Review: Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide — why we shelve a comic next to the classic
★★★★☆3.9 / 5.0 (editorial rating)
Verdict: an illustrated guide, and we recommend it without embarrassment. Dasein, being-in-the-world, the "they," being-towards-death, the "turn" — one idea per spread, drawn and captioned, in about an hour. For anyone who wants to see the summit before starting the climb — and lower the failure rate of every book that follows.
- Title
- Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide
- Author
- Jeff Collins (text), Howard Selina (illustrations)
- Publisher
- Icon Books (Graphic Guide series)
- Length
- 176 pp.
- Difficulty
- Beginner ★☆☆ — about one hour
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What it is — in three lines
Icon Books' Graphic Guide on Heidegger: the life and the core vocabulary, one idea per illustrated spread — from the question of Being to Dasein, being-in-the-world, the "they," being-towards-death and the later "turn." Text by Jeff Collins, drawings by Howard Selina. Read in an hour, kept as a reference for years.
Why a graphic guide is a legitimate first step
The biggest enemy of a defeated reader is not the difficulty but the belief that Heidegger is simply not for them. And his central moves have a feature that makes the illustrated format genuinely apt: many of them are pictures of ordinary life before they are technical claims — a workshop of tools, a crowd of "everyone," a life lived towards its own end.
In the everyday world we are not ourselves; we are whoever "one" is — we do what one does, and shrink from what one does not.
— Heidegger, Being and Time §27, on das Man / the "they" (editorial gloss of the German original)
A philosophy of tools, moods and the anonymous crowd loses less in pictures than most. The Graphic Guide uses that honestly: each spread plants the image, the caption supplies the claim, and the concept map builds itself while you are still enjoying it.
Three highlights
1. The vocabulary, made unscary
The terms that turn readers away on page one of Being and Time — Dasein, thrownness, the "they," being-towards-death — arrive here attached to a drawing and a single sentence. Meet them here first and they are old acquaintances by the time you reach the original.
2. It goes past the early book
The guide does not stop at Being and Time. It sketches the "turn" and the late concerns — technology, language, the history of Being — so you know the whole shape, not just the opening move. That makes it a real companion to Polt's overview.
3. It does not flinch from the politics
The Nazi episode is on the page, not airbrushed out. A one-hour guide that still finds room for the hardest fact about its subject is a guide taking its reader seriously.
What to watch out for
Plainly: this is scaffolding, not the building. You will not have read Heidegger when you finish it — you will be equipped to. Captions cannot carry the strange, patient rhythm of Heidegger's own sentences, and that rhythm is half the philosophy; it lives in Being and Time itself, with Mulhall to explain it. Treat any summary — drawn or written — as the map you carry, not the country you visited.
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