Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780060638450
ISBN number: 0060638451
Label: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 397
Printing Date: April 04, 1991
Publishing house: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Sale Popularity Level: 870983
Studio: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
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Product Description:
Heidegger's most popular collection of essential writings, now revised and expanded -- includes the 10 key essays plus the introduction to Being and Time.
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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 very 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 very 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, very 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, very 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 very 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. ... Read More
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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 very 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 yesterday 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 subsequent 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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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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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 very 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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This an excelent translation of several works by Martin Heidegger. It is a good edition.
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