Being and Time

The value & one's corresponding rating of a book is a measure of how its adds to the quality of your life, either whilst just reading it as entertainment, or why I generally prefer non-fiction, it has the potential to add to the quality of your life beyond the book itself (yeah fiction can do this but not nearly as often).

Philosophy should have one of the greatest potentials for this life-enhancing capability. But not this book. It is in a word ... tedious. And I daresay the ideas themselves are somewhat tenuous given that he choses an arbitrary starting point - “being” (which he calls “dasein”), & makes as much meaning as he can from this distinction whilst simultaneously is blind to those distinctions he chooses to take at face value (like “knowledge”). This is imo a poor way of building a philosophy. Any philosophy should start with metaphysics to build a proper & logical and systematic foundation (see J G Bennett for best example of this). I do resonate with some of his distinctions (which is why I read the book in the first place) like care or concern as the essence of being. I find his thinking on time similarly lacking in solid foundations. The book is also soulless. Just the worst of the caricatured Germanic seriousness. Maybe there are better writers out there who speak to Heidegger's insights.