Existentialism
Introduction
[…] Heidegger’s philosophical significance will have to rest on his publications. There is no way of getting around these. Few, if any, second-hand accounts can pave the way to them. Almost all of those now available in English are marred by the mere fact that they are found in the misleading context of accounts of existentialism, which Heidegger repudiates. Most of them fail to realize the development in Heidegger’s thinking. And they are even less adequate as introductions to the phenomenological aspects of Heidegger’s work. Thus the challenging problem of providing a real introduction to Heidegger’s thinking remains unsolved to this hour. In stating this I do not mean to imply that it can be solved, especially at this stage when important evidence is still missing. Yet the attempt ought to be made, if only for the sake of better relations between the main philosophical currents of our time. (Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction. Second edition. Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague/Boston/London, 1978; p. 274.)
The aim of this book is to present the main ideas of Being and Time, Heidegger’s most important philosophical work, in a clear and accessible manner. In so doing, the book also strives to correct certain fundamental misconceptions of Heidegger’s thought, including the mischaracterization of Heidegger as an “existentialist.”
No one could plausibly deny that Being and Time is a dense and difficult philosophical treatise. Its stylistic flaws, even in the original German, are too obvious to excuse. Nevertheless it is equally undeniable that Being and Time is an original, systematic, and epochmaking philosophical work. Without a doubt it was one of the most influential books of the 20th century, and its influence on contemporary thought is continuing and pervasive. I think it is fair to say that on the whole Heidegger’s own stylistic excesses, as well as those of his imitators and, I fear, also of his detractors, have tended to produce a nimbus of unintelligibility surrounding what Heidegger actually believed and thought.
The present exposition is devoted to making the conceptual underpinnings of Being and Time transparent in order that its philosophical significance may be better understood. The title of this book, Rephrasing Heidegger, was chosen in order to emphasize this point. While a certain amount of technical terminology is indispensable to any intellectual work, there are ways of minimizing the burden placed upon the reader’s good will. For the sake of intellectual honesty, I have made concessions that Heidegger himself—it must be emphasized—was not prepared to make. An author, like an educator, has an ethical obligation to the audience to be clear and comprehensible. Whether Heidegger’s rejection of this obligation can be philosophically justified is a question that I myself have answered in the negative.
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Rephrasing Heidegger is addressed primarily to students, both graduate and undergraduate, encountering Heidegger for the first time, as well as to anyone who is in need of a solid acquaintance with Heidegger’s philosophical thought. It is also hoped that the book will be useful as a textbook or companion to seminars on Heidegger, since it was written to fulfill that function for my own seminars.
