Where to start with Heidegger?

[Anonymous No.22711770]

What’s the best introduction to Heidegger. Is it absolutely necessary to read his main influences before attempting to understand him? Do you have any good secondary literature to recommend as a supplement?

[Anonymous No.22711791]

>>22711770
Start with Husserl.
Which is to say, start with Brentano.

[Anonymous No.22711794]

Hubert Dreyfus' course on archive.org, following along with the syllabus if you can find it

>>22711791
I wouldn't recommend this, it's actually easier to get Husserl once you get Heidegger. Heidegger himself didn't get Husserl for like a decade.

[Anonymous No.22711817]

>>22711770
Bare minimum for influences, read Kant's Critique of Pure reason, have a working understanding of Nietzsche, and read Descartes' Meditations. It would be good to also have a basic grasp of Plato and Aristotle. Helpful but not necessary to have some knowledge of Husserl. This anon: >>22711794
is actually correct, Husserl is easier via Heidegger than vice versa.

For Heidegger, its easy enough, just start Being and Time. As the other anon said, Dreyfus is a flawed reader but an ideal intro interpreter, Being-in-the-World is a classic book for a reason.

[Anonymous No.22711859]

Pretty sure Heidegger said to read Aristotle for 15 years before you read him. It’s probably a joke, but it is funny because I think Heidegger is a dead end so you’d be spending 15 years walking into a wall. A great contextualixer for Heidegger is Leo Strauss.

[Anonymous No.22711868]

>>22711859
Heidegger is quite literally the end boss of Western philosophy, at least in terms of where he situates himself meta-philosophically. Even Hegel might be worse off. Heidegger is only a dead end in the sense that there's nobody who goes further than him. Once you get Heidegger, the only way out is through original insight or giving up completely.

[Anonymous No.22711872]

>>22711868
He’s only the end boss in the sense that represents the death of Western philosophical thinking. He’s a dead end. So either he was wrong or you philosophy unravels and you can’t do it anymore after him.

[Anonymous No.22711873]

>>22711817
I was hoping you weren’t going to say Kant. Does this mean I need to read Hume, Locke, and Spinoza to read Kant to read Heidegger?

[Anonymous No.22711876]

>>22711868
Just read this
https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/existentialism/

Strauss is right about Heidegger. His project was a failure.

[Anonymous No.22711877]

>>22711859
I have mixed feelings about Strauss and the Straussian school but he is on my list.

[Anonymous No.22711897]

>>22711877
I don’t really like Strauss but he was right about existentialism and Heidegger’s failure to escape Aristotelian rationalism, which is not possible anyway. Heidegger implicitly admitted this when he said only a God can save us. He philosophy had failed and couldn’t go any further. He just didn’t know what kind of god he was talking about, but Strauss did.

[Anonymous No.22711920]

>>22711897
Seems like Zen is the way out to me. But this is just a hunch.

[Anonymous No.22711931]

>>22711920
I think Eastern philosophies are all BS, especially Buddhism, which was not really ever possible for us anyway unless we just delude ourselves. The mainstream religiosity/philosophy will never be Zen or any other sort of Eastenr philosophy.

[Anonymous No.22711932]

>>22711873
No, Kant is pretty original, he of course is writing in response to those thinkers, but his writing is mostly just focused on the actual problems themselves.

[Anonymous No.22711961]

>>22711931
I am not really concerned with the mainstream but I like the idea of direct unmediated insight into reality presented in Zen.

>>22711932
Okay that’s good to know maybe I will read Kant first. I already have a passable understanding of Nietzsche and the Greeks.

[Anonymous No.22711978]

>>22711961
You may like it. That doesn’t make it a tenable view or give it effective power, which is really what we need. Something more like the odyssey that Eugene Dennis Rose went through is going to become normal, and it might go through Zen but won’t stop at Zen, or Buddhism.

[Anonymous No.22711989]

Start with the lectures. He talks like a normal fucker in them. Prior context can be helpful, or you can learn as you go, just look at his footnotes. Kant is helpful but Kant is intimidating to newfags. Beware of opinionated pseuds in these threads. Heidegger is chill and rolls nicely into Deleuze, Virillio, Derrida and all the other French fags. Heidegger is like the gatekeeper to the cool kids club house of meaningless jargon, like in museums and architecture.

[Anonymous No.22712000]

>>22711978
Hmm sounds like you’re a bit of a Christian dogmatist which would explain the hostility to Buddhism. I have never read Rose or Thomas Merton but I want to at some point. I appreciate talking to you by the way but I am not convinced by Christianity as it currently exists.

[Anonymous No.22712012]

>>22711989
I just want to find a new way to approach existence outside of the materialist rationalist enlightenment paradigm. I really liked the ideas I saw of Heidegger taking about poetic reality and the nature of technology and how it messes with the way we perceive the world. The ideas of standing reserve and being at hand. I think he goes really well with Jacques Elul’s idea of technique.

[Anonymous No.22712032]

>>22711897
>>22711876
Strauss' "solution" to the thoughts of Heidegger and others he spoke on doesn't deserve the time of day. We may as well listen to a priest, imam, or rabbi because what Strauss proposes is no less than a blanket acceptance of revelation as a basis for knowledge, politics, ethics, etc.

[Anonymous No.22712043]

>>22712032
What do you think about seeking new revelation through mysticism or other methods combined with philosophical inquiry? Is there any possibility of a new religion/philosophy this way that could be acceptable philosophically?

[Anonymous No.22712068]

>>22712000
I just basically think Buddhism is wrong but my view on this topic is that it wouldn’t matter if I were or were not Christian because our culture is essentially a sort of Christian and we’ve never really been able to be otherwise. That’s one of the points that Strauss makes in regard to Heidegger and existentialism. Rose interests me because his story is basically exactly that of the extremely post-modern homosexual California cosmopolitan who went through Eastern philosophy but ended up in Christianity. My sense is that in regard to the mainstream all roads lead us back to somewhere that looks a lot like where we started and it could never be otherwise. I’m not trying to convince you to be a Christian. I’m just stating that I suspect that you’ll end up there one way or another.

[Anonymous No.22712070]

>>22712032
Strauss never proposed a solution so you’ve outed yourself as a non-reader pseud, but sure, talking to a priest, rabbi, or imam would make a lot of sense once you concluded that philosophy is at a dead end.

[Anonymous No.22712076]

>>22712043
No. And that’s exactly why Heidegger was a failed project. His god that can save us is precisely a historically Western god. Religious can be made a new but gods can’t.

[Anonymous No.22712100]

>>22711872
>or you philosophy unravels and you can’t do it anymore after him.
Philosophizing doesn't mean innovating. If Heidegger could philosophize, love wisdom, for all of his life then so can his followers.

[Anonymous No.22712134]

>>22712100
For Heidegger, it meant innovating. He tried to do something very specific with his philosophy and in the context of western thought it was novel. It just wasn’t successful. .

[Anonymous No.22712171]

Honestly just go for Being and Time if you have a basic grasp of Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. It's hard, but it's not hard in the same way as like, Hegel is in that the way the ideas are articulated won't make sense unless you're familiar with arguments other philosophers already made. If you can understand what he's talking about in the first two chapters with the ontological distinction I think you can understand the rest.
A big part of the challenge of Heidegger is just being patient. It takes him a lot of time to unravel what central terminology like dasein means. The definition of "the being for whom its being is an issue" is provisional in the sense someone who hasn't read the full book would understand it. I think that's because when it comes to ontological matters relating to dasein, Heidegger rejects the Aristotelian distinction between knowing that something is an knowing what it is. So you don't even know what he's referring to until he's done with the description of what it is.
If you can get through the first two chapters, you can get through the third chapter, the worldhood of the world. And my experience is that the introduction and first two chapters are too indefinite to understand what the book is really about from them alone. After you read chapter three, I think everything else falls a lot more readily into place.

[Anonymous No.22712233]

>>22712070
I mean "solution" in the sense of the possibility and future of philosophy in light of the questions raised by Heidegger. Strauss was like Heidegger in believing that reason on its own was not only insufficient to answer the questions philosophy sets out to answer, but that, left unchecked, it destroyed the tradition as it was understood to the extent that new approaches were necessary, going all the way back to the ancients. Heidegger's positive attempt at this was attacked by Strauss' basically negative attempt which is mostly a lifelong discussion about possible ways forward, and I'd call it pretty disingenuous to assert that revelation didn't play one of the foremost roles in that discussion for Strauss.

>Revelation is always so uncertain to unassisted reason that it can never compel the assent of unassisted reason, and man is so built that he can find his satisfaction, his bliss, in free investigation, in articulating the riddle of being. But, on the other hand, he yearns so much for a solution of that riddle and human knowledge is always so limited that the need for divine illumination cannot be denied and the possibility of revelation cannot be refuted. Now it is the state of things that seems to decide irrevocably against philosophy and in favor of revelation. Philosophy has to grant that revelation is possible. [...] Philosophy, the life devoted to the quest for evident knowledge available to man as man, would itself rest on an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision. This would merely confirm the thesis of faith, that there is no possibility of consistency, of a consistent and thoroughly sincere life, without belief in revelation. The mere fact that philosophy and revelation cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of philosophy by revelation.

[Anonymous No.22712288]

>>22711961
You don't need to read Hume, Locke, and Spinoza, but any serious attempt at Kant requires reading of some introductory lecture notes or secondary literature just to get your head around his terminology and what he is even trying to achieve. After that it reads quite smoothly

[Anonymous No.22712312]

>>22712233
I didn’t say anything about revelation. I only said that Strauss didn’t offer a solution in any positive sense, which you more or less said yourself. Only alluded to a general sense of direction given his critique of Heidegger. It’s not like he said “oh hey here’s this new philosophy per revelation”. He said “hey without something like revelation you’re fucked”.

[Anonymous No.22712437]

>>22712068
I gotcha it’s very possible I will end up Christian but i still have problems with Christianity’s claim to exclusive truth and the idea that non Christians are damned.

>>22712076

If it’s true that we can’t neither revive Christianity nor adopt a new religion then it means Western Culture is doomed. I think it might still be possible but it’s small chance.

[Anonymous No.22712487]

>>22712288
Do you have any recommendations in particular. I am sure I can find something but you seem to know your stuff.

[Anonymous No.22712538]

I have a question about Heidegger. Strauss said of Heidegger's thought that it left no room for political philosophy. I take this to mean, roughly, that it left no place for criticism, questioning, or reflection of the political and social actions of the historically placed Dasein; maybe Heidegger's participation in and support for national socialism as it manifested in Germany can be understood as a natural consequence of this. This so far is all well and good, but does it not overreach when this is supposed then to be some sort of fatal flaw in light of the actions of the German state at that time? Criticism of, for example (and to be inflammatory), the Holocaust and the tyranny of Hitler's Germany universally entail a moral condemnation, but isn't that moral condemnation from the likes of people like Strauss and others with an understanding of his theologico-political contradiction of modernity (who I believe to be an increasingly large group today) itself coming from a place of ignorance of that contradiction, by appealing to some sort of universal moral code?

This might be made fairly clear to Strauss and those that subscribe to him by the gall of Athenians in the siege of Melos during the Peloponnesian War, and the complete lack of interest in expressing moral condemnation towards it. Maybe the compulsion to show this sort of outrage at an event like the Holocaust, etc, points to some sort of as-of-yet unknowable aspect of human nature or general truth, but isn't it just more likely that it is a merely a holdout of centuries of the imposition of Christian values over European thought?

[Anonymous No.22712732]

>>22711873
I would say
essential Plato<essential Aristotle<summary of Hume<Kant CoPR<Heidegger

[Anonymous No.22712935]

>>22712732
Maybe I’ll will but being and time and if I don’t get it go back and brush up on my Greeks.

[Anonymous No.22713102]

>>22711770
with schlegel.

[Anonymous No.22713294]

>>22711989
>Deleuze, Virillio, Derrida
Those guys are turbofags; now I don't want to read him :(

[Anonymous No.22713327]

>>22711897
I'm not a Straussian at all but his essay on The Concept of the Political (it's included as an afterwards to the book at least in English editions) is the best explanations of a text I've ever read, the book completely opened up after I read it. He's a deeply perceptive reader.

[Anonymous No.22713719]

>>22713327
I will check it out.