Life and Biology

This chapter examines Heidegger’s understanding of life by analysing his appraisal of early twentieth-century biology. The chapter places this appraisal into the context of Heidegger’s overall aim of identifying the lineage that runs from the ancient conception of the human’s status within physis, through the physis/ēthos division in Plato’s Academy, into modern articulations of the life/spirit opposition. Heidegger pursues this aim in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics by exploring biology, the discipline that explicitly seeks to examine one side of the life/spirit divide, and assessing what the landscape of this discipline looks like in the contemporary situation. The chapter argues that, given the broader context, it is acceptable that Heidegger summarises the contents of life-science research in a way that expresses metaphysical prejudices, for his claim is that we must first understand the delusions of thinking, and how we ourselves came to be deluded, in order to retrieve and rearticulate more essential knowledge.