Invitation to Being | Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale Nota Bene)

The Easiest to Read & Most Interesting Heidegger Book | Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale Nota Bene) | Martin Heidegger

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	• Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale Nota Bene) Martin Heidegger Yale University Press, 2000 - 294 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A lucid discussion of 'being'

First let me set the expectation right because the title lends itself to expectations quite varied from the intent and purpose of the book. This book pertains to ontology rather than metaphysics in a wider sense. (Ontology is regarded as one of the branches or subjects of inquiry comprising metaphysics).

And this is in no way a textbook on metaphysics or an introduction to the subject of metaphysics (I picked it up when I did not know who Heidegger was and wanted a quick introduction to 'metaphysics' about which I was hazy then. But I ended up loving this book for a different reason).

This however does not discount the value of the book. The book asks and seeks to answer the question 'Why are there beings rather than nothing?' (in the older transaltion -- beings = essents). It then moves on to the questions like what is Being, what is the meaning of Being, what are the limits of Being, what are the etymological origins of Being (not the etymology of the word, but of the concept - including Greek and Latin equivalents) etc.

The book explains the sense of 'limitedness' latent in the concept of Being through etymological connections with terms like polis, for example.

In the last chapter, Heidegger dileneates Being from its four boundary conditions - thinking (as contrasted with existing), becoming (changing into another being), appearance (being as perceived by another being) and ought (abstract goal for being).

This book clarifies many essential concepts like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph by delineating them from a lot of muddle that has been written about them by many other philosophers. If there were to be an alternative title for this book,'The Concept of Being' captures it best.

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Invitation to Being

"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 the question of Being.

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The Easiest to Read & Most Interesting Heidegger Book

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!

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...whatever you say, Martin...

This book is interesting, but also frustrating. On one hand, Heidegger offers some fascinating reflections on the preSocratic philosphers' doctrines, with quite profound and highly original insights. His questioning of being is penetrating, and certainly gives food for thought. But on the other hand, it lacks clarity, just as most of Heidegger's work I have encountered. Surely a philosopher should, yes, seek depth in his thought, but not at the expense of basic clarity. Furthermore, his criticisms of previous Western reflection on being smack of intellectual arrogance (sorry Martin!). I mean, he seems to expect us to accept that everyone since Plato was wandering around blindfolded until he (Mr Heidegger) came along to tear the wool from our eyes and bring us face to face once more with the question of being. And on what grounds does he ask us to accept this? A few (dodgy) etymological derrivations! This is, to be generous, a somewhat biased reading of philosophical history. If Heidegger really was the future of metaphysics (as he thought he was) I would have taken up crochet long ago (or something else equally un-philosophical). But happily, he is not. So do I recommend this book? Yes and no. Undoubtedly, it raises interesting questions and it is a good way into Heidegger's philosophy. But as an attempted answer, or even a proposed approach, to the question of being, it is deeply unsatisfactory.

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great translation

The translators have used an excellent editorial apparatus for this text. I can see how it would be a great starting place for studying Heidegger, but without knowledge of German and ancient Greek it seems like it would be hard to understand some of his arguments, if not most of his wordplay. Heidegger has a certain romantic charm, with his quest to get back to the originary. However, one can get a sense of how wild his line of thinking is when you look at his translations of ancient Greek passages ... they are very bizarre (as he himself acknowledges). His entire project of studying being, and in this text, his focus on such grammatical elements as the copula, from which he unearths insights (supposedly) receives an excellent critique by Theodor Adorno in Part II of Negative Dialectics. Heidegger makes an excellent priest or priestly philosopher, but beyond that the value of his work is open to questioning, if not criticism. The way he takes a few statements that a reader can sympathize with and then attempts to draw rather ridiculous conclusions and how he leaps from analysis to a supposed conclusion should not be accepted without some critical scrutiny. He seems very much to be delivering sermons, not lectures.

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