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The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Revised Edition (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

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This book is a must read for those that choose to read Being and Time. The book itself is based, like so many of Heidegger's books, off of a lecture course he gave at the University of Marburg in the summer of 1927. This is important because Being and Time was ready for publication in 1927. If we put Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics alongside The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and Being and Time, we have the predominant whole of early Heideggerian thinking.

As for the book itself (for now on referred to as BP), the book is incomplete--just like Being and Time. Heidegger undertakes Three Parts each with Four chapters (see page 24). But BP only deals with all of Part One and only chapter 1 of Part Two. Heidegger gets no farther than the Problem of Ontological Difference (entities vs. the Being of entities) and the lecture course ends. But the book is extraordinarly helpful because of what it does address. Part One is elaborate and interesting because it deals with other philosophers and their ideas. Heidegger pays particular attention to Kant, Aristotle, Descartes and explains how their ideas have been inherited into the contemporary philosophic era. What I found most interesting was the deconstruction of Medieval and Modern ontology. Heidegger thus gives a broad historical interpretation of the history of philosophy and explains the presuppositions of each period.

Obviously this book is not for philosophical neophytes. The book should only be undertaken by those with some background in 20th century philosophy and knowledge of basic Heideggerian thought. The book's appeal should thus be limited to few individuals, and certainly only those with philosophic interest.

The book borrows much of the terminology from Being and Time with some notable exceptions. Authenticity and inauthenticity have pracitically been dropped. The term "horizon" becomes notably more important and the term "Temporality" is of great importance to understanding what is being disclosed from the text. Ontological difference is explicitly defined, though it was implicitly defined in Being and Time. Pay particular attention to Part Two of the work, for it questions through many of the underlying questions I had after completing Being and Time. If you are disappointed how the book abruptly ends, it is to be expected. But for those 285 people on Earth interested in Heidegger this book is indispensable. But read Being and Time first!

Philosophy Student,
Drake University

This is an eminently readable translation of Heidegger--a chore that is indeed quite difficult. Moreover, the material Heidegger treats here finds a very concise, cohesive presentation, so it is all in all a very approachable text. As a reviewer noted below, this text is quite helpful in understanding _Being and Time_, or just generally for its own value in exposing Heidegger's thought around this time. Highly recommeded for someone serious about approaching texts by Heidegger.

I read this book for a graduate seminar on philosophy. In one of the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time," he 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.

This book will be impenetrable without prior knowledge of Heidegger and especially Being and Time. The reason for this is that the 'basic problems' explicitly deals with with the "temporal" facet of Heidegger's quest to carve out a path for fundamental-ontology in 'Being and Time'. Now, all of the teachings of Martin Heidegger are temporally based, to put it that way, but the manner in which temporality is described in 'Being and Time' is done with a nuance and scientific vigor that morphes after the 1920's and this is what is often mistakenly called 'The Turn'. What this does is explicitly presupposed the reader with the vast probject of "Being and Time". In this book, the insights of those investigations are explicitly applied to particular stages in the history of ontology, culminating in what is nothing less than a vivisection of Kant.

This book is foremost about the 'ontological difference'. As translated, the 'ontological difference' does indeed consist of entities and their being. However, I think that this English translation by Hofstadter, one that is perhaps initiated by Macquarrie & Robinson [I'm not sure], slightly undermines Heidegger's teachings. This change of being into "Being" obscures Heidegger's investigations because being is not a being. Of course, one could argue that "being" is already an objectification, which is why the word nearly disappears in the late-Heidegger.

There is also the problem of substituting "entities" for "beings". It is true that 'entity' is more common in English; we wouldn't hesitate calling a pen or a social-program an entity, but would we call it a being? We should. The problem is that in English "entity" is very ontical and thus removed, in a sense, from its propriety, the being's being. "Entity" compromises Heidegger's initiative to reveal how the ontical is "always already" existentially in the ontological. By substituting 'beings' for 'entities', so as to arrive at 'the being of a being', we retain the essential continuity of language by directing the being back to its origin.

The frequency in which the term "horizon" appears in this text is only consequential to the elucidation of "Temporality" [estatical-enpresenting]. I think the crucial reason as to why "horizon" becomes increasingly important is because Heidegger's temporal enterprise is, at bottom, an interpretation of "care". Here we can again see why "Being and Time" is so important for this text, since "care" is an eminent facet of "Being and Time". In this case it would perhaps be circumspect to take Heidegger's "Temporality" [estatical-enpresenting] as an attempt to institute "care" itself as a limit-situation, with the "horizons" serving as the literal schematic boundaries which are then maintained by the temporal ecstasies, though this is only a preoccupation of mine. One could perhaps further inquire into how these schema [horizions-praesens] are made manifest, and thus constituted. To impart to you another one of my worthless positions, I was personally heeded from any such inquiry because throughout all the teachings of Heidegger that I've encountered, but especially here, I could hear Nietzsche's cry "back to the body".

EDIT 4/30/2011

I've tried to correct the confusing, anomalous vocabulary and syntax of the initial review without deleting it outright. I'll probably get around to rewriting it so as to totally remove the layer of sophmoric pretension.

In reference to Nietzsche's call, it seems that I heard Heidegger correctly. However, for those who are unsuspecting "body" must be ambiguous. Here is a statement by Heidegger from the third volume of the Nietzsche courses which clears everything up, in case you were confused. This is from page 218 of the third volume (paperback), the second book which is titled as 'The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, Nihilism":

"However, the nihilistic [Nietzsche's] negation of reason does not exclude thought (ratio); rather, it relegates thought to the service of animality (animalitas). Yet animality too is likewise already inverted. It no longer passes for mere sensuality and what is base in man. Animality is the body bodying forth, that is replete with its own overwhelming urges. The name body identifies the distinctive unity in the constructs of domination in all drives, urges, and passions that will life itself. Because animality lives only by bodying, it is as will to power".

P.S. I'd like to offer another correction. Since I had mentioned Derrida [i.e., 'Post-Modernism'] in this review I'll just go ahead and say what needs to be said since I merely hinted at it earlier; don't read Derrida at all. He is nothing more than a Leftist hijacking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which means a direct attack upon Nietzsche and Heidegger. As this he is a monument to mendacity, as all of today's Academia is, and has been for some time.

Mostly, philosophy is clean as a whistle, and we rarely understand it well enough to bow to the obviously superior form of intellect which, lecturing in 1927, strove to convince those who would like to consider themselves at the cutting edge of knowledge that:

"We have here once again the peculiar circumstance that the unveiling appropriation of the extant in its being-such is precisely not a subjectivizing but just the reverse, an appropriating of the uncovered determinations to the extant entity as it is itself." (p. 219).

If you read the small print on the cover of THE BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY (1982, published in German as Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie in 1975) by Martin Heidegger, you will see that this book includes "Translation, Introduction, and Lexicon by Albert Hofstadter." The Lexicon is quite an accomplishment: pages 339 to 396 contain a wealth of information about the pages on which particular words ended up in this translation of lectures by Heidegger on philosophical problems. If you read the book first, then come to the first entry on page 340, "already, always already, antecedent, before, beforehand, earlier, in advance, precedent, prior--expressions used with great frequency: . . ." you know that dozens of pages can be cited for "some characteristic instances: . . . " Longer entries provide more complete indexing for being, being-in-the-world, beings, Da, Dasein, exist, extant, horizon, interpretation, "is" (See copula), Kant, now, nows (nun), ontological, ontology, philosophy, problem, problems, problems, specific, projection, project, self, structure, subject, Temporal, Temporality, temporal, temporality (zeitlich . . .), temporalize (zeitigen), theses, thing, thingness, thinghood, thinking, time, transcend, truth, understand, understanding of being, unveil, and world.

Frankly, I am glad that I have previously attempted to read lectures and the Heraclitus seminars which used the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc.) for Greek words, so that I was warned that translation was necessary, and I learned enough Greek words to recognize that ancient language even when it is printed in transliterated form, with no indication that a foreign language is being used, as frequently occurs in this book.

"In a corresponding passage Aristotle says that this `is' means a synthesis and is accordingly en sumploke dianoias kai pathos en taute, it is the coupling that the intellect produces as combining intellect, and this `is' means something that does not occur among things; it means a being, but a being that is, as it were, a state of thought." (p. 182).

People with absolutely no knowledge of Greek might try reading the Lexicon entry for "Greek expressions" (pp. 358-359) before reading pages 73, 86, 115, etc. to remind themselves that when they read "to on" on page 53, they were reading Greek, as "to ti en einai" on page 85 is a bit more obviously not in English, as Aristotle was not. How helpful is this? Consider the final entry in Greek expressions: zoe, 121. Looking it up, I find in the final paragraph of section 12:

"First, however, one problem makes its claim on our attention: besides the extant (at-hand extantness) there are beings in the sense of the Dasein, who exists. But this being which we ourselves are--was this not always already known, in philosophy and even in pre-philosophical knowledge? Can one make such a fuss about stressing expressly the fact that besides the extant at-hand there is also this being that we ourselves are? After all, every Dasein, insofar as it is, always already knows about itself and knows that it differs from other beings. We ourselves said that for all its being oriented primarily to the extant at-hand, ancient ontology nevertheless is familiar with psuche, nous, logos, zoe, bios, soul, reason, life in the broadest sense. Of course. But it should be borne in mind that the ontical, factual familiarity of a being does not after all guarantee a suitable interpretation of its being." (pp. 120-121).

The actual lectures only consist of 22 sections, with "The Being of the Copula" in Chapter Four (pp. 177-224) primarily considered in sections 16 and 17, though the outline of the subject at the end of Heidegger's Introduction, section 6, suggested that this would be at the end of Part One, Chapter Four. Section 18 on the existential mode of being of truth has also been included at the end of Chapter Four, where it seems to follow quite naturally. Though it is only followed by Part Two, Chapter One, anyone who wishes to imagine more may adopt the idea stated by Heidegger on page 225 that Part Two would also have four chapters, in which we could encounter the basic problems again ending with "fourthly, the problem of the truth-character of being."

There isn't anything about pandering in the Lexicon, but the 22 listings for "copula" might be close, considering the "See `is' " cross-reference and the amount of political scandal that has recently been generated by President Clinton when he was trying to think non-copulatively in the way he defined "is." The 1908 Oxford translation of Aristotle included in note 4 on page 181 illustrates the kind of compartmentalization that most people exhibited in thinking about the impeachment proceedings:

"For neither are `to be' and `not to be' and the participle `being' significant of any fact, unless something is added; for they do not themselves indicate anything, but imply a copulation, of which we cannot form a conception apart from the things coupled."

I have studies about relationship between Immunology and Psychopathology including Heidegger. His philosophy is very similar to my fundamental philosophy. He is the great person who teached me the important medical philosophy.