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Title: Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. by Hubert L. Dreyfus ISBN: 0-262-54056-8 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 14 December, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (7 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: not a bad book but........
Comment: it is rather disingenuous on Dreyfus' part to present this as some kind of authoritative interpretation of Heidegger (I fully agree with the negative review below on this), for so much of this book is filled with his own personal polemics against the artificial intelligence community, which are simply irrelevant to an introductory discussion of Heidegger.
And despite Dreyfus' own claims to the contrary it is not at all clear whether Heidegger adequately answers the traditional problems of philosophy, since Heidegger is not at all interested in (unlike Wittgenstein, say) actually engaging with them. Rather his point is closer to just trying to bypass them because they're not the truly important questions in life. I fully agree with such sentiment, in fact. However it is disingenuous to pretend that Heidegger's project is somehow fully continuous with the contemporary philosophical discussions involving holism, anti-realism (and the likes of Donald Davidson, John Searle, Rorty, etc.) and such.
Also Dreyfus has an annoying habit of presenting Heidegger's arguments (against Cartesianism, psychologism, etc.) as somewhat unprecedented in the history of philosophy, for he very well knows antipsychologism in meaning and logic, and repudiation of the primacy of epistemology (in fact, the medievals beat Heidegger to it!!!) are the perennial themes of the 20th Century philosophy.
But Heidegger is not a negligible thinker-in fact he is an extraordinarily powerful writer in terms of phenomenological descriptions, presenting history of the Western philosophy (particularly the Presocratics, who are the REAL philosophical kins of Heidegger-and Wittgenstein) and last but not least, being a cultural critic, which makes discussing his political career all the more (not less) necessary (which "anaytic" readings of Heidegger are prone to avoid).
For truly "introductory" (but stimulating) writings on Heidegger, I think one can do much better by reading the short pieces by people like Thomas Sheehan and Michael Inwood which are much more judicious and sensitive than the faux-rigorous Dreyfus-Charles Taylor-rehashed books like those by Guignon, Polt, etc.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best Available Secondary Source on Heidegger
Comment: Ignore the preceding anomalous review: this is indisputably the best secondary source on Heidegger's early philosophy available in English. It may not be the last word on all points, but it sets the standard for clear and honest philosophical assessment of Heidegger's achievement. Dreyfus is the most important Heidegger scholar in America, one of the most important in the world. His work will continue to inspire generations to come.
Rating: 1
Summary: A highly misleading interpretation of Heidegger
Comment: There's no getting away from Heidegger; most of the intellectual life of the later 20th century is a series of commentaries on or arguments with Being and Time. But the book is almost as difficult as its reputation would have it. Most of us need some help.
Probably the best short summary of its thesis came from Samuel Johnson: "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." But Johnson died about 140 years before the book was published, so he didn't actually get to read it. Those of us born after its publication could use a more detailed guide to Heidegger's dense and unwieldy work. This, unfortunately, isn't it, in spite of Dreyfus's decades of teaching and the testimonials on the back cover from Charles Taylor and other luminaries.
Dreyfus, who teaches at UC Berkeley, reduces Being and Time to a neutral quasi-psychology in which "being-there is doing something it makes sense to do given the public situation, and given already taken-over public for-the-sake-of-whiches." And that's all, folks. Dasein (Heidegger's term for us human folk) and the world are knowable only through everyday public practice, and according to Dreyfus the point of Division I of this two-part work is to show how it's possible to get through one's day without thinking about it and how that provides the only basis for knowledge.
After being criticised for his failure to address Division II, Dreyful admitted that he had "overlooked warnings, scattered about in Division I, that the average intelligibility desribed there would later be shown to be an inferior form of understanding." Well, duh. Those aren't hints; they're screaming tirades. Dreyfus not only undervalues the importance of Division II; he is deaf to the emotional character of the whole work, which conveyed as much by its literary qualities as by its argument.
Although he tossed in a few half-hearted denials that he's doing anything more than ontology, Heidegger clearly loathed the world of everydayness, the inauthentic being of the "they," and he longed for its supercession. "Existential analysis," he said, "has the character of doing violence, whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness." (H 311) In retrospect it's clear how this position led to his embrace of Hitler--not that one can read Nazi ideology off from the book, but because its hopes and fears were just those played on so expertly by the Nazis. Heidegger saw Hitler as the truly authentic man who could be the conscience of the nation. (He tried to cast himself in a similar role at Freiburg, with results that would be comical if anything about that time could appear humorous.)
But one doesn't need literary sensitivity to see what's wrong with Dreyfus's Heidegger. Why would young German intellectuals have flocked to his lectures if he were simply showing them that everyday skills were the be-all and end-all? It's simply impossible to imagine this spectacled epistemologist as "the secret king of philosophy," the charismatic magus who captivated the young Hannah Arendt in presenting "the thinking that springs as a passion."
Dreyfus's book contains a long Appendix on Kierkegaard, authenticity, and Division II; but its conclusions are just as bathetically deflationary as the main text. Here, too, Heidegger comes across as a multiculturalist liberal. Authenticity is supposed to make available a salad-bar of "marginal practices," a phrase which appears nowhere in Being and Time and which is not supported by the citations adduced. Instead of a stoic and joyful acceptance of one's fate--one of the themes that leads Heidegger to Nietzsche--Dreyfus sees merely a free choice of commitment from the social resources available and a concomitant choice of a role model like Jesus or Florence Nighingale.
And Dreyfus knew Heidegger. No doubt the sage listened politely to whatever he had to say and took it as further proof that Americans had no culture.
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Title: Tree of Knowledge by Humberto R. Maturana ISBN: 0877736421 Publisher: Shambhala Pub. Date: 31 March, 1992 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Being and Time by Martin Heidegger ISBN: 0060638508 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 01 August, 1962 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time by Michael Gelven ISBN: 0875805442 Publisher: Northern Illinois Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Martin Heidegger by George Steiner ISBN: 0226772322 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: July, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time by Magda King, John Llewellyn, John Llewelyn ISBN: 0791448002 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: February, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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