Alex Peek blog

List of posts    Blog archive    About

 

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Martin Heidegger and Being

 

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Willy Pragher

Photo license: CC BY-SA 3.0

 

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher best known for his analysis of Being. Thomas Lange said,

 

"Heidegger's thought will fit no category; no more than Hegel can be presented as a Platonist or Kant as a follower of Leibniz and Hume. It is equally foolish to say that Heidegger is just Kierkegaard de-Christianized, or Nietzsche systematized, or Hegel de-absolutized. I consider Heidegger's philosophy one of those extraordinary manifestations of man's forging of a knowledge of Being which the ages cannot but recon with." (Meaning of Heidegger: A Critical Study of an Existentialist Phenomenology, 1959)

 

The rest of this post is some quotes from Heidegger.

 

Being

 

"We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed." (Being and Time, 1927)

 

"Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Dasein, is the nobody to whom every Dasein has always surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another." (Being and Time, 1927)

 

"Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein." (Being and Time, 1927)

 

"Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question... And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us." (What is Metaphysics? 1929)

 

Time

 

"Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter be addressed as a being." (Brainyquote.com)

 

"Since time itself is not movement, it must somehow how have to do with movement. Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable; change is time." (The Concept of Time)

 

Language

 

"Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibilty which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems." (Being and Time, 1927)

 

"Language is the house of the truth of Being." (Letter on Humanism, 1947)

 

"All the poems of the poet who has entered into his poethood are poems of homecoming." (Existence and Being, 1949)

 

Unknown

 

"Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize 'facts' never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light." (Contributions to Philosophy, 1989 posthumous)

 

"In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks." (Nietzsche, 1961)