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46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lucid discussion of 'being', September 27, 2005
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.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great new translation, February 12, 2001
By A Customer
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."
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29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Invitation to Being, June 24, 2006
"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.
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