Name: The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger
ISBN: 9781441199850

Eric S. Nelson

Francois Raffoul

The definitive reference guide to Heidegger's life and work, including 57 original essays covering all the key aspects of his thought.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger

Tim Pendry

This companion comprises over 60 relatively short essays on Heidegger's key texts and life including two sections devoted to the sources and influences on his philosophy and on his influence on other philosophers and schools with one on major themes in his thought. It is exhaustive, some might say exhausting if you commit to reading it straight through as I did (bar two essays which I simply could not face of which more anon). Severely academic, you are warned that it is not for the faint-hearted even if it is an excellent guide to current scholarship. The essays are, as you would expect, variable in readability and depth but the vast majority are enlightening. The best approach for the generalist is not to worry that you do not understand it all but rather to allow the 'thinking' to wash over you and 'suggest' what might be learned. The book changed some of my views. Above all, it helped me to understand just how much Heidegger's thinking was a continuous process over time. What was thought in the 1920s must be considered on very different terms from what he might have been thinking in the 1950s or 1960s. There is no obligation here to accept a system, Heidegger's philosophy permits disagreement by its very nature. It is fluid. It is always possible to depart from its premises further down the line and come to very different position so long as one thinks in good faith. It also clarified for me the shift from Being &amp; Time (which I can now understand could never have been completed and still allow Heidegger to continue thinking as he had to think) to his even more dense and sometimes almost mystical and poetic later thought. I still prefer the earlier Heidegger and I still appreciate where Sartre took it for all his Cartesian faults but I understand better and appreciate more the indisputable richness of Heidegger's later thought processes even where I find myself increasingly departing from them over time. As to his life, I am not overwhelmingly interested in the tortured 'Heidegger as Nazi' debate which is a flagellating exercise that tells us more about the debaters than Heidegger but I found myself enlightened throughout by just how embedded he was in the faith culture of Germany. His faith journey towards a curious form of spiritualised atheism from Catholicism via Protestantism has its integrity but it also teaches us that the thrownness of this particular Dasein (and of all of us Daseins) means that we cannot be detached from our environment no matter how much we 'think'. This sets up a paradox in his thought. It liberates us from our condition but only up to a point. Our thrownness into the world means that we are our condition even as we expose it to our gaze and question it. Our thinking might throw us back into ourselves but we are still bound by the 'out there'. No review can utter anything truly sensible about his thought but we can still see that it is both coherent and yet expresses the impossibility of any language defining our situation as coherent and fixed in space and time. The turn to the poetical and quasi-mystical seems inevitable in retrospect. We are dealing with Wittgenstein's 'whereof we cannot speak' except that, still interested in language but eschewing the logical-analytical approach, Heidegger will not give up on the possibility of saying much more than other philosophers think possible. Naturally this results in apparent obscurity and an increasingly private language shared publicly even if every word and sentence is coherent in relation to his previous words and sentences - that he should become increasingly engaged with the obscurity of Art is no surprise. Heidegger is a revolutionary force in Western thought. Even now his impact is being delayed by Western habits. The odd thing about him is that his philosophy is difficult to understand intellectually but, once understood even at a basic level, it is surprisingly easy to live. There are one or two low points - the intersectional feminist essay (added as perhaps a concession to the contemporary academy) was one that I could not tolerate after a few paragraphs and the psychoanalytic essay was simply uninteresting unless you are a psychoanalyst. The greatest disappointment was one of the Editors (Eric Nelson) offering an almost obligatory addition of a piece on Heidegger as Nazi. This was embarrassing. After an initially clear exposition, its standard rather pompous liberal moralism denied everything that the man had taught us. In other words, even this excellent and well edited volume could not escape 'fashion' and the associated posturing of early twenty first century ideology, although, having pacified the usual suspects, we can at least say that this stuff represented under 2% of the whole. However, some of these essays more than made up for the stolid academicism of the bulk and the bits of nonsense. Even the most academic and difficult article contained some seed that could grow into revealing thought despite the problems of comprehension. One stand-out essay was Anne O'Byrne's on the application of Heidegger's thought to Birth as much as to Death. It contained powerful insights that could probably only have come from a woman Dasein. If we all are defined by our Finitude, we are also defined by our thrownness into the world as Origin. This allows us to escape something which Heidegger himself seems to have understood as a limitation of his early work and perhaps a flaw in the Sartrean adaptation - an excessive emphasis on our autonomous solitude. We are born into something that is pre-shaped as community and its bonds. This tension between Birth and Death is revealing to me as the tension between male and female (with due regard to the transgender) - between our matriarchal and patriarchal modes of being to some extent. Heidegger finds other ways to remind us of our debt to history. Another stand-out essay, if only for the clarity of the exposition, is Ian Thomson's on Heidegger's Ontotheology. He argues that it is the key to Heidegger's thinking. He is persuasive. Whether right or wrong, he is so clear in his writing that it is the essay I would recommend if only one were to be read. On his influence, there are two essays worth picking out. There is Trish Glazebrook's on Heidegger's influence on environmental philosophy which has spun off into some fairly inhuman directions in ways that I suspect we will see soon in techno-philosophy as Heidegger is inverted in the age of AI. The second is the superb and instructive review of the dynamic relationship between Heidegger and East Asian philosophy (notably Japanese philosophy) where some extreme claims are moderated but the influence of equals recognised. It was a discovery to realise that Japanese student philosophers were present at very early lectures and that Japanese refutations of Heidegger represent some of the most coherent criticism from an intense Zen perspective. It made me want to explore the work of Nishida. Heidegger and the Japanese were targeting the same problem - the experience and expression of the ineffable. Heidegger overthrew the entire Western tradition since (and including) Plato to head in a direction that might be called (dubiously) the pre-Western rediscovered. Most criticism of Heidegger in the West simply fails to understand just how much Heidegger had pulled the rug out from all absolute (as opposed to utilitarian or pragmatic) claims made by Western thinkers. Western criticism is largely a recovery operation exercised in a state of denial. From a utilitarian-pragmatic perspective, the only Western criticism that still seems to have something to say in contestation with Heidegger is not the liberal tradition but the sometimes sarcastic Marxist tradition which, of course, has nearly been crushed to death as alternative. Japanese criticism was, however, far more powerful because it tended to finger Heidegger as still unable to escape his situation as a Western philosopher and unable to think in the absolute terms of the ineffable and of Nothing as East Asians debated the matter. One senses that this criticism was one that Heidegger accepted - that he knew when he was beat but that it did not matter because the fact was that the West was the place into which he had been thrown and the West needed different thoughts from the East because of its own history. In this context, Heidegger's concern with 'techne' (more than just technology) may be his most lasting legacy, creating a problem with the thing that, more than anything else, defines Western power and legacy - and the terms of resistance to it. The resistance is not about rejecting technology but not allowing technology to become more than the hammer that the peasant uses to hammer into place a nail. The Westerner has become his hammer rather than seeing that hammer as just an extension of himself or herself. The critique of technology on these terms has in a simplified and possibly poorly understand form driven romantic environmentalism but now we are faced with a new challenge - forms of technology that may become Dasein on their own account and which replace human functionalities. Personally I tend to disagree with Heidegger on technology as a 'problem' but not as a description in the context of the Being of beings. I slip back into the Nietzschean perspective of 'overcoming' and of mastery of technology as part of overcoming. However, the secret to all this lies in who is overcoming what or who and for what purpose. Heidegger's description and thinking about technology remain invaluable in defining the terms of mastery. Sadly few technologists would seem to have any idea of what he was talking about. This is probably as far as we can go here. Do not read this book (unless you are a professional philosopher) and expect to understand it even with some previous basic reading in Heidegger's thought. Thinking does not work like that. It is a continuous process. Let it flow over you and do not be frightened by what you do not understand. One flash of insight or trigger for thought in each essay is still 160 or so new thoughts or thought processes that may change your own way of thinking. It is hard work but worthwhile and you can take it slowly.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger

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