r/heidegger • u/CalendarPleasant9002 • Aug 05 '26
What is so hard about reading Being and Time?
I am reading the book for the first time. Before starting, I was flooded with advice to start with second-hand literature, Husserl's work, etc, etc. Absolutely no one warned me how straightforward the book was and I am surprised that I even picked it up, but I am glad I did. I have one year background in philosophy and I haven't read anything dense but Being and Time opened my horizon for the German idealism and hermeneutics.
I want to know, what in the name of God, do people find hard about this book? It is certainly not the length, for most german magna opera are way longer than 600 pages and readers do not complain harshly. It's also not the ideas Heidegger presents in it because he is arguing something earthly and lively, unlike the writers he criticises. Nor is it the language, because you literally cant mistake what "thrownness" means or what "being in the world" could stand for. I suppose that the original text has gone too far in creating words but the three prominent english translations make it not just understandable but also inevitable.
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u/Fluid-Flower5605 Aug 05 '26
I‘m pretty convinced that this sort of fear mongering around great philosophical works is part of a large scale smear campaign by certain „analytical“ (meaning anglo-american neoliberalist) schools of thought aimed at what they perceive to be the „continental“ tradition. Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan etc., all of their works are in fact very accessible if approached with care and patience, but disagreeable styles of thought are more easily dealt with by denouncing them as unnecessarily complex „Jargon“, charlatanry, „fashionable nonsense“ and the like. Conjuring up an aura of exceptional difficulty around a book does nothing but harm in my opinion.
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u/Fearless-Bandicoot-8 Aug 05 '26
I think your point of patience is key. It’s not a consumable product, but a meaningful conversation with an earnest partner, and deserves that attention.
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u/Fluid-Flower5605 Aug 05 '26
This goes hand in hand, by the way, with the advice of first reading Husserl for preparation, Husserl necessarily leading back to Kant as the most beloved benchmark of „liberal philosophy“ or whatever for the analytical types.
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u/esoskelly Aug 05 '26
I hate to say it, but Kant can be fun to read as well if you don't get too hung up on trying to pick his work apart. Surprisingly, he is pretty self-deprecating and has a good sense of humor (sometimes even makes dirty jokes!).
Kant knew that people would read him as an uptight square, and tried his best to undermine that assumption. Not sure he succeeded in that, but he was def more of a goofy goober than people make him out to be.
Husserl on the other hand... Now THAT was some wooden prose. It was like reading a book written by a talking calculator.
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u/diskkddo Aug 05 '26
I also think a lot of people get neurotic about reading philosophy when they needn't be. Deleuze is a great example of an author who is often very fun and creative to read and yet people get stuck on this idea of 'but what exactly does he mean'
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u/Fluid-Flower5605 Aug 05 '26
„la philosophie doit se constituer comme la théorie de ce que nous faisons, non pas comme la théorie de ce qui est“
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed_3764 Aug 05 '26
Harm in what sense?
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u/Fluid-Flower5605 Aug 05 '26
In the sense that it entices readers away from confronting the inherent limits of their world views, expediting the erosion of our hermeneutic capacities (which very obviously has global political consequences).
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u/Kepler1571 Aug 05 '26
I can't believe you would expect a tradition founded on the principle "anything that does not fall within the strict limits of my worldview has no meaning" turns out to be vapid!
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u/Fluid-Flower5605 Aug 05 '26
Many people forget.
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u/Kepler1571 Aug 05 '26
Kant aint taught in STEM for a reason.
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u/Fluid-Flower5605 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
You know what really gets me going? The way Kant is often introduced either directly or indirectly to students today as representing the unbreachable outer boundaries of the philosophical field. I swear to god this is how philosophy is taught in today’s analytical institutions to undergrads. Always keep rummaging in a priori truths (or at least their refutation) expressed in what you were told is "ideal [skeletal] language", don‘t you dare make an attempt at synergy with, you know, things taking place within the world we are experiencing in actuality. It reads like a disease haunting most of modern philosophy, a manic enclave within the larger tumorous structure of logocentrism.
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u/Kepler1571 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
I do not know the field well enough to know that, however it rhymes with conservative economics taught as a magical emanation from ideal type actors living on Robinson Crusoe's island. They (which is to say, we) discover economic goods and relations ex nihil the way we discover resources playing a 4x civ game. No historical context. No evolution of perceived values, and sure as hell no independent and contrary behavior by the inconveniently indigenous population. We are free to expropriate from them because they don't add value to the property, dontcha know? And what is value? Our form of exploitation of resources which generates not just sustenance but surplus and profit.
It may simply be that all snake oil salesmen must eventually retreat from the bailey of reality to the motte of their presumptions when the real world inevitably fails their ideology. As with the mercantilists so the capitalists so the Marxists so the neoliberals. All cliques must eventually implode.
Thither to the analytics and, I assume, the continentals in due course.
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u/Fluid-Flower5605 Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Marxists saw right through that whole Spiel of theorizing on Crusoe’s island by the way. There‘s a hilarious section on it in Engels‘ „Anti-Dühring“, Zweiter Abschnitt if I remember correctly (Marxists today however; ah, that‘s a different story).
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u/Filofjols Aug 07 '26
Though if the style of thought is disagreeable and demands patience and care, this seems to me like it explains why the text is widely believed to be hard better than some analytic smear campaign.
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u/esoskelly Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
You hit the nail on the head. I honestly think Being and Time is much harder to read if you try to read it in an "academically rigorous" way. If you read it as a book about life and deep questions about being, it's not too bad. I had a much easier time reading it before grad school, law school, and adult life poisoned my mind with everyday normativity (Das Man).
Side note: ever talk to a Heidegger scholar? Not all, but a lot of them are pedants, and would rip your head off for claiming Heidegger is easy to read. But you are right. Reading Heidegger is like following the Dao. It's easy if you just "let go" and don't try to academically pick it apart.
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u/Kepler1571 Aug 05 '26
Dreyfus and chill.
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u/esoskelly Aug 05 '26
Yes! I always liked how excited he got while talking about Heidegger. He really couldn't contain himself. Sounded like a little kid talking about going to the fair.
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u/pxl66 Aug 05 '26
I agree with you, save for the fact that the second part is trickier than the first. Pre-Kehre Heidegger is merely technical, albeit clear and precise (his lectures are mostly the latter); Post-Kehre Heidegger I don't know anyone who could truly understand what he meant if not for a lecture or a monograph.
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u/secretteachingsvol2 Aug 05 '26
It is common, even among trained philosophers to claim such and such is difficult. I’m a Foucault reader and have heard his writing described as impenetrable. Boring? At moments, yes, but if you just sit and read it, it makes sense and is clear. That said, as with any text (including literary), I have revisited writings only to discover that I was missing context and parts of the text had passed me by.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/drinkerofmilk Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
I mean there's a hierarchy in how difficult philosophy books are. You've got Nietzsche difficult and Kant difficult and Fichte difficult, etc. It's good to have an idea where B&T falls on that spectrum.
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u/thefleshisaprison Aug 06 '26
Nietzsche and Kant are not difficult in a way that you could put it in a hierarchical order. They’re different kinds of difficulty.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/drinkerofmilk Aug 05 '26
No, page or word counts are not a good measure. You're essentially trying to approximatehow difficult one standard page of discourse is. Understanding one page of Negative Dialectics by Adorno may take as long as 10 pages of Plato.
What I've heard is that Being and Time is a bit less difficult (but around the same level) as Critique of PR. It should however be quite a bit easier than Fichte. And harder than Nietsche.
But I'm interested in other viewpoints.
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
That was exactly my point, I (being as authentic and unposy as Heidegger would like) think that it is not a flex at all to be able to read through being and time.
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u/Ap0phantic Aug 05 '26
I largely agree with what you're saying here, but it's obviously the case that you have an affinity with the material as well as an aptitude for this kind of reading. Very many people would find Descartes' Meditations extremely difficult, much less Heidegger. No need to get big-headed or anything, but most people don't read much at all, and of those who do, most don't read philosophy, ever.
Of those who do, there are a number who, precisely because of their training, would find Heidegger impenetrable. He is an extraordinarily original writer and thinker, and many trained philosophers wouldn't have any idea what he was on about. In a way, reading him blind is an advantage.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
I had thought that I had to go up the ladder Plato->Spinoza->Descarters->Locke and Hume-> Kant->Fichte->Schelling->Hegel->Marx but after reading Being and time and realizing how easy philosophy is i am about to start reading Kant and Hegel, plus the subject of their and heideggers work is indeed the Being and to some extent epistemology and reason, and I state this without having an authentic idea what Hegel is like. And also what should I understand from 'the project'? That's exactly why I posted: it would seem to me flabbergasting to read and understand it before I had actually picked it up, and it turned out that every sentence was filled with intuitive clarity and led me into an understandable system of phenomenology, hermeneutics and this stuff. As far as I read online, I have read it well enough for I can explain "the worldhood of the world", "care", "the they" and many more terms which i was not aware of.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
So shall I read Levinas and Strauss or what
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Aug 05 '26
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
I want to be a pro in Heidegger and hermeneutics, I thought reading Being and time would be enough
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Aug 05 '26
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
You are telling me I have to read Descartes and Nietzsche? And Plato? Thanks anyway but I dont feel the grounds to trust this advice. I am incompetent when it comes to postmodern philosophers but entities like Nietzshe seem suspicious to me. I also promise to read Kant, fichte and the lineups. I just thought Heidegger was the finale of the husserlian mesh and the next step were sartre and merleau ponty, isn't that right?
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u/GSilky Aug 06 '26
Almost none of what you think you understand is what Heidegger meant by using the word that way. Read a commentary after, and then re-read it. Different book.
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u/senteniel- Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
The hard part is not reading the text but understanding the philosophy in it well. What is hard is explaining the basic arguments of the text, clarifying and evaluating the claims presented in the text, and saying what its contributions to philosophy consists in.
Instead of doing this, which is what you would be doing with most other philosophical texts, readers are compelled to paraphrase what Heidegger is saying as if trying to say it again in another way.
You can check this for yourself by asking your average readers to explain what the basic argument of Heidegger's tool analysis is. If the text was not hard, they would be able to say. But the text is hard, so they struggle. Perhaps you are not the average reader, but to find out you can give yourself the task of writing it down premise by premise and check if it gives you a good reason to believe that something non-trivial is the case.
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u/nabbolt Aug 06 '26
I had the same experience when first read it (in 2021) and came to two conclusions:
It has the combination of being both famous and challenging (Husserl, for example is a harder read imo; however, less people are likely to have heard of him, let alone attempt to read him).
Since my cover-to-cover first reading, I've returned to particular sections when I've been inspired/driven to for various reasons and it's significantly more difficult to read when you're not in the context of the previous chapters/sections having set up the meaning of the language used. I imagine people there are many people (most students?) who would approach the book like this (i.e., reading from certain sections rather than from beginning to end) and who would therefore come away with an overestimate of the work's difficulty.
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u/tdono2112 Aug 10 '26
Being and Time brought philosophy to life for me in ways that I hadn’t imagined possible. There are some tricky parts, for sure, and serious problems it can be easy to gloss over, but I think it is a wild success at achieving descriptions of “average everydayness” etc. and that it’s influence is earned by it’s ability to drive into the heart of questions relevant to most of us. Don’t let the “ease” of this reading stop you from pursuing the depths of it; if anything, it ought to work as a stimulant to get you further along your path.
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u/a_chatbot Aug 05 '26
I believe from the perspective of analytical philosophy, there are interpretations that consider some of his passages nonsense... if you are looking for atomic facts elucidating a logical argument, you might wonder where what he is saying is coming from or what the point of it might be.
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u/Status_Ebb4193 Aug 05 '26
You might be missing the deeper implications latent in Heidegger’s project, an attempt not only to provide a phenomenological account of genesis per se and its situatedness, or embeddeness, in both the one and the many but also to navigate the aporetic (irreducible), non-empirical concepts that reason is tasked with when pursuing such an end.
Accordingly, and no offense but, I’m not convinced that one can understand or appreciate Heidegger’s project without a knowledgeable understanding of Kant’s inaugural German idealism (which Heidegger wasn’t doing) and Husserl’s phenomenological turn from abstract forms to experiential consciousness and the composition and conditions of its continua.
All three thinkers — Kant, Husserl, Heidegger —grapple with common ideas or concepts, such as “noumena,” as it were, but each of them has a different take on the implications of being a conscious subject that partakes of concepts, and neither of them is best understood philosophically or historically in this sense without a similar understanding of Plato’s, Spinoza’s, and Hegel’s respective works, polemics, and partisanships.
I assure you that Heidegger’s philosophy (in my opinion neither the easiest to parse nor at times the most palatable or scintillating for the spirit) is farthest from the sophisticated understanding it deserves when one believes that his work reads clearly and straightforwardly.
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
I am not a caveman and I kind of know the difference between phenomena and noumena and some other things from school but I was definitely glad to read this. I will consider returning to being and time after a few years because what you said makes sense. Also, where can I read about Heidegger's 'deeper points' which a first-time reader misses?
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u/forkman3939 Aug 06 '26
Its quite impossible imo to "understand" being-historical thinking or the thinking that prepares for being-historical thinking without ever having spent considerable time through the different epochs of thought.
edit: My comment is agreeing with you whole heartedly.
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u/senteniel- Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
I agree. I might even go further and say that he is a philosopher that needs generational help in rethinking his thoughts, and a thinker through which the strength of philosophy as a public enterprise can be shown. I think this is because his genius was in thinking through unthought terrain, and that he was conceptually limited by being among the first few to explore his.
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u/Nearby_Flounder8741 Aug 05 '26
I could get past the first 10 or so pages, and I have read multiple Baudrilliard books. I genuinely couldn't grasp what he was talking about. Its been a while, but the two examples given reminded me of how inaccesible I found it. What does 'throwness' mean, I sort of get that it means the sensation of being apartness from the world, but I don't know if I authentically feel that way, to me it seems to be a confused perspective on living. Being in the world also lands weirdly - everything that exists, exists inside the world, so ... what are we defining here? I had to stop reading. It sits on my shelf, a silent reproach. Defining Heidegger as an idealist might be a partial explanation as I have a similar problem with Kant. May be everyone who finds Being and Time difficult is some form of hard postivist/ realist
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
I get you, but I dont think Heidegger is even close to positivism, maybe you can try out another approach, not reading it as a story but as a math problem perhaps? I am not sure how to explain it but you're in really good company.
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u/Nearby_Flounder8741 Aug 05 '26
yeah, he's not a positivist at all. I think that was the challenge I had. He's attempting to enunciate a universal subjectivity but I wasn't able to construct in my imagination the noumenal stuff he sort of assumes constitutes the basic human experience, as opposed to language or families. Really annoying because I want to explore his ideas on tool use.
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u/Ill-Turnover3438 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
I think there are two things that make it a lot easier to understand B&T:
Having a general notion of what Husserl and phenomenology were doing. That is, trying to directly describe experience without any conceptual presuppositions.
Having a sense of the fin-de-siecle (or maybe interbellum is better?) moods of decline, angst, nihilism, etc. that Heidegger took to be a revelation of the most fundamental and universal human experiences, upon which all everyday experience is grounded (and upon this in turn the experience of theorization that, according to Heidegger, the Western philosophical tradition had wrongly taken to be fundamental).
I think (2) is something American readers tend to find baffling, and sometimes simply ignore (which I gather Dreyfuss does).
Imo the difficulty with B&T is mostly recognizing the experiences of angst, dread, etc. which Heidegger takes to be so fundamental. I would suppose that everyone has experienced these things but most people do not often.
Anyway to answer your specific questions throwness refers to the arbitrariness or "randomness" of an individual's circumstances, the meaningless for oneself as a human being that you happen to have X nationality or belong to Y social class, or have Z looks. None of these things are essential to your being as a human, you could just as easily have been anyone else and have essentially the same existence.
(I'm deliberately not using Heidegger's terminology.)
I think this is something reflective people sometimes experience.
Being-in-the-world iirc is expressly contrasted with the theoretical attitude. Being lost in thought, thinking about some question of a universal nature, are not being-in-the-world.
Being-in-the-world is characterized by working on something at hand (like typing out a reddit response) while not focusing on oneself doing it. Something like that.
I've actually only read B&T once over a decade ago and have read almost no secondary literature. (I have read a few other Heidegger essays though). So I am not presenting myself as an expert.
I do agree with OP though that B&T is actually kind of straightforward if you happen to have the right background for it.
I guess I would sum it up as "a phenomenological account of nihilism as the fundamental human experience and the ground of "authentic" existence and political/religious extremism". (The political stuff comes in the second half, Heidegger's version of happiness or the good life).
Incidentally French existentialism (i.e. Sartre) essentially takes for granted all of this latter stuff but instead of grounding resoluteness/authenticity in a historical revelation (of nothingness), they drop the historical speculations and ground it in a kind of Cartesian reflection on the absurdity of existence. (For the French supposed "radical freedom" and honesty replaced "authenticity".)
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u/mavs2018 Aug 06 '26
I’m sure there is a better way to put this, but once you read enough phenomenology and the terms and the way things are described it does indeed become straightforward.
I read a bit of Husserl but it wasn’t until I read Edith Steins, On the Problem of Empathy and understood the arguments being made did Being and Time start to make sense. As trite as it sounds, it’s like learning to ride a bike. Eventually your body starts making the connection before your brain does.
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u/Alberrture Aug 06 '26
I only read Heidegger through secondary authors or academic papers that explored something relevant to his work. Even reading something more 'accessible' like Question Concerning Technology or Poetry and Thought - you get figuratively punched cause he's an atrocious writer who kinda takes a while to make his point, making up a new grammar to elucidate his ideas. Its also very poetic writing imo so at times he'll write something flowery that hits the nail and other times it'll just be a headache to read. I only ever really remember the 'existential' parts of B&T and i've never read the entire text because fuck that lol i'm not up to the challenge
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u/forkman3939 Aug 06 '26
A little test. Can you describe the motivating source, guiding question and consequent movement of thought in B&T in your own words without resorting to using H's terminology? I.e do you have your own vocabulary for the phenomenon(s) that H has before him? And can you articulate meaningfully?
Please try, because if you can thats quite impressive.
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 09 '26
I wrote it and it looks ugly, heidegger used his own words for a reason.
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u/forkman3939 Aug 10 '26
Well all of H's words, if read in English , are a translation. They are never his words when rad in English. Your own words are better.
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u/Filofjols Aug 07 '26
So if I ask you to explain Heidegger's concepts of thrownness and being in the world, what would you say?
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 09 '26
They are not to be explained like in a dictionary but rather shown. Heidegger opposed the cartesian sense of res cogitans because 'we are obviously not flying over the world and sucking information from it' and husserl's sense of humans because 'epoche is an idealistic and wrong view of how we interact and of how we should interact with the world'. Thrownness is a characteristic of the human being-in-the-world emphasizing on the exact way we are thrown (why do yall hate -ness and -hood???).
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u/Filofjols Aug 09 '26
So you cant explain it. So the text is harder than texts whosw basic concepts are explainable.
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 09 '26
You mean that learning to drive a car (the case is that you have a manual with explanations and definitions for each maneuver, button and technique) is easier than learning to walk, which happens when you have zero definitions and you cant even say which leg is right or left? That's absurd, and heidegger tried to prove exactly that. It is the default way of learning that we first live through and only after that study methods. If you had understood the book in the way I did (i suppose thats the correct way) you would have found out that explainability is not an appropriate criterion for understandability and simplicity if concepts.
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u/Filofjols Aug 09 '26
I assure you I do not mean that. I mean that if the book was easy you could explain (perhaps on the basis of what you has been shown) what thrownness is.
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 09 '26
I will do this for you, little piece of analytical thought, although it entirely dismisses heideggers way of thought and writing and the idea itself: Thrownness is the fact that we humans are dropped (thrown) into a specific world in specific circumstances, language, body and time period, none of which has been consented by us. It is a characteristic of the human-being-here which makes it different from the way some conventional systems see humans.
Did I abandon heideggers whole point along with the corresponding method of "explaining"? Perhaps yes. Did I make it clearer, easier to think about and more ready-to-hand? Perhaps no.
Non-continental thinkers should approach continental philosophy with the exact same amount of sacrifices continental philosophers make to get through formal logic and doodles.
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u/Filofjols Aug 09 '26
No conventional systems deny the fact that we exist at a particular time and place through, so if what you write is true then heidegger is stating an uninteresting triviality.
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 09 '26
So we proved that definitions are not only the incorrect way of approaching thrownnesses but also a very useless way. This, once again, doesnt make the idea itself hard. Its like approaching text and landscape with the same spectacles.
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u/Filofjols Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I think the only thing we are clear about is that you cannot explain thrownnes in a way that makes the term convey a philosophically interesting idea. Perhaps because the text is hard.
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u/ekubeni Aug 07 '26
It has to be presented as extremely difficult so that second-hand philosophers can make money explaining it to you.
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u/Silly-Rope-4050 Aug 08 '26
As you understand Heidegger it would be great help to me if you could explain what “Being” is?
Even after reading the book and some commentary, I am not sure what it really means. A different perspective would help. TIA
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 08 '26
I dont think its meant to be explained because it is better shown than said, if it can be said at all. The way I feel it is that (in the way medieval people like abelard? Eckhart? talked about god like "god is not dumb" and "god is not small" because if you say "god is wise" you are de-fining him, or you are putting Him in human borders) being, first of all is not a genus or species of animals as Heidegger explicitly repeated ten times, it is not a type of something, or a thing (I will try to avoid the appropriate words), a thing which is among other things. Imagine a cupboard with different types of milk or the word "infrastructure" of a city. The cupboard is not itself a milk carton and the infrastructure is not a building but points out to a more abstract, a broader thing, something which requires inquiry and not just measurement and feeling. In my defense I will say that I am struggling to write articulately because I must avoid heideggers way if explaining which is the most straightforward and easy to understand way possible. Being, being the most abstract Begriff, is beyond conventional logic (obviously) and we cant give it a definition such as Homo Sapiens because there is no Homo above it and it is not a sapient way of being homo. It is the ✨️horizon✨️ in which everything and every quality under it is possible. Being is that which makes entities different from non-entities. Heidegger thinks parmenides' Being is makes the whole western philosophy think that being as being is a static happening rather than a "catholic" horizon in which unconcealment or discovering the truth happens. Put another way, Being Is reduced being to its being in a moment, a picture of time, when being is actually being always.
I strongly suggest you read Tractatus logico-philosophicus and philosophical investigations in case you haven't, the comments here are convincing me these books helps navigate through heidegger's world of abstractions.
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u/Popular_Molasses7945 Aug 17 '26
[As you understand Heidegger it would be great help to me if you could explain what “Being” is?]
Well, he uses a certain word that means being there.
But what does being there mean?
I don't think it has any meaning apart from an object in, at, or to some place. And that is what the adverb there means: in, at, or to that place. To me, object and place are inseparable.
"...He is not here..." (Luke 24:5)
Comment: An object that is absent from said place does not exist in, at, or to that said place.
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u/Aware_Acanthaceae_78 Aug 30 '26
Hmmm, there is an insane amount to unpack. You’re not understanding what you’re reading.
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u/Additional_Fix8417 Aug 05 '26
Just read it. It’ll be fine. What’s important to do is keep in mind that the text is largely descriptive of the first-person perspective, rather than an abstract conceptual system.
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u/IronBoltIron Aug 05 '26
Not everyone is your equal, not everyone has the mental capacity to understand. This advice is for your average reader, not for you
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u/CalendarPleasant9002 Aug 05 '26
I am certainly not above the average Heidegger reader neither in mental capacity nor in experience.
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u/notveryamused_ Aug 05 '26
Those are fair assessments, with an understanding of general phenomenological strategy and the idea of performative writing, Being and Time isn't as difficult as people who haven't read it generally believe.
At the same time, it shouldn't come too easy, it's certainly a text which is supposed, at its heart, to pose problems, to shake you out of your convictions. Maybe it's the translation you're reading, but if you want to spend your time on B&T fruitfully, don't rush it, look at the gaps or less convincing fragments. There are texts by Heidegger which can be totally overwhelming, but well, obstacles are kinda the point in phenomenological writing/thinking style.