Being and Time

 

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Did I learn?" This is the only possible question I can ask about my reading experience with Martin Heidegger's notoriously difficult tome Being and Time. I would be lying if I said I clearly understood more than 25% of this work. Warning: unless you are a trained philosopher or a genius autodidact, you will find within these pages a long stretch of imposter syndrome waiting for you. I cannot rightfully or accurately assess whether I "got" this book. Some of it, sure, but I don't know enough here to assess what I really, really know about Heidegger's philosophy.

But did I learn? Let's find out. Below, I've cut and pasted the notes I've taken along the way. Immediately following each self-quotation, I will assess whether, at the end of it all, I learned anything in relation to these initial impressions. Let's go:

Well, the foreword and translator's notes successfully put me to sleep. Hoping that the actual text is a little more engaging.

This did get better. As I crawled along and picked up an occasional idea here and there, along with bolstering my knowledge by watching very specific youtube videos on particularly difficult passages, I found myself more and more engaged because I understood more of the previous groundwork as I went along.

Heideggering is hard work. I'm glad I know some German or the footnotes here would be mostly nonsensical. Or at least misleading.

Yes, Heideggering is hard work. That did not change. Knowing German helped quite a bit, but sometimes my knowledge of German actually got in the way because of the way that Heidegger uses the German language. Some of his wordplay is incredibly subtle and I suspect that even native speakers with a high level of academic training need to use the footnotes as a crutch to help understand the precise way in which he uses specific words with specific nuances. The footnotes, along with having German "at hand," so to speak, were extremely helpful.

My brain hurts.

This was true throughout.

That Philosophy 101 course I had 27 years ago isn't helping me much here, for some reason. I want a refund on that portion of my tuition!

It actually came in handy later, when Hegel and Aquinas came up I had a comparative framework to diff off of Heideger's ideas, which gave me an unexpected and needed context. But I still want that refund!

I cheated and watched a youtube video or five to get some grounding. Glad I did that.

Essentially, Heidegger is rewriting Philosophy 101 as it relates to ontology.

I'm still glad I "cheated". That helped things immensely. And I STILL want that refund!

Hmm. About 10% of the way through the book and I understand about 25% of what I've read.

This proportion of understanding proved true from the beginning to the end. I understood things well about a quarter of the time. Truth be told, I *somewhat* understood other things maybe another 15-20% of the time. Not bad for an imposter.

Page 65 . . . and I'm just at the beginning of Part 1?

Yes, I was. But that preamble was necessary not to set the stage, but to strip the stage down to it's loose wooden planks and rebuild philosophy. Heidegger was a philosophical marine drill sergeant. He destroys you, then builds you up again.

We're going on a cruise in a couple of weeks. I strongly suspect this will NOT be a book I take with me. Sorry, Heide.

Well, that cruise didn't happen. My wife got a blood clot the week before we were supposed to leave, and with here then-recent cancer scare, we couldn't take a chance. Good thing, too, as we would have likely ended up in a hospital somewhere in Anchorage. We still plan on taking the cruise, but it's probably going to be a year or two. 2022 was pretty brutal.

"Linguistic gymnastics" is the phrase that comes to mind when trying to describe what my brain is doing now. And I've fallen off the balance beams more than once here.

See my comments about German above. Lots of linguistic gymnastics in this work.

I'm glad I don't *have* to read this. It's one thing to discipline myself to read something inscrutable; it's quite another to have it assigned to you.

In the end, I'm glad I read it. But I could easily see a huge number of philosophy majors going to the counselor's office to change their majors after this. Easily.

Every two pages I spend on Heidegger is a hard-won battle. Most of the time, I lose, but I'll hold onto my feeble victories and improve upon them. Slow and steady wins the race.

It wasn't *always* torture, just most of the time. Slow and steady did win the race, incidentally. Or at least I finished the marathon.

This text can feel so mechanical at times that one forgets it is about human beings. Then, occasionally, one slips past the strictness of the language and realizes that not only is Heidegger not philosophizing about an "ideal" human being, but that he is sympathetic to humans in their weaknesses, even when they don't reach their full potential.

This was a surprising revelation that became more and more clear the more I read. Heidegger's primary concern was the inner life of an individual human being, replete with its faults and foibles.

Any review I do for this book can only scratch the surface.

c.f., this pithy review.

Back to the philosophical salt mines . . .

Looking back on this phrase, it was definitely ill-advised and I didn't even think about the implications at that point, given Heidegger's overly-problematic political leanings. It was not intentional, but I suppose it might have been subconscious. My apologies for the "bad optics". I suppose I could redact this note altogether, but that wouldn't be intellectually honest.

I'm not sure if Being and Time is considered "analytical philosophy," or if I'm even using the right term, but this sort of Definitional work seems like definition for the sake of definition. It's academically interesting, but emotionally flat and intellectually tedious. But I will press on and finish. I'm learning things, but it's not particularly enjoyable.

Obviously, from my earlier comments, this feeling came and went. But when it came on, it came on strong. Reading more slowly helped me to cut through this academic wall and get to the actual "soul" behind it. I do believe the book has "soul," but it takes some digging to get to it.

The whole notion of death in this book is utterly fascinating. While acknowledging the cessation of being in this world, and thus no longer being a Dasein, Heidegger hints that there is a sort of existence of one, even as that one has ceased being in the worls as Dasein here. But the Being of that being is unknowable by Dasein.

This actually helped me connect with this work in a way I hadn't up to this point. This probably has to do with my admiration for Existential philosophy in general. The seeming paradoxical nature of Heidegger's statements in relation of Dasein to death actually tied things together quite nicely for me. Your mileage may vary.

Death enters the picture and suddenly all that came before in this tome makes much more sense. Existentialism instantiates clarity!

As I just said . . .

317 pages in, I feel like I'm beginning to grasp what Heidegger is on about. Call me ignorant. But I am starting to put two and two together.

Mmmmmaybe I was learning something?

There is something fundamental about the call of conscience, an irreducible something that is at the core of Dasein's Being. There is no good answer to "where does it come from?", it is intrinsic to Being. So far as I can tell, this is the closest Heidegger gets to some notion of "spirit," "soul," or "essence". But what do I know?

This, I think, is where Heiddeger's view of some sort of "soul" became more clear. I went back and scanned throughout the book, and one can find ghostly whispers, very faint, of this feeling, here and there throughout. Perhaps this is inevitable when one is talking about the inner life of a human?

There's something a bit Ayn-Randian about the concept of conscience here, but it seems less mercenary. Self-serving? Yes, more a focus on authenticity, to being true to one's self, than just snubbing every other human being around you without mercy for the sake of the argument.

Heidegger's ties to nazism are fairly clear, from what I understand. Though Ayn Rand wasn't a nazi, per se, her individualism-to-the-point-of-extreme-selfishness rings with some of the same echos, albeit on a personal, rather than national scale. I find Heidegger much more kind (if that's the right word) than Rand, but still adamant about the individual need to be oneself, despite what society as a whole thinks. Of course, if you get a whole bunch of people who think they are being individualistic, while they are merely all following one person's individualistic personality, well, you get facism.

I'd love to be able to state that I understood thus and such percentage of this book. But that would imply a continuous "block" of understanding, and that's just not true. It's more like a journey where certain points were more lucid and memorable than others, like pearls unevenly distributed along a string.

This notion also held through, especially in hindsight. And this is the most corect summation of my reading experience with Being and Time. Will I read it again in full? Probably not. But I will dip into sections from time to time in order to both build my understanding of this work and to provide context when other philosophers refer to Heidegger.

So I feel that I did learn from the book. And i will keep on learning. Some of the ideas herein and some of the structures have provided glimpses for me into the workings of philosophy, even if uneven and obfuscated by my own ignorange. Gradually, though, I'm hoping the light seeps in and grows and I can use this as a springboard into other, perhaps equally difficult, works. My intellectual muscles have been strengthened, though I have yet to understand how to integrate the whole body of work into my philosophical routine. That, I think, is a lifelong pursuit.






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