more on length constraints

Another thing I apparently dropped the ball on, in late July, was Ian Bogost’s RESPONSE POST TO MY REMARKS ON HIS RECENT ATARI BOOK. I think I simply missed it, and am not sure how that happened.

I don’t want to belabor a point made several times on this blog already, but I was rather inspired by the Montfort/Bogost point in Racing the Beam that not only were Atari cartridge designers severely limited by the surprising weakness of the VCS hardware, but that much of their ingenuity was inspired by precisely these limits.

I think Ian said that book was around 60,000 words. If memory serves, my own Heidegger Explained was also around 60,000 words, and now for the first time I remember that there were externally imposed length constraints on that book too… In other words, much of what I’m now going through with L’objet quadruple was pioneered by the methods I used for Heidegger Explained; I had simply forgotten that point until tonight.

The initial decision with that book was the important one. It belonged to Open Court’s Great Philosophers Explained series, and so I had to be in the same range of length as the other books in that series. It seemed to me that the “wimp out” decision would have been a hand-wringing “OOOOOOHHHHH, Heidegger is sooooooo complicated that one can focus on at most one of his intricate books in 60,000 words. Anything more than that would be amateurish!”

It would have been a “wimp out” move because it would have involved no intellectual risk on my part. The publisher would surely have deferred to such a decision, and any Heidegger specialist would have nodded knowingly if reading my bland justification of this tactic in a sandbagging preface that could easily have been written to defend such a safely boring strategic decision.

No, I knew I wanted to cover his whole career in 60,000 words. (And frankly, I think it succeeded.)

Once I had chosen the two constraints on the book: 60,000 words, and all of his career, everything else started to fall into place.

There obviously had to be a whole chapter on Being and Time, which everyone knows deserves at least a chapter in any book on Heidegger. But the constraint of choosing to write on his entire career obviously forbade devoting any more than a single chapter to his uncontested magnum opus.

I also wanted to write a whole chapter on “Einblick in das was ist” (1949), because a strong case can be made (and I have made it many times) that this is his real second magnum opus. Few if any other commentators have rated it that highly, so this also helped give an original flavor to Heidegger Explained.

That, then, was the third constraint: one biographical chapter, one chapter on Being and Time, and one chapter on “Einblick.” Once I had decided that, it was easy to see how many total chapters could be written, and which periods of Heidegger’s career had to fit in various places in the book.

Oh yes, another constraint was that I knew I wanted to do the book chronologically rather than thematically. The odd thing is, most chronologically arranged accounts of Heidegger’s thought are for obvious reasons quite beholden to the supposed great differences between “early” and “late” Heidegger, whereas I am quite serious about saying that such differences are few, and of only the most minimal philosophical importance.

My reason for choosing a chronological rather than a thematic organization for the book is that the latter are generally quite arbitrary, in my experience. How does one decide whether the five chapters in a Heidegger book should be called “ontology”, “ethics”, “the political”, “artworks”, and “theory of knowledge”, or some other permutation of topics?

By contrast, it is much easier to split up phases in his career. There are the early Freiburg years, the Marburg years, the second Freiburg pre-Rectorate period, the Rectorate itself, etc. etc.

That doesn’t mean I think there are vast flips or tiny micro-turns and micro-shifts in Heidegger’s career, because in fact I think there are not. It’s simply a good way of cutting the pie into edible pieces.