Malcolm asked:

I actually have two questions:

1. How can someone learn to understand a book like Heidegger's Being and Time,or any other
difficult book?

2. I am very frustrated when trying to learn philosophy because all I have are questions and all I think
of are contradictions in the text. Combine this with an awareness of an opinion of Nietzsche and you'll
see why: "The so called paradoxes of an author, which the reader objects to, are often not at all in the
author's book but rather in the readers head" (from Human, all to Human).

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Unfortunately there is no easy way to approach a difficult writer like Heidegger, who presupposes of
his reader very wide reading in just about all eras of western philosophy, from the Presocratics
onward. In such a predicament, the only useful advice is to read the text chapter by chapter with a
guide that does the same thing; and fortunately there is such a book around: it's by Stephen Mulhall
in the Routledge Guides (Heidegger and Being and Time).

Re the Nietzsche quote: I sympathise with your predicament! But of course you realise that this quote
is a paradox in itself. Part of the problem with reading Nietzsche is that he is aphoristic and like
Heidegger assumes that you know, when you come upon such a paradox, what it's background and
motive might be. Unfortunately Nietzsche is not as well served as Heidegger (yet) in the basic
secondary literature and it is unfortunately all to easy to fall into the hands of an author with an axe to
grind and that's one reason why I gave up and just read his texts. However, I can recommend one
book to you which, even though it is a bit dated by now, still conveys the essentials of his thinking, the
book just called Nietzscheby Walter Kaufmann. You might have to buy it secondhand these days or
borrow from a library.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney

1) a) Take courses in the philosophy that the book is based on before you read the book.

b) Read the philosophical background before you read the book based on that background.

c) Take a course in the philosopher.

d) Get a version of the book with lots of annotations and explanations (Macquarrie's is good).

e) Read it over several times.

Heidegger took pride in being unintelligible (yes this was literally true). So you're not going to
understand him easily. Do all the above, in that order.

2)Yes, well, Nietzsche wasn't much of a philosopher, especially in terms of clarity, organization, lack
of contradictions, logic, and if it comes to that, sanity, in my opinion. So I'd take his comments with a
large grain of salt. He was a polemicist, and an insightful one. That's on the one hand. On the other,
without knowing the background which someone brings to a philosophical position, you simply cannot
fully appreciate what they're saying. It's like trying to jump into a physics or biology journal without
knowing, well, quite a bit in those fields. So Nietzsche has a point, even if it's self-serving.

Steven Ravett Brown