Jeff Collins - Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide

It means to propose a thinking that proceeds otherwise ...

Few philosophers have proposed such a radical disturbance of philosophy.

It took Heidegger into some strange and contentious territories, both conservative and revolutionary, secular and theological, anti-traditional but deeply rooted, backward-looking while proposing a future thinking whose contours are still not settled.

Unsurprisingly, the author Heidegger has been read in many different ways. It has often been said, there are many Heideggers.

A Heidegger of German idealist philosophy, preoccupied with abstruse but fundamental questions of time, death, and the underlying anxiety or Angst of human living ...

A scholarly Heidegger, central to European philosophy, intersecting major currents of 20th century thought, interrogating philosophys great traditions ...

A theological Heidegger, taken to have offered a philosophical foundation for modern Christian thought ...

... and some Heideggers who disclaim this: one thoroughly secular, and another of post-theology, responding to the death of God while searching out what remains of religious thought in mystic traditions, Eastern religions, etc.

Not far away is a Heidegger of abstruseness, opacity, impenetrability and obscurity: the bte-noir of Anglophone analytical philosophy; a Heidegger of dangerously unaccountable speculations; of mysticisms and obfuscations; sham tautologies and self-important immersion in self-generated problems ...

The question of being? A senseless querying of what must be an absolute presupposition. If treated as a question there is no way of answering it ... Heidegger has displays of surprising ignorance, unscrupulous distortion and what can fairly be described as charlatanism.

British analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer in 1982

Heideggers writings contain the last despairing glimmer of German romantic philosophy. His major work Being and Time is formidably difficult unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it.

British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in 1992

Heidegger has been interpreted more positively.

... the rescuer of PHENOMENOLOGY (a philosophy of consciousness) from its own self-constructed limits.

... contributor to modern HERMENEUTICS (the philosophical inquiry into how we make interpretations), crucial to the key hermeneutic theorist, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

... the most profound influence on 20th century EXISTENTIALISM and major figures like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.

... a POST-STRUCTURALIST Heidegger, coming before the name, anticipating the most innovative developments in philosophy and theory in recent decades and a powerful formative influence even on thinkers who took other paths.

Jrgen Habermas ...

Herbert Marcuse ...

Michel Foucault ...

and many others.

... And a Heidegger of DECONSTRUCTION, providing the most important resource for its leading proponent, Jacques Derrida.

There are Heideggers of social and cultural critique ...