Sartre, Levinas, Arendt, Ortega y Gasset and many others great thinkers had him as a teacher.
He was member of the Nazi Party.
And many consider him the most important thinker of the XXth Century.
That’s right, friends, today we’re talking about Heidegger.
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, Germany.
Because his father was the sacristan of the local church, asides from being a barrel maker,
young Martin received a conservative catholic education.
Consequently, when he was a child, Heidegger was an altar boy,
and when he was fourteen he entered the jesuit seminar to become a priest.
Nevertheless, during his road to become a priest,
he stumbled upon with several philosophical writings, which drastically modified his perspective.
Among them was the already famous father of Fenomenology, Edmund Husserl.
Heidegger left the seminar to study literature and philosophy,
by his twenty-six he was a habilitated doctor,
and when he was twenty-eight years old he became assistant to his admired Edmund Husserl at Freiburg University.
Heidegger will eventually become a teacher at the same University,
where he was known for being an eloquent teacher and an original thinker.
In 1933, professor Martin Heidegger, aged 44, became rector of the Freiburg University;
at the same time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
On that year Heidegger affiliated himself to the Nazi Party.
You heard that right!
Probably the most important philosopher of the last century was a member of the Nazi Party.
Some say that Heidegger was too naive and couldn’t foresee the cruelty with which the Nazi Party would conduct itself.
Others believe that he knew what he was in for,
and that he actively supported the Nazi regime helping to inculcate Nazi’s views and mores at Freiburg University,
giving speeches and conferences where he didn’t rejected, but embraced National Socialism.
Can we confirm that Heidegger was a Nazi?
Yes.
Does the later invalidate his philosophical work?
No.
What can I say?
Sometimes it is better to accept the complexity of the world in which we live
and to admit that some of the most brilliant ideas
can come from the mind of people far, VERY FAR, from what we would consider morally or ethically correct.
Getting over that controversial point,
we have to point out that Heidegger served as Rector of the Freiburg University for less than a year,
and that when the War was over,
he was removed from his teaching position at the University.
He would return to the academic life six years later,
writing, traveling and offering conferences until his death in 1976.
Without a doubt, Heidegger is one of the most important philosophers of the last century.
His most important work, Being and Time, was a philosophical milestone
due to the originality of his thought,
and in this video we’ll explain some of the key concepts
and in this video we’ll explain some of the key concepts that make this book a key to existentialism.
Being
According to Aristotle, knowledge begins in definitions,
which are constructed by the nearest kind (genus proximus)
and specific difference (differentia specifica)
–in fact, we still clasify living beings by their kind and species.
For example, Aristotle’s definition of “man”
is “rational animal”,
in which “animal” is the kind,
this is, a type of wide concept susceptible of referring all “animated” beings –horses, dogs, cows, mosquitos, etcetera–,
–, and “rational” works as the specific difference,
this is, that which can only be predicated about “man”,
that which distinguish it from the rest of animals or animated beings.
And things haven't changed much since Aristotle:
This is the same structure present in our current taxonomical definition: homo sapiens.
According to this definition,
we belong to the homo kind,
as all the other hominids do,
and to the sapiens species.
Now, within this logic, being would be the broadest kind,
the “kind of kinds”,
therefore, it lacks definition.
This is because anytime we talk about anything
we are forced to predicate existence (or being) about that thing: when we talk about something, anything, we must assume its existence.
Talking about being is that simple.
This way of understanding the being,
the one that has prevailed since the ancient greeks until medieval philosophy,
reduces the conception of being to a mere logical conjunction.
But Heidegger wasn´t convinced by that explanation
and knew that there was something deeper behind the concept of being.
For him, we cannot continue believing that being is something merely logical,
we must study it from an ontological point of view.
But, what is ontology?
Ontology is a branch of philosophy,
specifically of metaphysics,
which studies the existence.
Ontology postulates questions such as
how do we know that something exists?
Can we categorize what exists?
How do existing things relate?
God exists?
You know, the kind of questions that come handy in family reunions, birthday parties, romantic dates…
Well, Heidegger’s most notable contribution to philosophy
consists in studying being from an ontological perspective,
with all the complexity it implies.
What a task!
In the beginning of Being and Time,
Heidegger decries Occidental Philosophy for not taking on the question of being;
moreover, he denounces philosophy for plainly forgetting that question.
Therefore, he makes it his task;
from this moment on, his entire work will consist in taking the problem of being from an ontological perspective
and in trying to recover the mystery that it entails.
To explain the way in which Heidegger tackled the problem of being
we must first clarify his concept of entity.
Entities
Entity is everything that is:
stones, animals, cars, houses, bikes, human beings, plants…
Everything there is is an entity.
And all entities are manifestations of Being.
Here we reach the crucial point.
Being.
Being is a complex concept.
Nevertheless, we can understand that Being is different from entities,
but only through entities we can have a notion of Being.
Being is not an entity,
but it has the need of entities to manifest itself,
in the same way that entities need Being.
Being and entities belong to each other.
This is important
because it helps us to correctly formulate the question about Being.
This question cannot possible be
“what is Being?”
because the pronoun “what”
implies that we are asking about a thing,
an entity,
and as we said before, Being is not an entity.
Therefore, we cannot look for it whit the pronoun “what”.
But, if we cannot ask “what is Being?”
how, then, can we begin to reach into the problem of Being?
Well, there are some good news:
of all entities out there,
there is one
that can be the key to know Being:
this entity is Man
By Man, of course, here we refer also to women,
we are refering to all human beings.
Man is the only entity that wonders about Being,
about death, about existence.
If we want to understand Being,
we must look into ourselves.
And that’s why man occupies a special place in Heidegger’s philosophy.
On one side, we are connected to all plants,
animals, rivers, mountains;
to all that is,
because we are all manifestations of Being.
On the other side, we are the sole entity that reflects on existence,
that reflects on Being.
WE ARE AN EXPPRESSION OF BEING that wonders about Being.
We are an auto-reflexive particle.
Heidegger is known for coming up with words to explain his concepts
because he believed that languages
lacked words to convey the philosophical concepts he wished to express.
And within his philosophy
he referred to men with a word he came up with,
which I, personally, find beautiful.
The word is
DASEIN.
DASEIN is a compound word that can be translated as Being-There,
which expresses the way Heidegger thought about man.
For Heidegger, you are an expression of Being, there,
thrown into the goddamned world,
thrown into an era,
into a nation, into a family that you didn't choose;
whitout the ability to choose your gender, race or your mother tonge.
TIME
When born, we are thrown into the world that is already determined by a long story,
but this is the world in which we are bound to develop through our decisions and actions,
this is the world that we can explore,
in which we can act, build and destroy.
And we are the only ones with the power to give form to the world.
Life gives us the opportunity to choose among the different possibilities that our surroundings offer.
Although there are elements that are previously determined by the past,
Dasein is always projected towards the future.
Dasein is not his present,
but his future possibilities.
We are what we can become.
Certainly you couldn’t choose your nationality, nor your raising, nor your race or socioeconomic position when born.
But, by being conscient of those facts and of the place you have in history,
you can choose what you will become.
You can choose your occupation, the books you will read this year,
how you will spend your free time,
if you will have a couple,
if you will have kids of your own...
You can choose how you will behave within your community.
We live permanently ejected into a future.
We live projecting in our heads these different possibilities,
but, for better or for worse, there is a limit to our possibilities.
This limit is Death.
Death marks the end of any project,
the end of decisions and actions.
Death is the end of any possibility.
During a conference, a young man asked Heidegger if he had any advice for a fuller life.
Professor Heidegger pondered for a couple of seconds and answered:
yes, he said, spending more times in cemeteries.
This answer is coherent with his philosophy
because in it death is something we must continually consider
for reaching what he called an authentic existence.
Authetinc Existence
In Heidegger’s philosophy we find the concept of inauthentic existence and authentic existence.
These concepts are not mutually exclusive within a person’s life;
there is nobody with a purely authentic or inauthentic life.
but through the different moments of our life,
we have a higher or lower authenticity.
To live an authentic life is to think by yourself.
We cannot always have an authentic life because we are product of a society
that gave us a language,
that gave us certain values
and certain ways of thinking.
Nevertheless we must try to live in the most authentic way possible
by considering our beliefs and reflecting by ourselves.
Someone with a mostly inauthentic existence
is characterized by his lack of reflection
and a low disposition to reach his own conclusions.
The inauthentic person doesn’t think for himself,
but adopts the predominant way of thinking within his social circle
or the mass media that is consumed.
Inauthentic existence is extremely easy
because you don’t have to make an effect to reach conclusions of your own,
and you don’t have to risk familiar or social bonds
defending your beliefs.
That’s why reaching conscience of your own mortality
is a big step towards a more authentic life.
Think about it.
if this were your last year of life,
what would you do?
How would you behave?
What decisions would you make?
What would your priorities be?
Would you still care for social conventions?
This channel has an audience with an average age between 20 and 34 years old.
For this age,
the probability of dying this year is about 0.1%.
This means that for 1000 people watching this video,
1 is going to die this year,
and no one can be sure of who would that be.
What if this was your last year of life?
How would you like to live through it?
An authentic existence entails understanding the finitude of life,
and with it, the unsetting feeling and angst that comes with going on,
exploring the world, building, loving deeply,
and, above all, an authentic live entails thinking by our own,
and, at the same time, having the humility to recognize that we are a small part of everything.
My own conclusion
Heidegger’s philosophy is, for me, particularly enticing
due to concepts such as authentic existence
and to the way it considers death and helps us to approach it.
I recur to thinking about death when I find myself in a stifling problem;
this helps to put things in perspective.
So, I wonder:
If I were to die this week,
would this problem be as stifling as it is now?
Most of the time the answer is no.
This is not to say that the problem disappears,
but it does appear in a different light,
allowing me to take distance from it and to think with a clearer mind.
Something that I personally don’t do, and I’d wish to start doing,
is to consider death when I find myself in relaxed situation
when nothing’s wrong.
I don’t know,
watching a Netflix show without any concern in my mind, and wonder:
if I were to die this week,
would I still spend my weekend
marathoning this series
or would I rather do something else?
There, instead of considering death to lower angst,
I would use this thought to bring more angst,
just the necessary bit to get up the couch
and do something that appears more meaningful to me.
Or maybe the series’ really good and I remain sitting on the couch for eight hours.
That is also a possibility.
I also find interesting how
even when we make an effort to think by ourselves
and to get to our own conclusions,
there´s always going to be a certain degree of inauthenticity in our thought
because it derives from the ideas that we have learnt from our parents, teachers and culture.
Our thought will never be entirely original
because we think through a language that has been given to us.
Taking this into account,
it would be very easy to believe that our failures and vices
are society’s fault
or our father’s fault;
nevertheless, Heidegger´s philosophy invites us to take the matter in our own hands.
“We are what we do with what they have done to us”,
would say one french student that attended Heidegger's courses,
“I am we and my circumstance”,
would say one spanish student that also attended Heidegger's courses,
In the end,
Heidegger is, without a doubt, a philosopher’s that’s worth reading and enjoying his genius.
But that’s only my opinion;
I would like to know what do you to think about Heidegger’s philosophy?
Do you believe that thinking about death can help to live a more authentic life?
Please, let me know in the comment section.
If you enjoyed this video please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.
Good bye
and until the next one, Ciao.
