July 31, 1985

I always remember July 31, because that’s the day when I purchased my copy of Being and Time back in 1985. I was 17 years old, and like many Iowa high school students, had spent a few weeks detasseling corn for some summer income. (That’s where you walk down many miles of rows, pulling the tassels out just before they emerge and engage in unwanted cross-pollination.)

In those days you ended up with a few hundred dollars in the end, which was not bad for a high school student in the 1980’s. I walked into the B. Dalton in Iowa City, which was a fairly crappy chain but not bad for those days, and saw that they had the Macquarrie/Robinson Being and Time on sale for, I don’t know, $28.95 or something like that. I had a feeling that I’d react to the book strongly in some way, so I went ahead and bought it.

I started reading it right away, but didn’t finish it right away. Both the “being” part and the “time” part weren’t quite clear to me then. I made something like three abortive attempts to read the book, and didn’t actually finish it until March 1988, during my sophomore year of college. (And only after I’d first read Metaphysical Foundations of Logic in Heim’s translation, which somehow made Heidegger clearer to me.)

Then I read everything that was available in English in about 18 months. And then for the rest of my 20’s slogged through all the German volumes, which I finally finished a few weeks after turning 30. I’m glad I did that, though I wouldn’t wish to do it again. It’s helpful to have some philosopher as your reference point, someone to refer to and someone also to struggle against. (As one of my undergraduate faculty put it: “Great teachers take years to overcome.”)