Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86391 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 487 pages

Amazon.com
Martin Heidegger paved the road trod on by the existentialists with the 1927 publication of Being and Time. His encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy from ancient to modern times led him to rethink the most basic concepts underlying our thinking about ourselves. Emphasizing the "sense of being" (dasein) over other interpretations of conscious existence, he argued that specific and concrete ideas form the bases of our perceptions, and that thinking about abstractions leads to confusion at best. Thus, for example, "time" is only meaningful as it is experienced: the time it takes to drive to work, eat lunch, or read a book is real to us; the concept of "time" is not.

Unfortunately, his writing is difficult to follow, even for the dedicated student. Heidegger is best read in German: his neologisms and other wordplay strain the talents of even the best translators. Still, his thoughts about authentic being and his turning the philosophical ground inspired many of the greatest thinkers of the mid 20th century, from Sartre to Derrida. Unfortunately, political and other considerations forced Heidegger to leave Being and Time unfinished; we can only wonder what might have been otherwise. --Rob Lightner

From Library Journal
One of the landmarks of 20th-century philosophy, Heidegger's 1927 treatise is thought to have been the inspiration for such subjects as psychoanalysis, existentialism, ethics, hermeneutics, and more. This new translation by one of Heidegger's students offers the text in a more precise and understandable English than earlier editions.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

An Improvement But Not Perfect
I read the previous translation of Sein und Zeit in its totality, and am slightly more than halfway through the volume reviewed here. Overall, the text does seem a bit more accessible, but there are several places where there is a word wrong or missing. In a text such as this one--difficult to read and absorb even under optimal conditions--this is a considerable oversight.

This is one of those rare books that can be picked up and read a page at a time, then put down and picked up again later; it is well to let Heidegger's thought "run in the background," seeping through the interstices of everyday assumptions.

Unfortunately, Very Important
There is no point in trying to say whether Being and Time is "interesting" or "good," because anyone looking at this review already knows that this is not a breezy pleasure-read for the poolside. Heidegger's magnum opus is one of the landmark achievements in 20th century philosophy, and it is required reading for anyone interested in modern thought.
Essentially, the book is a dense explication of ontological priority of Being, or Dasein. Heidegger breaks with every sort of continental philosophical tradition in his work, for rather than trying to make the next step in ethical or metaphysical thought, he attempts an examination of the bare fact of being, in and of itself. In fact, he insists that he has nothing to do with the traditions of ethics or humanism (but without being a nihilist or an anti-humanist). I believe a good place to start with his work is a little essay by Derrida called The Ends of Man, in his Margins of Philosophy.
It has been claimed, quite vociferously and in many different quarters, that Heidegger's affiliation with Nazism precludes his being an important philosopher. This is like saying that relativity theory can be dismissed because Einstein didn't always treat his wife kindly. While there must of course be a connection between thoughts and deeds, this does not mean that a particularly brilliant thinker is always aware of the faults of his personal existence. If you are worried that an explication of the ontology of Dasein might lead you to promulgate the virtues of concentration camps, then perhaps this book is not for you. But if you have that concern, you probably wouldn't be considering purchasing one of the densest volumes of modern philosophy.

Catching your hand with your hand
In "Being and Time," Heidegger tackles the biggest and seemingly unanswerable question of them all: Why is there something rather than nothing?

In the introductory chapter, he narrows the focus of this ancient query: What significance does Being have for Dasein (human being), the asker of the question? He rejects analysis of the phenomena found "within" consciousness (as Heidegger's mentor Edmund Husserl prescribed) in favor of investigating the structure of human existence--how we exist. Heidegger claims that we exist as "thrown projections," that is, "thrown" into already-existent and distinctly historical nations, cultures, families; and always "project" a concrete future against a background of possibilities.

In Chapter three, he examines of the primary modes of "being-in-the-world." We are entangled in a world which has two possibilities: the "ready-at-hand" and the "present-to-hand".

The former state involves our mode of "taking-care-of-things" when we are in the flow of normal everyday activities; the "thingness" of beings is covered up, because we are absorbed in what we are doing.

The latter state is disclosed when a disruption in the flow occurs: we notice the thingness of things in the world; in this state, the background significance of our activities (the projection) recedes.

His analysis reveals that the second, "derivative" form of "existing-as" has lead to both philosophical problems and the scientific outlook, and in the course of his "deconstruction" Heidegger undermines the many readymade answers Western philosophy/science has used to essentialize reality. Fundamentally, Dasein is "always already ahead of itself," and this existential state cannot be encompassed by discourse, or symbolized in any way. Hence Heidegger's almost mystical idea of "silence" in the face of this state, which leads to the "call of conscience" which can bring a person to a state of "authentic being-towards-death" (my professor who taught "Being and Time" spent ten years trying to tease out a substantive doctrine to Heidegger's concept of authenticity. But there is none, and Heidegger admits it; to do so would contradict his idea of authenticity, for each person, always already thrown, must LIVE resolutely as the possibilities of life whittle away).

Part two of "Being and Time" was unfinished. There are several strains of mysticism throughout this work (Heidegger was trained as a theologian) particularly with regard to anxiety (angst) revealing the possibility of nothingness as our ground, a la Meister Eckhart.
"Being and Time" is a tough book to read, no doubt about it. Heidegger coined many torturously hyphenated phrases to express his concepts, and many questions remain unanswered, especially with regard to Part 2 on Temporality for which I've docked it one star (many of these threads are picked up and refashioned in Hubert Dreyfus's book "Being-in-the-World", an excellent intro to BT).

But with effort this is one of the most challenging philosophical inquiries ever written.