This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter – and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.
martin Heideggerquotes
1889 - 1976
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) radically rethought Aristotle’s philosophies and devoted his life to ontology (the study of being). With the publication of his masterwork, Being and Time, he laid a framework to be built upon by numerous other schools of thought and philosophers. It won him international renown as a leading philosopher of his day, and Heidegger continues to be known as an original thinker who significantly influenced contemporary European philosophy.
However, Heidegger’s works have also drawn much criticism and have remained controversial because of his deep involvement with the Nazi movement in the 1930s. After the war, he was banned for teaching because of this involvement. The ban was lifted in 1950, and he went back to work at Freiburg University for another decade.
His students found him mesmerizing and engaging as a professor, and he is famous for his theories on existentialism and phenomenology. Interestingly, as soon as Being and Time was in print, Heidegger found fault with its basic approach. He began a second work to accompany it, but never finished. Obsessed with culling the mystery of being, Heidegger turned less toward philosophy to answer his questions and more toward poetry. He was particularly captivated by the works of Rainer Maria Rilke and Friedrich Hölderlin.
Heidegger would have loved to see a return of the Greek traditions, for he found Western thought nihilistic. The classical experience of being, he believed, was the way for society to begin anew.
Philosophy, then, is that thinking with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time.
Language is the house of Being.
The song still remains which names the land over which it sings.
Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot.
The thoughtless habit of using the words “existence” and “exist” as designations for being is one more indication of our estrangement both from being and from a radical, forceful, and definite exegesis of being.
Dasein itself – and this means also its Being-in-the-world – gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters ‘within’ its world, and from the Being which they possess.
being / entity / understanding
To make of “the truth” a goddess amounts to turning the mere notion of something, namely the concept of the essence of truth, into a “personality.
notion / personality / truth
Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.
The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which ‘external’ things within-the-world are useful or harmful for human creatures encumbered with bodies…. They tell us nothing about entities in their Being.