Being and Time

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1. lmf4lolJun 2026
   Not OP, but I have read Being and Time on and off over the years, and every time, I am blown away how precise Heidegger describes things and the being of things. Granted, I am German, so I can directly read the source without needing a translator. That might change things.

   Regardless, I think Heidegger gave one of the fullest metaphysic-free accounts of the human experience and what Being is. And he starts from scratch. You essentially can read him without having to first study the whole western continental philosophy and he will construct the whole system by himself. Tremendous work

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2. lmf4lolJun 2026
   i didnt say that at all :-)

   Heidegger uses very specific German words to build a very specific vocabulary. This vocabulary then allows him to express very complicated sentiments very quickly and he can use this to express more and more complex structures.

   Obviously this requires the reader to first learn the vocabulary and - granted - that is hard and challenging. I have a notebook here , which I consult and modify evertine i dive into Being and Time. But as I said. It keeps on giving. I often try to convey arguments and descriptions to others without falling back into Heideggers jargon, and its sometimes very hard and requires a lot of bloating . So you can argue that it was even necessary for him to invent the vocabulary, because otherwise the book would have been 10x in size

   Your comment strikes me as a bit ignorant i must say. You accuse the work of being non-sensical word play but you’ve obviously not invested any time in learning the vocabulary. Because otherwise you wouldnt have made that comment. Id suggest to give it a chance. Its a wonderful piece of work and mind blowing in its own way. That a single mind can think something like that up. I’d argue its on the level of Hegel in terms of system building.

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3. ForOldHackJan 2025
   I could not disagree more. There are 1000s of examples of people becoming better people after forgetting. See "Regarding Henry" and Heidegger "Being and time."
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4. 6AA4FDAug 2021
   With regards to Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida— each in their own way, they hold off philosophical decision. Lacan stylistically (he sucks, but is pretty structural and emphatic about his registers, sexual distinctions, mirror stage, etc) and Heidegger and Lacan through their interrelated development of the problematic of closure and archi-writing, right? But Heidegger doesn't consign himself to closure, he very emphatically sees a way out in death, the condition of possibility for the authenticity of being. Derrida does not take a way out, but also does not write or reason arbitrarily, his process rests on the simultaneous articulation of a straightforward and historically oriented commentary, and a counterpoint exposed through the repetition of the language of the commentary back at itself until underlying confusions are revealed. This is the basic knowledge I assume you have after 10 years. If you are not familiar, I recommend Simon Critchley's 'Black Socrates', and 'The Ethics of Deconstruction' in addition to the Seminars, Being and Time, and Violence and Metaphysics obviously.

   The way it reckons with your question, is that these points of tension, even when they are not fully resolved, allow us to come to a place of improved understanding about the systematic and historical functionality of the language and culture that produced them. This is really nothing new: we do not need to come to the same conclusion about any other subject, anthropological, historical, even hard-scientific, to deploy our provisional understanding. A concrete example of this is talking about moral reasoning- considering similarly non-philosophical work by Levinas, I have come to the conclusion that many of the ethical dilemmas I struggle with in my health care work are not neatly decidable, and are frequently more a question of how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice for my clients... or how much I can hold back for myself in good conscience, rather than a logically and arithmetically guaranteed minimum or maximum fair ratio. This is why deconstruction + pragmatism is such an interesting subject for people like Brandom and Rorty, I imagine.

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5. thebooktocomeFeb 2021
   Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and Time is really good.

   The problem is laypeople expect to be able to understand advanced philosophy without knowing anything about the history that led to this point.

   Nobody complains about, e.g., Weinberg's textbook on QFT being unreadable. I think this is primarily because Weinberg is basically unknown to people who haven't had 4+ years of physics education.

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6. richardjdareSep 2019
   If you want to get a handle on Heidegger, I recommend working through Being and Time while listening to Prof Hubert Dreyfus's UC Berkeley lecture series, 'Philosophy 185 - Heidegger'. I heard them on ITunes U long ago, but they are also available on archive.org [0].

   Dreyfus wrote a critique of AI, "What Computers Can't Do" in the 70s, and talks a bit about a Heideggerian approach to AI in his lectures which may be of interest to a few people here.

   [0] https://archive.org/details/Philosophy_185_Fall_2007_UC_Berk...

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