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Martin Heidegger, "Being and Time: An Annotated Translation" (Yale UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Cyril Welch
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Stephen Dozeman
Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Dozeman. A full century ago, a young and relatively unknown philosophy instructor in a small town in Germany would publish a book that would be swiftly picked up and radically reshape the intellectual landscape around it. Everything published before could now be re read in a new light, while everything after would often be seen as a sort of development. In response to this book, its author was Martin Heidegger, and the book was being, in time, one of the most important and influential works in the history of philosophy. Due to the difficulty of the text filled with dense neologisms or unconventional uses of common terms, Heidegger's work has proven a consistent challenge for any translator trying to render him in English. The first attempt was by John McCrory and Edward Robinson in 1962, with a repeated attempt by one of Heidegger's students, Joan Stumbo, arriving in 1995 with revisions by Dennis Schmidt in 2010. Now, in 2026, Cyril Welch has brought his own translation to publication. Initial work began several decades ago in his classroom where he was trying to teach the text. And so he started offering up his own translations of key passages for his students. Over time, these translations were revised and added to until eventually he found he had enough to consider formal publication. This was held back for some time, but now is finally able to come to light, giving both seasoned and fresh readers of Heidegger a chance to read his work anew. Cyril Welch is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. Cyril Welch, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:52]
Cyril Welch
Yeah, glad to be here.
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Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. So I always like to ask guests at the beginning of these conversations if they could just introduce themselves to listeners who maybe haven't heard of you or don't know who you are. Could you tell us just a bit about your academic background?
- [02:11]
Cyril Welch
Yeah, okay. At presently I'm retired as a philosophy teacher. Been retired for over 20 years and not. I was educated primarily, however, in the United States. And I'm now presently have been living in Canada since 1967 and in Europe. I live a split life between Europe and Canada. I received my PhD in Fossett Penn State University. And I ended up, for reasons that maybe will come out, I ended up translating Heidegger's being in Tan. Maybe that's enough to start.
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Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, jumping right into that. One thing I found interesting in both reading the introduction and also talking to you before we set up this recording was that you did not initially slide set out with the Intention necessarily of translating the entire text for publication. But instead it was very much born out of your experience teaching the text. You were translating sections for your own students. I'm wondering if you could maybe speak a bit to the origins of that. Because I think that's kind of unique for people doing academic translations. Most of them have maybe a publisher in mind as soon as they start, but you kind of. The publication almost seems to have been a second thought. Instead, it was more something born in the classroom. Could you speak to that?
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Cyril Welch
Sure. Yes. Actually, I was given a copy of Being in Time for my birthday in 1961. That was before any translation existed of the book. And I read the book that fall, I remember, at Penn State when I just arrived there to do my graduate studies. So this is my first year. I read it. I remember five pages a day. It was tough. And that meant all day. They took me a long time. I digested each sentence over and over again. The book struck me powerfully at that time, but partly because I had already, in the previous year or so, been reading other pieces of his, some in German and some in English, and found them. Those other writings, which were later writings, writings from the 30s, 40s and 50s. I found them very inspiring, in fact, contributing largely to my getting out of mathematics, which was the one field that I was felt at home in, the only one, and devoted myself to philosophy in general. For the reason, partly because Heidegger helped me understand what was going on in philosophy from the beginning, so to speak, and not just his own work. Now, as time went by, I finished my PhD which was Drew heavily on Heidegger, also American philosophy. Finished that in 1964. I first tried teaching it in 1967. But you see now, when I taught it in 1967. Now at this point, I had to read the English translation. That was just the one at the time. And I was startled by how much the translation seemed like totally different book. It wasn't the book that I read in the German originally. And again then I moved eventually to Mount Allison here in Canada. The first one was at Antioch College with very bright students. It's now defunct, but at the time it was known as kind of a minor Ivy League. And the students were very bright. But I moved up to Canada in 1967 and I tried to teach it again. And I had the same experience, in other words. So I stopped wanting to teach it. It was two different books, English and the German. But I finally did sit down and I remember in 1974, and taught it for a Whole year. Ah, it's important to know that in those days Canada had year long courses and that's a terrific. That's a little thing that makes a big difference. I had 10 weeks to teach it in Antioch College. I had 26 weeks to teach it at Mount Allison University here in Canada. That's a little item that's important because people try to cram the book into a short period. I had the whole year to do it now that still I had good students and that was a productive course in 1974. 75. But I was finding I was bucking the translation. So as I began to teach it later on in subsequent years, I just started copying out. Translating it of course, goes slowly. So I translate every week I would translate a batch of it, then handed out, hand out my own translation to the students. Now, of course there's lots of errors in this. It isn't accurate. Lots of corrections are needed and the students ask questions. And in any case, over about 20 years then it kind of grew as a, as a teaching exercise. Now I, it wasn't. I, I also. You learned. I recommend anybody translate because you really learn a book when you do that.
- [07:56]
Stephen Dozeman
You.
- [07:57]
Cyril Welch
Because if you really want to do justice to work, you got to account for every single note in it, just like maybe Herbert Parancarion has account for every note that Beethoven put down there. So you want to account for every word and you're going to do that more likely as a translator. So it was an experience for me of learning too, because you keep a great work is one that you. It's always fresh when you come back to it. I was just reading. I just read recently this guy, GK who was it? GK Chesterton, the British author who said that you really know a book. Now a book really doesn't mean anything to you unless you expect him to come every, every morning at breakfast and tell you something you never heard before. And that was what was happening with me. But it was strictly experience of my own. Towards the end, around the year 2000, I, just a little after, I think John Kulka from Yale University Press at that time, he's not there now, but he, he called me one day after I had made. I did make an inquiry. I said, look, I have this book, I've been around now often, and maybe you'd like to publish it at Yale. Why? Because Yale had just come out with another translation of what is Metaphysics? And I thought, oh, they're going to be doing second translations, so fine. Well, John Cuco took a lot of interest in it. But at that point the American Supreme Court extended the, the. It's called the Mickey Mouse Extension act or something because Walt Disney wanted to have 20 years more of. Of copyright material. Books published in 1927 and Mickey Mouse in 1927 became extended. The popular was extended to 20 more years and then. But John Kuk was later on and 20 years later when he's still interested in it, no longer at Yale, but he wrote his friends at Yale and they asked me to send. Submit the manuscript. So it was all a lot of happy coincidences, a lot of learning experiences, but it certainly wasn't a project to try to make a name for myself or money or anything like that.
- [10:12]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, jumping off of that and speaking more to your experience teaching the text and bringing it to students and engaging with students in the introduction, you note that whenever you're teaching the text, you give your students a kind of challenge or exercise, which is to read Being in Time alongside a novel. Some novels, you say, work better than others for this, but I'm curious if you could speak to why you encourage this kind of comparative reading or parallel reading as a way of understanding what Heidegger's Being in Time is trying to get at or elucidate.
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Cyril Welch
Yes, that fits into a general principle of teaching for me. It's a grand illusion to me that a philosophy book tends to give a big picture of the world or something. There may be a few who do that. I think Schopenhauer probably does that. But the great work is the. It's just not so that a great work is trying to set up a system that is then something that you read and you kind of check it out, see whether it fits what you know and so on. It's a great philosophical work is a journey of revelation where you. Where then you're supposed to be. If it's at all helpful. It's great philosophical work helps you understand where you are and what you're doing. And that's to my mind, exactly what a great novel does. I mean, again, there are lesser novels that are just trying to distract you and so on, but I. But the great novel is one that is taking some particular world, some particular personages, and working out the dramas that are essential to human life with regard to the. These particular individuals. Well, that's exactly what I wanted my students to do. I wanted to see that wherever they had been doing whatever they. Wherever they've been, whatever they've been doing for the first 20, 25 years of their life or whatever this book is about that. Well, it's hard for them to get them to turn to their own life. I got them do that in other courses and to take a book as really in dialogue with their own. What they know, kind of. But. But if you take a good novel, that's a good practice point because they'll more easily get into novels. That's part of the significance of a novel. A novel, the history of a novel is a history of a form of literature that was easily accessible. Unlike poetry and epics, they're difficult, but a novel is easy. So even as difficult as you might think Faulkner's novels are, they're. They have a kind of some ease to them. And so I particularly like Faulkner and I would. I typically. I think pretty much it was always Faulkner's Go Down Moses that I took because it had some turning points in that marvelous book that I. That I also are very close to Heidegger. So that any case. So their task was always to talk about something else. Don't talk about the book, for God's sake, for the author's sake, for their own sake. Don't think that you're going to talk about a book. The book is meaning to help you talk about something else. So that was a pedagogical point that I exercised in all of my classes as much as I could.
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Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. Speaking a little more specifically to the text itself. So the book was published first in the late 1920s. But in the lead up to that, Heidegger was frequently lecturing. And many of his students would go on to become quite prominent philosophers in their own right. Hannah Arendt and Hans Georg Gadamer to name a couple examples. But with this in mind, he brings in, as a result, a lot of his own lecturing experience and the topics that he was discussing in the lead up to being in Time's initial publication. One I'd like to particularly hone in on is his interest in ancient Greek philosophy. That especially because if anyone reads the text right at the introduction, you're gonna be hit with first passage from Plato. But then he immediately starts digging into a lot of initial Greek terms, kind of trying to pull them apart and show that there's something going on in Greek philosophy that he thinks is really important for his own philosophical intentions. I'm wondering if you could maybe speak a bit to what he's finding here.
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Cyril Welch
Yes, I think that Heidegger himself has taught many of us, certainly me, just how much Plato's and Aristotle's works are addressing the very same question. He's Addressing and being in time. In fact, I remember this. A teacher of mine, Henry Bugby, just once remarked that I should take Plato's Republic very seriously because it was the first great work in phenomenology. Now, Henry Bugby was one of the few great American thinkers that I've ever come across, particularly living still at the time, although he's now dead. But the idea that. That Plato's Republic is a. The first great work in phenomenology. Yes, I taught. I taught Plato's Republic at least 40 times in my life, starting at my first job. It was always teaching Plato's Republic. Not because of my choice, always. It was departmental choices when I was first teaching. Yeah, it's. You can read Plato's. If you read. You read Plato's Republic in parallel with Heidegger's being in time. I don't recommend that as a pedagogical thing because you have two difficult works to handle at once. But the. Yes, it's an account of what it means to be in a world. It accounts for all the different interrelations and it accounts for the big crunch. You might say every great philosophical work accounts for the big crunch. That is the turning point. That is what it is that makes the difference between getting it and not getting. Getting it in life. It's all right there. And if you and I, I learned Greek, as many people do after reading Heidegger, they're inspired because that the very kind of the. The resonances, the. With our own condition, all for all time, as we say, would come out much more clearly for one who knows Greek. I mean, the. It's really impossible to get any English translation is always going to be leaving out three quarters of the point. But it's really powerful when you start seeing the original. And Heidegger, yes, people could say, oh, he disagrees with Plato. He disagrees with Plato only because Plato, you know, quite formally is the point for scholars. I mean, it's kind of an obvious point, but that Plato does not account for, but rather assumes our being in a world. He drifts immediately into what all Western philosophy has done since until Heidegger. And that is trying to understand ourselves as being in nature rather than being in world. So that Heidegger's quarrel with Plato in the end, I mean, there's lots of little things that you could pick out, but in the end it's that. That he's the same coral. He has his entire tradition that it really only works if you slip under the interpretation that is the story that's being Told in each of these great works, and I mean great works, there are always things that are not great. A sense of our being where we are, that has a being there. That is our being there. That is priority to our being in nature. And it's a being there in a world. So that he. What Heidegger. I think it's not just that he believes this. I think he's taught us to go through the entire tradition, starting with Plato and redeem it. He calls it. It's very misleading because he used the word destroy, which is. He is the Latin form of that which is not common in German, you know, destruction. Because he does. And he said. He says, oh, that's not the same as. Which is the usual German word. But of course, in English we only have the one word of destroy. So we all. People say dismantle or something. They ticker with it. Well, it's absolutely essential to Greek philosophy is the whole point of being in time is to recover what's in Plato by the University of Illinois, not exaggerated, but something like that. We could pursue that. By the way, there's also the religious. In our original notes there you said. What about this interest in mysticism? Actually, because of that, I went back and spent about the last two weeks studying Meister Eckhart again. And this time learning the Middle High German to do so. To see what the connection is between Heidegger and. And at Meister Eckhart. And sure enough, particularly if you read them in the German, it's the same vocabulary, all the same vocabulary. And it's all the same question of the big crunch. It's a question of being able to taste God in everything. And that's where Heidegger's being in time is going. And I see again, you know, in that case it was on my own in my old age. An example, the advantage of learning the. Because I already knew German, but I mean, you're in the older German. So because it's really. It's really quite rich and very, very much in tune with. It's kind of a musical Please place. You see, Heidegger's being in time. Meister Eckhart sermons and on that. They all fit nicely together. It's because they're about the big crunch. We don't. There's a little point here. Excuse me for maybe over talking here, but. But the I think is a historical point. Somebody has to learn here that is all thinking and all literature and everything before 1600. I exaggerate a bit, but just cut it off that way. Is always about what the big crunch in life is. Starting with Descartes, my quick history of modern philosophy. Bacon, Galileo and et cetera. The notion that great work is addressing the big turnabout in human life, the big crunch, they say. No, no, forget that. Let's turn ourselves rather to understanding the world that we are in. By that they mean nature. Exactly. Nature. And be able to learn to understand nature in a way that serves human purposes. And that consequently, for 200 years, cleanly, and then even for the 19th century, the idea was that all stuff, everything has to do with a big crunch in life is to be put down to something personal. And if you really make a big deal out of it, you call it mysticism. You should at least please my readers. Readers of our general. Realize these are terms of critical language, of criticism afterwards. And I doubt. Tell me if you can find it sometime. But I doubt very much whether Meister Eicharc thinks of himself as a mystic. If you read him carefully, he's right out of Aristotle. Every. All of his structure and everything is strictly out of Aristotle. He got that, if not directly, at least from Thomas Aquinas. And it's. It's. Yeah, so why am I getting on this? But in case we have a difficult time understanding religion and stuff like that in the. Because we think it's personal and it's. It's a violation of the separation of certain state if we think that they kind of go together. I'm sorry, you're gonna have a hard time with all literature. And in the end with Heidegger, if you endorse that.
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Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, we'll circle back to some of this, I think, later. But I also wanna get another thing on the table that's really key to understanding the text we're discussing here, and that is phenomenology. So Heidegger picks up this kind of new way of thinking about philosophy from his philosophical mentor, Edmund Husserl. But you note in the introduction that while he did borrow a lot of inspiration from it, he also took it in a very different direction. I'm wondering if you could kind of speak briefly to what exactly phenomenology is and what Heidegger was kind of getting out of it, you know, even in his own kind of very unique way, you know.
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Cyril Welch
Yes, you give me forewarning. I've thought a lot about this. You know, the first answer is right up front. He said, don't look at books. Academic look directly. Now that I say you. I mean, this is. Whether it's. This is Husserl this is Shaler. This was really impressive in those days. What you mean we don't. It was a little bit. It had developed what you might call a scholasticism, which certainly accounts for the scholasticism with which the middle age came to an end, is very analogous to what the 20th century experienced. You have all these people who are thinking that they can get things straight in life by reading about them in books. So it was just astounding to attend a lecture by Husserl or something where he said, now look at this, look at this, look at that, look for yourself, look at this, and so on. So the most challenging part of phenomenology was really learn to look for yourself, suspend all of the literature that is there, because that's like opinions you have to wash away or suspend the opinions that you start with. And that's, I think, really the most impressive feature, although it's not part of the official doctrine. Now, if you want to say what phenomenology is more than that, it's a little, what can you do? I mean, it's like somebody asks you what painting is like, you know, or what sculpture is like, you really have to do it. Students, of course, always people always ask me, you know, what is phenomenology? So it's a question I've been around a lot. But really, you always cringe a bit because you know that you don't know anything unless you do it. And it's a grand delusion to think you can understand something without actually doing it, which is perhaps. And that's universal through all philosophy. Okay, but what would you do if you. To be a little more conciliatory on that? I could say, well, okay, take some few pages from Husserl, take a few pages from Heidegger, and take a few pages from Merleau Ponty. Merleau Ponty, for instance, the introduction to his Phenomenology of Perception has a nice little essay, what is phenomenology? And I've actually shoveled that onto people. I said, read it, you know, if you want. Want to find out. Whatever it is, though, you would see that those three are very different, but they all share the idea that you look for yourself. It's emphasizing that to be intellectually responsible is to account for things as they happen and are happening, prior to giving reasons for their happening, prior to looking behind the scenes. I have a good. I had a very excellent physiotherapist in France that put me together, kept on putting me together many times, because I used to do a lot of mountain climbing. And I would strain this and that, and he'd put me back together afterwards. But I was really struck by the way he could look when he looked at phenomena. He would look very carefully at phenomena, but he always would see things behind the. Underneath my skin, you know, a good physiology goes. And he feels around and he could tell me exactly what I've been doing for the last 24 hours. And he could tell me what the problems were. And he gave me a story about getting the knots they knew out of this and so on. He was not a phenomenologist. Why he looked at the phenomena very carefully, but the idea was to see what was under them. And that's a very legitimate enterprise. And even some in a lot of literature does that. But it's the philosophical literature. Of the examples that I would choose there, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau, Ponty, are all efforts to stick with the phenomenon and to keep telling the story of the phenomena. Because that phenomenon means coming to light. But stay on that and then realize that the effort to see what's under it is another enterprise. And Heidegger is very good on that. One of the most astounding features is a very simple one of being in time. He says it's one thing to look at things at hand, that is you're actually using them at hand. They're two hand. You have to deal with them exactly like my. There the guy that. That Frenchman who knew exactly what he was doing. You get that? Where am I now? The idea of looking for something that's behind them is a derivative form of dealing with things. And that's the important thing. Derivative, it's secondary. It requires an act of abstraction. It's not really seeing things as they entirely are. My physiotherapist can see what I did yesterday on the mountaintop where I strain my. Some muscle or tendon or someplace, but that's not. That's way of dealing with it is not the way that he's going to understand me or mountain climbing or anything else. It's not a way of understanding things. However, that's modern science. Modern science is a way of understanding things falsely, so to speak. I mean, I'm a vast exaggeration because I say falsely, but derivatively. And so that's the insistence on it that trying to understand things by finding their causes behind them, which we take naturally say, is that what I take an academic course for? Yes, that's exactly why you take an academic course. And that's why academic courses are false. And that you kind of smell that out when your students smell it out, until they finally. They say it, and then they learn not to say it anymore. But they're not. It's very hard to find a course in academia that really talks about it, gives you an insight, and you can be easily convinced that. That Faulkner has a greater insight into human drama and the human south, the history of the United States and the history of Western civilization than many history professors do. And they. And I would agree with. So phenomenology is meant to be, of course, not a little. It's an art, something you have to learn. That's another thing. You can't just go in and say, I'm going to buy some. No, he would. Phenomenology is a way of life. You have to become a writer and speaker to do this and to do it well and to help other people. There's always that. It's, you know, the test of it is if I. If I as a teacher cannot help other students understand where they are doing what they're doing, then I have failed as a teacher similarly, and so on. Anyway, you can see that that's where I would go along now. I'm sorry, you'd have to take the course.
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Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, I think to kind of jump off of this and develop it. It'll maybe help kind of flesh out what you mean by phenomenology by talking about one of the main topics of Being in Time, which is everydayness. So, you know, when people think of existentialism, they probably think, as you were saying, like, you know, moments of the big crunch, these big decisions, angst and ennui. And yet, if you read Being in Time, a huge amount of it, especially kind of in the first half, will be spent on just much more basic modes of operation and existence. So he talks a lot about just hammering nails into a board, walking down the street, you know, just being in a room with other people. Just very basic stuff. Stuff that I think even, you know, most professional philosophers would think is not super philosophically interesting. And yet Heidegger really kind of sticks with it for a long time, kind of trying to tease things out of it. I'm wondering if you could speak to what he's doing when he spends all this time on what I think most people would think is kind of philosophically insubstantial times of our life. What's in. What is phenomenology seems to be like a key part of how he's trying to tease it out.
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Cyril Welch
Yeah, you know, exactly. It's just so much that you remind me. I'm so glad after these years, by the way, as I've been retired since 2004, I haven't had much of a chance to actually talk in a kind of a quasi pedagogical manner. And that's. It's. You know what the beauty of being in time is? It's like a tragedy. You have the whole story of where we are and then the crunch and then what might happen. And that's the story of every Shakespearean and Sophoclean tragedy. Now, if you look at what philosophers do, they'll spin by very quickly. Philosophers also say, you know, our banal life, our everyday life is kind of a cloud, it's kind of a fog. You know, lots of metaphors. Let's get down and really get to see what's going on here. And they jump right in to the other half. They write into what might happen, what the alternative might be. And then the only thought that people could have is they think, well, that's of course extraordinary stuff. Let's talk about the ordinary. And then they start talking. And then you have a whole modern sciences of the ordinary, that is modern behavioral psychology. Just not all, but almost all the sociology I've ever studied ever come across has been a study of banality. It's a. And then the. And assuming that's enough. But Heidegger says, look at the whole point is to understand where this can go or where we can go in it. So we better know where you are to begin with. And where you are to begin with takes at least in this case 200 pages to talk about where you are to begin with. The. If you don't do that, I'll tell you one of the con. One of the consequences. Well, no, having done this, maybe talk positively having done that. When it comes to understanding the alternative to absorption, to living out your life of Willy Lumen, you know, that sort of thing. Just the alternative to the sleepy life is he can show how that alternative number one, it can be born out of the banality itself. He will want to find evidence phenomena within that that show that the question, the question of beings he would put. But the question of what's what it. The of an alternative put it that way. The question of an alternative is raised already by our condition, if you understand it properly. And that's he. He takes notoriously, he takes the notion of angst, which is very common in states in. In Augustine's Confessions or in parts of Meister Eckhart and certainly in Kierkegaard manner. He takes the notion of angst as being phenomenal evidence. That is it happens already in everydayness. And then he gives a special meaning to it. Of course, he always has to give. Every philosopher tries to give a special meaning to the words. Tries to get the words to mean something. We say special meanings. That means not lost in everydayness but actually meaning something. That's a good task to get the words to mean something. And then shows so that it's. It's a. It's an. See, I would notice how temptation. I want to say it arises naturally. But his whole point is this is the word natural he wants to avoid. Why? Because nature he wants to have as a topic in itself. And what. What is natural. It has to be a temporary topic. But it arises of itself. The question of an alternative. That's the first important achievement that's really achieved. I don't know of any other philosopher except people like in the religious tradition. Kierkegaard and Augustine would be most famous for that. Does see that question. But he raises that question. And then there's a second thing that's even more important. That when you seek an alternative it doesn't have to be something else. It's not metaphysics. It's not like my physiotherapist who finds out something else that I didn't know underneath the skin. It's a kind of. To use a religious term. The alternative involves the redemption of the everyday. So the everyday becomes. You say saved. The everyday becomes the place. Every day becomes the opportunity for the sun rising. New each day. I like that from. I happen to. I take just about everything we ever have. Little quotes from Heraclitus. It's beautiful. But he says the sun is new each day. He means by that that if you wake up the alternative is going to be worked out every morning. I like that myself that any case, his sense of the alternative is not the discovery of anything else. It's as he says so beautifully. And I end up over quoting it all the time. The alternative is that comes at that moment when for the first time probably in your whole damn life you've actually been able to face things and people in their terms rather than your own. Says that I Forget what page 299 or something like that. He really harps on it. And I think I quoted in the preface there in case people missed it. But that means you're not looking for anything else. You're looking for the very potentiality. That Aristotelian word too, isn't it? Potentiality? You're looking for the first time you can see the potentiality of things themselves. You know, Aristotle just said, of course, things are their potentiality and so on. But he shows. Yeah, that's right. But how did he learn that? He spent 200 pages, first of all, showing the unrealized actuality of potentiality, and then gets that moment, talks about the moment when that. When that potentiality first emerges. That's why. And he wants us to see that in our traditions, not just in our everydayness. But he goes on then afterwards and says, you know, you can see the same thing. Once you learn to see that your own condition has potentialities in it, you can see that your very everydayness is already imbued with. With, so to speak, Aristotle and Jesus and Meister Eckhart and Descartes and Kant and all of this. And by George, you can spend the rest of your life actually talking with your ancestors. Talking with your ancestors and making them alive. Just, you know, there's a little thing at the end of Plato's apology. I don't know what other people make of it, but if you look very carefully at the final pages of Plato's apology, Socrates is answering the question, you know, oh, well, aren't you afraid of death? No, no. What's death? Death is either a lengthy sleep or it's an opportunity to talk with my ancestors. And, you know, I read that over and over again in my youth when I used to teach it, you know, I didn't think too much about it and suddenly realized, hey, that's that cleverness of ancient literature. He said he posed in the last pages of the apology the fundamental opportunity alternatives for us. Are we going to sleep our lives through or converse with our ancestors? That's. Yeah, okay. I often have to laugh at myself and just shut up, because I don't. I get carried away.
- [39:51]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, I mean, developing this a little more. One of the things you talk about the text in the introduction, a key theme that you've already talked about a couple times, is seeing the way we kind of look at things and see them. One thing I kind of want to unpack, though, is, yes, it is like an art that everyone needs to learn, but there's also a way that, especially in his later writing, although I think it's kind of present in being in time in a ways as well, is that depending on your place and time, it might be more difficult to see certain things than others. Like the way you see things is affected by kind of the context that you're born into. And so when you try and see things in the way that you're elucidating or that Heidegger is trying to get us to think about, it's also. You need to be kind of aware of what you're kind of bringing into that experience. You know, that kind of contextual baggage that you have. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to what Heidegger's trying to get us to notice here.
- [40:58]
Cyril Welch
Yeah. One of the things that. Okay. One of the things that I think Heidegger has taught a lot of us is that seeing is communal. You might say he would say historical. I mean, he doesn't use the words. He would say more like historical. But it means that when we see things, we see them together. That is, as a way of seeing things. In Sackville, New Brunswick, here. I came here in 1967 and I discovered that those are the last, perhaps the final days of the royalists in Canada. Royalists were those people who left the United States for a variety of reasons, but informally, that was because they remained loyal to the King of England and they couldn't live down in the States that had broken that tie with the old world. There was a. I noticed that everything, what education was and what life, the exigencies of life were understood much differently here. That since has evolved, by the way. But I didn't notice that it's a communal way of seeing. And if I wish to live here, I was going to have to see things that way too. This all goes a bit against. Besides the American spirit, which is of individualism. Let us say that, you know, briefly, Americans are great individualists. They should know that they're the only ones in the world that are that way that I know of. But their thought is that if you don't have to see the things the way anybody else does, you can see the things that weigh you down. Well, please. Everybody has his own little world, so to speak. You discover that whatever you're doing, anything significant is always part of something to Faulkner knows that for all of Faulkner, that's a great novelist. They don't have theories behind these things. And Faulkner is really powerful in that, if you live. He taught me that. I lived for a year in the south and I read Faulkner. That's when I started reading Faulkner seriously. Because I noticed that in the south, people saw things differently in 1960s, boy, did they ever see things differently. Really amazed me the way I looked at the world and that I read Faulkner and helped me. It's a. In his. See, he speaks about this historically, he says that's our historicity and everything. I. It's. He. I'm not. Heidegger speaks that way. But. But when you read that, please don't. Don't get lost in it. Find other ways of talking about it. We. We. It's. It's a certain togetherness, a togetherness with our ancestors, a togetherness. And that's something, again, Americans will have a lot of trouble with. They don't think that. They think ancestors can be left behind. That's. I don't know of any place else in the world that believes that. Mao Zedong tried it in China and Chinese didn't buy it. In that sense, the difficulty of seeing. Oh, by the way, don't forget this. You have to learn to see every day new. I mean, so that you're not talking about a difficulty of achieving something. You know, there's one time you climbed some big mountain. You know, you've done it, and you are now henceforth the one who climbed the mountain. That isn't the case in what we're talking about. What we're talking about is something that has to be renewed every day at breakfast. And it's difficult, just difficult to understand the need for it. That's more a problem of Americans. But it's difficult to do it because it's something that doesn't go away. The fact that you succeeded yesterday doesn't mean you'll succeed today. And anyway, maybe that doesn't answer your question a bit. But anyway. Got me talking.
- [44:48]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. The last theme I think I want to talk about within the book itself is that of authenticity. So he kind of sets up this long discussion, as we discussed, of everyday being. But especially in the later sections, he turns to questions of authenticity. And my understanding is this word in German roughly translates to ownership. So you kind of are taking ownership of your existence. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to what he's getting at here, given that it's one of the kind of central themes, not just of this particular text, but the existentialist movement as a whole. Was very interested in developing this.
- [45:32]
Cyril Welch
Sure. But incidentally, a quick footnote in my reading of Meister Eckhart in the last two weeks, I noticed he plays on the same thing. Eigenschaft. It's right there in him. And translators note it, and they notice he's doing something with it. He's raising the question, authenticity is an answer to a question. It's an old, old question. It's a question that will always arise. Part of the question of being, you might say. But it's the question of what it means to be a self. You know, what does it mean to be, in fact, an individual? If you want to take that. And you do discover throughout the world there are different ideas of that. As a born American, I know very well the American one, and I actually believed it. I thought it was the only one that existed myself until I moved around in the world. But it's every. I've had a lot to do with Orientals. I've never lived in the Orient, but I've had a lot to do with Orientals. They have a totally different understanding of what it means to be a self. The usual understandings could be in a sociological kind of a way, expressed in predicates. You could describe the American sense of individuality with a set of predicates. I won't dare try to do it. You could certainly take the Chinese idea of what it means to be yourself and get a bunch of predicates for it. Now, again, Heidegger wants to give a phenomenological account of this. Right. That's not to give predications of it. It's a distinction that readers have to work out. It's not a question of predicating something, but it's. So he's not going to come away with a number of significant predicates. He wants to see what it is that happens that might account, in fact, for all of great variety throughout the world, of understandings of what it means to be a self. And he picks this notion of ownership. Yes. He says, you know, what is the big choice in human life? Big choice is either to sink in and go along with it, those things. And then you see, at that point you think, oh, then to be an individual means to extract yourself from it, to go and do things your own way. Frank Sinatra's song I Did It My Way, you know, I love the song. It's a great song. But he didn't say he had it his way, by the way, I think if he had said that, he would have been a fool. But he was very wise in an American kind of a way. But he said, but I did it in my way. A beautiful line from Frank Sinatra. But even before that. So before that little philosophical word, not before in the sense of another time or underneath, but just as something that actually happens phenomenally first is whether or not you take where you are, where you are as yours. That's your. Some phrases I've seen in movies and whatnot, like the last few years, I thought it was interesting when somebody says, okay, I'll take that as my own. You know, somebody comes in at a company with a problem and the boss, instead of saying, you go solve it, he says, oh, I'll take that as my own. Something like that. And I thought, wow, that's right. That's the fundamental act, to take it as your own or to shuffle it off onto somebody else, pass the buck and so on. You know, all those expressions, that's certainly, that's at the root of his talk of authenticity. You know, it's not. We often think being, for instance, being authentic, you get confused. You need to talk kind of in a Wittgensteinian manner there about the different ways this word actually is used. And significantly, one of them is to be authentic is always just to be honest with yourself and others about what's happening, what you're doing. Start and you give examples. There are people that are lying all the time, both to themselves and to others. Kind of a mysterious thing. And so you say, oh, an authentic person is a person that's really just himself and so on. The problem with that is you end up with a free floating self. I mean, Heidegger, lots of understandings of the self actually alienate the self self. And I think that is a cultural problem. I think that in many places, not just America, but I live in Europe a lot, I can begin seeing that coming on. Being yourself means not having anything to do with the routes around you. That is being, you know, it's different of being independent. And people think that Thoreau meant that when he went out into the lived in the woods, he's going to do it his way and have it his way and hell with everybody else. That I'm afraid it just doesn't work. It's called Chesterton beautifully says that's the omnibus that takes you to the insane asylum. And I think a beautiful little book on that. It really leads directly in the olden days. If you read that book called Orthodoxy by him, he's beautiful on that. One of the things that he's assuming in 1907 is that everybody accepts saying asylums. Interestingly, we've eliminated them. I was around saying asylums in my life. I don't think they exist anymore. But anyway, he uses that as a prime example of somebody who thinks he can do it all by himself and have it all his own way. It's Chesterton, 1908, I think. So he's really worth reading in this regard. A comic writer, by the way. In fact, I recommend one of the problems with reading Heidegger, he writes in a heavy, tragic way besides reading a Faulkner novel. I would read, say, Chesterton Orthodoxy, because he says all the much of the same stuff in a traditional way, but in a way that's funny as hell, as Oscar Wilde does, too, in. In the. What's it called? The. The decay of lying. Oscar Wilde is also a very highly educated person, and he. He says everything that we need to know, but he says it in a funny way so that you. It's. That it's a good little counterbalance to Heidegger. So besides reading Faulkner, you should read Testerton then. And because they're in English, too. Testerton and Oscar Wilde. You don't have to worry about translations. Okay, I'm really getting off on that. Would you pull me back to where we. Oh, authenticity. It's a big question. And it's only. Let's face it. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, I used to tell my students, I said, could you ever say that you know something unless you take the situation as your own? If you go into a chemistry class, do you really know chemistry if you just are always taking what the teacher says and putting it in your notes? No, you know the chemistry of. You take it on your own. Take a serious interest in there and getting back in that laboratory, putting on your apron and sitting there and working with it. You take it as your own. And if you cannot take it as your own, you're just taking it from somebody else. I'm sorry, you don't have knowledge even in the. You know, even you don't know chemistry that way. You're not going to be a chemist. So it's not just a moral question of being honest with yourself. You're talking about the conditions or the possibility to use Kant's terms, because this is for the possibility of even knowing anything. You have to take it as your own. I was at a little trouble with this interview, by the way, when I first talked to you a few times ago, I wasn't too sure I could take this interview as my own. Well, I think I'm taking it as my own. Now.
- [52:46]
Stephen Dozeman
I do want to ask, you kind of mentioned that Heidegger has admittedly this very heady style of writing. There's not a lot of lightness to it. But I am curious, as someone who's obviously read it really closely in German, does it stand out stylistically from, like, other texts in German of the time? Or is that tone. Is there like maybe a tone or something getting lost in the translation? Like, does it Feel colloquial to German readers, would you say, in your opinion?
- [53:24]
Cyril Welch
Yeah, this has been remark for itself and I think it's true. Other people said it. I wouldn't be in this case. I lean a little bit too on the testimony of other people because I never worried much about it. But Heidegger's being in Time is a mix of highly academic stuff. He's strictly the first pages. It's all set up as to what the problems are and. And very stiffly, but yes, but it's for sure that his actual style, when he cuts loose, when he's actually doing his work, there's two kinds of moments in that verse. Two, he's very proclusorial. He's going to talk about what needs to be done. It's just so professorial. He's not doing it, he's just talking about what needs to be done that's done in this awful Germanic stiffened style. But as soon as he cuts loose and actually does something, he's talking about our involvement in this, that or the other thing. He seldom has examples, but if you can supply your own. When he is cutting loose and it's all colloquialist, he might as well be talking with a farmer. I mean, and he has that beautiful connection between the two, I think. Yeah. And I suppose that's part of the. Makes it difficult to translate. I mean, in a way I never thought of it as difficult, so I wasn't worried. I was always just asking myself, how can I get this to mean something for students? And that was different from me trying to get something. I never had the question of how I could get this to be an accurate. I hope it is accurate, but an accurate rendition of something that will pass the peer review tests and that would meet academic standards or anything like that. I had to myself as a translator, I think occasionally I cut loose and I just put in English called criticism for the dirt to correspond to the German one. Because that's what he believes. He himself, he believes he's talking about what it means to be on the ground. He doesn't want to talk about what's it like to be in academia defending theses and things like that.
- [55:35]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, I mean, it does bring to mind instances in previous translations of the text, particularly Macquarie Robinson, where certain terms, they just don't translate out of the German, they just leave it in German. Or there are other instances where it's like, you know, two or three words connected with hyphens, which can certainly intimidate a lot of English readers. But I think the counterargument is that they're trying to make it clear that Heidegger is doing something that's kind of very unique to the Germanic that he's working with. I'm wondering if you could maybe just speak a bit to, you know. Did you say you kind of felt more comfortable leaning into English colloquialisms, you know, and maybe like, some people will come after you say this kind of, you know, takes us away from Heidegger's German a bit. And obviously there's like, we could go on all day about like, which is the preferred option. But it does seem like you kind of were interested in something a little more colloquial in English, maybe a bit more friendly to the reader. Could you maybe speak to that kind of desire or intention?
- [56:46]
Cyril Welch
Yeah, well, it is a. It's a. Quite apart from how successful any of us translators are in this, it's kind of a challenge to. Aristotle said this. I'm always struck. You read a lot of Aristotle, pretty soon you notice it. So he already said it. The great. There is a trick always in effective speaking and effective writing. Now, Aristotle, talk about speaking that to get a mix of the old and the new, the colloquial and the special. For this simple reason, for the double reason that you are talking about something that's very ordinary in a certain way. You know, this is a doctrine of recollection, so to speak. I mean, in time isn't telling you anything you don't already know. You could say that, you know. I mean, if he is saying something you couldn't possibly know, then he's doing something else. My physiotherapist, or can he see therapeutic told me things I couldn't possibly know. But philosophical work doesn't tell you. It tells you precisely what it is you already know, so to speak. So it has to be ordinary. But on the other hand, the fact that it's you that it's missed most of the time that we. Or if you wish that traditionally you live in a fog or live at the bottom of a cave or live in the water like fish. And don't think that that's the fish. The water is. We miss everything that's outside the water and so on, whatever those images are. We sleep, you know, another image. We're asleep most of the time. Okay. It's going to be special when in those moments you get it right, which is the assumption is you do, you don't, you don't. Oh, big illusion. You don't learn, you don't read Heidegger to get it right. You learn Heidegger to figure out how you got it right already. Sometimes that way you can testify to yourself you got it right. Okay? So you need the specialness there. And Heidegger does have even that word authenticity. He means it in a special sense, in the way that I talked about it. All of his words he means. But probably the most common word in the whole damn book is Dasein. And yet it's easily translated. It's used in everyday English. When you go out knocking on the door, you say, is he there? And that's the. Is there is the being there. And. And Hegel uses it exactly that way. Hegel uses the term meaning the great task in life. Heidegger points this out towards the end of the book. I don't know how many people noticed that Heidegger actually admits Heidegger's. He takes Hegel's term being there, which is right out of the streets. It just means to be where you are. And Hegel said you have to work through thinking until you are really there. Until you are there. That. That's absolute vision. That's absolute knowing to when you bring your whole conceptual apparatus to be there. So I think the hugest mistake, even if people quote Heidegger as saying he approved of it, is to translate that. That particular word as it's not translated. No, it's the commonest word in the world. He's just talking about where we are, damn it. He's not talking about Dasein someplace else. Something else he's talking about where right there. You're sitting there. I can see you got a lot of beautiful bookshelves there, and you're sitting in an office someplace, and you told me it was Wisconsin. And. And so on. You are there and you're trying to conduct an interview with a guy that talks too much and so on. I mean, that's. That's you're there and that's all it's about. So. But you get the specialness. You know, that's a. There's no recipe for handling that. I mean, it is true. Anybody wants to translate for other people. I. By. By the way, some translation is just for the translator. I translate when I translate Meister Eckhart. I'm translating it for me, not for anybody else. And it's awkward. It's word for word and so on, but just keep you a bit of specialness, a bit of ordinariness. Follow aerostyle. Good advice on that.
- [60:34]
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- [61:02]
Stephen Dozeman
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- [61:33]
Stephen Dozeman
into, maybe moving away a bit thematically and more towards the edition that's being published, one thing I find interesting is you've got a number of footnotes in the text and they're broken up into a few categories. So one is Heidegger's references. So he quotes Aristotle. You know, you provide a footnote to that part of Aristotle. Another is some of your own commentary just explaining some maybe difficult concept or a difficult term. You know, I'm translating this this way. It also might mean this, that sort of thing. So that's all very helpful. But it's third category that I'm interested in asking about is Heidegger's own later kind of marginalia and commentary. I'm wondering if you could tell us a bit about where this comes from, why you felt the need to include it and how does it enrich our reading and understanding of the text.
- [62:28]
Cyril Welch
Yeah, just a fact that as I get from the editors who write it, I mean the fact is that when they go through his works they often many of his work, the being in time in particular. He noticed that Heidegger in the course of the years had written things in the margin, okay. And that they some additions then started quoting them as footnotes. Now why I put them in there, I just thought it was a bit of a the easy answers. I just thought there was a bit of for the sake of completeness. But now we reflect a bit on that. A lot of these are single words. A lot of them don't seem it's not at all clear what he's Referring to. But it's. I would say the significance of it is for me. And then, I hope, for the reader a bit. They offer a little bit of a pause. They say, Heidegger later, in his later years, wanted to come back to that passage. And then that. And now sometimes it's interesting because he sometimes actually changes it. Now, that's interesting. He said, no, that's not the right word. And he puts another one in. Now that's certainly interesting because that shows a second thought on it. That shows some of the doubts that are involved, some of the little tiny background drama that's going on. The question of how can I have that? We all do. We wonder whether we said things the way we should. I mean, afterwards, we. I don't. I'm afraid of this kind of interview because I can't go back and correct it. It's there, you know, it's one I'm so used to be writing something down and coming back the next day or the next year and looking at it and say, hmm, that seems a little off. I certainly don't want that. And I might make it a change. So that's one kind. So the actual corrections he makes, I think other source of pause we make as readers and we can say, yeah, that shows it must be a little bit ambiguous. There's some of them are, I think, revelatory. There's other ones where I think he's talking about critics that he doesn't like to be called an existentialist or something like that. So I remember there's a few footnotes there where he says, I forget what the words are, but he says something to the fact, ha, you see, I'm not an existentialist. He didn't put it that crudely, but something like that. Another one. Sometimes I can see, because I'm interested in his later works, I can see that he's saying kind of, oh, yeah, this is something I developed later on. Maybe in a few cases, he actually says where. But the significance of all of this, I think, is to give. To point out that the text is kind of alive a bit. You know, it's still. After all the years he looks at it. One little thing, I footnote this myself along one of my own footnotes. But I had a couple of different conversations with him over the years. And when I came to him and wanted to ask him to talk about something on page 333 of Zine Insight, he got up and he went over and got it and he put it in front of him. And the Very thing that I wanted to talk about, he'd underlined in red. And he was so pleased that I. That I raised it. He says, yes, exactly. And so on, you know, so that. But he himself, in other words, for him, of course, for him, once it had the public attention that it was getting. He said again, of course, noticing that people were not understanding the book. That's natural. You don't understand a book just by reading it through you. And people pick things out of context and get bothered by this. And it's a. It's a terrible. It's a challenging book for two reasons. First of all, it's very, very rich and has so many things to consider. So that makes it difficult. But a second reason it's very, very difficult is that it actually tries to pinpoint what that big crunch is. And that always bothers people because they have their own idea of the crunch or they don't like the idea there's a crunch. There's a lot of almost psychotherapeutic problems that people have when you want to talk about the crunch in life. They've read Freud, they know damn well what the. They've read Auguste Kant, they know damn well what the crunch is. See, you come in already. The crunch is so important to us in life that we usually. The greatest problem is particularly by the time you reach middle age, are you middle aged yet? I don't know. But you get a fixed idea what that is. And so somebody comes along and wants to talk about it. It's a kind of a challenge to them. A lot of people's negative reactions to being in time. I know what the beginning. I'm not around knowing how people are doing it now. But they were just bothered by the fact that he was. He was kind of saying, you're implying by offering an alternative that this wasn't quite that maybe there's a. That you didn't get it quite right. You know, and this can be very, very upsetting to people. But anyway, it shows, as I say, all those footnotes, not footnotes, where it just says, this is from aristotle's metaphysics book 7. You know, that just gets in the way. But to my mind. But the other footnotes are meant to kind of give you a pause to see that the text is kind of vibrating a bit. It's waiting, it's for. For its own fulfillment. And it's not entirely clear where. Unhappy where it is at the moment. Which is exactly the way it should be.
- [67:59]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. Speaking to another aspect of that. So being in time as we have. It is composed of two divisions, an introduction, and then division one, division two. But at the end of the introduction, he outlines the entire planned project of Being in Time, which was supposed to be two volumes of three divisions each. So essentially, we have the first third of maybe an intended project, the rest of which is not available, at least in this text. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to how we ought to, like, read the text. Given that there's a further 2/3 of it that is not in there. Not between those front and back covers.
- [68:49]
Cyril Welch
Yes, you would forewarn me about that question. You know, at first I thought I didn't have any answer to that. It's just a fact and so on. No, I think I've changed my mind. This morning when I was thinking about it. I think it is. It's important to ask that question and think about it. For one thing is, I think, unbeknownst to Heidegger, I think there was a certain naivete. He thought that the job of philosophy would be to write, to get it all done. A bit like Ruskin. Ruskin thought that he could go down and look at the stones of Venice or whatever it was, and get it all straight and come back and tell you that great artwork. I don't mean to knock Ruskin, I actually like him. But he said something that bothered Marcel Proust. He said that. Something that artworks give it all to you. I mean, that's the beauty of it. It gives you the complete picture, whereas we normally live partial lives. But an artwork gives you the full picture. Marcel Proust wrote a book in response to Ruskin on that. He translated Ruskin. So you knew him. And Marcel Proust said, no, no. A work puts you on the threshold. You have to cross the threshold yourself. The greatness of the work is precisely that it can put you in the threshold. And with a view to that. The wisdom of that. I think there's a terrific wisdom in that. So it's in a book called. What's it called? Sur la Cure. I think in France, Proust. I don't know anybody else who reads it. I read a lot of books. I never know anybody else who reads it. Excellent book by him. And he. In that long way that he has. He in effect says that the thing about an artwork, including his own, although, is that sets you at the threshold where you can cross or not. In that regard, the incompleteness of the project Heidegger proposed belongs to the project. Because I think being in time only puts you on the threshold. So it really does belong to it. Now it would be naive, in other words, to think that anybody could have finished the rest of it and then have it all in those terms. The however, on the end. Other end, if you look at what those other parts were supposed to do, you can see that those are part of crossing the threshold. I mean, so part of it would be as Heidegger has gone on and helps and tried to help you do is one of it is to, as I would say, redeem our ancestors, to talk with our. Get a conversation going with our ancestors and to keep them without. Doesn't mean agreeing with. It's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing. It's a question of seeing the drama in which we live. We're living in the drama along with Plato and the rest of them still today. And that's part of it. It was to do the. He called the destructuring. That is, I think I translated as destructuring destruction. One should at least know this, that Germans don't normally talk about destruction. It's. I guess I already mentioned that the other one. The other part of it was though the other thing that was left out was a complete account of thinghood. Being in time accounts for a lot of things, but one of them is selfhood. And you could say that he never accounted fully for thinghood. I emphasize that in my footnotes pointing out that Heidegger is saying this all the time. And that was the page on 333 that I was talked an afternoon with with Heidegger about back in the 60s. The. The. It's. The other half is evident in his other works when he talks about world and thing and both in the art of artworks. The. What's it called? The. The work of art. The. The. And there's other pieces where he talked about a fourfold and that sort of stuff. Those are works where he's trying to bring out the how. There's a holiness of things that you also only learn if you take upon the situation upon yourself that was to be addressed also in being in those parts. And he himself has half a dozen pieces in his older later works where he actually does this but does not tie it into the framework of being in time. So but it's. But it is really. It's another threshold, so to speak. He sets up other thresholds. There's many. Maybe he had to learn that there's more than one threshold.
- [73:51]
Stephen Dozeman
They certainly have a very different feel or language to them. And it does. Like as you're saying, there is maybe a Way in which you kind of realize that the project he wanted to carry out with Being in Time couldn't be done in the kind of schematic, systematic language of Being in Time. I found, like when reading either primary sources or secondary sources on Heidegger or sometimes Kierkegaard or some other writers, there's kind of this. You find this tension within academic literature where you can kind of feel the attempt to get at something really meaningful kind of coming up against the form of, you know, an academic monograph which, you know, needs everything kind of neat and tidy for the peer reviewers. And there's, you know, perfectly good reasons to kind of have peer review. I'm not disagreeing with that. But I think one thing that's interesting is writers like Heidegger kind of seem to come to a point where they realize that form is. Is, you know, holding them back. Do you see him maybe kind of in later points in life? Kind of.
- [75:04]
Cyril Welch
You say it just as well as I could. Yes, absolutely. It's a difference between youth and old age. I say I can speak a little bit about that difference now. When you're younger, you think that there's a way of straightening everything out and it can all be put in the same basket and damaged world should reform itself accordingly and whatnot. When you get older, you realize that framework of that certain. That original framework has its purposes, it has its uses and so on, but it doesn't meet the full. What was that phrase from Lincoln when he said they gave the full measure of their devotion? It's not the full measure, but when you're young, you think it somehow. It should be the full measure.
- [75:58]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah. So in wrapping up this conversation, I'm wondering if you have any final thoughts or maybe hopes or aspirations for this translation, like for people who maybe are coming at the text for the first time, or maybe people who've already read it multiple times, written papers on it, like, do you have any final things you'd like to say for people preparing to embark on this big 600 page or so journey?
- [76:31]
Cyril Welch
430 of his, and then a whole bunch of mine. Yeah, the. Yeah, again. For one thing, I just wish that people would come into this work with a song in their heart rather than thinking, this is a. This is an overwhelming, awful thing to do. And I mean a task that's going to take. It's going to be weighing down on me and so on somehow. It should be. It should be bright, even though it's dark in many ways. And I've suggested, as a teacher, you can do that a little bit too. I think as a teacher, I would try to. I don't mean to be funny or anything like that. I just mean that we're talking in, so to speak, the New Testament, not the Old Testament. I mean, the Old Testament is a very harsh, hard thing to read. And through a lot of sadness and whatnot, it is very heavy. You can get a song in your heart when you look at the New Testament. I say that because I resolved about 20 years ago to read the Bible from COVID to cover, you know, just because I thought belongs so much to my tradition. And I saw a guy in the religious study department after a month or so, and I said, you know, I read. I just got into the New Testament now after finishing the Old Testament. What a relief. I said, what? And he said, well, that's the whole point. The whole point of the book is the is to. Of appearing in time is to. Is to give you a sigh of relief. This is meant to be. To weigh you down with stuff. It's. And I. And I hope that my translation helps in that regard a little bit. You had forewarned me on that question. And to break it up into old timers. The old timers, I think they've already read the book, you know, in a certain way. That's too late. But I. The. I was just recently thinking that I noticed myself in my older age reading it differently. When I was going over it for Yale, I had to review it a lot. And I noticed that I looked at it a little differently again because I was now obviously in my high 80s rather than in my 30s when I. Or 20s when I first started. But there's a little topic of there that something I translate as shared lot, the Heidegger is a great concern for how it is that we could find ourselves sharing, not sharing, you might say the word lot in a heavy sense of our allotment or destiny that would be shared. He says, that's a kind of a destiny. It's a kashyk within the shiksa. And I think when I was young, it didn't make a hell of a lot of. It didn't mean a hell of a lot to me. It does now and in my old age. I think historically speaking, as a matter of fact, it's the big question hanging over us, you and me right now, is in what sense do we live within a shared lot? Now, I admit that that's beyond the German. The German is just simply geschich, which is very related to shiksa. But if you look at the way he himself defines it, he means that shared is a shared. But how do you get that shift. Sharedness in there? You know, how'd they get that? It's, it's. It's not. That's something that I. Maybe an old timer's already taken account of that I don't know. But it's, it's, it's there and it's Heidegger's later works and a lot too. You know, I was thinking about for the young, fresh readers that the young ones, the first time around, I would hope that they could see and appreciate their own literary traditions more from when they read it. They could see that although the tone is much different, that they should be able to go back and appreciate Thomas Jefferson and Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman. Henry Adams, for heaven's sake. I don't know how you Americans can stand not reading Henry Adams. I mean, he's the most revelatory thinker, is Mont St. Michelin, Chartres. I forget around 1905, maybe. His education of Henry Adams is his autobiography written in the third person in around just the end of the First World War. I think that's when he died, I believe. Come on. It's terrific stuff. I mean, then you have. This is all very important stuff. And if you feel that you've read Being in Time successfully, it'll take a while to learn how to do it. But that when you can go back and look at all this stuff and really see that it's important. Thoreau, Whitman, Moby Dick, Faulkner, the rest, that's what it's there for. It's not many. It's not there to give you a system that blanks out other things. It's meant to be an opening.
- [81:38]
Stephen Dozeman
Yeah, that's a good note to end on. So, without further ado, Cyril Welch, thank you so much for coming on and being with us.
- [81:48]
Cyril Welch
As it turned out, it was a real pleasure for me.