“There is music in the midst of desolation/ And a glory that shines on our tears.”
Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen (1914).
Contemporary Western philosophy is divided into two main branches: continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. The former developed many movements or fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, Marxism, existentialism, structuralism, postmodernism, etc. The latter mainly studies language, truth and logic. For followers of analytic philosophy, philosophy should be restricted to the analysis of language, especially the study of meaning. On the other hand, the most persistent feature of continental philosophy is the commitment to questioning the foundations. Despite the wide range of themes, we can say that subject and truth are the two great themes that have dominated contemporary philosophical discussion.
A journey through the history of continental philosophy reveals the name of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) as one of the most innovative thinkers of the 20th century. Like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, Heidegger was a critic of modern culture. Writing after World War I (1914-1918), he tried to understand the intimate relationship between us and the world through the study of the nature of being. Heidegger believed that the entire philosophical tradition was misdirected. As Heidegger sees it, Western philosophy from Plato to modern times has been primarily concerned with entities or things in the world, failing to see that the most primordial fact is the very existence of the world. In other words, the Western philosophical tradition has forgotten the “question of being”, the Seinsfrage.
George Steiner observes that the leitmotif of Heidegger’s task was the question asked by Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing? In this sense, Sokolowski points out that Heidegger formulates his task in classical terms and shows a deep knowledge of the history of philosophy. In fact, Heidegger was a philosopher who always had an eye on the history of philosophy. His work represents a constant dialogue with historical sources. Furthermore, it was Heidegger’s deep conviction that the Germans inherited the philosophical mission of the Greeks. Our objective in this essay is to outline a broad panorama of Heidegger’s thought in order to approach the story of Dasein.
For Heidegger, the central mystery is not knowledge, but Being, existence. Therefore, he emphasizes the importance of understanding what it is to “be” in the world and not “knowing” it. Heidegger was mainly interested in the question that has escaped the consideration of philosophers throughout history, namely: what is Being? Or put another way, what does it mean to be? Heidegger wanted to define our place in the world, since Being is the most fundamental aspect of life. In truth, the question of being was formulated by Aristotle and had been a concern of medieval schoolmen. So what is new about Heidegger’s approach? Heidegger explicitly points out that his way of questioning being is more original than the metaphysical way. Surely Heidegger rejuvenated the study of the nature of Being through phenomenological reflection. Now let’s remember that Heidegger worked with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) at the University of Freeburg. Husserl is the founder of the phenomenological philosophy of the 20th century. Simply put, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience or consciousness. Early in his career, Heidegger was drawn to Husserl’s phenomenological appeal: “to return to things themselves.” That is, the attempt to describe things and experiences without metaphysical and theoretical speculation.
Phenomenology is entirely dominated, or at least in its early phase, by modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. In Husserl’s perspective, the mind or consciousness is taken as an obvious starting point for any description of reality and that is a common principle in Kant and German idealism. In fact, Husserl’s phenomenology is based on the Cartesian method of phenomenological reduction, also referred to in the literature as the Cartesian way (chemin cartesien). In any case, we will see that Husserl’s phenomenology is not some kind of neo-Cartesianism. For now, suffice it to say that Heidegger created an original method, ontological phenomenology, working in opposition to the main ideas of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Christopher Macann observes that Heidegger’s break with the phenomenological tradition represents a “quest for concreteness”. In the same way, Ernst Tugendhat observes that the question about the meaning of Being represents a radicalization of the phenomenological theme, which was only possible through a methodical rupture.
When Heidegger appeared on the intellectual scene in the 1920s, German culture was completely disoriented. Indeed, the post-World War I era in which Heidegger wrote reveals a period of deep reflection on the end of German cultural and imperial hegemony in Europe. As a consequence of that defeat, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) was created, which was the first truly democratic state in German history. In philosophy, following the tradition of elaboration of great systems started by Hegel, thinkers such as Ernst Bloch and Oswald Spengler wrote extensively between 1918 and 1927 on utopia and decadence. The horrors of war were reflected in the cultural despair of this period. Artists tried to create an ideal world. They were angry at the destruction inflicted on Europe in the name of patriotism. Surely the fate of man became a topical issue. The need for a renewal of man was in the air.
According to Karen Leeder, after those disastrous events, German writers like Rilke, George, and von Hofmannsthal rejected the spiritual impoverishment of modern life and sought redemption in a transcendent realm. This is not everything. At the outbreak of the war, the movement known internationally as Dada or Dadaism embraced the search for a completely new human language, one that could express the desolation and frustration that existed at that time. German Expressionism also sought to re-create language and the world by creating new forms. Significantly, the German language was completely open to such a renewal. This is because after the war the German language sought a break with its past. Judging from this point of view, Heidegger’s proposal to reopen the question of being and his new philosophical vocabulary can be seen as a response to that situation. George Steiner tells us that the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal questioned the adequacy of the old words; he was skeptical about the possibility of communication and believed that words no longer had meaning. Surely Wittgenstein and Heidegger listened carefully to von Hofmannsthal’s question. This is one of the reasons why Heidegger wrote in a kind of German-Greek idiolect. Another reason is his desire to start genuinely from scratch with a vocabulary uncontaminated by earlier theories.
Along with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Heidegger is one of the most important critics of the classical period of German philosophy known as German Idealism. It is true that Heidegger was influenced by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Basically, Heidegger’s philosophy is a discourse built on two elements: a critique of the traditional notion of the subject and a reconstruction of language to allow for the understanding of Being. Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (1927) is a masterpiece of artistic and technical skill, although the two-part project was not completed. It was a reaction against the empiricist reductionism and transcendentalism that still dominated philosophical inquiry. This work represents Heidegger’s effort to bring to the center of philosophical discussion a new understanding of ourselves and the world rooted in the phenomena of time. Heidegger tried to articulate by means of phenomenology his own field of ontological investigation. In short, Heidegger acted against two strands of Western thought: the traditional metaphysics of Plato and Descartes and 19th-century positivism, including the later version of it known as the logical positivism school.
Copyright: Marco Antonio Bomfoco 2009
