Thomas Kuhn reports offering the following maxim to his students:
When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and then ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer. I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.1
Reading these remarks, I realized in retrospect that this is what happened to me in trying to understand Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and the works that came after it.
In a way, I have Paul Edwards to thank for my insight into Heidegger's thought that led me to write this book. His antagonistic articles on Heidegger's notion of death make Heidegger's discussion suddenly seem absurd, trivial, and rather silly,2 The plethora of replies to Edwards, each advancing quite a different message about what Heidegger's real point was, only made his discussion seem more puzzling.3 Just what was Heidegger saying?
I looked at Heidegger's text again with Edwards's criticisms in mind, but, unlike Edwards, I was operating under the assumption that Heidegger was a sensible man.4 As a result, I noticed remarks to which I had never really paid attention before and confronted head-on a problem about the structure of Being and Time which had always vaguely bothered me.
The book had always seemed to fall apart into two halves. If we describe the view expressed in it as 'phenomenological existentialism,' then the first half seemed to be the phenomenology and the second the existentialism. The turning point comes at the discussion of death. From a discussion of tool-use, relations between human beings, language, and so forth, we seemed to turn abruptly to a discussion of how the individual ought to face death, the significance of conscience and guilt, and the nature of the experience of time. The subjective reorientation hinged on a rather fishy-sounding question about whether we could adequately analyze the whole phenomenon of human existence when that phenomenon always included the 'not yet' of death. Why should the fact that people die hinder our analysis of what it is to be here and now?
With the second half of Being and Time apparently going off into a discussion of how to live authentically, it seemed no wonder that so many commentators thought that in the course of writing Being and Time Heidegger backed himself into a dead end of subjectivity and could not proceed to answer his original, mysterious question about 'the meaning of being in general.' This, they explained, was why his half-finished book was dropped, its projected analysis never completed, and why he went on to try a radically different approach in later works.
How could an intelligent philosopher have gotten so sidetracked? A fresh and careful study of the text began to reveal quite a different issue than the one that the familiar accounts of the matter addressed. Absurdities dissolved, and trivialities disclosed what lay beneath their surface. The new meaning taking shape in the chapter on death began to reach out into the surrounding chapters, especially the ones on Dasein's experience of time. The ontological level of the whole discussion in the second half of Being and Time shifted from the personal and subjective to the cultural and historical. Soon it became clear that not only was the second half of the book a necessary extension of the first, but it tied directly into the works that followed throughout Heidegger's career.
My book is devoted to articulating the vision of Heidegger's work which grows out of a new understanding of what he was trying to address in his discussion of death. I acknowledge that the discussion of this issue in Being and Time is far from clear; its intentional false starts and dead ends easily mislead the reader. But a careful study of the distinctions he makes there show many common assumptions about his analysis to be problematic. Comments about death in his later works sharpen the issue and bring the discussion of Being and Time into sharper focus, perhaps even for Heidegger himself. The consistency that this new interpretation of death brings to that book in its internal structure and in its relation to subsequent works suggests that he was driving at this issue from the beginning, even if initially that drive was more of a grope.
This new interpretation of Heidegger also short-circuits many traditional criticisms of Heidegger's views, something which I occasionally indicate in the course of my exposition. Such criticisms are often the verdict on a view that is read into Heidegger only to be then dismissed as wrong-headed, a process we might call circular criticism. While I may claim the virtue of greater consistency for my account, I also cheerfully acknowledge that Heidegger's own philosophy would suggest that we are all in a better position to understand his insights after fifty years because they have now become a part of the conventional wisdom of 'the Anyone,'5 Heidegger's personification of the common opinion. His view shows up in accounts of knowledge in the physical sciences, in the assumptions of social sciences, in art and film, perhaps even in popular culture in general, but does so in ways ignorant of their origins.
Now that these insights into the nature of culture and history have filtered down into the culture at large, we can make Heidegger intelligible in a way that perhaps he himself could not. I have chosen to try to make the best possible case for Heidegger that I can, and, in doing so, to make him more intelligible to those people with a long acquaintance with his work, to those with a long aversion to it, and to those, most hoped for of all, who are just starting to pursue an interest in it. In the Introduction, I briefly place the problems with which Heidegger is dealing in the context of issues in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy in order to locate him for the latter two audiences. The approach and language of the book accommodate the novice, but the content offers food for thought for the Heidegger scholar.
My aim in this book is to make Heidegger's position as clear and as convincing as possible. I try to rest my case on works by Heidegger that are available in English translation in order to make him accessible to this wide range of readers. Many quotes are provided not only to back up my case but to show that Heidegger's convoluted remarks can be explained, even simply so. I quote freely from the whole chronological range of Heidegger's works since one of my basic premises, justified explicitly in Section 1.4 and tacitly throughout my whole analysis, is that he spent his life saying, to use his term, 'the Same.' There is no distinct 'early' and 'late' Heidegger, in my view, only earlier and later ways of saying the same thing.
It would be easy enough to criticize Heidegger repeatedly for his murky and cryptic writing and perhaps even his willful obscurantism. But in the end such criticisms are rather boring and beside the point if a philosopher has something interesting to say. Kant once remarked: 'There is no art in being intelligible if one renounces all thoroughness of insight.'6 Heidegger does have something insightful to say, and his dense writing results from the complexity and depth of the issues with which he is dealing.
I do think that Heidegger has a very interesting vision of the nature and history of philosophy, and I think that this is the issue with which he is primarily concerned, even in the discussion of death and time. Reading him as any sort of an existentialist was a mistake on our part, as he himself repeatedly said. So that the reader has some taste of what is to come, let me say that I read Heidegger as being much less like Sartre and much more like Hegel and Marx than most commentators do. Neither is Heidegger much like Husserl, in whom an interest in the history of philosophy and culture is almost totally missing.
I do not present my view of Heidegger's analysis of time and death as a comprehensive or final interpretation of his thoughts on these issues. In any philosopher worth his salt, and Heidegger is, there will always be something more and something new to see. As Heidegger himself says, there is no final interpretation of a thinker, no Plato or Kant 'in himself.' Such a Plato or Kant would be 'something dead' (MFL 71/88)- dead in a sense which this interpretation tries to clarify. Commenting about Parmenides, Heidegger amplifies: 'The dialogue with Parmenides never comes to an end, not only because so much in the preserved fragments of his 'Didactic Poem' still remains obscure but also because what is said there continually deserves more thought' (EGT 100f./248). My work pushes forward into the future the dialogue with Heidegger.
1 Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. xii.
2 Paul Edwards, Heidegger and Death: A Critical Evaluation, Monist Monograph Series (La Salle, Illinois: Hegeler. 1979). This monograph combines and expands two earlier essays: —. 'Heidegger on Death as Possibility,' Mind, LXXXIV (1975), pp. 548-566. —. 'Heidegger and Death: A Deflationary Critique,' The Monist, Vol. 59. No. 2 (April 1976), pp. 161-186.
3 See the following essays:
Lawrence Hinman, 'Heidegger, Edwards, and Being-toward-Death,' Southern Journal of Philosophy. XVI (Fall 1978), pp. 193-212.
John Llewelyn. 'The "Possibility" of Heidegger's Death,' Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Vol. 14. No. 2 (May 1983), pp. 127-138.
Jamshid Mirfenderesky, 'Concerning Paul Edwards' "Heidegger on Death": A Criticism,' Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 13. No. 2 (January 1979), pp. 120-128.
Dan Magurshuk, 'Heidegger and Edwards on Sein-zum-Tode,' The Monist, Vol. 62, No. 1 (January 1979), pp. 107-118.
4 Recent revelations about his political and social views may make me question his good sense in that realm, but his grasp of ontological issues and the history of philosophy is not so obviously biased and petty.
5 Heidegger's term is 'das Man.'
6 Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, translated by Thomas Abbott, 10th edition (Longmans, Green and Co., 1955), p. 31. I like this English translation's pithy version of this sentence.