Simon Critchley has been writing on Heidegger's Being and Time for Cif Belief's How to believe. It's been good to read, Heidegger's own prose being so tricky that another authoritative commentator's take on him is always valuable. What struck me reading the posts was how Heidegger's neologisms and tortuous attempts to get inside being so often seen like attempts to render religious concepts for a secular age.

Time as arriving at kairos, Conscience as discovering self-knowledge, Death as a judgement on life that affirms life, Anxiety as a dark night of the soul, Thrownness as being created out of nothing.

The theological imagination certainly provides a way in and whilst wrestling with his texts must be the primary way to yield Heideggerian insights, I wonder whether Heideggerians might not learn from the religious communicators of similar subtleties and turn to myth and parable, perhaps even the witness of their own lives. That latter task is one reason I think that Havi Carel's Illness is so good.

Incidentally, if you're looking for excellent guides on reading primary texts, the How to read series that Simon edits can't be beaten. I've particularly enjoyed John Caputo's Kierkegaard, Slavoj Zizek's Lacan and Mark Wrathall's Heidegger.

Tomorrow, on How to believe, I believe my own blogs on Plato's Dialogues begin.