Heidegger

The Routledge Philosophers

by John Richardson

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most influential, but also most cryptic and controversial philosophers. His early fusion of phenomenology with existentialism inspired Sartre and many others, and his later critique of modern rationality inspired Derrida and still others. This introduction covers the whole of Heidegger's thought and is ideal for anyone coming to his work for the first time.

John Richardson centres his account on Heidegger's persistent effort to change the very kind of understanding or truth we seek. Beginning with an overview of Heidegger's life and work, he sketches the development of Heidegger's thought up to the publication of Being and Time. He shows how that book takes up Husserl's method of phenomenology and adapts it. He then introduces and assesses the key arguments of Being and Time under three headings pragmatism, existentialism, and temporality its three levels of analysis of human experience.

Subsequent chapters introduce Heidegger's later philosophy, including his turn towards a historical account of being, and new ideas about how we need to think to get the truth about it; his influential writings on language, art, and poetry, and their role in the Western history of being; and his claim that this history has culminated in a technological relation to things that is deeply problematic, above all in the way it excludes the divine. The final chapter looks at Heidegger's profound influence on several intellectual movements ranging from phenomenology to existentialism to postmodernism.

A much-needed and refreshing introduction to this major figure, Heidegger is ideal reading for anyone coming to his work for the first time and will interest and stimulate students and scholars alike.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

406 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2012

About the author

John Richardson is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is a co-editor of Nietzsche (2001) in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that with this book John Richardson has written a brilliantly accessible introduction to the entirety of Heidegger’s oeuvre. I can definitely say that I feel I have a greater comprehension of Heidegger’s work than I did before I read it.

I should say, however, that Richardson turned out to be a very good match for me in relation to my previous exposure to the legendary German thinker. I have read some actual Heidegger. In grad school I read the majority of a decent sized anthology of “Major Works” including excerpts from “Being and Time” and many shorter works. But my main, previous exposure had come through a book by the noted Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus, “Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time: Division 1’”.

I think Dreyfus’s book is wonderful. But Dreyfus’s fame comes in no small part from his idiosyncratic (although, I think, convincing) interpretation of “Being and Time” as being as much if not more a harbinger work of social constructivism rather than existential phenomenology. Dreyfus put much less emphasis on the decisions of individuals in Heidegger’s thinking than had previous interpreters. For Dreyfus, Dasein (Being-in-the-world) refers more to the social plurality within which individuality operates or perhaps of which it is even only a symptom.

Richardson, I learned only in reading his book’s dedication, was a student of Dreyfus at UC Berkeley. Richardson’s “first Heidegger”, like mine, had been that of Dreyfus. However, Richardson had departed from his mentor by choosing what he readily admits is a more traditional interpretation of “Being and Time”.

It seems to me that the key difference between Dreyfus’s and Richardson’s notions of Dasein relies on how we interpret Heidegger to mean “choice” in “Being and Time”. The differences these interpretations imply might seem obtuse- and maybe they are- but I do think they could be paramount to arriving at an “authoritative” interpretation of “Being and Time”. In fact, they lead me, for one, to believe that no such “authoritative” interpretation of that book can be arrived at. Interestingly, as much disagreement as there is between different readings of “Being and Time”, Heidegger’s later writings, which strive for a greater radically than the magnum opus, are almost universally interpreted in reasonably compatible ways.

Hopefully, I will convince my readers, if I ever have any, that Richardson did indeed instill in me a decent comprehension of Heidegger’s oeuvre through my attempt to explicate Richardson’s explications. I also hope to communicate some of my thoughts on the decisive vagueness of Heidegger’s concept of “choice” in “Being and Time”.

Heidegger revealed a critical attitude towards the way philosophy had been practiced in the west from his earliest works, written while still a student, and having not yet fully renounced his Catholic heritage. The early works are characterized by two competing, paradoxical inclinations towards philosophy. Either, thought Heidegger, philosophy has not been practiced rigorously enough and should be held to the same standards as science.

Yet he also sometimes argued in these youthful days that philosophy excessively attempted to reflect science in its method. It too often tried to explain what things are (which is the role of science and to which philosophy is ill suited) when philosophy should be trying to address questions as to how we understand things, how they become what they are for us.

This was the germination of what would be one of the central themes of Heidegger’s philosophical project throughout his life: Our thinking has been conditioned to deal with entities. And, indeed, everything we can take as a subject is an entity except for the very condition that makes entities possible- being. “Being”, for Heidegger is the “transcendental condition” of entities. Being can therefore not be reduced to or generalized from entities. So, if we are to arrive at a philosophical understanding of HOW entities are- the true role of philosophy according to Heidegger- then we will need to stop thinking in terms of entities. We will need to arrive at a whole new way of thinking and this will require a radical reconditioning of our methods.

In his paper “Doctrine of Judgement in Psychologism”, from 1913, Heidegger distinguishes between an intellectual act of judgement and the “logical contents” that are the subject of the judgement. Philosophy has all too often, Heidegger claims, taken a psychological path in understanding judgement by focusing on the individual’s act of judging, in and of itself. Rather, to understand judgement philosophically, we must focus on what is being judged and how that entity came to be there for us to be judged the way we do.

1915’s “Doctrine of Categories and Meaning in Doc Scotus” would prove to be the source of one of Heidegger’s few intellectual embarrassments. The primary work “by” Scotus that he comments on would later be proven to have not been Scotus’s work at all. Nonetheless, the paper contains early versions of what would become important themes of “Being and Time”. Humans posit content in the act of judging through “intending”, the act that allows entities to be there for us. Heidegger identifies three stages to his notion of intending. The initial is the intuition of the entity, then the differentiation of the entity into subject (a chair) and predicate (the concept “chairs”) and finally the communication of this predicate to others.

Through a series of short papers and journal entries from 1919 we know that Heidegger began an intense reading of works by old Christian mystics. This led him to return to his concerns that philosophy had grown too rigorously rational. In being caught up in this attempt at rigor, a thinker risks loosing sight of the world we “take” to be there. “Take” in this context is a variation of the Scotus paper’s notion of intending as a process that allows entities to appear to us. When human being takes the world, it bends it towards itself in a way that can only be felt, not theorized. Heidegger thus himself flirted with mysticism before writing “Being and Time” in ways that he would again do after the completion of that magnum opus.

Heidegger liked to claim that “Being and Time” represented an entirely new direction for philosophy, but in fact its fundamental method is recognizably Kantian. Like Kant, Heidegger claims that we half-know what the truth of our world is but not how that truth is, how it has become that truth. But he also wants to do this in the broadest way possible. He seeks insight into “Weltlichkeit”, or “general world-hood”. He’s trying to identify what must characterize any world in its world-hood.

If the method of “Being and Time” is Kantian, the conclusions reached most reflect the work of Kierkegaard and (Heidegger’s questionable interpretation of) Nietzsche. The truths that Kierkegaard interrogated were ethical and religious in nature, and he took these truths to exist only on a subjective level. If a subject’s relation to an ethical belief is sincerely faithful, then it is a true belief even if the content of that belief is in fact false. Heidegger took Kierkegaard’s notions of ethical truth and applied them to our truth claims about being, the condition that allows the world to be a world to us. (This, to me, itself sounds Kantian.)

Heidegger’s indebtedness to Nietzsche revolves around (Heidegger’s again questionable interpretation of) the latter’s notion of “will to power”. This will need to be elucidated further later on. For now, we can say that Heidegger’s embrace of Nietzsche is part of his fierce rejection of Descartes. That Frenchman had caused the fateful misunderstanding of western humanity to think of itself as first and foremost a thinker.

For Heidegger, human being (“Dasein” in Heideggerean) does not understand the world by reflecting on objects as concepts but by acting in and on the world. Indeed, Dasein’s world simply is the totality of ways it knows how to function in it and with it. Skepticism, in the Cartesian sense, would be a meaningless question for Heidegger. (This is why some writers have seen correlations between “Being and Time” and Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” with language, in the latter work, taking the place of tools in the former.)

This is not to say that thinking is denigrated in “Being and Time”- far from it. Indeed, thinking is the only way that Dasein can find itself in relation to the truth of being. It’s just that for Heidegger, Dasein is usually not thinking. What most people think is thinking is not, in fact, thinking. Authentic thought is a difficult act and a rare event. At most, when we think that we think we are focusing on entities, not being itself.

Heidegger never uses the term “intentionality” (or its German equivalent) but Richardson thinks that Heidegger does have a sense of human intentionality and that it has two primary features. First, Dasein is directed towards entities not reflectively, but with an unconscious telic end-goal (a “for which” in Heideggerean). Dasein projects towards an end and understands the world in relation towards that end. Secondly, for Dasein to be directed upon an entity is also for it to be directed towards itself. One can say that Dasein’s end-goal is itself.

Together, these two aspects of intentionality constitute what Heidegger calls “concern”. (This sounds a bit like Bergson’s writings on perception being shaped by biological need and thus only perceiving aspects of the world that are in the interest of said needs.) Again, this concern is unconscious and is not subject to detached thinking. Moments when we address entities as concepts are the exception, not the rule, and even when we practice such Cartesian “thinking” we are not concerning our thought with being. This more specialized mode of theoretical reflection, a “knowing that” if you will, has been mistaken by philosophers as primary, especially since Descartes, because it is more conspicuous than far more common and foundational, everyday concern.

Not only is theoretical concern not primary, it is, claims Heidegger, only a modified version of everyday concern, and one might even say a deficient version of it. When we theorize about the world we are still concerned about it. But when engaged in such theorizing, what Descartes would call “thinking”, we pause our aiming at the world so as to (attempt to) encounter entities not as they are useable to our ends but as they are in themselves. This is still concern, and in fact is still telic (or end-directed). Theorizing is a concern to suppress all concerns except that of curiosity about entities in themselves.

If we recall Heidegger’s notion of “intending” from the Scotus paper, we can better understand his more developed concept, in “Being and Time”, of “uncovering”. This is the process by which Dasein brings “explicit attention to an entity in a way that determines it under a particular aspect”- that aspect being its relation to Dasein, which is the function Dasein knows how to apply to it. “Uncovering” is an un-forgetting that makes possible a “disclosure” of the world. Indeed, disclosure is being showing itself. Again for Dasein, all entities, and ultimately the world as a collection of entities, is the ways Dasein knows how to use them to satisfy its ends. This most immediately available aspect of the world for Dasein is labeled by Heidegger as Dasein’s “umwelt”, generally translated into English as “environment”.

Heidegger identifies two modes in which Dasein “uncovers” entities. When a human takes a rock and uses it as a weapon, say, or as an object with which to build a stone wall, the rock is uncovered for Dasein as “to hand”. “Worumwillen” (sometimes translated as “involvement” other times as “reference”) is the end purpose a to-hand entity has for Dasein, the way that Dasein wields an entity to shelter itself.

When a human theorizes about what a “rock” truly is, or the mineral components of a particular rock, the rock is uncovered as “at hand”. To encounter the same object- say the same rock- in different modes of concern is to encounter two different entities with different modes of being. Indeed, for Heidegger, there are three essential modes of being- entities that are to hand, those that are at hand, and Dasein itself.

Not only is intending not generally conscious, it is also not a substance or entity. (Again, Dasein, as a form of being, is not a substance/entity.) So, what does this mean? Here we get into murky territory between different interpreters of Heidegger. I think this clash of interpretations is very important in understanding “Being and Time” (or of understanding the limits to which that book can be definitively understood). This will, I think, reveal itself more fully when we examine what Heidegger (might) truly mean by “choice”.

For Richardson’s mentor, Dreyfus, Dasein’s concern is not a substance because it exists in the form of social practice. Indeed, Dreyfus sometimes sounds as if individual decisions are illusory. We are programed by the social conditions that bring the world to us, the way our social programming tells us to use the world. (Dreyfus, however, thinks we are “programmed” in exactly the way a computer cannot be because a computer can never truly be social.)

Richardson’s interpretation is more traditionally existential than his mentor’s. He thinks the irreducible difference between concern towards substances/ entities and the latter themselves is that the former exists in a fully different temporality than its object. Intentionality is always present in the now but also stretched between the past and the future. This does not apply to the simplistic temporality of objects.

That which is most imperative to us, our ends, are obscured from us. Mostly, this obfuscation is the result of taking these ends for granted without reflecting on them. Other human ends are actively repressed. (Heidegger would have steadfastly denied that he ever engaged in psychologizing, but he clearly did so, even rather traditionally at times.) It is thus one of the tasks of philosophy to bring these ends to light. But how is a thinking that has been trained to theorize in the Cartesian sense to understand Dasein’s concerns objectively if such theoretical thinking is itself a form of concern? Heidegger answers immediately that it simply cannot. Thinking will have to be retrained and reconditioned.

Such reconditioning can only come from outside our immediate thinking. Heidegger places his hope in what he terms (the German equivalent of) “breakdowns”. Usually this comes in the form of when our tools fail to function in the way we expect them to. He uses the example of a hammer breaking before it can complete the task the wielder has in mind for it. Breakdowns make us become actively concerned with ends we’ve previously taken for granted. The hidden aiming to the end is awakened to consciousness.

Heidegger clearly believes that he has a uniquely insightful understanding of this hidden aiming, for he describes three different levels of it. The first level is “sein konnen” the literal translation of which is generally thought to be “an ability-to-be which is not yet manifested” though which is mercifully usually shortened to “projection”. Dasein projects itself towards what it might become in the future.

The second level of aiming is, paradoxically, Dasein finding itself in the present. Heidegger calls this “versteden” or an understanding of the world, and the way it acts upon Dasein just as Dasein acts upon its world. “Geworfenheit” or “throwness” is the state of Dasein finding itself in its present situation by forces outside and behind it.

The third level of aiming is social existence, characterized first and foremost by “rede” or “talk”, Dasein’s grounding ability to interact and communicate meaning out of its engagement in an encompassing social practice. It is in regards to talk that we first encounter Heidegger’s concept of “authenticity” which will become imperative in the remainder of “Being and Time”. Richardson convincingly argues that “authenticity” is the primary value promoted in “Being and Time”, written by an author who insists he preaches NO values. It becomes difficult to swallow that Heidegger is not, on some level, urging his readers to strive for authenticity. Richardson defines “authenticity” as “an adequate exercise of Dasein’s capacity to choose its non-pragmatic projects.” It is authenticity that gives Dasein a real self, which Heidegger thinks many Daseins are lacking. Authentic talk occurs when one Dasein effectively uses talk to get another Dasein to share in the talker’s concern. “Teilung” or “sharing” is the “process of aligning concern between different Dasein” or by one Dasein to itself at different moments.

However, Heidegger believes the vast majority of talk is inauthentic. Such discourse devolves into “gerede” or “chat”, in which sharing one’s experience as a average member of a social/linguistic group takes precedent over the topic of concern and very little, if anything, of importance or understanding regarding the topic of concern is shared. Heidegger calls engaging in such chat a “verfallen” or “falling” (which most certainly sounds like a value-laden condemnation). Dasein falls away from its authentic being and talks as “Das Man”, which basically translates as “anyone”… or no-one….

Dasein falls away from itself to avoid facing something which, by the very fact it seeks to avoid it, Dasein must already recognize. (Heidegger calls the activity of falling on the part of Dasein a “flight”.) Heidegger identifies that which Dasein flies from as “anxiety”. The two identified sources of anxiety are “death” and “guilt”.

One can, of course, die at any time. On some level, knowledge of this is common-sensible. But on another level, we do not treat this ever-real possibility as such. Chat pushes the fact of this possibility to the background. Death is always uniquely personal to every Dasein/ human being. We always ultimately face death alone and our experience of it cannot be substituted, or ultimately even related, to anyone else’s. When we die we become something-else than what we have ever been. Death is the absolutely unimaginable possibility.
(continued in "comments")

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

150512: this, like heidegger's thought, is of two parts: being and time, then everything after the 'turn'. after he establishes h's particular senses of truth as more than correspondence, being as the question, brief bio overview not neglecting h's nazi error, i read with great pleasure richardson's series of chapters approaching b&t from various perspectives: from phenomenology, from pragmatism, from existentialism, from its own way as time and being.

no small feat, this book makes each chapter elucidate h's ideas, from h's version of method of phenomenology, searching for truth and being, to embedded but unmentioned pragmatic attitudes, through concern, theory, thrownness, talk, das man etc. to falling, anxiety, authenticity, finally to temporality, historicality... this is all great stuff. i do not know if it was h's cartesian, regular, logic that makes these ideas cohere and inspire, or richardson unearths a logic not there but in retrospect. this is the first part of b&t. could see how h could influence so many fields, people, colleagues and adversaries. great, felt i understood it. then it stops.

or at least for me. a long chapter about what h called his 'turn', prepared me for something completely different. and yes, this is when h becomes the obfuscatory, opaque, anti-philosophical-way of telling h's new thoughts, that i have heard analytic philosophers find annoying to the nth power. but then, h is addressing that question that some analytics might feel settled: when you say 'the dog is red' instead of 'dog' and/or 'red', h investigates the 'is' between them.

so the four is how well i feel richardson has explicated h, not necessarily how congenial i find his later thought. h becomes more and overwhelmingly interested in the question of being, of presence, and there is a good argument about how being and beings can best translate to being and entities. great. but in his later work h does become particularly difficult to parse- or even not be thought to say anything of value. h becomes poetic, prophetic, and this argues surpasses nietzsche's idea of the overman etc. not that the nazis' ever needed philosophical backing, but clear reading will not find it in h.

more to read? yes. and maybe i will come back to this and think it too simple or something, like the merleau-ponty in this series. maybe i will read h myself. i have some books holding down one end of the shelves...

[arbuz · Rating 5 out of 5]

mmmmm... The Being....

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hitchhiker's guide to the Heideverse-

Very good and accessible book on a notoriously obscure philosopher.

Heidegger's thought (like Wittgenstein's) can broadly be divided into two phases- the phenomenological Being and Time phase and the mystic post-Turn phase, and the book works in a similar chronological way, starting with a biography, and then exploring each area. Having tried to get into both phases of Heidegger several times previously and failed, I recommend this book as an easy way in.

i. Being and Time-
Heidegger originally intended to be a theologian and Being and Time thought can be read as an attempt to secularize the Christian viewpoint. Instead of a last judgement, man is thrown into the world and fleeing from angst, the fear of death, but it is death that gives man's life meaning. Hence man's place is as a being in time. It is for man to be authentic and take account for his actions- this authenticity takes the place of the Christian salvation. In addition, Heidegger was part of a school of thought known as "phenomenology"- a focus on the things in themselves as opposed to abstract conceptions. Objects are to be understood through a framework based on their use, rather than in an individual context. So man too is to be understood in such a framework (as outlined above).

ii. The Turn
Heidegger originally intended to publish a third division of "Being and Time", but abandoned the project. This shift in approach was known as "the turn". Heidegger then adopted an alternative historical approach to the problem of being (the third division intending to cover a historical approach). His argument was that early philosophers had sight of being itself, but it became obscured by language and metaphysics after Plato irreversibly i.e. the focus was on one form of being such as being as form/idea (Plato), God as the supreme being (Middle Ages) as opposed to "being" and ways of being in general. His goal was to "unconceal" being. To do so he focused on how language and objects form the world (and "being") as we know it. He places much emphasis on the poetry of Holderlin (German mystic poet) and the power of language to introduce new ways of perceiving the world. He also talks about how temple structures created divisions that made people aware of their being in different ways- by creating a dividing line between earth and sky they made people consider their relationship to the gods and to the earth in a new way. In the last chapter (God and Technology), the author discusses how technology is increasingly becoming a single viewpoint which is shutting out other ways of viewing the world. The Rhine with its ancient history, its natural beauty is nothing more in the eyes of the techno-state than a way to produce electricity and fish fingers (ok I made the fish-fingers point up). If we focus on just one way of viewing the world, we lose so much. Hence his claim in his last interview "only a God can save us now" (i.e. a new way of viewing the world).

One of the great strengths is this book is that it doesn't degenerate into unreadable lines of "daseining the geworfenheit". The German specialist terms are there, but only dasein (instantiation of being) is used repeatedly without an explainer everytime. It also doesn't degenerate into a Nazi-obsessed book. Yes, Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party. Yes he was not a particularly nice man to his Jewish mentor. Yet Heidegger's work is much less personal than a philosopher like Nietzsche and to obsess about his Nazism misses the point. It is also relatively short, clocking in at around 200 pages.

In short, I honestly think this is the best work I have read on Heidegger and can't recommend it enough.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding introduction to the philosophy of Heidegger. I still have to process a lot, but at least with Richardson’s book, it appears that there is something to process. I especially enjoyed the thorough discussion of H’s philosophy in Being and Time and his famous “turn” which seemed to appear in the mid-1930s. There is a lot here to go through but it was worthwhile.

[Jailen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Heidegger. Pretty mid philosophy tho. The author is Schopenhauer’s doppelgänger, so seeing him following the lineage of German philosophy is funny.

On a serious note, I’d consider this to be a necessity before reading any Heidegger in depth. He backtracks on a lot of his original ideas, and Richardson does a good job at making sure the reader is aware of this.

[Elaine]

chapter 5 "existentialism"--relating to authenticity, death, division II of being and time

[KarnagesMistress]

For the 2015 Watauga County Public Library Reading Challenge: A book with a one-word title; A nonfiction book; A book by an author you've never read before