Another Conversation with Martin Heidegger?

Raymond Tallis talks about communication problems.

- Raymond Tallis

A quarter of a century ago, I published A Conversation with Martin Heidegger (Palgrave, 2002). Though it was issued by a respected academic press, my book was a somewhat eccentric account of the central ideas in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), which is generally accepted as his magnum opus. My chapter headings say it all: 'A Breath of Fresh Air', 'Wayfaring', 'Darkness in Todtnauberg', 'Leaving You and Not Quite Leaving You', and 'Sunlight on My Arm'. I also published a few after-ripples of this sustained immersion in Herr Professor's thought, including The Enduring Legacy of Parmenides: Unthinkable Thought (Bloomsbury, 2007), which was in part prompted by reading Heidegger's work on pre-Socratic philosophers. After that, the Magician of Messkirch largely disappeared from my intellectual life.

A year or so ago, prompted by an invitation to contribute to a collection marking the hundredth anniversary of Being and Time, I reengaged with his writing. When I had finished the commissioned chapter, I found I was reluctant to abandon Heidegger again. There was unfinished business that seemed to be worth pursuing. Many subsequent hours spent arguing with his central ideas have generated two successive drafts of a book provisionally called Another Conversation with Martin Heidegger. As I embark on the third draft, however, it seems that the title has grown a question mark. I have rediscovered how Heidegger is one of the most exasperating philosophers to think with or against. And yet he cannot be ignored. He was, after all, arguably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. His nearest rival is Ludwig Wittgenstein, but the latter was in many respects an anti-philosopher. In the Preface to his only work published in his lifetime, the