Publisher's Synopsis
The collection I propose is designed as a volume for Blackwell's new "Guides to Great Works" series. Although (or perhaps because) there is an enormous secondary literature on Heidegger's Being and Time [BT], there is a clear need for a collection of fresh and original essays about this work that reflects the basic ideas of this series.
Most currently available collections on BT, as well as the recently published single-author guidebooks, tend to display one of two features that the proposed Blackwell volume will avoid. In quick and dirty summary: On the one hand, some writers approach Heidegger already so strongly influenced by their own philosophical outlook and interests that Heidegger's project in BT (and thus also the purpose of its treatment of such famous topics as practical vs. theoretical understanding, care, death, time, and historicity) disappears from view. On the other hand, some commentators are so intent on staying faithful to Heidegger's own concerns that their analyses never stray very far from summary, paraphrase, and conservative extension of the master's pronouncements. The first approach, at best, succeeds in showing how Heidegger can be made to contribute to other philosophical projects (e.g., analytic epistemology/metaphysics, deconstruction, critical social theory, or existential therapy). The second approach, at best, succeeds in showing that the first approach, by appropriating Heidegger for other uses, retains features of precisely the traditional philosophical outlook that BT identifies at the very beginning as the primary obstacle to its project of "raising again the question of the meaning of being."
Of course, this classification of Heidegger collections and commentaries is selective and lacking in nuance. It does, however, highlight what seems most needed and least provided, especially for students and non-experts--namely, accounts that both clearly set forth what Heidegger says but also explain what he is actually doing. First, Heidegger must be made to speak English. If this means one must sometimes employ concepts whose normal or traditional philosophical sense might be quite un-Heideggerian (e.g., theory, practice, essence, existence, justification, object, even "concept" itself), this might be a strong reason to provide an account of the problem; but it is not a proper excuse for creating neologisms or settling for Germlish. Second, however, to understand (as opposed to merely appropriate) what Heidegger says, one must also have a clear account of his purposes in BT. In general, one must take seriously the idea that BT is the product of a "hermeneutic phenomenology." In other words, at any given point, Heidegger has some phenomenon in mind that he wishes to describe and analyze, but that he sees must be interpreted against a prevailing outlook or opinion which distorts, occludes, or otherwise obscures it. Thus, to take an example, regarding the question of our own "being," it is not wrong to ask what is "essential" about human "life"; but it is mistaken to assume that this must mean we are looking for the primary properties of a substance, or that life is mostly what the sciences tell us it is. And one more example: Regarding the special kind of categories (the so-called "existentials") in terms of which Heidegger articulates the question of our being, it is not wrong to utilize concepts that abstract and generalize; but it is mistaken to assume that language always works best this way, or that conceptualization of this sort is the only way to be rational.
Really useful accounts of this kind, however, will do still more that just describe in good English what Heidegger says and explain what he intends to accomplish. They will also be accounts with a critical edge--which can involve any one of several strategies.
- It can, of course, mean that a commentator engages in immanent critique. Not every passage on every issue raised in BT is fully reconcilable with every other passage on the same issue. (There are, e.g., as Pöggeler has shown, serious impediments to reconciling what Heidegger says about the historically determinate nature of his thinking in BT's introduction with what he says about human historicity in §§72-77; and, as Stambaugh has argued, BT's descriptions of "authenticity" are fraught with ambiguities.)
- Helpful accounts might, however, shed special light on Heidegger's project by carefully relating his concerns to others that he appears to set aside. [So, e.g., if we take Heidegger at his word that BT does not have and is not developing an ethics, then why does his language so often sound value-laden (e.g., conscience, guilt, anxiety, authenticity) and so easily yield an ethic of a quite distinctive kind?]
- Finally, a number of the authors I propose below have been selected because, in addition to being clear writers and established scholars, they also possess some sort of additional perspective or interest that they can use to draw readers toward Heidegger by comparing his concerns with more familiar ones (in, e.g., philosophy of science, analytic epistemology, traditional or neo-pragmatism, contemporary theology, or feminist accounts of Western metaphysical gender bias).
With these standards of helpful accounts in mind, I propose structuring the BT collection in the following way--as a mixture of surveys, first of the context and background for BT, second of its main purpose and stipulated approach, third of its central topics, and finally of its aftermath and BT's ultimate foundering and Heidegger's reconception of its original purpose. It should also be noted that a careful editorial eye will be kept on the need for ancillary treatment of important issues that are not the identified topic of one of the selections [e.g., Heidegger's early critique of Husserl, his methodological concept of formal indication, BT's notion of repetitive retrieval, primordial vs. derivative modes of being, being-with-others and the problem of the social, the phenomenon of the One in everyday life, attunement or being-situated, understanding, facticity, anxiety, resoluteness, inheritance and fate, and of course (from several angles) Dasein].
