Heidegger: An Introduction

"Heidegger is so important, and so fascinating. Once you immerse yourself in Heidegger – and you do have to immerse yourself in order to understand him at all – you realize he is writing about things that are crucial in the twentieth and twenty-first century. He writes about technology, he writes about our relationship with the physical world and the way that the human being is embedded in the planet Earth. He was one of the first to unpack some of Nietzsche’s critical thinking about the received ideas of philosophy, and to set off in a completely new direction. He also wrote about many existentialist themes that Sartre would then pick up on –- things like anxiety and how we accommodate ourselves to the realization that one day we’re going to die. This is an extraordinary theme to derive a philosophy from, and he makes it crucial to his sense of what a human being is. If you’re seriously interested in existentialism, it’s essential to tackle Heidegger, and I would say that if you are coming to him for the first time, it’s worth starting with some sort of guide. Richard’s Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction is one of the best I’ve come across. It’s a fantastically clear and concise exploration of Heidegger’s philosophy, concentrating on his first great work, Being and Time , though he also covers the later writings of Heidegger. The book is filled with great examples. Polt has a very good way of making Heidegger seem clear, which is not the first word that comes to mind if you go straight to Heidegger. “If you’re seriously interested in existentialism, it’s essential to tackle Heidegger.” Then, once you’ve read an overview and feel equipped and ready for it, it’s really worth plunging into either Being and Time itself, Heidegger’s greatest and richest work, or to a compilation. There’s one called Basic Writings which has bits from Being and Time , and also goes onto some of his later essays, such as “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology” and“Building Dwelling Thinking,” which is a fascinating one about architecture and about how we find ourselves in the landscape. Heidegger is a strange figure in the history of existentialism because, as you say, he’s incredibly troubling. Books have been written about whether we should or shouldn’t distinguish his politics from his philosophy. I don’t think we can. I think it would be crazy to say we can separate out two things that are so close to each other. But that is not to say that Heidegger is not worth reading. In fact it’s even more important to tackle why it is that some of the most powerful ideas of twentieth-century Continental philosophy should be so closely intertwined with what was definitely the twentieth’s century’s worst idea. So yes. It’s well worth tackling Heidegger. One of the problems with Heidegger is that if you read him in English translation, it seems more formidable than it is, because English doesn’t lend itself to the coining of multi-faceted terms in the same way that German does. In English you end up with a lot of hyphenated phrases.“Being-in-the-World” is one of the relatively simple ones, it’s just got three hyphens in it. Having said that, yes, he does coin a lot of terms, and in reading Heidegger you have to grapple with them. You can’t separate the thought from the language because he uses language very carefully, very precisely, to defamiliarize the way we normally approach philosophy. In his view, the language — of human subjectivity, of human consciousness — embodies a tradition in philosophy since Plato that presupposes a separation from the world, from the Being that we find ourselves in. So, when he talks about human beings, he uses the phrase “Dasein” which literally means “Being there” in German. It seems a bizarre thing to do. Why deliberately frustrate our desire to talk about human beings or human consciousness? He does it precisely to break those habits, to break the connection that language seems to try to make, almost by itself, between human being and some sort of floating consciousness separated from the world. He wants to put the emphasis on Being, on Da sein . So the language almost is the philosophy, to understand the language is to understand Heidegger’s philosophy to a large extent. That’s one reason for starting with a lucid and useful introduction, such as this one by Richard Polt, because it gives you the vocabulary, it gives you a way into it. Yes, it’s interesting and it is inconsistent, because most of Heidegger’s terms are translated. “Being-in-the-World” is not “InderWelt sein” I’m never quite sure. I keep changing my mind. I started out as a Heideggerian many years ago when I was studying philosophy at university. I started a PhD on Heidegger and I was enthralled by him at the time. It was almost like a cult, because when you’re immersed in Heidegger’s language and Heidegger’s thought and Heidegger’s way of defamiliarizing and almost re-inventing the world from a new perspective, you do feel passionate about it, and hugely engaged with it. What’s happening now as I read Heidegger’s writing again several decades on, is that I still love it, I still feel very drawn to it, but I have a very different critical perspective on it, even an ironic or sceptical one. I can almost do those two things at the same time and I’m finding it a much more fascinating experience, really, than the first time around. I do think Heidegger is crucial to understand and to read and to throw yourself into, but if I have a favourite, it’s probably Merleau-Ponty. He takes many of the starting points of Heidegger and particularly of Edmund Husserl — the phenomenologist, who was Heidegger’s teacher, and who provided existentialism with its initial methodology: describing experience rather than theorizing about it. There are all kinds of connections and also some big differences — we’re talking about a very different era, a very different set of philosophical traditions. But a philosophical style which is common to both Montaigne and the existentialists is to approach life as human beings live it, and as individual human beings live it. Montaigne wrote about the human condition, not in the abstract, but through his own experiences of life, his own ways of doing things, and in different phases of his life, when he was young, when he was getting older. He would reflect on his constantly changing self, and his constantly changing experience of life. The existentialists approach philosophy in the same way, it’s a specific thing. We each have our own life, and it’s concrete. If you’re going to philosophize about life, you’ve got to philosophize about concrete life. That’s one thing they share that I find extremely attractive and beguiling. A lot of the existentialists also wrote about the body, about the fact we’re not pure mind, we have bodies, we are our bodies, in fact. Merleau-Ponty wrote about human being almost entirely as an embodied phenomenon that’s interconnected with the world and with other people. He actually wrote a wonderful essay about Montaigne, in which he recasts Montaigne perhaps not as an existentialist, but as the first phenomenologist, that is the first person to write in detail about the world as it presented itself to him and to his individual perspective. Merleau-Ponty also writes of Montaigne as someone who thinks by constantly asking questions. The questions may not have an answer, but the questioning in itself is the philosophy. This is something that Heidegger made central to Being and Time and to his later work as well: that to think is to question. Most of us live in what Heidegger calls the “forgetfulness of being,” we forget to ask any questions about the existence we find ourselves thrown into. But to think is to be always wondering. For Sartre too, to think is to try to make sense of our lives, and perhaps to do things a little better, given that we are thrown into the world and have to choose what we make of it."