I once told a university friend of mine, who was majoring in modern philosophy, that Heidegger was the most empty and nonsensical philosopher I had encountered in high school. He blamed this on translation difficulties and my Marxist teacher, and offered to guide me through a selected reading of Sein und Zeit; an offer on which I took him up.
We called it quits (in a friendly manner) after five evenings of heated arguing over whether it was even intellectually permissible to use half of the words Heidegger was using, and I left with the judgment that Heidegger was raping the German language.
I don’t know about raping the German language but your friend is right in that a) Heideggerr, more than maybe any other philosopher ever, is harder to understand in translation and b) a Marxist might have a lot of trouble explaining Heidegger.
He definitely is not an author one should take on by oneself and I definitely can’t explain much of anything he’s said. I do lean toward the position that he said meaningful, even important things but thats totally based on people whose rationality and intelligence I trust regarding other philosophy telling me so. His obscurity is definitely the cause of a ton of bad philosophy.
I once told a university friend of mine, who was majoring in modern philosophy, that Heidegger was the most empty and nonsensical philosopher I had encountered in high school. He blamed this on translation difficulties and my Marxist teacher, and offered to guide me through a selected reading of Sein und Zeit; an offer on which I took him up.
We called it quits (in a friendly manner) after five evenings of heated arguing over whether it was even intellectually permissible to use half of the words Heidegger was using, and I left with the judgment that Heidegger was raping the German language.
I don’t know about raping the German language but your friend is right in that a) Heideggerr, more than maybe any other philosopher ever, is harder to understand in translation and b) a Marxist might have a lot of trouble explaining Heidegger.
He definitely is not an author one should take on by oneself and I definitely can’t explain much of anything he’s said. I do lean toward the position that he said meaningful, even important things but thats totally based on people whose rationality and intelligence I trust regarding other philosophy telling me so. His obscurity is definitely the cause of a ton of bad philosophy.