Heidegger's 'Being and Time': A Reader's Guide

Heidegger is extremely difficult to decipher as to what exactly he means in his writing. The huge secondary literature is usually either too specialised (not good for beginners), or the ones which are for beginners either don't give any examples even though explaining things better, and even when they do, never help you access the primary text itself. While having a good overview of Heideggerian thought, you are still left without being able to understand Heidegger's language. Blattner takes you through the book itself, section by section, with ample examples and very helpful explanation. Wish more philosophy books were like these.

Excellent book.

Coming to this book after having gained a basic knowledge of Heidegger's method and jargon through reading Mark Wrathall's 'How to read Heidegger', and browsing Stephen Mulhall's Routledge guidebook and Hubert Dreyfuss' audio lectures on Division 1 of Being and Time, I found Bill Blattner's guide to have just the right level of detail to take me from a basic to an intermediate understanding of the text. I haven't started to read Being and Time itself yet; I might as well have been hitting myself over the head with it for all the good it did going straight ahead with no prior understanding - Blattner, like most other good guides, also offers alternative translations to append or overwrite Macqarrie and Robinsons standard edition. I have to say now that I appreciate why Heidegger had to make it so hard; he is doing something fundamentally new in the history of philosophy, and he wants new words to avoid the old and bad habits of philosophers' past. People seem to think our average philosophical language MUST be well suited to philosophising - there is no reason to think this whatsoever. Heidegger uses strange words, but everyday notions to characterise his new understandings - a fact that Blattner brings out well. I don't think you should take into account too much that parts have been missed from the coverage of the text, as Blattner gives good reasoning for his elisions. The missing part - primarily Heidegger's exposition of his understanding of time - by no means the most important part of the book, very complicated, and not worth the space in an introductory guide to the text (and also wrong, apparently). Although Blattner has also written an entire book on this aspect of Heidegger's philosophy called 'Heidegger's Temporal Idealism, I don't think it's a cynical ploy to get more sales. The rest of the text (That's all of division I and most of division II) is very well presented in clear language, and the Jargon is defined at a nice pace as you go. Dreyfus in his lectures says that '[Blattner] understands Heidegger better than Heidegger did' and it shows. ---Review ends here, for some more thoughts on Heidegger read on--- If I were to give one tip to people looking to orient themselves towards Heidegger, it would be to try to basically grasp the hermeneutic (interpretation) aspect of his work: (extremely basically) 1) Our relation to the world is not one of (propositional) 'Knowledge' 2) There is a more basic way of understanding the world which we utilise in our average everyday life, which is familiarity (we always, and already, have an understanding of our being-in-the-world) 3) This is called a pre-understanding or a primordial relation to the world which is ours even before we begin to articulate it in discourse. 4) Since it is already there, we can articulate this 'originary' understanding in language to try to show our understanding of the world to others, but we can never fully characterise it. Our language doesn't characterise things, but reveals how we understand them already in our familiarity with them. Interpretation is articulation of what the pre-understanding is already seeing-as. To those who are on the edge of giving up, or not sure whether to engage with Heidegger's thought, I have to say it is worth doing! I was in that position at one time, and went so far as falling into the old 'analytic' style dismissal on grounds of textual style and the character of the man. (It now makes me very uneasy to think of the similar case where 20+ anglophone philosophers appealed against Derrida's being awarded an honorary degree from Cambridge, on what can now be seen to be basically cultural grounds) I mean Wittgenstein is praised like a lord and he wouldn't even offer detailed argument in THE ONLY WORK HE PUBLISHED IN HIS LIFETIME because it would ruin the style, and there are FOUR-VOLUME COMMENTARIES on the Philosophical Investigations due to its obscurity! Being and Time is FULL of salient argument, and is relatively clear once you get the jargon, like Kant's first critique. Also, If you like the later Wittgenstein, then you'll get on well with Heidegger; there are many similarities between the two thinkers. Also try to get past the genetic fallacy involved in so many people's rejection of his work. One amazon review says we 'should stop reading the old Nazi'. If you do this you will miss a VERY important thinker in the history of philosophy, but if you just can't bring yourself to do it then Blattner's book is possibly the next best thing. If you are scared to be corrupted I would point out that in studying Heidegger you will find it hard to forget he was a Nazi since he speaks 'Heideggarian', conveniently hiding the phoneme 'aryan' - it keeps you attendant, as you should be, and thinking about whether any of these strands lead to fascist style thoughts.

This guide to Heidegger's Being and Time is clear and engaging. It features questions for you to consider which certainly do help you to engage with the content of the book. I have only given it three stars because the author has decided for us not to go in to the Second Division of the book because he thinks it's wrong. This might be so, but if you publish a book claiming to be a guide to a text in its entirety, it seems haughty and disingenuous to write off swathes of the text without going in to why. A section on why Heidegger's project came apart in the Second Division would have both served to complete the promise of the title and shed light on what Heidegger did next.

Blattner’s interpretation of Heidegger is very clearly informed by scholarship and is far more accessible for a reader who is getting tongue tied in Being and Time. Although, if you really want to understand Being and Time, just take Dreyfus’ advice: read it over and over!

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