Dwelling With Martin

My first exposure to Heidegger was through William Barrett's Irrational Man, a book I read when I was about 15 years old.

In my teens, I was a voracious reader of Existential philosophy. I suspect it was ordinary teen-age angst that drew me to such literature, plus the ennui born of growing up in an affluent white suburb of what Kierkegaard would have called a "market town" in the mid-1970's.

Martin both gripped and repelled me at the same time--though, until recently, the repulsion has typically outweighed the attraction.

I cannot count how many times over the last four decades I have picked up Heidegger only to put him down again for what I was sure would be the last time. But it was never the last time--nor will it be, so long as I have the strength to cast my eye upon a page.

Unlike Wittgenstein (a thinker with whom I fell in love almost immediately upon reading him and who remains one of my guiding intellectual lights), Heidegger refused to disown the philosophical heritage of Western Europe. Instead, he attempted to reinterpret it and, in effect, to re-write it--a Quixotic project that resulted in the production of volumes of tortured prose and twisted politics.

If that weren't bad enough, self-styled Heideggerians have always impressed me as High Priests of The Obscure; as a consequence, I have never harbored any desire to learn their secret handshake.

In 1989, however, Richard Rorty published Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity--a book that took Heidegger seriously and without sycophancy. He valued Heidegger's intellectual project and incorporated aspects of it into his own. This impressed me immensely, but did not convince me to lower my guard. Then, in 1991, George Steiner published a monograph on Heidegger. Steiner is not a professional philosopher and yet he, too, values Heidegger's work, finding it useful in his reading of literature. He is also a first rate intellectual, gentleman, and superb prose stylist for whom I have boundless admiration.

Rorty and Steiner supported my interest in Heidegger and encouraged me to continue to read him despite my misgivings. These would continue, however, through the 1990's into the 2000's. Even as late as 2007, when I was writing a PhD dissertation on hermeneutics, I was tough on Heidegger, and remained suspicious of him. It has only been in the last five years or so that I have finally made my peace with Martin, accepting him for the deeply flawed and yet remarkably visionary thinker that he was.