10. After Being and Time

‘After Being and Time’ provides a brief survey of Heidegger’s thought after Being and Time, which reveals something of the overall coherence of his life-long project. Being and Time gave a fairly favourable account of the world in which we live, but one question was left unanswered: how was such a world established in the first place? Have there been better worlds in the past and, if so, what is the nature of, and the reason for, the decline? Is there any prospect of a return to our earlier condition? To answer these questions Heidegger turned to something barely mentioned in Being and Time: art, poetry, and religion.

7. Time, death, and conscience

‘Time, death, and conscience’ is concerned with how the temporality of human life affects the way we live. Time is more crucial to our lives than space, and is itself created by Dasein and its temporal nature. Death stands as the ultimate possibility to give impetus to human life. Heidegger believed that it was possible for Dasein to know non-empirically that it will die, and that dying individualizes Dasein. Conscience, with a capital ‘C’, calls everyone to choose to choose. An authentic choice for a future mode of life, although still circumscribed by time, gives Dasein a resoluteness that enables it to give an account of its condition.

6. Language, truth, and care

‘Language, truth, and care’ examines how interpretations of the world can be formed and communicated. Language emerges from interpretation and consists of a multiplicity of meanings. Words and their meanings are already world-laden. This results in an everyday condition of ‘fallenness’ where meaning is inauthentic and comes from an anonymous ‘they’, not from original thought. The difficulty of communicating truth means that the philosopher’s message sheds light and should be built on, not merely accepted. Dasein’s necessary existence in the world involves it in the world, through ‘care’. Phenomenology dictates that science is only a secondary perception and there is no plausible account of a Dasein-free world.

9. History and world-time

‘History and world-time’ explores how history can be accessed and serve as inspiration. Dasein’s intrinsic historicality means that the past is intertwined with the present, and history is not dead and gone. Heroes from the past can provide opportunities for repetition, giving possibilities that can shape the fate of authentic Dasein. Inauthentic historicity, like inauthentic Dasein, is dispersed in the world of the present. Past philosophers are to be read with a view to their possibilities, but need to be placed in world-time. World-time, like the world itself, is significant and everything present at hand has its place. This contrasts with temporal now-time, which is a homogeneous sequence of nows.

2. Heidegger’s philosophy

‘Heidegger’s philosophy’ lays out the significance of, and the questions raised by, Heidegger’s masterwork, Being and Time, which was published in 1927. The result of his reading, lecturing, and thinking over the previous decade, it points the way ahead to his later works, which cannot be understood independently of it. Being and Time is also one of the most difficult books ever written. The work addresses how humans can ask the question ‘What is Being?’ and the temporal nature of the human being (Dasein). A proposed third section of Being and Time considering the question of Being and its relation to time, in greater independence of Dasein, was omitted.

11. St Martin of Messkirch?

‘St Martin of Messkirch?’ assesses Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism, his anti-Semitism, and his philosophical standing. Nazism did not inform his philosophy, nor can his philosophy be applied to it. Heidegger saw Nazism in terms of its possibilities, hoping it would bring about a spiritual renewal of life. Heidegger’s philosophy did more than adopt the ideas and problems current in his immediate environment; it asked new questions and reinterpreted other philosophers. Rootlessness plays an important part in Heidegger’s thought. He links rootlessness with ‘technology’ and the capitalist mindset, and Jews with capitalism as well as with Bolshevism, which he regarded as another version of technology.

8. Temporality, transcendence, and freedom

‘Temporality, transcendence, and freedom’ considers Dasein’s place within time and space. Time is a result of Dasein striving to impose order and significance on an apparently hostile environment. The past informs the opportunities to be found in the present and the future. As such, time makes living in the world possible. Dasein’s sense of time allows it to transcend the world and transcend temporality by actualizing its own purposes and constructing its own encounters. This ability to view the entities as possibilities rather than sheer actualities relies on the freedom that Dasein has. Thus, Dasein asks for the grounds of things because ‘to exist is already to philosophize’.

5. The world

‘The world’ examines how Dasein understands the world. Dasein needs a world populated with entities for it to engage with; it sees these entities primarily as objects of use. Different entities relate to each other and form a significant whole. The world is seen in terms of a web of significance in which things have their rightful places. Much of it is normally inconspicuous. Certain features of this understanding, like spatiality and the self, are known a priori and Dasein’s world is a public world accessible to others. Understanding the world displays possibilities, but requires a ‘fore-structure’ to start from. Moods can affect this understanding and reveal the world differently.

4. Dasein

Dasein is Heidegger’s way of referring both to the human being and to the type of Being that humans have. Its essence lies in its existence. It can respond to its circumstances, thereby choosing its ‘Being’. ‘Dasein’ is about the human being and its place in the world. Dasein is essentially in the world, because it continually interprets and engages with other entities and the contexts in which they lie. Only Dasein makes the world a unitary world at all, rather than a collection of entities. Dasein is the whole human being, and makes no distinction between body and mind. Heidegger rejected any purely psychological realm.

3. Being

‘Being’ describes the importance that Heidegger ascribed to considering the nature of an object, or its Being, before addressing knowledge of it. Whereas other philosophers, including Aristotle, treated all entities as vorhanden, ‘present at hand’, as appropriate objects of disinterested description, Heidegger argued for multiple conceptions of Being. These conceptions included the existence of the object, qualities that distinguish it from others, and its mode of Being—as a real entity rather than an ideal one, for instance. Heidegger was convinced that Being must be considered in the context of the world around and of the relationship of the subject of inquiry to the object considered.