Reddit reviews Heidegger's 'Being and Time': A Reader's Guide (Reader's Guides)

Short answer: no. Without reading it (which I haven't done in full), you will be helped very little by synopses. But there are definitely some good reading guides, I found this one interesting, but it's written for a newspaper audience:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy

Also try Dreyfus's podcast: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978475

Finally, the most helpful ones are the full-length reading guides. Blattner's is the most recommended, I think: http://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Readers-Guides/dp/0826486096/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1300394473&sr=8-6

Either way, though, I would say, if you want to read it, you're in for a long, tedious trip. And, I think I disagree with you, OP--Heidegger is a lot less clear than Kant, in my opinion.

You probably should have a basic background in history of philosophy, and should at least be somewhat familiar with people like Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Husserl. You don't necessarily need to read their work directly, but at least read some overviews and stuff.

I'd strongly suggest reading Being and Time alongside some secondary literature. William Blattner's book is very good as a guide. I come from a more analytic background, and I found Mark Okrent's book to be the most clear and helpful presentation of Heidegger's ideas. Hubert Dreyfus also has lectures online. He's hugely influential in contemporary Heidegger scholarship, but I'm honestly not particularly fond of his take on B&T.

I've yet to come across a definition of existentialism that seems to do justice to the variety of figures put under the term, although I did come across a nice little tidbit a couple weeks ago:

>"Existentialism" is not a precisely defined term. It refers to to a movement or a set of issues. It is, moreover, as much a literary sensibility as it is a set of philosophical ideas...they share a reaction to the philosophical tradition that precedes them. They regard is as overly focused on the achievements of cognition and as offering little insight that can touch the lives of individuals. It is also characteristic of existentialism to regard everyday human life as something of a sham, as a distortion of a more distressing underlying truth. This truth, once exposed, can serve as a springboard for personal liberation, however, and that makes confronting it worthwhile. Page 4.

Kierkegaard does assert that human beings have a sort of eternal essence, something later existentialists, most notably Sartre, strongly push against. However, he emphasizes the weight of being human in a way Sartre and many of his peers also would, exploring themes like anxiety, depression, choice and authenticity, all of which would be picked up by Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Jaspers and many others in a variety of ways. While some would try and say that people can live without eternal truths (or that we have to whether we can or not), Kierkegaard seems to think that we're incomplete without something firm to ground ourselves upon, as he says in The Sickness Unto Death of the person who doesn't ground themself in the eternal,

> The self is its own master, absolutely its own master; and exactly this is the despair, but also waht it regards as its pleasure and joy. But it is easy on closer examination to see that this ruler is a king without a country, that really he rules over nothing; his position, his kingdom, his sovereignty, are subject to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment. Ultimately it is arbitrarily based upon the self itself. Page 100.

The problem your question points to is really more about Kierkegaard's reception that it is with Kierkegaard himself. While I think that it's great many atheists and more secular thinkers took Kierkegaard seriously, I do think that there's been a problematic emphasis on his existentialism and psychology, often to the detriment of his spiritual and and religious thought. While you can read Kierkegaard well as an atheist or existentialist, Kierkegaard's central problem was not existentialism; it was how to become a Christian in Christendom.

If you're interested, Anthony Rudd has a book on the topic, and while it is expensive, it does a good job of explaining Kierkegaard's view of the self as being one that requires some sort of eternal truth. He does point out that this doesn't necessarily mean you pick up Kierkegaard's religion, as Kierkegaard himself often talks about our need for 'the Good' as opposed to 'God' (although for Kierkegaard, the terms are obviously going to be largely synonymous) in works such as Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. Rudd develops Kierkegaard as being situated largely in the Platonic tradition where people, in order to flourish fully, need to be oriented towards some objective Good, and I don't see a reason a more secular person couldn't pick this theory up, even if it does mean picking up the idea that humans have something of an essence. He also does a good job of contrasting Kierkegaard's view of the self compared to fatalists who overemphasize our immanence over our transcendence (Schopenhauer) and existentialists who overemphasize our freedom to the detriment of our given selves (Sartre).

Sorry if this comment is a bit unclear; I'm reading Sickness now, so I'm admittedly working my way through some of these questions and haven't quite organized all my thoughts, but hopefully somewhere in the mess above something works well enough to help you out.