Being and Time

"The interesting question is how could the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century – and he was, just quantitatively, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, in terms of the effect that he had on generations of thinkers after him in different traditions – have also been a Nazi? There’s that question which I won’t get into now but it has to be considered head-on. In the same way as in Plato’s Republic the arguments for philosophy are arguments against democracy, in Heidegger, the arguments for his conception of philosophy lead him to a sustained commitment to national socialism. And that has to pondered, not used as a basis for not reading him but using him to think more carefully about these questions. So, there’s that issue. “How could the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century – and he was – have also been a Nazi?” As to why Heidegger’s Being and Time is important, there’s a line very early in the text where he says something like Dasein – which is his name for human beings – is not enclosed in a ‘cabinet of consciousness’. Dasein is out there with and alongside things in the world. So, the primary message of Being and Time for me is that human existence and human life is literally ‘ecstatic’; the answer to it is not going to be found by looking inside our heads or through brain scans, it’s going to be had by engaging with what’s out there in our being in the world. Heidegger really shifts the focus of philosophy away from its concern with the self and the subject, towards a concern with our being in the world. That is a kind of fundamental shift in the way in which philosophical activity is understood and a lot follows from that. So, that’s the primary discovery of Being and Time. It means that the fundamental question of philosophy is no longer the question of epistemology, namely how can a subject know an objective world, which the question that we’ve basically inherited from Descartes and Kant. The question is now given that we’re already out there in the world, what sense can we make of it? Given that we’re out there already in the world, and the world is not a meaningless world, it is a world that is configured and hangs together as a world of significance, how can we understand that? How can we find the grammar to get hold of that? So, that’s what he tries to do. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Heidegger gives us the analytical tools for understanding human existence in the world. If you begin philosophy from that starting point, it fundamentally changes the way that you understand the activity. It’s not about sense data pouring into eyes, and minds inside heads which might or might not be attached to brains, all of that is just left by the wayside. We’re out there, with things, with stuff, and that makes sense. How does it make sense, how does it hang together, and what can we say about it? Absolutely. This is a fundamental revelation that Heidegger brings us. We don’t begin philosophy by going into a room like Descartes and then abstracting away from everyday experience because we’re not sure when we look out the window whether the people walking down the street are robots or human beings and therefore we fall back onto forms of geometrical proof in order to rebuild the whole thing from the standpoint of the subject – of the human being – as a thinking thing. For Heidegger, it’s exactly the opposite. We begin philosophical activity – the activity of thinking – by focussing on the average and the everyday in their average everyday character and finding something there, rather than inside us or in some ideal world. It’s a much rich way of doing philosophy in my view and also connects philosophy with sociology, with anthropology, and with all sorts of other areas. So, for me, Heidegger gives us a fundamental shift of orientation. We can get to the same point with the later Wittgenstein and his concern with the everyday and the ordinary but Heidegger gives us a more systematic picture of parcelling out our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves."