisitation of the first of Heidegger's books to appesar in an English version. This short book is an excellent introduction to Heidegger's thought in the 30s. The 30s were his most "Nietzschean" period, and also his most controversial period, because of his support at the time for the Nazi party. The 30s also acquired something of a legendary status among Heidegger scholars because it was then that he was working on his "Contributions to Philosophy". Otto Poeggeler (privileged with access to Heidegger's manuscripts) had been saying for years that the "Beitraege" was Heidegger's most important work, which made many people naturally curious about this work. When it finally appeared (in 1989, an English translation appeared in 2000) it proved to be as daunting a text as "Being and Time". The "Introduction to Metaphysics" dates from the same time, and could well be thought of as a companion piece to the much more challenging "Contributions to Philosophy."

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" (1) Martin Heidegger, the most poetic and controversial philosopher of the 20th century, cuts straight to the heart of the matter with this very question. The heart of metaphysics is its very ability to question the extra-ordinary - a questioning that is entirely impractical, for "You can't do anything with philosophy" (13). Philosophy as questioning means being in a way that is fundamentally cut off from the technological and scientific tendency towards instrumentalization that has been so endemic in the modern world. This questioning points to the fact that it is in language that we are made and in language the we come to be; in language we come to Being.

But, what does it mean to be? This is an ancient question, but it is a question that during the modern era has been entirely lost from the realm of the philosophical. In an almost religious manner, Heidegger claims that we have quite literally "fallen" from the ancient Greeks, who were able to ask that question with all its force and come to recognize in that question a raw reality: truth is about revealing or "unfolding". This "unfolding" that truth *is* should be spoken of as light. Human-Being, then, is a coming into the light that the question of Being is.

One can easily become lost in Heidegger's dense, poetic prose. Yet, as one reads what he has to write about language and how we find ourselves *in* it, one begins to suspect that the sheer elegance of his writing is intentional: its goal is to wake us from our modern slumber and get around to asking that fundamental question again. Otherwise we risk falling into the insanity of nihilism that Nietzsche (whom Heidegger engages throughout the work) noted: seeking beings in the oblivion of Being (217).

In this question of Being, however, Heidegger wishes to inscribe the historical becoming of humanity as essential our own being. In this work, the historical becoming of a people - their Dasein or "being-there" - points briefly to what Heidegger calls the greatness of National Socialism: the meeting of the human and the technological. Heidegger's brief involvement with the Nazi party in the early 1930s, when these lectures were originally delivered, has haunted his legacy ever since. The Nazis appeared in the early 1930s to give a promise of destiny to the devastated German people and Heidegger, for a time, bought into it. For some, this taints all of Heidegger's insights about the nature of human becoming as it asks the question of Being; I do not. At the very least, Heidegger's praise for the party early on certainly points to the compelling and potentially seductive nature of the promise of historical becoming as one's being.

Heidegger is often criticized for being elliptical in his writing, but this criticism is superficial. Heidegger is as much a poet as anything else, and reading him means less reading word for word what he has written and more a simple listening for the question of Being.

Martin Heidegger is a difficult philosopher to read. His own biography, serving as at least a passive supporter of Nazi Germany, makes him somewhat suspect. His opaque and challenging writing style can easily turn one off. However, whether or not one agrees with his ideas, this work is important to confront. He raises arguments that confront many of our beliefs about the way that things are. The struggle to understand--and critique--his views is well worthwhile.

According to Heidegger, the word "phenomenon" comes from the Greek term "to show itself." A phenomenon, then, is that which shows itself, that which is manifest. An appearance is not necessarily the thing itself, since appearances are merely referential to the underlying thing. For instance, a disease is the phenomenon itself, but we normally only recognize it through its appearance, that is, its symptoms. To know things, then, we must get beyond mere appearance. To do this, we must, in part, suspend our illusions that we truly "know" the thing (or "essent," as it is referred to in "An Introduction to Metaphysics" [trans. Ralph Manheim]).

The opposite of a phenomenon is "covered-upness." This is when the essence of a phenomenon is hidden from us. This can come about in three ways: (1) it is as yet undiscovered; (2) it can be buried over or forgotten--it was once discovered but has since deteriorated, either by losing sight of the thing or by forgetting it; (3) it can be disguised (this is the most frequent and the most dangerous route). The third possibility can come about through deception or misleading.

We must beware of reifying concepts, treating them without questioning, without trying to get at their essence. Heidegger says:

"Whenever a phenomenological concept is drawn from primordial sources, there is the possibility that it may degenerate if communicated in the form of an assertion. It gets understood in an empty way and is thus passed on, losing its indigenous character, and becoming a free-floating thesis. Even in the concrete work of phenomenology itself there lurks the possibility that what has been primordially 'within our grasp' may become hardened so that we can no longer grasp it. And the difficulty of this kind of research lies in making it self-critical in a positive sense."

Again, we must not reify phenomena and lose sight of their primordial character. We must continue to question what we observe and not "take it for granted." He emphasizes in another work that we must ". . .push our questioning to the very end." He contends that, simplistically put, we should "challenge everything" or "question everything." We must not ". . .be led astray by overhasty theories, but to experience things as they are on the basis of the first thing that comes to mind."

He concludes by noting that "The true problem is what we do not know and what, insofar as we know it authentically, namely as a problem, we know only questioningly." That is, we are closest to knowing the essence of something when we recognize that that sense of knowledge is itself a problem, that is, that we cannot be sure that we really know it. If we come to think that we know something, we tend to do so theoretically and, in the process, distance ourself from the thing itself and its being.

Key points at which these thoughts challenge the dominant liberal tradition of which Americans are a part: skepticism about the power of human reason or logic to uncover what is and apprehend what should be (contra the ability of humans to divine natural law through the exercise of reason), avoidance of reifying concepts and theories (those in the liberal tradition, once more, believe that we can uncover the essence of reality and develop theories to explain what is), question those ideas that one develops and continue questioning one's understanding of what is. Finally, the subject and object are linked with one another; we cannot step back and understand objectively that which is around us, as Enlightenment thinkers believe.

At least for me, this was a tough read. But, in the end, it raises questions that are worth addressing, whether or not one has any level of agreement with Heidegger.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Heidegger's writing can be very difficult and is often torturous. Add to that Heidegger's obvious and overt German nationalism and you've got a challenging book on more than one level.

First, Heidegger is engaged in this text in a radical deconstruction of all the traditional ontological categories of Western philosophy as they have existed and been defined for the past two-thousand years, beginning with the most basic concept of all "Being". Because of this Heidegger is completely unable to rely on accepted and traditional categories of thought, and their traditional definitions, in expressing his own thought, and instead has recourse to neologisms such as "the abiding-emerging sway" which defy precise, scientific definition, relying instead on a certain suggestiveness in order to convey their meaning. This makes Heidegger's writing difficult to understand from a technical standpoint especially for those who are used to a certain scientific precision of definition in their concepts, which Heidegger's guiding thoughts definitely lack. And that is not a mere accident that can be easily rectified through a more precise definition of terms but is deeply rooted in Heidegger's philosophy and his notions of being and language.

Secondly, Heidegger's work is a challenge because, with the benefit of hindsight, we know precisely where Heidegger's celebration of the German spirit and it's supposed role in a total spiritual rejuvenation of the West, leads. It is almost impossible, therefore, to read certain passages from Heidegger where his German nationalism is most prominently on display without a definite feeling of revulsion. This makes it difficult to separate Heidegger's more general philosophical point about the spiritual decline of the West and the forgetting of the question of Being, which in my opinion is not necessarily allied to German nationalism or any other form of nationalism, from Heidegger's own nationalism, and so it is easy to dismiss them both as part of the same bag. In other words, it is easy to dismiss Heidegger's philosophical points based on his questionable political allegiances precisely because the two seem allied for Heidegger himself and because Heidegger often expresses his more general philosophical points in nationalistic dress. Heidegger presents his notion of the forgetting of Being, for instance, in the form of a battle between the spiritual integrity of the German people and the spiritlessness of American capitalism and rationalism on one hand and Soviet Marxism on the other. But in my opinion it is both possible and worthwhile to separate Heidegger's basic insights from these nationalistic tendencies though to do so means pushing past our initial revulsion to try to get to the basic point Heidegger is trying to make, which can be difficult to do. I would add, however, that Heidegger's nationalism in this book should be read in conjunction with his comments on nationalism in the Letter on Humanism where it is clear that Heidegger is not a vulgar nationalist merely interested in the assertion of the German nation. It should also be remembered that the lectures which were the basis for this book (Introduction to Metaphysics) were attended by members of the Gestapo so the positive remarks that Heidegger makes regarding national socialism should be taken with a grain of salt.

Despite its difficulties this is a really important book for anyone interested in the development of Heidegger's thought. In Being and Time Heidegger attempted to provide an existential-ontological interpretation of Dasein as a preliminary to answering the question about the meaning of Being. Through a kind of radicalization of Husserl's phenomenology Heidegger was able to uncover the historicity of Dasein. Dasein is historical which means that it exists within tradition and sedimented meanings. In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger turns to history itself in order to uncover the sedimented understanding of Being that present historical Dasein lives within. Specifically Heidegger is interested in understanding why "Being is in fact almost nothing more than a word now, and its meaning is an evanescent vapor" (pg53). The 'forgetting of Being' which is operative in this understanding is, for Heidegger, the root of nihilism. In the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger attempts to trace the historical roots of this 'forgetting of Being' and to do so he examines the word Being (das Sein, or sein, in German) in detail in its various forms (infinitive, verb, and substantive) and the translation of Greek terms into Latin and the different connotations that the Latin terms had which effected an epochal transformation in our understanding of Being.

One of the central ideas of the book is Heidegger's interpretation of the Greek understanding of Being in terms of phusis. Phusis meant, according to Heidegger, the process of beings emerging into presence, their 'standing out' (the etymological meaning of the word existence) from a ground of nothingness, or "the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance, and holding itself and persisting in appearance" (pg15). Originally truth (aletheia) and language (logos) were intimately connected with this process of emerging into presence (phusis). Aletheia is the Greek term for truth and the alpha-prefix functioned in Greek in the same way as the un-prefix in English so Heidegger translates this term as unconcealment (for more on this read Heidegger's lectures on Plato's Sophist). Aletheia was thus a movement from concealment into unconcealment and belonged to beings in themselves (rather then being a relation between propositions and beings). Logos also was a way of bringing and maintaining beings in unconcealment. This begins to change with Plato. Plato begins to interpret the Being of beings as Idea (as their look). For the Pre-Platonic philosophers the Being of a being was in its existence, its self-emergence from concealment, they were in wonder before the 'thatness' of beings (for lack of a better term). Plato turns away from the notion of phusis as emerging-abiding-sway and toward the 'what' of beings as the determination of their true Being. The being in its emergence and presence becomes a mere copy of its true being or Idea. Sensible reality is degraded into mere appearance, or seeming, while true Being is interpreted in terms of eternal archetypes. This also begins to change the nature of truth. Truth is no longer unconcealment (aletheia) but is instead correctness. Since the Ideas represent the 'true" Being of beings behind their appearances truth consists in bringing one's own understanding into correspondence with the Ideas and disregarding the deceptive appearances of sensible reality (the allegory of the cave). This transformation of truth is truly epochal for Heidegger; it is like a fate running through Western history and it is still ruling us today. One of the goals of Heidegger's analysis in this work is to draw our attention to the historical contingency of this particular understanding in the hopes that we might free ourselves from this fate.

In summary, this is a difficult book on many levels but it is an essential work for anyone interested in Heidegger's development, or anyone interested in the history of the West. Heidegger genuinely believes that the history of the West can only be understood in terms of the secret history of Being which he develops in this work and while there will be many who will disagree with his conclusions his ideas are definitely interesting and even compelling if you can make your way through his dense prose. For those who are looking for some help with this particular work I would highly suggest picking up the Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics edited by Polt and Fried.

-Brian

I am not a philosopher or a philosophy student but enjoyed reading this book because:
1. It shows cases some pretty original thinking.
2. The question "why there are beings and nothing at all " is eternal although in today's world many people think there is only the theory of evolution and other "zoological" explanations to this question.Heidegger shows how this question can be posed in way that shows "what" it means to be even if we we know "how"(i.e. evolution, natural selection etc.) we came to be.
3. The whole book is really about clarifying the question and trying to unbundle all the preconceptions about the question.Only towards the end we get a glimmer about what could be the start of an answer.
4. Heidegger is an eloquent writer and this must in large measure must be due to the translator's competence.
5.Yes, there are many reference to Greek words and poems and one does have to read many sections twice but the scope of the book is sweeping so the rewards of a second or third read are well worth it.
6.At the least you will question the familiarity of many words and their everday usage after you read the book and that should hopefully help you think more clearly and equally (if not more importantly, after reading Heidegger..)articulate yourself clearly.

Why is there something rather than nothing? That is the question Heidegger challenges us with at the beginning of this book. Those who were expecting an answer must remain unsatisfied, for the author uses that question as a starting point to show that language, as presently used, doesn't supply us with the linguistic tools we need to even formulate a precise approach to the problem. Heidegger tells us that before we can properly consider that primary question we must come to an understanding of what we mean by being. The rest of the book is the attempt to approach the elusive meaning of this term. Heidegger's arguments are surprisingly less abstract than I had expected. Evidently an intense student of language, he shows how much of the confusion about the term "being" has come about through a debasing of the originally purer, more vivid Greek roots. To Heidegger, archaic Greek language was akin to poetry. Indeed, he argues that poetry is the most direct way to draw near to the meaning of being. I was particularly impressed, even somewhat awed, by his analysis of the poem of the chorus in Sophocles' "Antigone". This poem tells us of Man, the strangest being, and pulls back the veil of familiarity through which we perceive existence. I felt intrigued as I was swept along with his insights, but must admit that, for me, it would take an intense study involving a rereading, along with help from books with titles such as "Understanding Heidegger's philosophy" or the like, to feel I was truly absorbing his meanings. Nevertheless, I feel it was worthwhile to explore this book, for having gotten at least a basic familiarization with this modern philosopher, and gaining a foundation to build on should I desire to pursue the subject further.

What a great book. I may of read about 4 to 5 Martin Heidegger books & this book flowed because it was more easy to read. Well, the first part of the book was easy, got a little lost in the "Being As Thinking" section. Heidegger's philosophy, minus the so-called "Certain Influences", helped me give up my Platonic ways of thinking. Heidegger starts off trying to ask the most basic axiom "Why are there BEINGs at all instead of Nothing" goes through a brief history of the main words, tears the words & main question apart, & puts the words & question back together again in a more "Primate", "Basic", or "Historical" understanding. Then he explains how BEING turns into BECOMING (how things change), APPEARANCE (how things influence our senses), THINKING (How & what we think about our experience), & the OUGHT (The way things "Should" or "Could" BE). Basic conclusion: Western Philosophy started out correct with the pre-Platonic philosophers asking what BEING was & then after Plato the debate became about mind over matter while losing the original meaning & questions about BEING (Reality). A Must Read!

Heidegger's 1935 lecture course on metaphysics is a seminal work in this thinker's corpus. Introduced to English readers prior to Being and Time, this course is possibly the most accessible path to Heidegger's position in the history of philosophy. Tracing his `destruction' of the history of metaphysics, Heidegger brilliantly critiques the metaphysics of `presence' and offers a retrieval of a more primordial, originary determination of the meaning of Being. In particular, Heidegger's sections on the grammar of `being' as well as the `restriction of being' are astonishing works of thinking. The later includes a mordantly brilliant examination of the epistemological distortion of all ontology, stemming from Platonism and leading to a logic that has concealed the meaning of Being for the tradition. A masterful piece of thinking.

Much to complicated for the average reader--and multiple redundant statements and aphorisms that make the book as totally boring.
Ron