Why do you read Heidegger?
I get asked this question a lot. After all, I am a scientist by profession; not mathematics, but natural sciences nevertheless. Why bother with an existentialist Brainiac like Heidegger? The philosopher Martin Heidegger certainly comes with a lot of baggage. His biography will forever be contaminated by his actions and inaction during the time of Nazi Germany. His writings seem impenetrable in the original German and infested with inaccuracies in English translation, but then he writes a sentence like this:
In den Wissenschaften vollzieht sich — der Idee nach — ein In-die-Nähe-kommen zum Wesentlichen aller Dinge. [“Was ist Metaphysik, 1929, page 25]
This very loosely translates to “ Practicing the sciences — in principle — brings us ever-so-close to the essence of all things”. We learn why the world is the way it is (and us in it). For people like me who practice science daily, this one sentence encapsulates everything we do and why we do it. It justifies hours of toiling, all our experiences of failure and joy. We can quote this sentence in a bar and ordinary people around will understand.
How do you even start to read Heidegger? Not like any other book, that much is for sure. Heidegger is not casual reading. Nothing to page through on the bus ride to work. Reading Heidegger is akin to reading quantum physics. To comprehend quantum physics, you don’t just open Feynman’s lectures on Physics volume III chapter 1 and start reading. You don’t just pick up Einstein’s 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect like you would Vanity Fair magazine. That is not how reading physics works and it is not how reading philosophy works either.
Heidegger’s work is advanced and arcane. It represents advanced metaphysics, just like quantum physics represents advanced physics. To understand quantum physics, one first has to master regular physics and a good bit of vector algebra. To understand Heidegger one has to know a good bit of Greek philosophy, ideally know some Greek. Knowing Greek will allow you to understand the peculiarities of Heidegger's grammar: how he uses verbs as nouns and nouns as verbs.
In Mathematics the word matrix implies an object with defined properties, defined operations, and multiple facets (here come the Eigenvalues). A word, or Begriff, in Heidegger's writings likewise has multiple precisely defined connotations. Much of his writing is about highlighting those connotations that we take for granted. He does not just make up novel words for the fun of it. Each has connotations routed in philosophical history. Someone trained in the art, would read “truth” and be able to recount the rich history of the word: how did Plato use it, how Aristotle. To read Heidegger, one needs to develop a frame of reference, based on the traditions that Heidegger was aware of at the time. Do we need a god to guarantee correspondence or is everything just a constantly evolving game. If you get those references you are ready to start Heidegger.
Do not read Sein und Zeit! Sein und Zeit is a long-distance race and we all know what happened to the messenger from Marathon. Start with something small and light, such as one of his lectures on the philosophy of the Greeks or a small speech, such as cited above. Here Heidegger is at his most comprehensible and digestible, as he is recollecting concrete writing and adding his interpretations subtly. These are the baby steps into Heidegger’s philosophical world.
Lastly, I want to shamelessly plug a book that brought me great joy and provides much of the framework one would need to explore Heidegger’s philosophy, “How to read Heidegger” by Mark Wrathall. It is in English and something of a beginner guide. Nevertheless, you would be hard press to digest more than one chapter a week — and that is week well spent.
