A Brief Introduction to Martin Heidegger's Philosophy

With a Reflection on Genesis and Humankind's Definition

“Vintage Shoemaker Occupation Art,” public domain.

*10 minute read time*

The history of Western philosophy, arguably, begins with Plato. The tradition has carried on for nearly 2,500 years. One theme unites most western philosophers, from Plato on: In here, is me. Out there, is the world.

The philosopher we’re studying today tries to leap forward by doing away with this notion. He’s known for being impossible to understand, using lots-and-lots-of-hyphens,¹ translating Greek using creative liberties, gripping Europe with his philosophy in the 20th century, and, well… for some darker things too.

He is Martin Heidegger.

In this essay, I’m going to try to perform a miracle: give an overview of Heidegger in a relatively accessible way in around 1,500 words.

Where to begin with Heidegger (1889-1976)? It’s difficult to overstate his influence, yet he’s lesser known to non-philosophers. Hannah Arendt, his student and, briefly, lover, became a renowned feminist philosopher. Another of his students, Hans-Georg Gadamer, provided an influential and novel understanding of hermeneutics (how we study literary texts, including the Bible). Heidegger’s ideas paved the way for the famous deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and renowned existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger’s notion that we cannot separate humanity, knowledge, reason, and actions from culture and tradition is taken as gospel today.²

His significance isn’t in question, but whether we ought to study him is.

He was a Nazi.³

This creates an uncomfortable, oft-discussed tension. How much of his philosophy is tacitly Nationalist? He rarely, if ever, writes about ethics per se, but some philosophers see his understanding of humanity as implicitly tied up with antisemitism. Let me state up front that I am neither antisemitic nor a Nazi, in case that was somehow in question. I believe Heidegger offers profound insights into philosophy that can be parsed from his Nationalism—I think most philosophers do. Some believe he’s unworthy to even be studied. I’m neither qualified nor do I have the space to address these concerns, but I would be remiss if I didn’t flag this at the start. If you want to be inspired by anti-Nazi resistance, check out my last essay on the German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.⁴

With that important caveat stipulated, let’s press on. I intend to touch on two Heideggerian concepts in my next essay: authenticity and anxiety (Angst). They’re two popular terms in modern lingo and central to Heidegger’s ideas. First, however, we need an introduction to Heidegger’s overall project. I’ll cover that in this essay, and try to come to the surface with an interesting theological observation.

Heidegger, Descartes, and Skepticism

In philosophy, there’s a deeply troubling quandary called skepticism. Especially during the Enlightenment, with less trust in God and more faith in reason, the question of how to know anything becomes inescapable. René Descartes locates the beginning of his response in cogito ergo sum, “I think; therefore I am,” or, “I am thinking, so, I exist.” A brilliant bit of philosophy, no doubt. He asserts that thinking (specifically, clear and distinct perception of one’s own thoughts) is fundamental. To him, this point serves as a rock-solid, anti-skeptical foundation.

However, this admits a vicious dichotomy. Inside my head, me. Outside me, the world. Descartes paints a bright subject-object line of distinction; the subject is my mind, and objects are out there. From this jumping off point, disproving skepticism becomes about how to bridge the gap. I know my mind, the cogito, is real, but how can I be certain the things “out there” are real? You’ve seen this played out in The Matrix and probably heard the smug teenage philosopher try to stump you with, “well, how do you know we’re not all brains in vats?”

Descartes, and essentially, the rest of the Enlightenment thinkers until Kant, struggle to accomplish this task of overcoming this subject-object skepticism.

Heidegger’s Response to Descartes

Heidegger, basically, says bollocks.⁵

Heidegger says humans are “beings-in-the-world” (the first of many hyphenated words), meaning we cannot even pretend to think the world isn’t real. Without the world, we wouldn’t be the kinds of beings we are—skepticism is a non-issue. It’s fundamentally impossible for us to not be in and a part of a world. It cannot even be theorized, for the theorizing requires us to live in the world and care for things first. So, first, Descartes fails because he thinks internal, rational, conscious thinking is primary, when clearly it is not.

Second, Heidegger thinks Descartes wrongly assumes all kinds of things about existence when he declares sum (am or exists). Heidegger wants to interrogate the meaning of existence as such. He intends to get to the bottom of “is” and “to be.” He believes most thinkers, including Descartes, all the way back to the post-Socratic Greeks, ignore, understate, or confuse the most fundamental question of philosophy, the question of Being itself.⁶ Their confusion about Being leads to endless absurdities, like the problem of skepticism itself.

Uncovering Being, or allowing Being to uncover itself, is the goal of his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927).

“Dasein” and Studying the “to be”

To achieve the study of “is,” he thinks we must understand the dynamic relationship of the world and our actions, our lives. This is why he calls humans “Dasein,” which, in German, means something like “being-there.” You cannot even imagine humans without a world—we are world-beings that care about things. We care about our work, like as writers; we care about our social roles, like as husbands; we care about our being-with others, how we’re perceived; we care about survival, that we eat and drink. He thinks Descartes is silly for thinking we can separate a “rational” agents apart from all of these cares. After all, Descartes had to care about philosophy to get his meditations rolling. In short, the cares of life are more fundamental than our rational side, especially in understanding Being.

Heidegger thinks that studying Dasein reveals Being as such, to-be-ness. This exploration of the way things are meaningful to us is the way things are meaningful at all, for what is existence without meaning? In what way does a cup “exist” unless it has meaning as a receptacle for drinking from—but to whom does it mean “drinking thing” for? Only Dasein, the only beings concerned with meaning as meaning. Note, that this point is more nuanced. Heidegger is not a subjectivist who believes reality is determined solely by our subjective experience. To explain why he’s not a subjectivist would take more time than I can spare here—you’ll just have to trust me.

Of course, animals care about whether the thing rustling in the bushes will eat them. Animals recognize a minimal kind of meaning, but they don’t care about care or meaning itself. They don’t lead lives. As Heidegger famously puts it, “Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue.”

To illustrate the point that we cannot separate our understanding of being-in-the-world, worldliness, and our understanding of Being, he makes his famous distinction between ready-to-hand things and present-at-hand things.

Present-at-hand Versus Ready-to-hand

A coffee cup is ready-to-hand, which basically means it serves a function. Coffee mugs are objects to drink coffee out of, and you do so unthinkingly, without explicit forethought. You might be typing at your computer, as I am, and pick it up and drink from it without even noticing you’re doing it. In these cases, the subject-object distinction disappears. I don’t think of the keyboard as a separate entity from myself, I’m caught up in skillfully using it.⁷

If the e ky suddnly stops working, Hidggr calls this unready-to-hand, another way of saying it’s broken. It halts my skillful typing and interrupts my writing mojo. If the mug springs a leak, it becomes unready-to-hand. As another example, the knobs to control showers you’ve never used before are always unready-to-hand. In addition, I’m convinced that all printers are always unready-to-hand. In short, I don’t think of my computer as a collection of silicon and plastic, but as a part of my activity of typing blogs.

Now, if my e key breaks, and slamming the key repeatedly doesn’t fix it, I might switch to seeing my computer in an abstract way to try and solve the problem. In this way, I switch to viewing the laptop as present-at-hand. This is a way of encountering an object in a theoretical, explicit, and abstract way.

Heidegger’s point is that we only think of objects as present-to-hand in unusual cases. We have to take a step back and pause our activities to theorize about something. Heidegger goes on (and on, and on) about present-at-hand and ready-to-hand to show that our approach to an object changes what the object is like, and vice versa. This reveals a difference in the way things are. Can you define a coffee mug without reference to how it’s used? Of course not. They come in many (though not all) shapes and sizes. Some are kitschy monstrosities, some are elegant and hand-made. The point is whether a mug “exists” or not is a matter only of physical composition, but the matter of use and our engagement with it.

More to the point, philosophers focus on the way things are present-at-hand far too much. Like Descartes, they philosophize away in armchairs without considering the “practical” ways we deal with objects, which, in day-to-day experience, eliminates any semblance of subject-object distinction. An account of Being must include a conception of present-at-hand, but it must also include an account of readiness-to-hand.

While this essay can’t really be called an overview, I’ve introduced some of his more fruitful ideas and generally gotten across that he’s obsessed with Being. So, I’ll wrap up my Heidegger discourse and close with a theological reflection.

Co-creation and Dasein

The Genesis myth tells the story of the first humans. Many Christian philosophers, especially medieval thinkers, defined humans as rational animals. They identified the imago dei, the image of God, as primarily concerned with God as logos (reason or Word). On the one hand, our “animal” nature (bodies, desires, appetites, feelings) and on the other, our mind (reason, language, logic). There’s something to this definition in the Bible, but primarily, they inherited this notion from Aristotle rather than Scripture.

In the Genesis creation account, rather than strictly define humans in a black-and-white, philosophical manner, God gives the first humans purpose, an integrated, harmonious way to live in the world. While Genesis certainly emphasizes humanity as an ordering being set against chaos, and language is a part of this purpose (e.g., naming the animals), the account really emphasizes humans as being-in-the-world—as active and doing. For example, as gardeners, rulers over animals, culture-makers, and sexual beings who can procreate, all skillful engagement with others and the world.

In other words, yes, we are linguistic beings who think, but we are also skillful beings engaged in the world, as athletes, cooks, and musicians. Arguably, the latter part is the focus of the Genesis myth that characterizes humanity. Through these activities, we create (co-create with God) the world we live in. The next question naturally follows: How should we co-create the world? Alongside God, submitted to his authority and wisdom.

That is, of course, where Heidegger goes so miserably astray—his nonexistent and deplorable ethics. He was thoroughly duped into following the false gods of German Nationalism.

We can create a better or worse world, a more or less heavenly world, but only through aligning with God’s will.

In the next essay, I’ll uncover Heidegger’s views on authenticity and Angst to bring insight into our modern mental health crisis.

Thanks for reading.

Soli Deo Gloria

1. Or rather, having his German compound words translated using hyphens.

2. Others, like Hegel and Husserl, have also hammered this point, but Heidegger made it uniquely “ontological”—we cannot understand existence itself without understanding that culture carries us along.

3. He joined the Nazi party in 1933 and never left it, although he distanced himself from the movement over time. The publication and translation of the Black Notebooks in 2014 suggests Heidegger’s antisemitism, if not his Nazi affiliation, was more deeply rooted than once thought.

4. The order of these essays was an accident—a happy coincidence, though.

5. In the following, I’m grossly oversimplifying Heidegger and giving my interpretation of his early thought in Being and Time. Also, sorry if “bollocks” offends you.

6. There is a bit of drama over calling Heidegger’s area of study capital B Being. Early translators did this to denote when Heidegger was talking about being as such, but this makes it sound like Being is some mystical thing out there, like a Platonic form. This is precisely the opposite of what Heidegger is doing—and the translators originally wanted Being to help showcase how it’s not a mystical “other” thing, but rather, what unites all being as such.

7. Yes, I recognize the irony of using a computer as an example when discussing Heidegger, considering his philosophy of technology.

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[Edit: I corrected some grammatical mistakes (which are forever enshrined in the email version of the blog), and made my point about his Nazism clearer. 10/26/24-10/27/24]