Welcome to our topic on Martin Heidegger! Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism. although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. He was able to deeply influence the succeeding generations of philosophers. In fact, you will be surprised to realize that some very common notions of ordinary people were actually attributed to Martin Heidegger. So, what are you waiting for, let us explore together the man and his philosophy. Jump in!
“We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.” ~ Martin Heidegger
Intended learning outcomes (ILOs)
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- Explain the development of the philosophical ideas of Martin Heidegger on Phenomenology.
Who is Martin Heidegger?
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is acknowledged to be one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He was born in 1889 in Messkirch, Germany, and had early aspirations to be a priest, but after coming across the writings of Edmund Husserl he took up philosophy instead. In fact, Martin Heidegger was an early colleague of Husserl and a student of his phenomenology. However, it soon became clear that his philosophical concerns were quite different from Husserl’s. The latter’s phenomenological reduction claimed to discover certain essential features of objects like coffee cups and matchboxes and to provide an account of our knowledge of these kinds of beings. Heidegger, however, was interested in applying the method to a deeper question—that of Being itself. He was not concerned with questions about the nature of individual “beings” (questions that he called “ontic” questions); rather, he was interested in the Being of beings—the fact that individual beings are at all (what he called “ontological” concerns). He said:
“Of all beings, it is only us human being which question our being.”
Heidegger was a student of Husserl, and he followed Husserl’s method of phenomenology. This is a philosophical approach that looks at phenomena—how things appear—through examining our experience of them. For example, phenomenology would not look directly at the question “what is a human being?” but would instead look at the question “what is it like to be human?” In asking this question, Heidegger essentially can be classified as a prototypical existentialist philosopher.
Humans have certain attitudes toward beings. In this respect, we are like other animals. But unlike other animals, humans also have an attitude toward Being itself. We “comport” ourselves toward it. We are unique not simply because only we can question Being, but also in that, in questioning Being, we put our own Being in question. We are the only being whose own Being is a question for itself. Therefore, our being is different. Heidegger designated that difference by saying that other beings are; we ex-ist. He named human existence Dasein (being there). Unlike other beings, which are merely in the world, Dasein has a world. Heidegger rejected the intellectualism of most philosophers who have seen the world as primarily the object of human knowledge. For him, knowing was just one way of being-in-the world. Furthermore, knowing is itself not just an intellectual act.
“We ourselves are the entities (beings) to be analyzed.”
In saying that we are ourselves the entities to be analyzed, Heidegger is saying that if we want to explore questions of being, we have to start with ourselves, by looking at what it means for us to exist.
Being and Time
Heidegger’s masterpiece, Being and Time (1927) contains the gamut of his entire philosophical enterprise. When Heidegger asks about the meaning of being, he is not asking about abstract ideas, but about something very direct and immediate. In the opening pages of his book, he says that the meaning of our being must be tied up with time; we, humans are essentially temporal beings. When we are born, we find ourselves in the world as if we had been thrown here on a trajectory we have not chosen. We simply find that we have come to exist, in an ongoing world that pre-existed us, so that at our birth we are presented with a particular historical, material, and spiritual environment.
We attempt to make sense of this world by engaging in various activities—for example, we might learn Latin, or attempt to find true love, or decide to build ourselves a house. Through these time-consuming projects we literally project ourselves toward different possible futures; we define our existence.
However, sometimes we become aware that there is an outermost limit to all our projects, a point at which everything we plan will come to an end, whether finished or unfinished. This point is the point of our death. Death is the outermost horizon of our being: everything we can do or see or think takes place within this horizon. We cannot see beyond it
Living authentically
Martin Heidegger was the one who made the philosophical distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence. We use experience as a learning method (phenomenology) to understand the meaning of our Being. To “understand” something is to understand it in the context of usage, to understand it as something serviceable or dangerous. Things are not just “present-at-hand”; they are not just objects for disinterested scientific investigation; they are “ready-to-hand.” The ‘there’ of our being-there (Dasein) is filled with objects that are there for us, ready-to-hand. We have care or concern for them. This “care” (Sorge) is one of the main characteristics of human existence; we care for the world around us, both the natural and the human world. And when we express care not just for beings but for Being itself, we are our most authentic selves as humans.
Being-within-the-world entails being-with-others. The ‘there’ of our Dasein is populated not only with objects for our use but also with the Dasein of others. Our relationship to others is neither that of presence-at-hand nor readiness-to-hand, for we must acknowledge that others make the same demands on us that we make on them. There is a danger, however, of giving in too much to their demands. We can “come not to be ourselves.” We can be sucked into the third person ‘theyness ‘ of others. This form of inauthentic existence in which we live in the opinions and desires of the anonymous they is a form of fear that produces a hollowness. “Fallenness” is Heidegger’s term for succumbing to this fear. Unfortunately, fallenness is not just a side effect of bad choices. It is of the essence of human existence. We have “fallen” into a world of others.
But it is possible to come out of inauthenticity through Sorge: care for Being and care for beings, care for the future, for the past, and for the community. We are also rescued from inauthenticity through Angst, anxiety. We experience anxiety in the recognition of death. This anxiety is not the same as the simple fear of death. Anxiety is cognitive. It produces knowledge that we are going to die. It reveals to us that Dasein is being toward-death. We discover the meaning of our being as Dasein in the possibility of not-being Dasein, that is, in death. It is also this discovery that reveals to us our own freedom, for in the face of our imminent annihilation we must choose a life that justifies its own worth despite its necessary termination.
References
- Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. (2008). From Socrates to Sartre. New York: McGraw Hill Publishing.
- Palmer, Donald. (2006). Looking at Philosophy: The unbearable heaviness of philosophy made ligther, 4th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill Higher Education.
- The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained. (2011). London: Dorling Kindersley Ltd.
- Ramos, Christine Camela. (2004). Introduction to Philosophy. Manila: Rex Bookstore.
- Gaarder, Jostein. (2004). Sophie’s World. Great Britain: Phoenix House.
- http://www.plato.standford.edu
- http://www.philosophybasic.com