Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.
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.
I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.
As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.
But “nowhere” does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot come closer from a definite direction within nearness, it is already “there” – and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and takes one’s breath – and yet it is nowhere.
Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in those who are jittery, imperceptibly in the ‘Oh, yes’ and the ‘Oh, no’ of men of affairs; but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically daring. But those daring ones sustained by that on which they expend themselves—in order thus to preserve the ultimate grandeur of existence.
But what is great can only begin great.
The nothing nothings.
The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.
Since time itself is not movement, it must somehow have to do with movement.Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable, change is in time. How is time exhibited in this way of encountering it, namely, as that within which things change? Does it here give itself as itself in what it is? Can an axplacation of time starts here guarantee that time will thereby provide as it were the fundamental phenomena that determine it in its own being?
And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.
distance / man / transcendence