Martin Heidegger

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to be introduced to the work of Martin Heidegger. It is eloquently written, has clarity in its expression, and is approachable by the reader who has not read philosophy systematically. In addition, Steiner addresses in a remarkable way Heidegger's relationship with Nazism, and his "silence" after the Second World War. Overall, it is not an easy read, but the best way to get introduced to Heidegger's work.

There are many very intelligent and careful studies on Heidegger's work that approach his lifetime question on Being from different angles and perspectives. Steiner seems to have understood Heidegger by sort of getting under his skin, lucid, inmersed in his thought he articulates the notion of Being clearly, even artistically, this is the turning point to understanding Heidegger, suddenly his difficult expressions come to life on a higher perspective, if you have been troubled by the lack of understanding on the Notion of Being in Heidegger, in this book somewhere within those pages you may get the insight, ah, eureka.

Steiner wrote with in an exceptioanlly clear style. This is the single best, most approachable and even-handed introduction to the intriguing thought of Heidegger. Part biographical, part historical, part critical. Lucidity is the key term here. Any serious aspiring student of philosophy would be hard-pressed to find better. Steiner doesn't bash H. (as i tend to do), not does he curl up to him in a servile and byzantine gesture of soulless academic praise 9and there is tons of that out there). I can't say enough. I'd also recommend his excellent rumination on the history of Tragedy: "The Death of Tragedy."

MARTIN HEIDEGGER. By George Steiner. 173 pp. University of Chicago Press edition, 1987 (1978). ISBN 0-226-77232-2 (pbk.)The presence of Heidegger is so insistent that sooner or later we want to find out more about this controversial figure. But where to start? His most famous work, 'Being and Time,' is notoriously unapproachable by the unprepared, but where can we find a really good Introduction to the man and his main ideas? After tackling several well-known Introductory studies, and quickly abandoning them as just too dry and boring, I finally discovered George Steiner's short study. What a joy it was to read Steiner! I'm one of those compulsive scribblers who always read pencil in hand, ready to annotate significant and memorable passages to make sure I'll be able to find them when I want to return and re-read them, and after a single reading pretty well every page was marked. Steiner has a beautifully lucid style, and he writes with real passion. After a 28-page Introduction, 'Heidegger: In 1991,' and an 'In Place of a Foreword,' three Chapters follow : 1. 'Some Basic Terms;' 2. 'Being and Time;' 3. 'The Presence of Heidegger.' The book is rounded out with a Biographical Note, a useful Short Bibliography, and an Index.Steiner throughout shows great skill in actually making us feel the movements of Heidegger's thought as it flows along totally unexpected and amazing paths, and one is left wondering what heights Western thought might have risen to if it had stayed true to its original impulse. It would seem that, for Heidegger, thought was not mere ratiocination, but something more akin to devotion, a devotion we come to share.Here are a few lines from the book : "We are trying "to listen to the voice of Being"" (p.32); "Art is not, as in Plato and Cartesian realism, an imitation of the real. It is the more real" (p.136); "Creation _should be_ custody; a human construction _should be_ the elicitation and housing of the great springs of being" (p.136); "Man has labored and thought not with but against the grain of things. He has not given lodging to the forces and creatures of the natural world but made them homeless" (p.136); "... the Heideggerian asker lays himself open to that which is being questioned and becomes ... the permeable space of its disclosure" (p.55); "The earth, says Heidegger, must once again be made a _Spielraum_, literally, a space in which to play" (p.149). These are truly luminous thoughts, and the book is full of them.I'm not sure what specialists may think of this book, but as a non-specialist I found it a very exciting book to read, and one that left me eager to know more. Steiner's study strikes me as what must be one of the best possible introductions to Heidegger for the ordinary reader.

Prof. Steiner's beautiful and precise prose clarifies the fundamental aspects of Heidegger's philosophy. Compared with similar introductions to the philosopher, Steiner's is particularly insightful and a pleasure to read by itself: the work is full of "sentences that arrest the spirit".