PUPPET OR MASTER?

From The Independent’s archive: Raymond Tallis’s 2005 assessment of ‘Being and Time’ by Martin Heidegger

My Desert Island Discs would be an arbitrary selection from a longlist of hundreds. For the book of my lifetime, however, there is only one serious contender.

I came across Heidegger’s masterpiece in my late teens, when life often seemed pointless and threatening. The classical philosophical questions – are we truly free or simply playthings of the physical world? How do we really know anything outside of our own experience? Does not the inevitability of death wipe out all meanings? – overwhelmed me. Through the dark glass of Being and Time, I saw a way out of my glumness.

Heidegger rejected the physicalism that made us puppets in a network of material causes. And he demolished the equally unattractive alternative – the notion that the world is constructed out of our mental experiences. He argued that neither physical objects nor mental phenomena were primary. Indeed,

“matter” and “mind” as conventionally understood were products of a mode of thought which had imprisoned Western philosophy. What was “primordial” was “being-there”: Da-sein, or being-in-theworld.

I had found a philosopher who realised Nietzsche’s ideal: one who ‘seeks to hear within himself echoes of the entire sonority of the world’

Heidegger’s marvellously subtle account of being-in-the-world awoke joy and wonder. The world’s “everydayness” was no longer threatening or dull; ordinary truth was a revelation; and the given transformed from a dead weight of implacability to a gift – one that did not have a Giver before whom one had to bow down in fear. Heidegger was an atheist; mindfulness of death made life glow more brightly. In him, I had found a philosopher who realised Nietzsche’s ideal: one who “seeks to hear within himself echoes of the entire sonority of the world”.

I am still delighting in, and thinking towards, his thoughts. And also against and beyond them: a few years ago, I published A Conversation with Martin Heidegger, in which I set out our differences. Even so, the final section of my book is entitled “Thanks”.

Heidegger has been excoriated for bad and good reasons. He was ignorantly dismissed by many AngloAmerican philosophers as a fraudulent weaver of linguistic spells. He has been more justly despised for throwing himself at the Führer’s feet when Hitler rose to power. Even more wickedly, he never repented explicitly.

But it is a measure of his genius that, despite its author’s dalliance with evil, Being and Time has entranced thinkers of all political persuasions. So I owe him another debt of gratitude: the example of his life and thought is a reminder that truly great thinkers may be neither great or even wise human beings.