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    Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide
    Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide
    Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide
    Ebook330 pages1 hour

    Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide

    By Jeff Collins and Howard Selina

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Martin Heidegger - philosophy's 'hidden king', or leading exponent of a dangerously misguided secular mysticism. Heidegger has been acclaimed as the most powerfully original philosopher of the twentieth century. Profoundly influential on deconstruction, existentialism and phenomenology, he stands behind all major strands of post-structuralist and postmodern thought. Heidegger announced the end of philosophy and of humanism, and was a committed Nazi and vocal supporter of Hitler's National Socialism. Was Heidegger offering a deeply conservative mythology or a crucial deconstruction of philosophy as we have known it? "Introducing Heidegger" provides an accessible introduction to his notoriously abstruse thinking, mapping out its historical contexts and exploring its resonances in ecology, theology, art, architecture, literature and other fields. The book opens up an encounter with a kind of thinking whose outlines might still not yet be clear, and whose forms might still surprise us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateMar 14, 2015
    ISBN9781848319714
    Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide

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    Reviews for Introducing Heidegger

    3.5/5

    41 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I have a copy of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to get to it. I also had this introductory text laying around. I am glad I went for the easy option first, as this text saved me from learning the hard way. I am not ready for Derrida - I have to start with Hegel and work my way through to Heidegger first.

      I am not averse to reading introductory texts, but this one is a little different, in that it is more like a comic book. Or, indeed, it is very similar to the style Alain de Botton has adopted for The School of Life (but this book predates the YouTube series).

      But the book is not too basic. Even after reading this introductory text, I am little the wiser.

      I see Derrida's idea of "deconstruction" as an attempt to critique logo-centrism, where Western philosophy tends to privilege one thing over another in a binary either/or paradigm. For example, speech tends to be privileged over writing; philosophy over literature, men over women (traditionally), and so on.

      Deconstruction is helpfully explained using the example of a zombie. Zombies are neither dead nor alive - their status is "undecidable" (see also the pharmakon (p. 73):To embrace the curious logic of this writing, we have to be willing to sign up to it, to subscribe to it the task it takes on: the creation of destabilizing movements in metaphysical thinking.Had I set out to read Writing and Difference, I would have been lost in Derrida's writing, which this text suggests can be "puzzling, infuriating, and exasperating", p. 73). It would be better to tackle his three major works on "structuralism and phenomenology" in order: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, then Of Grammatology.

      However, the reading list at the end of the text sets out a reading plan to ease into Derrida's work gradually, beginning with Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader: Between the Lines. Sound advice.

      It would seem that I must also go right back to Plato for a closer reading of his work so I can engage with Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy.

      What all this means is that I am completely out of my depth! Whereas with Albert Camus and even Nietzsche I was able to struggle through, with Derrida I will have to tackle post-modernism (Derrida didn't necessarily think of his work as "post-modern"). I suppose it is time.

      This text was a good place to start. I also found the School of Life's video (see the video "Jacques Derrida") useful. I must admit to being pleased to find an area of my knowledge that is so completely lacking as to require considerable thought - especially in approaching Derrida. At the same time, the task is quite daunting and it may have to wait until some time later next year if I am to do it any justice.
    • 4/5
      This is a really accessible introduction to Derrida and his Deconstructivist approach to philosophy, literature, art, and politics. Deconstruction is explained at a basic level here, with the amount of quirky illustration outweighing the text.It would be necessary to read some of the original texts by Derrida to be able to fairly assess whether his ideas have the significance that some people claim for them in philosophy, though I got the impression that he has just put a name on something that has been going on in the side lines for years - challenging the underpinnings of Western thought. However he doesn't seek to do so on the same terms (using a thorough logical philosophical approach), so to some extent what he does falls outside of Philosophy. This is perhaps the reason why he has been better received in English departments compared to Philosophy departments.
    • 5/5
      Derrida may be brilliant, however, his writing is incomprehensible. This book helped me understand what the hell he was talking about. Now I get to throw Deconstruction around like a ridiculously good hand of poker.
    • 4/5
      It made Derrida intelligible... of course, that may not really be a good thing!
    • 4/5
      I had to read this twice. And it's the comic book! But the second time I started to get it."Between life and death--it's an uncertain space. The zombie might be EITHER alive OR dead. But it cuts across these categories, it's BOTH alive AND dead. Equally it is NEITHER alive NOR dead, since it cannot take on the "full" senses of these terms. True life must preclude true death. The zombie short-circuits the usual logic of distinction. Having both states, it belongs to a different order of things: in terms of life and death, it cannot be decided.Undecidables are threatening. They poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. . . .What if the comfort of order is not to be restored? What if we insist on undecidability? The ceaseless play of EITHER/OR . . .NEITHER/NOR . . .BOTH?"

    Book preview

    Introducing Heidegger - Jeff Collins

    BEGINNING WITH A QUESTION ...

    Is is one of the most commonplace words in the English language. It slips into sentences almost unnoticed. It is difficult to speak, write or think without it.

    But few people ask –

    To the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), that neglect was astonishing.

    It is not just the neglect of a word, but of every resonance that such a word might have.

    What is Being ?

    Is is part of the verb to be, the verb of being. To ask "What is ‘is’?" is to ask a question of BEING. That was Heidegger’s central preoccupation.

    A strange concern? Heidegger proposed something extraordinary.

    Western thought has ‘FORGOTTEN to question being, not just recently, but in a process of neglect spanning 2,500 years.

    Heidegger’s task: to return to the question. How could being be understood?

    Was it possible to forge a new disposition towards being, redirecting the trajectories of the last two millennia?

    To Heidegger, what was at stake was nothing less than Western thought as it has been known – not only its philosophy, but its natural sciences, its human sciences, its everyday discourses.

    To turn towards being meant: to turn away from their traditional concerns, to place their methods, their concepts and their underlying assumptions in question.

    It means to propose a thinking that proceeds otherwise ...

    Few philosophers have proposed such a radical disturbance of philosophy.

    It took Heidegger into some strange and contentious territories, both conservative and revolutionary, secular and theological, anti-traditional but deeply rooted, backward-looking while proposing a future thinking whose contours are still not settled.

    Which Heidegger?

    Unsurprisingly, the author Heidegger has been read in many different ways. It has often been said, there are many Heideggers.

    A Heidegger of German idealist philosophy, preoccupied with abstruse but fundamental questions of time, death, and the underlying anxiety or Angst of human living ...

    A scholarly Heidegger, central to European philosophy, intersecting major currents of 20th century thought, interrogating philosophy’s great traditions ...

    A theological Heidegger, taken to have offered a philosophical foundation for modern Christian thought ...

    ... and some Heideggers who disclaim this: one thoroughly secular, and another of post-theology, responding to the death of God while searching out what remains of religious thought in mystic traditions, Eastern religions, etc.

    Against Heidegger

    Not far away is a Heidegger of abstruseness, opacity, impenetrability and obscurity: the bête-noir of Anglophone analytical philosophy; a Heidegger of dangerously unaccountable speculations; of mysticisms and obfuscations; sham tautologies and self-important immersion in self-generated problems ...

    The question of being? A senseless querying of what must be an absolute presupposition. If treated as a question there is no way of answering it ... Heidegger has displays of surprising ignorance, unscrupulous distortion and what can fairly be described as charlatanism.

    British analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer in 1982

    Heidegger’s writings contain the last despairing glimmer of German romantic philosophy. His major work Being and Time is formidably difficult – unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it.

    British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in 1992

    For Heidegger

    Heidegger has been interpreted more positively.

    ... the rescuer of PHENOMENOLOGY (a philosophy of consciousness) from its own self-constructed limits.

    ... contributor to modern HERMENEUTICS (the philosophical inquiry into how we make interpretations), crucial to the key hermeneutic theorist, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

    ... the most profound influence on 20th century EXISTENTIALISM and major figures like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.

    ... a POST-STRUCTURALIST Heidegger, coming before the name, anticipating the most innovative developments in philosophy and theory in recent decades – and a powerful formative influence even on thinkers who took other paths.

    Jürgen Habermas ...

    Herbert Marcuse ...

    Michel Foucault ...

    and many others.

    ... And a Heidegger of DECONSTRUCTION, providing the most important resource for its leading proponent, Jacques Derrida.

    A Social Heidegger

    There are Heideggers of social and cultural critique ...

    The Heidegger opposed to the conditions of MODERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, its mass culture and technological modes of thought ...

    ... correspondingly, a Heidegger of conservative RURALISM, rooted in a vision of the agrarian past; its traditional modes of life and its assured lore and customs ...

    A proto-ECOLOGICAL Heidegger, offering a platform for deep ecology: ways of thinking other than those of exhaustive extraction and relentless appropriation ...

    A Future Heidegger

    There are figures of the as-yet-unknown Heidegger ...

    A substantial amount of Heidegger’s large output remains unpublished. He lent a hand in setting up a Collected Edition, the Gesamtausgabe, in 1974. But the task of editing and publishing is far from complete. This is a not-as-yet Heidegger, still awaited.

    Heidegger’s personal papers are held in the German Literary Archive in Marbach, but access has been strictly limited ...

    – A private Heidegger, mostly sealed from view.

    Heidegger and Nazism

    Heidegger is therefore a noun with many possibilities, and its arrival has often sparked controversies. The most fiercely argued issue has been Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism.

    Curiously, this has become a powerful reason for reading him. At issue are the politics of philosophy – the political forces at work on it and in it, its attachments and responsibilities.

    For many readers, this is not a purely historical concern. It is bound up with our responses to resurgent nazisms now, emerging with new names and without a swastika in sight.

    There are many figures of the political Heidegger ...

    Heidegger was an energetic supporter of German National Socialism in the 1930s and never fully retracted or renounced his publicly-stated views.

    Was this a temporary career compromise – a Heidegger pressured by circumstances, perhaps politically misled?

    Or was it something deeper and more pervasive, something intimately bound up with his philosophy? That is another Heidegger: a thinker of conservative revolution, forging a discourse of romanticism and steel, bound into a vision of regenerated primordial Germanness.

    Whether philosophical or theological, socio-economic or political; none of these figures is totally unambiguous. Many are incompatible, and all are contentious.

    But the most persistent figure is Heidegger as the philosopher of being. What can this mean? Is there any question about being? How could any such question be cast, let alone answered?

    Existence in a World of Things

    Being might seem an innocuous site of inquiry, scarcely likely to upset the usual orders of the world. And it seems strictly philosophical, something rarefied and abstract; a soaring generality, perhaps invented uniquely by and for philosophers.

    Indeed the word being might be so abstract, that meaning drops away from it ...

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