Heidegger in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 59

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Heidegger is without a doubt one of the most important thinkers in the history of the Western world. He called his philosophy a “fundamental ontology”. His interest as a philosopher extended beyond the individual sciences to the underlying question of the meaning of life as a whole. His key question, then, was: “What is the meaning of Being?” But if we are to ask about the meaning of Being, and thus about the meaning of life, we must – so Heidegger argues – first look into the question of just what kind of being it is that poses such questions. This question-posing being, he says, is Man himself. Man is constantly looking for orientation. This is why Heidegger also describes human life as a great challenge. Life does not live itself but rather requires constant decisions in order to be lived. But this also means that we can, potentially, fail to realize the meaning of our own life. Heidegger provocatively suggests that most people fail to live out their existence. Instead of living authentic lives of our own, we stay within the tracks made safe and worn by others. But how do I know what life would be authentically mine? How do I make out the life that I am “destined” for? The book “Heidegger in 60 Minutes” uses key passages quoted from Heidegger’s own works to explain the philosopher’s famous “existential analysis” in a comprehensible way. It takes the reader on an adventurous journey to the deepest structures of his or her own existence. There will surely be few readers of the chapters on the “’care’ character of human existence” or “anxiety in the face of nothingness” who will not recognize something of their own life-experience in the existential structures laid bare by Heidegger. In the chapter on “what use Heidegger’s discovery is to us today” it is then shown how broadly and topically relevant Heidegger’s thoughts still are for our personal lives and for the society of the 21st Century. The book forms part of the popular series “Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes”.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Inhalt

Heidegger’s Great Discovery

Heidegger’s Central Idea

Man’s “Being-In-The-World”

Dasein’s

Basic Character of “Care”

Dasein

as “Being-Toward-Death”

The Flight into the “They”

Anxiety in the Face of Nothingness

The Call of Conscience

Authentic and Inauthentic Existence

Becoming Guilty Vis-à-Vis One’s Own Existence

Man in the “Enframing” of Technology, and the “Turning”

Of What Use is Heidegger’s Discovery for Us Today?

Openness to the Mystery in the Age of Technology

Anxiety is Part of Life – Existence as Potentiality

Breaking Away from the Anonymous “They”

Living with Mortality – Living with Resoluteness!

Bibliographical References:

Heidegger’s Great Discovery

Whoever takes an interest in philosophy is sooner or later bound to encounter the ‘philosophy of being’ of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). His writings are worth reading, whether one opts, once one has read them, to damn him, critique him, or celebrate him as one of the 20th Century’s most brilliant thinkers. There are few thinkers, indeed, about whom opinions diverge so widely. But whatever personal judgment the reader may finally form, he will always have been enriched by engagement with Heidegger’s ideas.

It was in 1927 that Heidegger published the 400-page work that made his name: Being and Time. Despite the strange new language in which it was written – or perhaps because of it – it became a worldwide bestseller. Heidegger is still today, with Sartre, one of the key representatives of existentialism. He called his philosophy “fundamental ontology” because it was his aim to reveal the deepest foundations of how people understand the world.

Zoology, for example, cannot count as a fundamental ontology but only as an individual one: namely, as the logic or the doctrine of animals. Geology, likewise, is specifically the logic of the earth; biology the logic of bios (i.e. living things); sociology the logic of society etc. Each of these sciences investigates the logic of just one part of the realm of being. This is why they are individual ontologies: doctrines of just sections of being as a whole. They talk, respectively, of how animals, the earth, the biocosmos, and society are constituted and of the laws each obey. But Heidegger’s point is that all these individual ontologies proceed, in their respective inquiries into truth, from something more fundamental which has, itself, never been inquired into: namely, the very capacity of Man to inquire into and understand things. Heidegger thus analyses in his “fundamental ontology” the basic form of Man’s existence as a meaning-comprehending being who is in the world and perceives it. His interest goes beyond the individual sciences to what underlies them: the meaning of life as a whole. His main question thus runs: “what is the meaning of being?”

But if we are to ask about the meaning of being and thus of life, argues Heidegger, we must first inquire into the nature of the entity that poses this strange question. This entity is Man himself, or (to use the term by which the (self-)questioning human individual is still denoted even in English translations of Being and Time) human Dasein:

Whenever, then, we try to answer the philosophical question of the meaning of life, we cannot avoid first engaging with the question of Man or, to use Heidegger’s term, of Dasein. This is so inasmuch as Dasein is the only entity in the world that can, indeed must, pose the former question. In other words, we must engage with ourselves. Because unlike, for example, a stone, it is, for Dasein – i.e. human “being-in-the-world” – always a basic concern to give a meaning to this being. Heidegger formulates this as follows:

The term “entity” (literally, “thing that is”) is a rather technical philosophical term that needs clarification. When Heidegger says that “Dasein is an entity” he means that an existing human being is, with his feet, arms, legs, belly and head, a physical thing present in the world just like a stone is present in it. In this sense, stone and human being are both entities, “things that are”. But whereas the stone is only a “thing that is”, the human being is something more: namely, a “thing that is” for which this “is” is – as Heidegger puts it – “an issue”. Unlike the stone, the human being is concerned by his own life. One might, then, restate Heidegger’s claim: “Dasein is an entity distinguished by the fact that, in its very being, that being is an issue for it” in clearer language as: “Man is a living being for whom the life that he is living is a matter of basic concern.”

Heidegger’s starting point, then, is clear. To answer the great question as to the “meaning of being”, he first examines that understanding of what it is “to be” which is implicit in the everyday life of human beings.

It is precisely from the “everyday”, Heidegger argues, that one learns a lot about the structure and functioning of human life:

Moreover, human beings succeed, in everyday life, in giving meaning to things around them and to themselves each time they say or think that something “is”. That is to say, we human beings all have an implicit understanding of being and move through the world as “understanders”.

We say, for example, each day such things as “the bus is late”, “the weather is cold”, “my heart is not in it” or “the world is not fair”. This word “is” may appear, at first sight, to be completely harmless and unimportant. But Heidegger takes it as the starting point for a profound analysis of the whole of human life. Our everyday use of such terms as “is” and “be” reveals, argues Heidegger, something very special: namely, the fact that we are constantly interpreting the world in one way or another: