To read Heidegger

To read Heidegger is to set out on an adventure – intriguing, challenging, and often baffling the reader – the words of Heidegger call him always to abandon all superficial scanning and to enter wholeheartedly into the serious pursuit of thinking.

Every philosopher demands to be read in his own terms. This is especially true of Heidegger. One must not come to him with ready-made labels, although these are very often given. Thus Heidegger is not an ‘existentialist’. He is not concerned centrally or exclusively with man. Rather he is centrally concerned with the relation between man and Being, with man as the openness to which and in which Being presences and is known. Heidegger is not a ‘determinist’. He does not believe that man’s actions are completely controlled by forces outside him or that man has no effective freedom. To Heidegger man’s life does indeed lie under a destining sent from out of Being. But to him that destining can itself call forth a self-orienting response of man that is real and is a true expression of human freedom. Again, Heidegger is not a ‘mystic’. He does not describe or advocate the experiencing of any sort of oneness with an absolute or infinite. For him both man and Being are finite, and their relationship never dissolves in sheer oneness. Hence absolute, infinite, or the One can appear to him only as abstractions of man’s thinking, and not as realities of essential power.

Heidegger is not a ‘primitive’ or a ‘romantic’. He is not one who seeks escape from the burdens and responsibilities of contemporary life into serenity, either through the re-creating of some idyllic past or through the exalting of some simple experience. Finally, Heidegger is not a foe of technology and science. He neither disdains nor rejects them as though they were only destructive of human life.

The roots of Heidegger’s thinking lie deep in the Western philosophical tradition. Yet that thinking is unique in many of its aspects, in its language and in its literary expression. In the development of his thought Heidegger has been taught chiefly by the Greeks, by German idealism, by phenomenology, and by the scholastic theological tradition. These and other elements have been fused by his genius of sensitivity and intellect into very individual philosophical expression.

[William Lovitt]