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Review Summary: Remarkable Edition |
Date: 2006-11-30 |
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Details: This volume, published by HarperCollins in the sixties and edited by translator David Farrell Krell serves as the perfect compendium to the thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the most significant thinkers of philosophy in the 20th century. Heidegger's methodology is necessarily difficult, as he is trying to remove himself from the `average-everyday' language we employ; and he is trying to approach the meaning of being concretely and originally. Therefore, stop complaining about the obscurity of his style and work your way through this text, for it will remain one of the major works of European thought.
The first essay is the introductory chapter to Heidegger's opus Being and Time. It is actually rather senseless to read it without going on to read the complete text. However, for those readers who simply want a taste of Heidegger's basic philosophic project and methodology, it is summarized here. He says at the outset: "This question has today been forgotten-although our time considers itself progressive in again affirming `metaphysics.' All the same we believe that we are spared the exertion of rekindling a gigantomachia peri tes ousias [a Battle of Giants concerning Being,' [Plato, Sophist]. But the question touched upon here is hardly an arbitrary one." (41). For Heidegger, philosophy has lost touched with the question `what is the meaning of being, as such?' However, in order to resolve the question of the meaning of Being, you must examine the Being of the questioner, (Dasein), leading us to do fundamental ontology.
The second essay in the collection is titled What is Metaphysics? It is an inaugural address the delimited many of the major ideas he would later expand in Being in Time. In it, Heidegger again examines the meaning of Being, but he also discusses the unheimlichkeit (the uncanny), and Dasein's confrontation with "the nothing" (100), and with attunement and Nihilism generally. This is a particularly famous, though cryptic essay, the major ideas in it are expanded at great lengths by Heidegger in his book `Introduction to Metaphysics,' published later in 1953.
The next essay is titled On the Essence of Truth, and it is particularly difficult. Heidegger begins with: "Our Topic is the essence of truth. The question regarding the essence of truth is not concerned with whether truth is a truth of practical experience or of economic calculation, the truth of a technical consideration or of political sagacity, or, in particular, a truth of scientific research or of artistic composition, or even the truth of thoughtful reflection or cultic belief. The question of essence disregards all this and attends to the one thing that in general distinguishes every `truth' as truth (115). Heidegger will later suggest in the essay that the essence of truth is freedom, or unconcealment. Heidegger does not adhere to radical skepticism, nor does he believe in eternal truths. He is interested in the essence of this question with regard to Da-Sein's `liberation' for `ek-sistence.'
The Origin of the Work of Art is unlike any essay in the history of aesthetic philosophy or criticism, because Heidegger is not at all concerned with the beauty of art, nor with the thinking of the artist. He is interested in the capacity for art to reveal worlds. He writes: "The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground. But men and animals, plants and things, are never present and familiar as unchangeable objects, only to represent incidentally also a fitting environment for the temple, which one fine day is added to what is already there" (168). Heidegger values the art of poetry more than any other. He says, "Art happens as poetry. Poetry is founding in the triple sense of bestowing, grounding, and beginning" (202), and he valued Holderlin, Trakyl, and Rilke above all other poets. Art is an origin, and it serves to preserve the historical existence of man.
One could go on and on. This volume also contains the Letter on Humanism, Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics, the Question Concerning Technology, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, What Calls for Thinking?, the Way to Language, and the End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. They will keep you busy for quite a while. |
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Review Summary: HEIDEGGER REVIEW BY TONY SEE |
Date: 2006-04-12 |
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Details: This is a good place to start if you are interested in getting an overview of Heidegger's writings. There are some obvious disadvantages such as the fact that some parts are included while others are not, but what is inside is generally good enough as a starting point for Heidegger's other writings.
I would recommend reading the other translations though such as the Pathways, Parmenides and Language and Thought if one is already serious about Heidegger studies as these have the important writings as well and in complete form.
There are some Heideggerian writings that are especially relevant to life in Singapore and perhaps to other urban and technological cities as well and the student of philosophy may want to see how everything fits together in the works on art and technology.
Tony See
Philosopher in Residence
(Singapore) |
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Review Summary: Exploring Heidegger |
Date: 2006-03-08 |
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Details: The best introduction to Heidegger's thought is a close reading of Being and Time itself. As many of the reviewers point out, the essays in this volume are a good collection of several of Heidegger's key essays, representing his intellectual development throughout his long life. They mark the many transitions and shifts in emphasis and thought. After writing Being and Time, Heidegger spent the rest of his life explicating and developing the many treasures one finds in the pages of that magnificent work - he went both into it, expanding ideas that were only hinted at in it, and far beyond it. For those who will not be reading Being and Time in its entirety, by having the introduction to Being and Time, this volume provides the next, though distant, best thing; for it is in these few pages that Heidegger first announces how radical and revolutionary a rupture his thought is from the history of philosophy.
Just a word about the review titled 'Are you *sure* you want to do this to yourself?'. Firstly, I am not sure whether this person has actually read Heidegger in the German, but he is absolutely wrong that Heidegger is not different or no less difficult in German than he is in English - what Heidegger is doing is far more apparent in the original German. This reviewer's comments are typical Anglo-American or 'analytic' propaganda. Such comments arise out of an inability to deal with Heidegger's complex thought and an unwillingness to undergo the profound discomfort that such a thinking entails. I have indeed read the philosophers he names and, with the exception of Wittgenstein, the others, though quite important in 20th century thought, don't hold a candle to Heidegger, as Wittgenstein himself, who had thought Heidegger an incomparable philosopher, would have readily admitted. His comments are based on a long tradition, arising in the 20th century, that claimed that 'clarity' is something that is not only possible in philosophy, and language for that matter, but also desirable. Philosophy makes uncomfortable. It is meant to do so. It is the opening of new worlds and whoever has traveled can attest to the discomfort that arises from such displacement, such being out of ones home or place of dwelling. New worlds are created through language and to be forced outside `our' everyday language is to be violated. Deleuze and Lacan, both of whom he also mentions, were also incomparable philosophers who are quite difficult and who built the most profound of worlds through discomforting languages. Such journeys require a willingness to be uprooted, something which this reviewer, for whom the failure lies within these thinkers and not within himself, cannot even begin to understand.
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Review Summary: Reading Heidegger in the XXI century |
Date: 2005-07-28 |
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Details: This an excelent translation of several works by Martin Heidegger. It is a good edition. |
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Review Summary: Very illuminating read, but KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO |
Date: 2005-05-11 |
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Details: While having one of the most abstract writing styles, Heidegger's intellectual bravura is worth reading. As a student of philosophy it was one of the most eye-opening - if not life changing - statements on how to live in a technological world that is increasingly separating man from nature.
This is a good introduction to Heidegger as it contains much of his important writings. In particular, I recommend Being and Time, the Letter on Humanism, and the Question Concerning Technology (the last of which is worth the book itself in my opinion).
Heidegger is very much a philologist, a lover of words. He uses this strength to construct a philosophy revolved around the 'original' (i.e. Greek) meaning of words (which the Romans mistranslated into Latin) in order to show how we, or the individual, can come to terms with their "Being." This is why it takes time to get through what he is saying. Much of his philosophy is his own re-reading of the history of philosophy, which he contends since Plato to Nietzche has taken us away from the meaning of "Being." Admittedly, it was helpful to be taking a course on Existentialism at the time of reading this book for my instructor made it easier to discern what the argument was and what the meaning of the words like "ex-sist" (standing out), "a-letheia" (truth as uncoveredness), "Gestell" (enframing), "putting forth" and "setting upon".
While at first I didn't want to read Heidegger because of his personal, moral failings, I found that this 'philosopher of being' was worth studying. But one should keep this caveat in mind.
In all, I recommend this collection as a good introduction to Heidegger's thought. Just be patient, re-read portions again and again, and you'll be fine. |
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out of 11 Reviews
