To better channel the thought of Martin Heidegger I am reading ‘Being and Time’ in my shed and taking notes with my ‘to hand’ typewriter. This shed contains an array of ‘to hand’ implements or tools for the garden or being-in-the-garden as he might have termed it. 3 spades, 2 forks, 1 shovel, 1 pick axe, a crowbar, brush hooks, grass hook, mowing machine, tiller, 2 scythes. The amenities of my shed are much less than those afforded by the hut where M.H. wrote ‘Being and Time’.
The typewriter is a Royal FP standard (pica font 10 cpi) which I bought in 1983 from the directress of a Shorthand and Typing Academy who was probably going electric at the time. It works beautifully and gives my direct copy with a quasi objective gloss. Would that be alienated accessibility?
But why am I reading ‘Being and Time’? I’ve been looking at it for years ever since it was left to me by a friend who bought it in 1989 and never cracked it, a stiff Blackwell paperback that requires two handed reading.
Is it a difficult book? The ideas in it are not, they are straightforward but are compounded into intractability by a convoluted jargon which makes them seem deeper than they are. Wasn’t it Wittgenstein who said "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence". Experts in the thought of M.H. discover floods of nuance. One finds 36 shades of meaning in the term ‘occurrence’ (S.E.P.) In pointing this out the writer of the entry in the Stanford Ency. is guilty of oblique irony.
Will I continue my ‘read along’? Probably but with an expectation tempered by his lack of amenability. Agonistically engaging however.
