r/heidegger

Warum wird auf dem Sub nicht auf Deutsch geschrieben? Martin Heidegger hätte es bestimmt nicht gewollt, dass man seine Werke auf Englisch diskutiert – und wahrscheinlich auch nicht liest. Wenigstens könnte man es auf Französisch versuchen, der zweitschlechtesten Sprache für die Lektüre von Heidegger. Aber Englisch ist mit Sicherheit die schlechteste.

Englischsprachige Nutzer können Reddits KI-Tool verwenden, um Texte zu übersetzen, und umgekehrt.

Dieser Post ist kein Trolling und keine Provokation, sondern ernst gemeint.

Is there any overlap between what you consider the most interesting criticisms and the most hostile views on his philosophy, or do you tend to dismiss the most hostile ones as excessive and unreasonable?

Whatever criticisms you view as most interesting, why do you find them most interesting, and to what extent do they clash with your own views?

Would you say Adorno is among the most interesting or most hostile ones, or not among either? Why?

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?

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.

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.