Martin Heidegger · Philosophy
Heidegger reopened the oldest and most forgotten question in philosophy: <em>what does it mean to be?</em> Not what particular things exist, but what ‘being’ itself means - a question, he charged, that the whole Western tradition had asked badly or forgotten entirely. <em>Being and Time</em> (1927) is the attempt to ask it anew.
In 1927 Martin Heidegger published Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), one of the most influential and difficult works of twentieth-century philosophy, and it opens by reviving a question so basic that it had been almost entirely forgotten: the question of being. We constantly use the little word ‘is.’ The sky is blue; two plus two is four; I am tired; God is; a number is; a stone is. In every such statement we presuppose that we understand what ‘is’ or ‘being’ means. But do we? Heidegger asks: what does it actually mean for something to be? Not which things exist - that is a question for the sciences, each studying its own region of beings (physics studies physical beings, biology living beings, theology the divine being). His question is more fundamental: what is this ‘being’ that all beings, however different, somehow share - what does ‘to be’ itself mean? He found that the tradition had no real answer, and worse, had stopped even asking; the most universal and obvious of all concepts had become the most obscure and the most neglected.
At the heart of Heidegger’s thought lies a distinction he calls the ontological difference: the difference between beings (entities - things that are: stones, people, numbers, gods) and being (that in virtue of which beings are beings, the ‘is’ itself). This sounds abstract, but the point is decisive. Being is not itself a being, not another entity alongside the others, not a thing you could point to or list in an inventory of what exists. If you cataloged everything there is - every star, atom, person, and idea - you would have cataloged all the beings, but you would not thereby have found being, because being is not one more item on the list; it is the ‘is’ that all those items share, the meaning of their existing at all. Heidegger’s charge against the tradition is that it persistently confused the two - that it treated being as if it were a being, looking for some supreme entity (God, the Forms, substance, matter, the ‘most real thing’) to serve as the being of all beings. But to seek being among the beings is to miss it entirely, like searching for ‘wetness’ among the drops of water. The question of being requires us to think the difference itself - to think being as distinct from every being.
Why should anyone care about so abstract a question? Heidegger’s answer is that the question of being is not abstract at all but the most concrete and urgent of questions - it is the question of what it means that anything exists, including ourselves, and our forgetting of it is, he believes, the deepest sickness of the modern age. We are so absorbed in dealing with particular beings - using things, calculating, managing, consuming - that we have lost all sense of the astonishing fact that there is anything at all, that beings are. The question of being is meant to reawaken this fundamental wonder, the wonder that Aristotle and Plato said was the origin of all philosophy: not ‘why is the world this way rather than that?’ but the deeper ‘why is there anything at all, and what does it mean that it is?’ Heidegger thought that recovering this question could transform our entire relationship to existence - could pull us out of the shallow, calculating, technological way of relating to the world that treats everything (including ourselves) as mere resources to be used, and open us instead to a more thoughtful, wondering, authentic way of being. The question of being, for Heidegger, is ultimately the question of how to dwell meaningfully in a world we have learned to manipulate but forgotten how to marvel at.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Heidegger revived the question of being (Seinsfrage): not which beings exist, but what ‘being’ itself means - and he charged the tradition with ‘forgetting’ this question by treating being as if it were just another being. Explain the ontological difference and why Heidegger thought the question had t…
Leads to Parmenides.
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