Braver - Groundless grounds: a study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger

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Copyright Lee Braver 2014

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First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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What the hell this one's for me. I wrote the damn thing after all.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my children, Sophia, Julia, and Ben, and my wife, Yvonne, for their patience and support.

Abbreviations

Note: Smaller, numbered divisions within some texts are referred to using the following symbol:

Introduction: An Initial Orientation

Martin Heidegger (18891976) is, by many estimations, the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, at least in what is known as the continental tradition. His work forms the connecting point of most of the major schools of the time. His early work brings together the dominant influences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries neo-Kantianism, existentialism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology whereas his later thought is the dominant influence on much of what followed post-modernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, as well as later forms of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Little in twentieth-century continental philosophy can be fully understood without a solid grasp of Heidegger's ideas.

This is what I try to provide the reader with in this book. There are certainly limits to how much I can cover of Heidegger's work, both in depth and breadth; his collected works amount to more than one hundred volumes, after all. But I will try to discuss many of his main ideas, the central themes he returns to again and again. No single book could hope to convey the nuances and complexities of his thought. This book is certainly not meant to be a substitute for reading Heidegger but an aid to doing so, a companion to give you an initial orientation to your own reading of his difficult works.

For they are disorienting indeed. Heidegger spends a great deal of time studying the history of philosophy, and I think it's fair to characterize this as a lovehate relationship. On the one hand, he is a relentless critic of the tradition, tirelessly berating past philosophers (with the exception of the pre-Socratics) for neglecting the question of being, his one unwavering focus. Philosophers have generally taken a particular understanding of what it means to be usually something like a substance which is self-sufficient and self-enclosed and applied it to everything that is. Heidegger's task, as he announces in his first book, Being and Time, is to reawaken this question that has been forgotten and ignored.

Yet, on the other hand, he constantly expresses enormous admiration for the great philosophers, seeing some of the best clues as to how to answer and even how to ask this question in the history of philosophy. These are the people who came closest to asking it, and even their negligence is informative. What they overlooked is not random but forms specifically shaped gaps in their thought and if we pay attention to both what they say and what they don't say, we can look through these holes to see the outlines of what they passed over and around.