“Knowing, the epistemic relationship to the world, Heidegger says in paragraph 13, is a founded mode of being-in-the-world (SZ 61/BT 88). That is, it is a deficient mode of relating to the world, and out of this deficient mode, the perception of the world as present-at-hand is born. This is a fascinating thought. Once we begin to relate to the world as a world of knowledge, or potential knowledge, then we apprehend the world as a realm of objects which we perceive. And perceptions, according to the traditional philosophical parlance, can be captured in propositions. Those propositions are things we can assert the truth or falsity of based on evidence, and science can be understood as the totality of true propositions.

Heidegger sets out to undermine that whole picture—objects, subjects, knowledge, perception, representation, propositions. We have to forget about the problem of perception—there is no such problem—and forget about the primacy of epistemology. Rather, for Heidegger, I am my world. The world is part of my being, part of the structure of my existence. I am part world.” – Simon Critchley, Heidegger Thinking

It isn’t hard to find people who claim to know things. We’re located in New York City; here, there are billboards, flyers, pamphlets, and screens aplenty claiming to have all sorts of knowledge pertaining to topics like love, death, God, politics, the thoughts of others, and the future. Similarly, the Internet has allowed such claims of knowledge to be plastered on all the devices connected to it. So, lots of people think they know things. Lots of people also seem to want to know things a lot. People pay ridiculous amounts of money to have the knowledge some of the other people claim to have bestowed on them. Even if it’s something more typical like going to university, such a situation would share this structure of giving people money so you can hear their “words of wisdom.” When you put it like this, the situation becomes strange; you may wonder whether any of these people with claims to knowledge, be it a fortune-teller in an alleyway or a tenured university professor, really have anything to say that is as valuable as the idea of knowledge we venerate in society.

This topic is of great concern for Heidegger in Being and Time. He thought that the knowledge most people were professing to have at the time, be it in the natural sciences, theology, and even philosophy, was actually not the kind of deep and fundamental knowledge that scientists, theologians, and philosophers were claiming it was. This is because, as the excerpt quoted above indicates, such knowledge is “founded.” This basically means that it assumes too much to be considered foundational knowledge about Being itself, or ontological knowledge. Rather, such knowledge is “founded” on Being, such that it assumes the ontological foundation of reality and then abstracts from there to develop new systems of knowledge that aren’t foundational. However, to actually study Being as Being, one must remember to not abstract from it, but to confront it. This means, first and foremost, diving into the world that we find ourselves, resisting any urge to appropriate it in a way that would satisfy our epistemological desires.

When one does this, many, if not all, of the classical “problems” of philosophy slip away. As the passage above indicates, no longer must we question our perception, nor do we need to separate the world up between subject and object. We simply exist. It’s sort of like a meditation, but instead of an emptying out of content, you experience the richness of the world as you encounter it as a Being-in-the-world, or Dasein, yourself. We find ourselves always-already part of existence, never separated from it as most of the canon of western philosophy insists that we are. The world is always our home, and we are always a part of it. This is the result of a correct start to the phenomenological investigation of Being. So, next time someone runs up to you telling you they have finally figured out what life is all about, consider whether they have realized the nature of existence and the world as such, or whether they are “comporting” Being away from its most primordial form. According to Heidegger, the former is the only way towards actually “figuring it all out” and obtaining ontological knowledge.

Next, we will take a look at how Heidegger specifically distances himself from his philosophical predecessors with respect to the notion of “world.” This will add some more philosophical detail to Heidegger’s conception of the world and presents an interesting argument against the other attempts to understand the world that were tried in the past. We hope you’re excited! Stay tuned for that coming soon.

This article was inspired by Heidegger Thinking, Simon Critchley’s book on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, to be published by New York Review Books in September. If you like what’s on our Substack, then we encourage you to check out the book and get a copy of your own.

– Simon Critchley, Heidegger Thinking

There is nothing you will ever do in your life that doesn’t involve time. This is no coincidence; for you to be at all, for you to have “a life” at all, time needs to be there. Things wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Try out this thought experiment: think about anything, anything at all, or even think of nothing, if you think that’s possible. You’ll notice that whatever you’re thinking about (or not thinking about, if you’ve elected to think of nothing) is there, it’s present. For there to be presence, there needs to be a present. And if there’s a present, this entails a past and a future. If you’ve grasped this, then you’ve grasped the basic, starting premise of Martin Heidegger’s 1927 masterwork, Being and Time.

This may seem like an abstract philosophical worry that doesn’t have much, if any, relevance to our everyday situation—this is also the diagnosis most people who roll their eyes at philosophy give to most philosophical topics and controversies. Anyone who’s met a disgruntled undergraduate forced to take a philosophy course has likely heard questions such as the following: “When am I going to use this in life? Why does this stuff even matter?” Ironically enough, this isn’t far from Heidegger’s concern as well. He thought that the western tradition of philosophy, hailed by many as among the greatest of human achievements (which is still very much the case today), had lost its way from its conception; by forgetting about time when asking about the meaning of existence itself (dubbed “Being” by Heidegger, with a capital “B”), philosophers had turned philosophy itself into an abstract playground of ideas that have little to no relevance to our existential, fundamentally temporal, situation as beings in the world.

Philosophy should, instead, be most relevant to our lives as beings in the world. By bringing the temporal nature of Being to the forefront of philosophy, Heidegger aimed to make this the case, thereby “fixing” the mistake of the philosophical tradition up to that point. With this amendment, philosophy now is directly able to speak on the situation of beings in the world.

This has a startling implication: Being as time implies that Being is finite. Thus, as beings in the world, we and all the other beings are slowly marching towards our end. This idea is quite intuitive, as it’s the core of our experience in the world. Everything around us is dying, both physically and figuratively. All of us have experienced or will experience a loved one passing away, missing an old friend we’ll never see again, getting into a conflict that fundamentally cracks a relationship, and failing at a project or other effort that we’ve staked so much on. This idea has even now been posited in the science of thermodynamics, with its second law stating the entropy (which is a term used to indicate something’s breakdown or undoing) of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. Philosophy is perhaps now too relevant to our lives, too close for comfort! Heidegger calls this phenomenon “Being-towards-death.”

What an intense idea! However, it’s not only intense for Heidegger, who argues that it’s also the basis for the meaning in our lives. His argument can be formulated in the following way: If we can come to grips with the fundamental phenomenon of our existence, now understood as Being-towards-death, then we’ll be able to understand ourselves better. It may not be the most comforting, nice, or neat understanding, but at least it’s authentic, in the sense that it is informed by the temporal reality of our Being. We’re not in the business of pulling the sheep’s wool over people’s eyes, and we hope you aren’t either!

So, what exactly might all this look like in more detail? What kind of beings are we if we are hurdling toward our demise? We hope these are of the same kind of questions on your mind as we get ready to dive into the themes of Being and Time. But first, to answer these questions well, there are some things to get straight before we directly come across the answer. We can’t make the same mistake as the previous philosophers did when attempting to find the “meaning of Being.” Rather, to understand life as it existentially, temporally, is, we must start out in considerations of the everyday, understanding the nature of our “everydayness” first, and then working our way up to the meaning of Being itself and its implications. So, that’s what’s to come next! We hope you’re excited. Stay tuned for the next article, which will talk about the world we find ourselves in as we live out our lives in their everydayness.

This article was inspired by Heidegger Thinking, Simon Critchley’s book on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, to be published by New York Review Books in September. If you like what’s on our Substack, then we encourage you to check out the book and get a copy of your own.