Being And Time: Introduction

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. With the publication of his book Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927, he revolutionized how we thought of our world and our existence in it as human beings. Pretty much all later Continental philosophy – existentialism, structuralism, and postmodernism – go back to him in one way or another.

Over a series of blog posts, I’m going to organize my thoughts on major themes found in Division One (the first 44 sections of Being and Time). This is the first half of the book known as the existential analysis of Dasein. I’ve read Stambaugh’s translation of the book twice recently and have gone back over certain sections numerous times. I’ve also kept a notebook and have sketched out some of the relationships between his technical terms. But it’s time to put all of this down in writing because that’s how I learn best. For me, that means blogging. A word of caution. Although I have a philosophy undergraduate degree, I am not an academic. My training was in the analytic tradition with an emphasis on philosophy of science and first-order logic. I went on to have a career as a software developer. So, Heidegger’s phenomenological method, his opaque terms, and his inability to communicate in clear language, have been a serious challenge for me. I have gone through multiple bouts of frustration. You will too. Have patience with yourself.

There’s an elephant in the room. Namely, the repulsive fact that Heidegger was an egomaniac, antisemitic, and joined the Nazi Party in 1933 as a true “blood and soil” nationalist. So why did I bother to read him? Well, when I was an undergrad, a professor declared that we would read Sartre but not Heidegger. Heidegger’s fascism made him strictly verboten. You can guess what I did next. I picked up a copy of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation to seek out this “forbidden knowledge” for myself. But I had a full course load, the book was impenetrable, and despite several attempts to read it over the years I never understood it. That always bothered me.

Fast forward a few decades and I picked it up again. I remained curious. But more than that, I traced in my own mind a connection between today’s relativism of “alternative facts” where truth is whatever one wants it to be, back through the postmodern rejection of objective scientific truth, and to Heidegger’s philosophical relativism where truth is a function of our own being. For Heidegger if we do not exist then there is no truth. I’m not sure what to make of that since I’m firmly in the camp that says a tree falling in the forest makes a sound even if no one is around to hear it. Unless you want to say that the displacement of air molecules by a falling object is mere truthiness. The point is my return to Heidegger is not just undergrad nostalgia but also something that feels very present.

My goal is to understand and describe what Heidegger is saying rather than to dwell on a flawed man. As much as possible I’ll adopt a journalistic detachment in my interpretation. At the end of the day, don’t take anything I say at face value. Read the book for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

Citations

This is the primary source which is the focus of my survey:

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (BT). Translated by Joan Stambaugh and Revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1996.

A full list of works cited is on its own page and I will link to that page when I make a citation to a primary or secondary source. A word about page numbers. Both the Macquarrie and Robinson and the Stambaugh translations include in the margins the pagination from the original Niemeyer edition of Sein und Zeit. I have Stambaugh’s translation. So, when I cite BT, I’ll quote from her with the Niemeyer page in parenthesis. For example, from page 10 of Stambaugh:

“Science in general can be defined as the totality of fundamentally coherent true propositions” (11).

In Macquarrie and Robinson this is on page 32:

“Science in general may be defined as the totality established through an interconnection of true propositions” (11).

Both are on page 11 of the Niemeyer edition. This convention is common in the secondary literature, so I’ll follow it as well. Last, Heidegger loves to italicize for emphasis. All italicized words in quotations originate from him unless I indicate otherwise. However, I will italicize words now and then when they are one of Heidegger’s technical terms (e.g., ontic).

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