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Where to begin with Martin Heidegger?

Foust is SO authentic

01:22 / 21.03.05

Where should a discussion about Heidegger begin? I mean, do we need to hash out the signifigance of his nazi membership, or jump straight to a discussion of his work?

08:14 / 21.03.05

Hmm. The short answer is no, we do not need to discuss the implications of his being a Nazi vis a vis his work. If there was a Nazi engineer who built a dam (or whatever) would we need to discuss their ideology with regard to his work? No.

AFAIK he became a Nazi in the early days of the party and used the party's influence at his University (even banning Husserl from the library!) - however as a professor I doubt he was fully aware of the full extent of the holocaust. Later, when these things did become apparent, went back on these values. In 1969 Hannah Arendt (a former student, and lover of Heidegger) described his involvement with Nazism as a brief "error" that he corrected "more quickly and more radically than many of those who later sat in judgment over him."

However, because his work deals with the human condition and Being - a closer examination is not completely uncalled for: as I remember he did seem to proscibe pre-industrialised Germany society for a cure to the despair which Dasein in the modern world is capable of. This unfortunately echoed certain elements of Hitler's vision for the future.

09:30 / 30.05.05

Well, not eclipse as such, but there's certainly an intersection (particularly around ideas of technology and Being, as Jub points out). The best place to start for me would probably be Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book, which links up Heidegger's theory of Being as a guilty response to a call with the moment in his life when he "took the call" on the phone from the Nazi Party and agreed to ban Jews from the University - and of course the whole thing is situated within a discussion of technology, call, and Being...

But I really bumped this thread because I need to know about Heidegger's Being-towards-death, and the people who have taken the idea up since (I think Derrida might have talked about it somewhere - maybe in On Spirit). Can anyone help me on that? I have a vague feeling that MH argues that being-towards-death is the only way for humans to live authentic lives, but I don't know where he does so or anything more about it.

04:57 / 02.06.05

heidegger's being-for-death material is primarily in 'being and time' from memory.

05:01 / 02.06.05

haven't read it, but no doubt jackie d's 'gift of death' deals with such themes. from what i know it doesn't 'specifically' engage with heidegger's thought on these matters, but derrida's thought is so infused w/heideggerian philosophy that it probably shines through in various ways.

Foust is SO authentic

12:36 / 02.06.05

I think Heidegger talks about death throughout his career, but I've only fumbled through Being and Time.

As I understand it, Heidegger says that we spend our lives falling into the They-self; we are always interpreting our being and interacting with others. Of everything we will experience, only death is uniquely ours; no one can die my death for me.

05:04 / 03.06.05

be worth a bomb to find a way for someone to do that!

"oh jeeves, just pop over there and get hit by that truck, there's a chap..."

hapax legomenon

02:09 / 09.08.05

If you let his affair with National Socialism blot out his enormous philosophical figure from the horizon, you are missing out on a rather lot. I know this, and still cannot escape a rotten feeling if I catch myself too absorbed by one of his texts. Someone once advised me to leave the question of Heidegger open. It might be a crude way of putting it, but you don't have to like him in order to read him.

10:38 / 01.09.05

With reference to Jack's desire to know about being toward death, the reference is in Being and Time, it's a core idea there and arises from an attempt to place the finitude of the human being (that he is mortal) into key position in an analysis of the existence of human beings as 'being-there' (ie; living in the world). (If you have trouble finding references in that text then PM me and I'll give you a hand by referring to my own annotated copies which I don't have with me here).

Not an awful lot of 'modern heidegerians' take up the being towards death idea because of two reasons: (1) Heidegger made a philosophical 'turn', following Introduction to Metaphysics, a turn towards language rather than mortality as the key existential element of human life (crudely put) - most modern Heideggerians seem more interested in this work on language than his earlier more explicit existentialist text (2) the notion of 'authenticity' which is key to BT and the whole being towards death idea is one that is often seen to be a key weakness in H and one which may well be part of the reason he fell in so easily with the Nazi ideology of pastoral aryan existence as 'true'. Authentic = true, the right way etc and mixed with politics becomes the grounds for an absolutism. In H's later work, as well as language, technology and the 'frame' become more immportant than 'authenticity' and are a lot more philosophically interesting to be honest.

In terms of who took up the idea of being towards death, well Sartre used BT as the grounds for his own text and took up being towards death albeit in a wierd way (due to translation difficulties amongst other things if i remember). In modern writers a fascinating author called Francoise Dastur has again approached the issue of time and finitude from what is in effect a 'Heideggerian' position. Her 'Death: an essay on finitude' may be of interest.

18:28 / 06.10.05

I am not familiar with "National Socialism and European Being" but have read B&T, some parts repeatedly. There is this obsession amongst some with his Nazi membership but I suppose in the spirit of a "death of the author" attitude I think obsession with author's biography distracts from the text. I am not saying that biography does not influence content but that ones interpretation of any text is more about your own biography than the author's. As such, I'd say start with the text rather than the biography and as texts go I have always found B&T to be one of the most clear and lucid of philosophical works - the problem for non-German speakers is the translation, although Macquarries & Edwards' is a great achievement and well referenced. Once one gets beyond the slightly unwieldy language of being-towards...., Daesin and temporalised temporality and the unfamiliar territory of his phenomenology of Being, it is great work of philosophy, what in my opinion may be the greatest work of the twentieth century.

As for Derrida's Donner la Morte, primarily about the mad economics or structural secrecy of our being from what I remember, Heidegger haunts it as ever but the true ghost in the "existential" machine is really brought to the fore - Kierkegaard. If you want to understand Heidegger's Being-towards-death then read Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety which I have elsewhere (but not here) argued is a seminal near criminally unacknowledge influence on B&T. In Kierkegaard you'll find humour, wit, irony and a lyrical playfulness that is impossible for his beloved German professors to reproduce. And avoid getting hung-up on Kierkegaard's devote Christianity, like Heidegger's Nazism it's a superfical distraction from his thought.

sdv (non-human)

10:25 / 11.10.05

Normally I rather pedantically argue that people should read source texts rather than reading secondary texts and then reading the original source texts. (for example with Deleuze, Spinoza, Kristeva or Foucault) But Heidegger is an exception - I think because of his fascist (aka Nazi) tendencies it is important to place him in the right context.

Consequently rather than immediately read the Heidegger text i'd suggest that some understanding of the social and historical background from which he emerged is very helpful. To that end the recent biography of Karl Jaspers would help a reader understand the social out of which Heidegger emerged. Other good secondary reading is Graham Parkes/Reinhard Mays 'Heideggers Hidden Sources' - 'Heidegger and Marcuse' by Andrew Feenberg. I mention these because they are both much easier than following the French line and then reversing into Heidegger through Derrida etc. What I'm suggesting (I think) is that only after understanding the context can the spectre of his fascism be understood and ignored...

For myself I'm reading Heidegger's 'Hegel's phenomenology of the spirit...' which does appear to contain as the cover note says some of Heidegger's clearest statements on temporality, ontological differnece and the dialectic... (good tube reading then...)