“The crisis of spirit suffered by Germany in 1918 was more profound than that of 1945.”
When you get to grad school in many humanities, you start to learn there’s a list of about 100,000 books you’re both expected to have read and know, and only later do you realize that not only is this an impossible task, no one, including your professors, except maybe that one person, has done so. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is one of those books, but so are, in lesser ways, his collection “Introduction to Metaphysics” and “Basic Writings” both of which contain various shorter essays of note like “The Question concerning Technology” and essays on language. Then you read him, and you squint. There’s a lot there that sort of begins to make sense, such as a rendering of the experience of being — that is being a conscientious presence in the world that is also observing and experiencing the world. And then there’s also the sentences that use and re-use the word being in three or four different ways wrapped up around itself. You get the impression you’re being trolled. But then you come across a cool idea and you continue to roll with it.
It turns out, according to this 1978 introduction (revised later) to Heidegger’s life and works by George Steiner, that this is more or less the consensus on Heidegger. Does Heidegger do anything? Does he say anything? Is his entire philosophy tautological? Is it even philosophy?
Part of the issue with Heidegger, according to Steiner, is that for one, Heidegger wraps up language into the essential category of being, meaning that language itself is part of being, not an expression of it or the expression of beings. And that partly comes from Heidegger’s reading of Greek and belief in Greek’s essentialness. But part of that is also the way German grammar often expresses ideas. For example, if you said “Ich gehe”, you are saying three distinct different possibilities that context and situation determine. In English, you would simply say “I am going” to mean “I am going” and “I go” to mean “I go”. So what this often means for Heidegger is that the construction of his own native language and then a language he chooses to work within allow for a kind a priori reading of language as a concept that doesn’t exist in every language. This leads to a circularity in a lot of his reasoning, or perhaps it doesn’t?
The other big question that Steiner spends a large amount of time with here is Heidegger’s connection to the Third Reich. Heidegger was not an active member of the Nazi regime, and there’s some suggestion that he was influential to their thinking, but the evidence for this is not clear. It doesn’t seem likely that his writing was particularly well-known. But what can’t be ruled in or out is that Heidegger was a teacher, and his teacher may well have been influential. What is not unclear is his total silence after the war, in which he basically said nothing at all about Nazism. And he was offered many chances and lived until 1976. Steiner does not have a lot of sympathy for this stance whether it’s statement (through silence) of support or one of cowardice.
This book would have helped me a lot in grad school to better what I was looking at, and more so, to make me feel less crazy about my reading. But I probably wouldn’t have read it, so who knows.