Framing our being in a different way - Martin Heidegger

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So, if I wanted to set myself up for failure here today, I’d tell you I was going to explain all of Heidegger to you in about 30 minutes. Luckily, I’m too old to make that mistake, and you’re too old to be believing it anyway.

But one thing I can hope to do today is to tell you something I think is very jarring—and pretty awesome—about Heidegger’s work. As well as something significant that will help you place him in however you think about the history of philosophy.

Heidegger was one of the most important members of a movement in philosophy that was trying to question metaphysics.

This is around the 1920s—it’s the beginning of his career—and in many ways, as a German thinker himself, he’s reacting to the ripple effect created by the work of another German thinker: a guy we’ve been talking about lately named Friedrich Nietzsche.

If you’ve read the last few posts then you know Nietzsche thought his work was the twilight of the idols from the history of philosophy. That one of the things included in that list of idols was the long set of traditions philosophers had built up in the field of metaphysics.

Nietzsche says we’re going to stop all this unverifiable speculation about ideal, other-worldly stuff. To just focus on the here and now— he really thinks his work is moving beyond this whole metaphysical tradition.

Well Heidegger was someone who agreed with Nietzsche that we have to get away from metaphysics, but he ultimately said that Nietzsche didn’t go far enough. Heidegger makes the claim that every piece of philosophy Nietzsche ever wrote was built on top of a metaphysical foundation that is completely wrong about the nature of being.

What was he talking about there?

He’s talking about making the assumption that as human beings: we are primarily subjects, that are living in a world of objects.

Now trust me: I get that your first response to reading that might be, “Well, what’s wrong with that? I mean aren’t we?”

My goal here if I can do anything in this post is to explain three things: One, where Heidegger’s coming from with this critique. Two, how this critique from his book Being and Time completely changed the way a lot of philosophers even think about the task of philosophy.