At sp!ked review of books to balance out the previous one. Worth a read.
A contrary view on Heidegger
Filed under History
Historian and philosopher of science, especially biology. Apple tragic. Pratchett fan. Curmudgeon. Punster. Fatso.
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As to whether Heidegger is unreadable, I’d say it depends. Being and Time is hard, but it’s hard the way that the Critique of Pure Reason is hard. I don’t think Heidegger was trying to be opaque at that part of his career. Like Kant, he was struggling to explain his own ideas to himself. Some of Heidegger’s lectures are also readable, particularly the series on Nietzsche. About most of late Heidegger, on the other hand, I pretty much agree with Thony.
I find Kritik der reinen Vernunft perfectly readable however my view on Sein und Zeit is summed up in an anecdote related by John Passmore in his One Hundred Years of Philosophy.
An English philosopher asks a German colleague at a conference why there is no English translation of Sein und Zeit. His colleague replies, because it hasn’t been translated into German yet.
And before anybody else says so I know that there are now two Eglish translations of Sein und Zeit
Has anyone ever made a suggestion as to why I should spend any of my time and effort in trying to read anything by him?
You shouldn’t because he is fundamentally unreadable.
“Has anyone ever made a suggestion as to why I should spend any of my time and effort in trying to read anything by him?”
It was once suggested to me that in his early work, Heidegger masterfully recounts and criticizes a couple centuries worth of work on existence — so he provides a “useful overview.” While I appreciated the sentiment of the suggestion, I couln’t force myself to actually read the material in question.
“… a thinker many regard as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century …”
Has anyone ever made a suggestion as to why I should spend any of my time and effort in trying to read anything by him?
Heidegger’s posthumous career has a lot in common with the legacy of Nietzsche, another philosopher who provided inspiration to leftists, rightists, and centrists whose only obvious similarity was (and is) a shared dissatisfaction with the status quo. Or maybe the best analogy is George Sorel: both the communists and the fascists sent delegations to his funeral. Thing is, granted the elasticity of interpretation, anybody sufficiently famous will be cited by everybody for the next hundred years, even if they aren’t as self-contradictory as Nietzsche or as obscure as Heidegger. A name doesn’t even have to be lurid: right up to the Founding Fathers, the 18th Century was chock full of authors tipping their hat to the “sagacious Locke,” whether or not what they were declaring themselves had much to do with anything that thinker had actually stood for.
Although I find his essay on the whole more than somewhat over the top and largely incoherent, there is one quote from Rosenbaum that sums up my view on Heidegger perfectly;
at least by those who considered his notoriously opaque use of philosophical language to offer something of value beneath it—apart from further opacity.
(my emphasis) I personally don’t think it does.