r/heidegger

Hello everyone. I just started reading Being and Time (at chapter 18). I only got interested in Heidegger because of an existentialist psychotherapist named Irvin Yalom since he somewhat bases a lot of his clinical practices theory on Heidegger's ideas of Dasein, Authenticity and Throwness etc. My only background in philosophy is a few books from Kierkegaard and one quarter finished Prolegomena To Future Metaphyscists by Kant so it is very bountiful. I had a few questions I wanted to ask here because searching has only made it worse since everyone says differently.

1- Is using AI like Claude while reading Heidegger bad? I gave Magda King's pdf to the AI for it to read and answer my questions so the source is solid. I have benefited a lot from the AI's ability to quickly tell me ready-to-hand or objectively present (Stambaugh curse thy translations) and similar lingo quickly while explaining it too. It is also helpful when I really don't understand a paragraph and in need of guidance. Do you think that AI is good enough to answer basic questions about Being and Time or is there a really big chance it is messing up and I do not realize it?

2- Is Magda King a good parallel read for Being and Time? I am really looking for a commentary book that goes over chapter to chapter (or at least concept to concept) of the Stambaugh revised translation? I heard the most popular one Dreyfus is actually really biased.

3- Is it normal to be so fucking lost? I am reading through it but it's very slowly to the point where I can only read 5-10 pages in a good day! It's one of the hardest books I have ever read but it feels like it points out things I have always felt but couldn't explain so I love it but I'm just wondering if reading 10 pages at most a day is too slow?

4- Do I have to understand every single paragraph? I won't lie, I am not here for a philosophy degree. I am just a medical student who wishes to practice psychiatry and to incorporate the ideas of Heidegger into practice in psychotherapy. For example the way I understand the 14-18 chapter is Heidegger claiming that the worldishness of the world is not referential totality itself, but the significance which allows for this referential totality to be grasped by the Dasein to use objects as ready-to-hand. Is this a wrong understanding? How do I know I understand it correctly or not? I also still dont fucking understand what significance is actually is or a lot of the terminology, I have a feeling but no concrete way to explain it if one asks me. Is that okay?

In the Grundbegriffe Der Metaphysik, Heidegger characterizes the human being as weltbildend partly through the possession of an Als-Struktur — the capacity to encounter entities as entities. The animal, seized by Benomenheit, lacks this structure and is therefore weltarm.

But this framing seems to pull in the opposite direction from B&T. There, Heidegger is at pains to show that our primary mode of being-in-the-world is Zuhandenheit — the pre-theoretical involvement in which things are not explicitly encountered "as anything". The theoretical and detached "as" is actually secondary and derivative, and it only arises when the smooth flow of life breaks down.

So when Heidegger uses the Als-Struktur as the mark of human world-disclosure over against the animal, is he not reintroducing something like a Platonic picture — where grasping the hammer as a hammer means seeing it as a particular that falls under an ideal category? That seems to contradict the whole spirit of B&T, where the hammer is precisely not encountered as a self-standing object with essential properties, but disappears into the referential whole of a practice.

Is this a recognized tension in the literature? one that Heidegger himself or commentators have addressed? Or am I just confusing basic stuff here?

Disclosure: I haven't read the 1929/30 lectures directly (only secondary summaries).

Since re-reading SZ I’ve come to interpret Heidegger as essentially proposing an existential voluntarism, albeit one that is implied and perhaps accidental at times.

For Heidegger, care grounds all aspects of Dasein (for Dasein is care). But in care we find Dasein able to choose possibilities (this or that possibility) but also choose, first, its own authenticity (to-be authentic or not).

The choice to-be authentic is the first choice Dasein makes before all others. And Dasein has already made this decision, often to the detriment of its own primordiality.

I think this is typified in the authentic moment-of-vision when Dasein chooses to accept its own finitude before death (future), its own thrownness into that finitude (past, or having-been), and can then decide what to pursue in its moment-of-vision (present).

I believe this is Heidegger at his most Nietzschean, and also why he chose to turn [kehre] away from SZ. He thought he was still too subjective, and too technological. Yet I can’t help but sympathize with this voluntarism of Heidegger. Obviously this isn’t a voluntarism of “free will vs. determinism” as these are both metaphysical categories, relegated to the present-at-hand interpretation of Dasein. But the existential ground of these, to me, certainly seems to be Dasein’s “will” understood in relation to authenticity.

Do you a) agree with my interpretation of SZ, and b) agree that this is what Dasein is, or do you lean towards the late-Heidegger’s critique of technological thinking, and find this reading is still a remnant of that thought.

How easy/difficult is his prose, in your view? Is there anything in particular you like (or dislike) about it? Do you have any thoughts on to what extent (and how) his writing style changed over the years? Has, perhaps, your view on his style changed over time?

Also, for those of you who speak German, and/or have read about assessments of translations of his works:

What's your opinion on those translations? Have any translations of his works been described as inadequate? Having in mind that some have defended various French philosophers against language-related criticism by saying that the problem is the translation, not the original French phrasings. (As it happens, I recently came across an English translation of something Jacques Lacan wrote that struck me as ambiguous, but I didn't find Lacan's sentence in French ambiguous.)

What books, lectures etc is the best starting point to understand Heidegger?

In his analysis of daseing, was heidegger emphasizing the "let's gooooooo" of human life? And was it fire 🔥 🔥 🔥 to authentically have rizz?

I recently finished Heidegger’s Sojourns: The Journey to Greece (Aufenthalte), his account of a 1962 journey to Greece, and found it unexpectedly moving.

What struck me most is how intimate this late Heidegger feels. Instead of the familiar conceptual density, you encounter an elderly philosopher experiencing places physically, attentively, almost vulnerably. He is still unmistakably Heidegger, but philosophy appears here less as system-building than as a disciplined way of seeing.

His reflections on Delos stayed with me in particular. What moved me was his sense that the temple does not simply present itself as an object to be consumed, but gradually discloses itself through movement, distance, orientation, approach, and light.

That resonated deeply with me because it captures something I’ve often felt in re-photography: a place is not merely “there”; it reveals itself differently depending on where one stands, how one arrives, and whether one is patient enough to let it show itself.

This feels like Heidegger’s aletheia in lived form rather than abstract theory.

For those who find Being and Time forbidding, this small book offers a surprisingly human entry point into his later thought.

Has anyone else read it? Curious whether others found Delos as striking as I did.

I have been trying to write a paper because it definitely seems like some parts, Being and TIme and the role of discourse in inauthentic idle talk and the authentic call of conscience might be connected in some way or able to be analyzed through Lacan, but so far I haven't found any scholarship on it. So I wanted to sort of open a discussion on it

Particularly, it seems to me that, unlike idle talk, the call of conscience is understood through a more "primordial mode of discourse", what he calls reticence or hearing and keeping silent. By how he describes it, it seems vaguely similar to Lacan's Real, insofar as it resists any symbolization and lies outside of language.

On pg 318 of B&T, he states,

"The call dispenses with any kind of utterance. It does not put itself into words at all; yet it remains nothing less than obscure and indefinite. Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent. In this way, it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces the Dasein which has been appealed to and summoned, into the reticence of itself. The fact that what it is in the call has not been formulated into words does not give this phenomenon the indefiniteness of a mysterious voice but merely indicates that our understanding of what is 'called' is not to be tied up with an expectation of anything like a communication."

Although language is described as the articulation of intelligibility and what gives things an "average understanding" of what is said in idle talk or gossip, this is specifically not the case for the call of conscience.

It also seems that although Heiddeger is clear not to make the call of conscience any sort of unconscious that gazes into its psychological conditions, it doesn't seem to make better sense of this caller as "from me but yet from beyond and over me" Pg. 320.

I'm not sure what the call of conscience serves for Being and Time, and am a little dubious as to how this is a pathway for authenticity and for Dasein to become individualized from the "they self" or the Other.

Is there any clear connection between Lacan and Heiddeger here? Is there any understanding of the intentional placement for call of conscience in B&T and why this seemingly important section does not play a significant role in it. It seems like while Lacan would agree in some areas, I presume he would resist in saying that we are able to break through to The Real. Thoughts?