This book simultaneously gave voice to and shaped some of the central ideas of 20th Century thought and culture. Few books can equal it in importance. It is very hard--don't imagine that you can pick it up and read it on your own--but it is immensely rewarding of serious study. Heidegger criticizes the view of the person that we have inherited from the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution--the view that people are isolated individuals, defined solely conscious possession of a rational mind--showing especially the crucial role that emotion, other people, and practical know-how play in human experience. Much of the most interesting philosophical work of the last hundred years, and many of the most interesting cultural and political developments, have come from a focus on precisely these Heideggerean themes. Though a new translation (Century thought in general, and this is the translation I recommend.

- namely, chapter 1 only of _An Introduction to Metaphysics_. It's all right there. After you get through that tight little essay, you will understand the important things about who Heidegger was, what he was doing, and where he was going with it, intellectually speaking. Then you will be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not you wish to continue, one that is based on your own opinion, rather than the (many and strong) opinions of others.

Heidegger is a highly controversial figure. Even his fiercest critics, however, acknowledge that his importance in philosophy is huge. (I am speaking of those critics of some stature, and disregarding the childrens' prattle found here.)

Heidegger is important because he found a gaping and defining hole in every philosophical argument from Plato to the 20th century. Nietzsche had looked for it, and had suspected that something was there, something huge, but Heidegger nailed it once and for all. He deserves credit for this, and if you want to know what the hole was, see the citation above.

It is what *else* Heidegger did that is the source of so much of the controversy and all of the criticism. Having produced a critique that laid the philosophical tradition of the west essentially to waste, he was vexed with the difficult problem of what to do next.

He made some initial, obscure, vague, and frustratingly tentative attempts to construct something in its place. _Being and Time_ is the prime example of that effort. It was an openly acknowledged failure. It was to be preliminary to a much larger work that Heidegger soon after admitted the impossibility of himself or anyone else ever undertaking with any success. Nevertheless, this first stab at it is interesting for the same reason that Plato's first stabs at what has come to be traditional philosophy, also ultimately doomed, were interesting and continue to be valuable and worthwhile, regardless that they were failures.

Most of the rest of Heidegger's work falls under two categories. One is the category of _Being and Time_ containing works that are similar except that they are even less systematic, impossible to understand in English, more tentative, and increasingly preoccupied up with German as a language. The other category consists of imaginative attempts to redeem part of the philosophical tradition he destroyed reading the presocratics, Aristotle, Plato, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, et al. Most of these attempts were also failures, but they were fascinating failures by virtue of their imaginativeness and extreme care and rigor. It was clear that, though he fumbled around a great deal, was politically naive and morally inept (perhaps requirements for excellent philosophizing), he had opened a door. And that door opened on to something much, much bigger.