The Essence of Heidegger

Unfortunately connoted with Nazism as he is, Martin Heidegger was nonetheless one of the most eminent and influential philosophers of the 20th century.

He pioneered the phenomenological movement, an important philosophical tradition affiliated with other thinkers such Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Edmund Husserl.

On the surface it may be viewed as a rather onerous and intricate school of thought due to its heavy neologistic terminology, especially in the case of Heidegger. How can wordy and often inaccessible works like Being and Time ever be applicable to us on an individual and practical basis, given its dry theory?

That couldn’t be farther from the truth!

At the core of phenomenology (the study of experiences from a first person POV) amplified by its existentialist attachment, lies the fact of our situatedness in the world, the I-in-the-world of society, customs and culture, namely the concept of Dasein.

However, Heidegger wasn’t the stereotypically austere, punctual and rigid German professor who wanted us to submit to some absolute, high-brow standards of theory with full intellectual commitment. On the contrary: he loved immediate worldly experiences, being an avid outdoorsman who often traveled to his cabin for recreational purposes.

Far from rendering Heidegger as some kind of self-help guru, his philosophy and the broader tradition he worked within was intimately connected with the world as we know it, namely as contingent realities: put simply, it is true by virtue of the way it is.

Due to the considerable scope of his work, it would prove more useful for us to concentrate on two particular concepts that are closely linked to Heidegger’s views on time, space and being-in-the-world: originary temporality and the care structure.

Although the conceptual term may sound off-putting, originary temporality can be readily understood by means of a clarifying analogy.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say you’re on a bus station waiting for your transit as per-usual.

While waiting during the intervening period and even after entering the bus once it’s arrived, you’re caught in a web of “mind-fog”, the commonly meandering stream of immediate (un)consciousness: one’s thoughts, reflections and worries about the past and the future.

This mixing of time-situatedness, thinking about past and prospective things and events all while anticipating the near-present arrival of a bus at one specific geographic location, makes us busy and less mindful.

In the long haul, this process has wider implications for our meaning and attachment to life in general; it prevents us from seeing things as clearly and precisely, as contingent yet necessary, making us unable to live our life to its fullest potential in a harmonious constellation of necessity and possibility, in Kierkegaard’s sense of the term.

This is why Heidegger thinks so highly of time: the classic philosophical categories of time and space are not just natural modes through which we humans can try to perceive Kantian things-in-themselves, inevitably failing to do so by virtue of our necessarily limited and subjective capacities, since our sense of observation of the world is invariably restricted by the fact of it merely stemming from a human perspective. The question of time also makes Heidegger especially concerned with death and mortality.

In the post-Hegelian break, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger and other thinkers tended to change their approach towards what could loosely be described as “the individualist turn”, where we tried to forget that the insights of Kant, who had exposed our unbearable limits of perception, had ever existed. Instead we cherished individuation, the “self-perspective” where new and original ideas could arise and respond to each other spontaneously, centred on those two perennial questions of yore: who are we and what are we supposed to do in the world to act authentically and morally just?

Although philosophy in terms of looking back could never retrospectively pretend like Kant never happened, that is not a satisfactory outlook, because we’re all too familiar with how it shook our fundamental beliefs and the very framework of “doing” philosophy. We can never philosophise about things in the same systematic, all-encompassing and formalistic way with the same natural “innocence” that we did before Kant arrived on the science, back when the norm was major, autonomous and “freely floating” metaphysical theories about the universe. This is a hard truth to face: that German thinker of Königsberg changed the rules of the game forever, our conditions of doing philosophy having been effectively barred off from any possibilities of continued imaginative reflection and speculative creativity.

That’s why later thinkers like Heidegger more or less rejected or ignored Kant for the sake of our (human) world, which brings me to our second object of consideration.

The care structure is a deceptively simple metaphysical system of a tripartite dimension: actuality, authenticity and fallenness.

Actuality is the existential category of how everything in the world is true by virtue of the way things are, i.e. as contingent facts.

Fallenness constitutes our being desolated and alienated from our true purposes, inclinations and values in life, caught in a spiral of a modern urban commotion of distorting proportions that is constantly fluctuating and changing yet with ourselves being continuously chained to our conditions. This could involve things like being stuck at a job we don’t like or which isn’t connected to something we passionately care about as our mission, or being in a struggling relationship with our spouse, the ideal of “the one” so often belied.

Lastly, authenticity is just what it sounds like: living in true harmony with our most deeply held convictions, ambitions, hobbies and interests in communitarian solidarity with others in a stable cultural society with mutually inherited traditions as well as similar habits of thought and behaviour. It’s living up to our fullest potential in what’s crucially our inextricable embeddedness in the society in which we live: we can never escape from the fact of where we grew up or whence we came. Provenance is key.

To sum up, I hope I’ve managed to give you a reasonable grasp of where Heidegger was coming from and what he was getting at when he was expounding his seminal philosophy in his infamously lengthy and complex works.