Introduction

Welcome to the Greatest Philosophers In History series: where we explore the most fundamental ideas of the greatest philosophers in human history. In this episode, we will be exploring the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger is known as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Born in Germany in 1889, he is best known for his work in existentialism and phenomenology. Heidegger was influenced at an early age by the Greeks. Aristotle’s Metaphysics which talks about what it is that unites all possible modes of Being, is in many ways, the question that ignites and drives Heidegger’s philosophy. The most fundamental philosophical question is: “Why does anything exist at all?” Or as Heidegger puts it, “what does it mean to be?” He was fascinated by the Greeks and spend considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought. Heidegger’s thought is a sort of authentic retrieval of the past. He revived the question of Being, which had been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition existing from Plato to Descartes. This is why he is also considered as a hermeneut, as he played around with language whilst reinterpreting various philosophical texts. William Dilthey who stressed the role of interpretation and history in the study of human activity profoundly influenced Heidegger. Heidegger also studied the giants of existentialism Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and most importantly had been a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Phenomenology is the philosophical study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. In other words, phenomenologists try to understand the phenomena that surrounds our lives, knowing that we live in a self-defined perceptual world. Husserlian phenomenology proposes intentionality, which is the characteristic of consciousness whereby it is conscious of something. In other words, it’s directedness toward an object. Seeing man’s situation as that of a subject confronted by objects. Heidegger began his existentialist philosophy with a profound rejection of this Cartesian dualism regarding object and subject and the distinction between mind and body, which can be traced back to rationalist thinker Descartes, who arrives at one single first principle of human existence: I think. Thought cannot be separated from me; therefore, I exist. This makes up his famous philosophical statement: “I think, therefore I am”, separating subject from object, mind from body. However, this self-conscious reflection does not exhaust our being. Heidegger says that before you think, you have to be. In fact, most of the time we’re just busy getting “stuff” done. It’s this feature of us that Heidegger pays special attention to, the “everydayness” of human existence. Prior to being a rational animal or a brain, we are firstly just Being. Heidegger tries to capture this Being before it is humanly defined.

Being and Time

His early work as a phenomenologist and university professor culminated in his masterpiece and one of the most significant works of contemporary European philosophy: Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). It is a long and complex book. Many readers initially encounter its strange and peculiar vocabulary. However, he does use it rigorously and economically, so one gets used to his language. Heidegger’s intention is to reveal the hidden meanings of ordinary talk. The depth of this work intended a profound change of direction for philosophy. Such was the depth of change that Heidegger found it necessary to introduce a large number of neologisms, often connected to idiomatic words and phrases in the German language.

Dasein

The fundamental concept of Being and Time is the idea of Da-sein or “being-there”, which simply means existence, it is the experience of the human being. The world is full of beings, but human beings are the only ones who care about what it means to be themselves. “A human being is the entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue.” Dasein and human beings are interrelated, without one another, there is no being and no meaning. Existence only exists within our being, and the reality without our being is irrelevant. If a volcano were to erupt without us being there, would it actually have happened? Heidegger would tell us that it would simply be irrelevant. “We are ourselves the entities to be analysed.” Dasein is what is common to all of us, and it is what makes us entities. Dasein is then not a disembodied, transcendent being, but rather the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings, an inherently social being that already operates with a pre-theoretical grasp of the a priori structures that make possible particular modes of Being. Heidegger stresses it to be pre-theoretical because a theoretical structure would prevent us from seeing things as they are in themselves. This perspective can then allow things to show as they are in themselves and not through some kind of lens.

Being-in-the-world

He associates Dasein as "Being-in-the-world", they are often used hand-in-hand. Being-in-the-world is an existential concept that emphasises human existence as a state of living with a highly meaningful orientation. Each individual has a unique destiny to fulfil in this world. This is an essential characteristic of Dasein. It is defined as an a-priori structure being “grounded” in the state of Being. Being-in-the-world is Heidegger’s replacement for terms such as object, subject, consciousness, and world. As mentioned before, Dasein is not a Being that can be observed, how can we then understand it? Heidegger would tell us to study beings, and especially what it is like to be a human being. We need to look at what is unique about our situation as human beings. But what makes Dasein different from all other beings: rocks, plants, and animals? To answer this, we must look into the various features of Dasein. These features always remain the same regardless of what time period it is in the world: whether its 1000 B.C. or the 21st century.

Feature 1. Being as an issue

The first feature of Dasein is that it is a “being as an issue for it”. It takes its own being as an issue; for it is ontological being. In other words, it asks questions about its own existence, it is always confronted with the question “what shall I be today, tomorrow or next year?”. And these questions are to be answered by oneself, he calls it “mineness”. We have no other way of experiencing ourselves or the world as being in any other mode than our own existence.

Feature 2. Care

The second feature is “care or concern”. We not only find ourselves in the world, but we care about it as Being-in-the-world. Heidegger uses the word “care” as a technical term which has to do with our engagement with the world for various purposes. Things are meaningful by themselves; meaning is not an add-on to existence, but rather the definition of existence. In other words, we are embedded in meaning, and there is no exit from making sense of one’s life. To be a Dasein is to always be doing something and pointing towards something, to be a being that is constantly engaged in doing tasks that we care about. Therefore, the essence of Dasein is its existence. We are instantly turned into the structures of everydayness and being-in the-world. What is important is that Dasein is its possibilities, it needs some context within which to work these out. In our case, as the beings that are being analysed, that context is the kind of world we find ourselves in. Heidegger concludes that “care” is the primordial state of Being as Dasein strives towards authenticity.

Ready-to-hand and present-at-hand

Two of his most basic neologisms, present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, are used to describe various attitudes toward things in the world. We are constantly surrounded by “equipment” as stuff we can work with in a “context of significance”. For Heidegger, most of the time we are involved in the world in an ordinary way or “ready-to-hand.” We are usually doing things with a view to achieving something. The being of the ready-to-hand announces itself as a field of equipment to be put to use. Heidegger gives the example of a hammer. When we look at a hammer, our initial reaction is not to deconstruct it and break it down into what it is made of. We simply look at it as equipment to carry out tasks. Let’s say an expert carpenter is hammering nails, after some time he’ll eventually start to forget about the existence of the hammer and can talk to his fellow carpenters or have his thoughts wander elsewhere, without necessarily being a subject contemplating the hammer (an object). The activity becomes a blur and reveals his surroundings. And by revealing one thing, one necessarily conceals and devalues another. This is Heidegger’s crucial discovery, when look at our ready-to-hand relation to things, we just don’t find subjects contemplating objects. However, what if the head flies off the hammer? It would immediately lose its usefulness and appear as merely “there”. Heidegger calls this being of an object “present-at-hand”. It happens when we regard an object in isolation and study it with an attitude like that of a scientist, of merely looking at the object’s bare facts as they are present. This is not usually the way we see things in the world as. When a hammer breaks, it loses its usefulness and becomes present-at-hand. However, it also soon loses this mode of being present-at-hand and becomes something that must be replaced or repaired. In this case its Being may be seen as unreadiness-to-hand. The ready-to-hand and present-at-hand levels represent the fundamental structure of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, with the more fundamental of the two, readiness-to-hand, being organised and arranged through Dasein’s care. Heidegger wants us to discover the blurry areas of existence without the layers of perception that hinders experiencing the world fully. The things we care about is a central focus in Heidegger’s philosophy. There are three fundamental terms for the care structure of Dasein: facticity, existentiality and fallenness.

Facticity

Facticity is a part of what he calls “Geworfenheit” or “thrownness”. We are all thrown or projected into the world, arbitrarily born into a given family, within a given culture and at a given moment in human history, these “givens” are facticities. The task we decide to be constantly engaged in and care about have very little to do with us, they are sort of decided for us by the particular facticity that we were born into. We are thrown with neither prior knowledge nor individual opinion into a world that was there before and will remain there after we are gone.

Existentiality

The second term is existentiality, the possibilities that we have at our disposal. The reality of being a Dasein is to be a being that has possibilities, and that is what distinguishes us from every other being, that is why we are part of Dasein. To describe existentiality we must distinguish between two key terms: Existentiell and Existential. These sound almost identical but are written differently and mean very different things for Heidegger. The first one, “existentiell” refers to the aspects of the world which are identifiable as particular delimited questions or issues, whereas “existential” refers to Being as such, which permeates all things and cannot be delimited in such a way as to be susceptible to factual knowledge. In general it can be said that "existentiell" refers to a "what", a materially describable reality, whereas "existential" refers to structures inherent in any possible world. In other words, the term "existentiell" refers to an ontic determination (physical, real, or factual existence), whereas "existential" refers to an ontological determination (dealing with the nature of being). These two are related as an ontic determination is inherently ontological.

Fallenness

The final term that Heidegger uses is “fallenness”. It refers to the inauthentic existence of Dasein. As human beings, we fall into certain tasks by default. Because of social expectations and people telling us how we should be behaving, making us fall into a herd mentality. We have all fallen into tasks as it is part of our nature.

Das-Man

Heidegger calls the behaviour of mindlessly following other people the Das Man, translated as “they-self” or “the-they”, which is the opposite of the authenticity of Dasein and Being-in-the-world. It is a mode of existence of Being-with-one-another. We surrender our existence to a formless entity. Instead of truly choosing to do something that we want, we do it because “that is what one does” or “that is what they do”. We become mere numbers in the crowd, and live inauthentic lives. Heidegger contrasts this inauthentic Das Man with the authentic Dasein, or “owned self”.

Authenticity and Inauthenticity

When we realise how this care structure affects our behaviour, the relationship of meaningfulness with respect to things, people and to ourselves create the possibility for two modes of Being: authenticity or inauthenticity. Inauthenticity occurs when a person embodies only their facticity (the reality they have been thrown into) and their fallenness (falling into tasks that other people tell them to do). They live as Das Man, without ever considering the possibilities at their disposal about other ways of living life, their existentiality. The experience of inauthenticity creates dread and anxiety. One moves right to the frontier between nothingness, absurdity, death and making sense. For Heidegger, the experience of this thin line that separates us from nothingness, throws us back into the sense-making world, now with the awareness that there is no ground under our feet, that we are doing this alone. Heidegger walks us through a phenomenological analysis of our whole world, everything that gives meaning to us, fall apart. We need to develop authenticity. A lifelong process of radically considering the possibilities at our disposal, to understand our facticity and be immersed in it, embracing it, including what Heidegger calls our “historicity” (the cultural and historical context with their rituals and traditions), to be introspective about our fallenness and to avoid the trap of Das Man and become Dasein. It is to be responsible to one’s whole human nature, to have accepted oneself as thrown, finite and mortal. Authenticity can come into existence when we arrive at the realisation of who we are and grasp the fact that each human being is a distinctive entity. Out of this authenticity comes the idea of Being-toward-Death.

Being-toward-death

The ultimate possibility and inevitability that we all have to deal with is death. This is not a fatalistic orientation that brings Dasein closer to its end, in terms of clinical death, but is rather a way of being. It is too easy to get lost in the everyday, until we face death and start thinking about who we truly were, ironically, for the first time we actually live for ourselves, without spending time thinking about the approval of other people on who we are. When asked how we might recover authenticity, Heidegger replied that we should simply “spend more time in graveyards.” To live authentically, is to recognise the inevitability of death in the context of our everyday living, so as to live life to the fullest. This is Being-toward-Death.

Temporality

The second most important feature of the book, apart from Being is, Time. He calls it “temporality.” Dasein is time, we are embodied time. We go from being-in-the-world to care to temporality. Temporality is the ultimate meaning of being-in-the-world and care. The anticipation of death is the ultimate source of meaning of temporality. Heidegger describes time as openness or unclosedness, it is being present to things not passively, but actively making sense of them. One of the features of inauthenticity is failing to actualise one’s Being. Heidegger stresses a form of being that is “ecstatically”, rather than passively, oriented toward its own possibilities. With the concept of historicity Heidegger indicates that Dasein always “temporalises” or acts in time, as part of a larger social and historical collectivity, as part of a people. Dasein possesses a heritage on which it must act. Historicity means making a decision about how to actualise important elements of a collective past. In other words, history is not a passive force devoid of intentionality – but rather a project that humans consciously and authentically undertake in order to respond to their collective past for the sake of their future. Being needs to be understood as fundamentally a timebound, historical process. Thus, we are not just temporal beings, but authentically historical beings, belonging not only to ourselves but also to our ancestors, community, and species.

The Turn

After Being and Time there is a reorienting shift in Heidegger’s philosophy known as “die Kehre” or “the turn”, he links this to his own failure to produce the missing divisions of Being and Time, as the book remained unfinished. He also distances his view from Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism, particularly his Being and Nothingness which retakes the Husserlian and Cartesian point of view of objects and subjects, and he starts to shift his focus to poetry, language and technology. His later thinking is encapsulated in his Contributions to Philosophy, written in a very poetic style. He famously said that “language speaks.” Heidegger’s writing shifts to understanding Being historically and Being in language. He had been talking about the modern epoch without realising that each epoch has a different way of understanding of what it is to be. This forges a pathway to a new kind of thinking. He moves from temporality as Dasein’s distinctive mode of Being to Being consisting most fundamentally in what he calls dwelling. Human beings dwell in that they stay on earth, under the sky, before the divinities, and among one another as mortals. The underlying unity of these are known as the “simple oneness of the four”, he calls it the fourfold. In dwelling, then, Dasein is located within a set of sense-making practices and structures with which it is familiar. It is a rethinking of Being in terms of the notion of “ereignis”, translated as “event” or “appropriation”. The question now becomes not ‘What is the meaning of Being?’ but rather ‘How does Being essentially unfold?’. We are now asking the question of Being not from the perspective of Dasein, but from the perspective of Being. Dasein is now appropriated by being and man owned by being.

Technology

The later Heidegger was concerned that in our modern society, we are so immersed in technology that we disconnect ourselves from being, from the world and nature. Technology was a topic that highly interested Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology he tries to explore the essence of technology. Heidegger’s main interest is its fundamental impact on Being, he describes a technological mode of Being. Technology has thoroughly moulded society as a whole, not as a neutral force, but as way of understanding Dasein. He thinks a large part of modern society’s anxiety is because of a technological and nihilistic understanding of Being. He was not against technology, he simply tried to understand the nature of it and warn us against the potential danger it can have to human existence. The focal point of our Being-in-the-world is going unnoticed because of the repetitive and trite daily realities of our existence with resources being exploited as a means to an end. “The circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterises the history of a world which has become an unworld.” The later Heidegger also introduces the concept of “the last god” and famously announces that only a god can save us.

Only a God can Save Us

“The last god is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history.” Heidegger has in mind not a religious intervention in an “ordinary” sense of the divine, but rather a transformational event in which a secularised sense of the sacred is restored. It is a sort of transformational cultural event that is seen as “divinity.” He argued that we are waiting for a god who will reawaken us to the poetic, and thereby enable us to dwell in the fourfold. This task certainly seems to be a noble one. Unfortunately, it plunges us into the most controversial region of Heideggerian philosophy, his infamous involvement with Nazism.

Heidegger's Controversy

It is quite strange how someone who could author Being and Time and become one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, could also be into Nazism. Heidegger’s understanding of traditional German rural life as realising values and meanings that may counteract the insidious effects of contemporary technology is tied with the national socialist image of rustic German communities, rooted in German soil, proving a bulwark against foreign influence. Commentators describe Heidegger wandering into National Socialism because he believed that the German people were destined to carry out a monumental spiritual mission and that his philosophy could contribute to the whole nation. After the war, he had stated that his participation in the movement had been “the biggest stupidity of his life”. And yet Heidegger never really truly took responsibility and apologised for his past actions.

Why You Should Read Heidegger

Despite this, what we really need to focus on are his ideas - it is through these ideas that we can be critically engaged with his sustained investigation into Being, to think deeply about human life and appreciate his massive contribution to human thought.