An Introduction to Metaphysics

...don't begin reading Heidegger without having read anyone relative to him. If you just happened to hear come cliche regarding Heidegger in idle-talk and wanted to learn more by just picking him up then you will be lost. First read some Plato [The Symposium, Phaedrus, and the Republic are all fine], seek out Allan Bloom who is a phenomenal multifaceted mind, acquaint yourself with Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Derrida [specifically his essays "Differance" and "Signature Event Context"]. Then you will be well primed. In having done the previous I had wanted to read Being and Time but instead came here for an introduction given that books' notorious reputation, but I found much more than a mere "introduction". I read this book in June of this year so this review may seem a bit glossed but its not as if we can truly capture any ounce of Heidegger's thought within these confinements. The book begins with an essay titled "The Fundamental Question". Overall this essay is a wonderful epitome of Heidegger with its question "Why are there beings rather than nothing?". Heidegger thinks through this question with the intellectual rigor that only a true genius could supply. There is an introduction of "Being"--in the VERBAL sense. An exploration of Being in relation to the "essent". Essent basically means thing but the translator supplies a wonderful characterization of the word. In English, the word "thing" is mutually confined to physicality; physical things in the world like a toothbrush or a pencil which is a thing I need when taking an exam. Essent transcends physicality and "represents" the non-physical as well; ideas, feelings, passions and even that which is not immediately interpretable to "Dasein". Heidegger states that a chemical combustion on Mars IS just as much as an elephant within an Indian jungle IS. Consequentially this translation strikes me as a fine accomplishment. The point of his asking towards essents and their Being is to re-open the question of Being itself; to revitalize its dissipated gravity. We may wonder why we are here but Heidegger is concerned with what it means to-be here in the first place and trust me he expounds this question with an intellectual virtuosity that at times arrested my mind into debilitation, not because he is too obscure but because Heidegger is entirely too clear. What becomes clarified can be disturbing. "On the Grammar and Etymology of the Word "Being". Basically, this 22 page essay is a lucid exemplification of Being's etymological history and various denotations in German, Latin and most importantly for Heidegger, Greek. The German is of course translated into English so we English are forbidden from natively--and therefore truly--grasping the German knowledge--and consequentially the full effect of Heidegger--of Being. Translations by virtue of what they are-are irreducibly cosmopolitan. None the less, in this chapter Heidegger vividly exemplifies how Latin translations of Greek began

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" (1) Martin Heidegger, the most poetic and controversial philosopher of the 20th century, cuts straight to the heart of the matter with this very question. The heart of metaphysics is its very ability to question the extra-ordinary - a questioning that is entirely impractical, for "You can't do anything with philosophy" (13). Philosophy as questioning means being in a way that is fundamentally cut off from the technological and scientific tendency towards instrumentalization that has been so endemic in the modern world. This questioning points to the fact that it is in language that we are made and in language the we come to be; in language we come to Being. But, what does it mean to be? This is an ancient question, but it is a question that during the modern era has been entirely lost from the realm of the philosophical. In an almost religious manner, Heidegger claims that we have quite literally "fallen" from the ancient Greeks, who were able to ask that question with all its force and come to recognize in that question a raw reality: truth is about revealing or "unfolding". This "unfolding" that truth *is* should be spoken of as light. Human-Being, then, is a coming into the light that the question of Being is. One can easily become lost in Heidegger's dense, poetic prose. Yet, as one reads what he has to write about language and how we find ourselves *in* it, one begins to suspect that the sheer elegance of his writing is intentional: its goal is to wake us from our modern slumber and get around to asking that fundamental question again. Otherwise we risk falling into the insanity of nihilism that Nietzsche (whom Heidegger engages throughout the work) noted: seeking beings in the oblivion of Being (217). In this question of Being, however, Heidegger wishes to inscribe the historical becoming of humanity as essential our own being. In this work, the historical becoming of a people - their Dasein or "being-there" - points briefly to what Heidegger calls the greatness of National Socialism: the meeting of the human and the technological. Heidegger's brief involvement with the Nazi party in the early 1930s, when these lectures were originally delivered, has haunted his legacy ever since. The Nazis appeared in the early 1930s to give a promise of destiny to the devastated German people and Heidegger, for a time, bought into it. For some, this taints all of Heidegger's insights about the nature of human becoming as it asks the question of Being; I do not. At the very least, Heidegger's praise for the party early on certainly points to the compelling and potentially seductive nature of the promise of historical becoming as one's being. Heidegger is often criticized for being elliptical in his writing, but this criticism is superficial. Heidegger is as much a poet as anything else, and reading him means less reading word for word what he has written and more a simple listening for t

What a great book. I may of read about 4 to 5 Martin Heidegger books & this book flowed because it was more easy to read. Well, the first part of the book was easy, got a little lost in the "Being As Thinking" section. Heidegger's philosophy, minus the so-called "Certain Influences", helped me give up my Platonic ways of thinking. Heidegger starts off trying to ask the most basic axiom "Why are there BEINGs at all instead of Nothing" goes through a brief history of the main words, tears the words & main question apart, & puts the words & question back together again in a more "Primate", "Basic", or "Historical" understanding. Then he explains how BEING turns into BECOMING (how things change), APPEARANCE (how things influence our senses), THINKING (How & what we think about our experience), & the OUGHT (The way things "Should" or "Could" BE). Basic conclusion: Western Philosophy started out correct with the pre-Platonic philosophers asking what BEING was & then after Plato the debate became about mind over matter while losing the original meaning & questions about BEING (Reality). A Must Read!

This translation is a long overdue revisitation of the first of Heidegger's books to appesar in an English version. This short book is an excellent introduction to Heidegger's thought in the 30s. The 30s were his most "Nietzschean" period, and also his most controversial period, because of his support at the time for the Nazi party. The 30s also acquired something of a legendary status among Heidegger scholars because it was then that he was working on his "Contributions to Philosophy". Otto Poeggeler (privileged with access to Heidegger's manuscripts) had been saying for years that the "Beitraege" was Heidegger's most important work, which made many people naturally curious about this work. When it finally appeared (in 1989, an English translation appeared in 2000) it proved to be as daunting a text as "Being and Time". The "Introduction to Metaphysics" dates from the same time, and could well be thought of as a companion piece to the much more challenging "Contributions to Philosophy."