Being and Time

He also teaches at the New School, where he's the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy.

I particularly wanted to have Simon back on now because of his latest book, Heidegger Thinking: Being and Time Explained, which takes on one of philosophy's most notoriously difficult texts, written by one of philosophy's most controversial figures, the 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time by Martin Heidegger.

It's a work that's soon to celebrate its centenary year, and one that Simon has been studying and teaching for decades.

In his characteristically wry, lucid, and lively way, Simon cuts through Heidegger's famously dense language and arrives at some of the book's most fundamental, deceptively simple core ideas: being is time, time is finite, and to live fully and freely is to reckon with that finitude.

And now, here's my conversation with Simon.

[on-hold music] Hi, Simon.

Welcome back to Time Sensitive.

Thank you very much, Spencer.

Hmm.

And then he packed books, and he took like [laughs] he took Being and Time by Heidegger, this book called Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and then a novel by the Russian author Solzhenitsyn called Cancer Ward.

Oh, gosh.

It's like this little, like, religion, philosophy, and literature.

... be efficacious, right? It's so easy for us to let the slack out and end up in that dichotomy.

And so someone like Heidegger I think is, for all of the problems with Heidegger, I'm rereading Being and Time, um, for a paper that I'm writing.

And, well, I can go on for days about Heidegger and Being and Time, but, um, one of the things, and I've written, and this is in print that I've written about, is... and Heidegger is so central to my PhD in many ways, is that Heidegger is wrestling with that tension.

You know?

Oh, yeah.

And that this is a thing that I think Heidegger was wrestling with, but he never quite...

You know Heidegger perhaps better than I do, so I've never seen...

I mean, I've read Being and Time too, um, a- and this is a point that Desmond and other people make, right? Um, and this is the Platonic point, or the Neoplatonic point.

And again, I think of McGilchrist and the, they don't come from him, but these sort of metaphors of the bow having to be taught for it to actually be efficacious, right? It's so easy for us to let the slack out and end up in that dichotomy.

And so someone like Heidegger, I think is, for all of the problems with Heidegger, I'm rereading Being and Time for a paper that I'm writing.

And Well, I can go on for days about Heidegger and being in time.

But one of the things, and this is in print that I've written about, and Heidegger is so central to my PhD in many ways, is that Heidegger is wrestling with that tension.

Awesome.

And what he...

So the argument would be that in Being and Time, Dasein's ultimate constitution is in this threefold temporality, and that's the kind of conditions of possibility for care, and bish-bash-bosh, and Heidegger thinks, and then he scraps the project, right? He does his first two sections and then doesn't do division two, or the second book with the three divisions.

There's been a lot of work there that's gone into Heidegger's temporality.

Hei- Heidegger was a bit squiffy, um, historically.

Um, I started reading Being and Time.

Um, so to circle back to what you were asking earlier about my favorite philosopher, Heidegger is not on that list.

It is a very, a very involved book, and I didn't finish it because there's only so much, like, 19th century German philosophy I can handle, really.

But why Heidegger is so irritating is that he was so hell-bent on destroying, were they used, destroying the history of philosophy.

He says that phrase towards the end of Being and Time.

He kind of lets...

The pen slip, he talks about the destruction of the history of ontology earlier on, but really he wants to get rid of the whole history of philosophy because he thinks the concepts that it's produced have just allowed things to be too familiar and too easy.

And the ministry refused the, the te-tenure because it was not enough.

So he was working on a second part, so he was, uh, pushed, uh, into the corner and submitted the second part too, and this is Being and Time.

It was supposed to have six sections.

We only have two because then he changes his mind.

... uh, philosophical prowess.

Um, and, uh, what Dreyfus' uh, book...

So Dreyfus is very interesting because he was-- he, he wrote a very interesting commentary to the first part of Being and Time, which is the part that he's a- I was saying is actually be, uh, is actually readable.

Um, uh, and he also wrote, uh, a v- a classic book in, uh, it was, uh, published in '72, uh, it, before his, uh, I think his Heidegger book was from the '90s, but the book that made Dreyfus, um, famous is What Computers Can Do.