Being in the World - According to Heidegger
Reading & the Good Life (21 July at Noon EST)
Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Join here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life. A space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living! This Friday, we continue our exploration of existential philosophy with Irrational Man by William Barrett, initially published in 1958.
Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading.
A Study in Existential Philosophy
As discussed in How to Think Like an Existentialist, How to Be Yourself — Like Nietzsche, and How to Think — Like Kierkegaard, Existentialism is challenging to define. Existentialist thinkers explored a broad range of issues from meaning, purpose, anxiety and authenticity, freedom, absurdity, and the value of human existence. Among the earliest figures associated with Existentialism include: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Being in the World — Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose work is readily associated with phenomenology and Existentialism. His most notable work, Being and Time (published in 1927), is standardly hailed as one of the most significant texts in the canon of (what has come to be called) contemporary European (or Continental) Philosophy.
Barrett describes Heidegger’s approach this way in Irrational Man,
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche fell like block-busters upon the quiet world of academic philosophy. They were philosophers outside the Academy, a new and revolutionary thing for modern times, and consequently, they wrote not as professors but as poets: their books are passionate and colorful, addressed to all men and not merely to the professionals. Heidegger, by contrast, is a thoroughly academic figure, a professor, and the mark of this is upon all his writings. He never expresses himself with the radical boldness and passion of a Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, but his message, swathed though it may be in academic and formal lingo, may nevertheless prove in the end to be as dramatic and fateful a bombshell as were those of his two predecessors.
Although his philosophy is challenging, it is not abstract. Ordinary human life moves within a preconceptual understanding of Being, and it is this everyday understanding of Being in which we live, move, and have our Being. “Being is the most concrete and closest of presences; literally, the concern of every man,” stresses Barrett.
In my conversation with Oliver Burkeman (author of Four Thousand Weeks), we discussed the notion of facing our finitude. Burkeman explains that everyday language reflects our everyday ways of seeing. But Heidegger wants to get under the essential elements of existence—the things we barely notice because they’re so familiar. Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; instead, it’s the thing that defines us.
Burkeman writes,
The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls ‘Being-towards-death,’ aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month.
How does all this connect to daily life, you might ask?
For Heidegger (and other existential thinkers), it connects with becoming who we are. In Being and Time, Heidegger put it this way, “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.”
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