Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Here is a word you used a dozen times today without a flicker of thought: "is." The coffee is hot. I am tired. There are four chairs. Being, existence, the sheer fact that things are rather than not, is the most familiar thing in the world, so familiar that almost no one ever stops to ask what it means. Martin Heidegger built his whole philosophy on stopping to ask. Western thought, he argued, had spent two and a half thousand years cataloguing the different kinds of things that exist, atoms and gods and numbers and minds, while completely forgetting to ask the prior question on which all the others depend: what does it mean to be at all? We had grown so busy with beings that we forgot Being itself. Heidegger set out to wake the question from its long sleep, and he chose a brilliant starting point. If you want to ask what it means to be, ask the one kind of being for whom its own being is a question, the one entity that does not merely exist but has to figure out how to exist, that cares about what it is and what it will become. That entity is us. Heidegger gave it a deliberately strange name, Dasein, German for "being-there," to strip away every cozy assumption packed into words like "person," "soul," or "subject," and he proposed to crack open the mystery of Being by giving the most patient, unflinching description ever attempted of what it is actually like to be one of us.

You are not a ghost in a machine. The first thing Heidegger had to clear away was a picture so deep we barely know we hold it: the picture, inherited from Descartes, of the self as a mind, a sealed inner chamber of thoughts gazing out through the windows of the senses at an external world of objects. On this view you are essentially a spectator, a detached observer who first perceives a world and then decides how to act on it. Heidegger says this is almost exactly backwards. Look at how you actually exist, he urges, not in the philosopher's study but in the middle of an ordinary day. When you are absorbed in using a hammer, you are not staring at a hammer-object and forming theories about it; the hammer has practically disappeared, become a transparent extension of your hand, while you are wholly out there in the work, in the nail and the wood and the thing being built. You notice the hammer as a separate object only when it breaks, when the smooth flow of doing snags. Our basic way of being, Heidegger saw, is not detached looking but absorbed doing, not subject-facing-object but a seamless, skillful immersion in a world of tools and tasks and meanings that we never chose and rarely notice. We are not ghosts piloting bodies through alien matter; we are, through and through, being-in-the-world, so woven into our surroundings that the very line between self and world, which Descartes took as his starting point, turns out to be a late and artificial abstraction.

The tyranny of "they." But how do we mostly live, immersed in this world? Heidegger's answer is bracing and uncomfortable: mostly, we do not live as ourselves at all. We are "thrown" into a world we never chose, a particular time and place and language and family, already underway before we could decide anything, and we cope with the strangeness of having to exist by quietly handing our existence over to what Heidegger calls "the they," das Man, the anonymous everyone-and-no-one. We do what "one" does, wear what "they" wear, want what people want, hold the opinions that are held, find funny what is found funny. The "they" is not a villain; it is comfortable, it relieves us of the crushing burden of having to choose our own life, it lets us drift along the well-worn grooves of the ordinary. And it is, Heidegger says, inauthentic, a way of being everyone in general and no one in particular, of living a life that is not quite our own. What can break the spell? A strange and unwelcome mood he calls anxiety, not fear of any particular thing, but the uncanny dread that sometimes descends for no reason and makes the whole familiar world go quiet and meaningless, so that you suddenly see it from outside and feel the vertigo of your own naked existence, the fact that you are, that you must choose, that no one can live your life for you. Most people flee this feeling straight back into the noise of the they. Heidegger thought it was a summons: the call to stop drifting, to seize your own existence, to become authentically the one you already are.

Living toward the end. And what, finally, individualizes you, what tears you out of the anonymous crowd and hands you your existence as unmistakably your own? Heidegger's answer is his most famous and most often misread: your own finitude. Each of us exists as a being with a horizon, a creature whose time is limited and who knows it; and this limit, Heidegger argued, the structure he named being-toward-death, is not a morbid fact to be avoided but the very thing that can make a life authentic and whole. The crowd, the "they," works hard to cover it over, to treat mortality as a remote statistical event that befalls "people" in general, someday, elsewhere, never quite me, now. To exist authentically is to drop that evasion and to live in clear-eyed awareness that one's time is genuinely limited and genuinely one's own. Far from being paralyzing, Heidegger thought, this is what frees a person: when you truly grasp that your existence is finite and that no one can take your place in it, the borrowed priorities of the they fall away, the trivial stands exposed as trivial, and you are returned, with a new urgency, to the question of what is actually worth doing with the one finite stretch of existence you have been given. The awareness of an ending is what lets a life become a whole, a shape you own rather than a drift you merely suffer. It is, in the end, a philosophy not about dying but about how to live: as a being who knows its time is precious precisely because it is not endless.

Everything on call. The later Heidegger turned this way of thinking onto the modern world itself, and produced a warning about technology that grows more urgent every year. The essence of modern technology, he argued, is not machines or gadgets; it is a whole way of seeing, a mode in which everything that exists shows up as resource, as raw material standing ready to be used, optimized, and ordered about. He called it the "enframing," and its mark is that the river becomes a power supply, the forest becomes timber yield, the field becomes agricultural output, and, most ominously, the human being becomes "human resources," a workforce to be managed, a population to be processed, a user to be engaged. Everything is put "on call," reduced to its usefulness, drained of any reality of its own. The danger, Heidegger insisted, is not the machines themselves but the way this single lens threatens to become the only one we have, until we can no longer see a tree as anything but lumber, or a person as anything but a means, or even ourselves as anything but a resource to be optimized. Against it he set the need for another relation to things, a letting-be that he named with an old word from the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, Gelassenheit, releasement, the capacity to let things rest in their own being rather than seizing them as material. In an age that turns more of the world into manageable data every day, his warning that we might optimize ourselves out of any genuine relation to reality has not lost a particle of its edge.

The deepest question, the gravest failure. The room reads Heidegger almost entirely from the wider record, since his work survives in English only under copyright, and the chat says so; and there is no avoiding the hardest fact about him, which any honest account must place in full view. In 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi party, accepted the rectorship of his university under the new regime, and lent it his voice and his prestige; he gave up the post within a year, but he never, in the decades that followed, offered the clear repudiation the world waited for, and notebooks published long afterward revealed anti-Semitic passages his defenders have not been able to explain away. The scandal is real, and it raises a question that will not go away: how could a mind of this depth fail so catastrophically as a man, and is the failure somehow in the philosophy, or merely beside it? Serious thinkers disagree, and the argument is not settled. What is not in doubt is the influence. Almost no major Continental philosopher after him escaped his gravity: Sartre's existentialism, Arendt's political thought, Gadamer's hermeneutics, Derrida's deconstruction, and the ethics of Levinas, who fought Heidegger's philosophy precisely because he could not climb out from under it, all begin in some reckoning with Being and Time. Even the builders of thinking machines have circled back to his insistence that human intelligence is not detached computation but absorbed, embodied, worldly coping. He asked the oldest question, what it means to be, more radically than anyone in centuries, and left a portrait of human existence, thrown, finite, caring, mostly lost in the crowd and capable of being found, that we are still learning to read. That so profound a thinker about authenticity should have been, at the decisive moment, so inauthentic a man is the permanent, unresolved shadow over the work.