Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes - Volume 2

Marx, Freud, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger

Walther Ziegler

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783741241468
• eBook ISBN:
  9783741268359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 2" comprises the five books "Marx in 60 Minutes", "Freud in 60 Minutes", "Sartre in 60 Minutes", "Heidegger in 60 Minutes", and "Camus in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? In Marx, it is the relations of production – that is to say, the conditions under which we labour and produce the goods we need – which ultimately determine our sense of our lives, our thinking, and our whole culture. In Freud, it is the libido and thus the energy of our drives, which we can either live out, repress, or sublimate. In Sartre it is the absolutely free human will which compels Man to make himself what he is. In Heidegger, what absorbs us is the struggle for the authenticity of 'Dasein' and the 'care' for the Being of the world. Camus is the only philosopher in this series who gives no answer at all to the "question of meaning". There is no "meaning", says Camus; life is absurd and depends merely upon a sequence of random chance events. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Walther Ziegler

Heidegger

in 60 Minutes

Translated by

Alexander Reynolds

Inhalt

• Heidegger’s Great Discovery
• Heidegger’s Central Idea
  • Man’s “Being-In-The-World”
  • Dasein’s Basic Character of “Care”
  • Dasein as “Being-Toward-Death”
  • The Flight into the “They”
  • Anxiety in the Face of Nothingness
  • The Call of Conscience
  • Authentic and Inauthentic Existence
  • Becoming Guilty Vis-à-Vis One’s Own Existence
  • Man in the “Enframing” of Technology, and the “Turning”
• Of What Use is Heidegger’s Discovery for Us Today?
  • Openness to the Mystery in the Age of Technology
  • Anxiety is Part of Life – Existence as Potentiality
  • Breaking Away from the Anonymous “They”
  • Living with Mortality – Living with Resoluteness!
• Bibliographical References:

Heidegger’s Great Discovery

Whoever takes an interest in philosophy is sooner or later bound to encounter the ‘philosophy of being’ of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). His writings are worth reading, whether one opts, once one has read them, to damn him, critique him, or celebrate him as one of the 20^th Century’s most brilliant thinkers. There are few thinkers, indeed, about whom opinions diverge so widely. But whatever personal judgment the reader may finally form, he will always have been enriched by engagement with Heidegger’s ideas.

It was in 1927 that Heidegger published the 400-page work that made his name: Being and Time. Despite the strange new language in which it was written – or perhaps because of it – it became a worldwide bestseller. Heidegger is still today, with Sartre, one of the key representatives of existentialism. He called his philosophy “fundamental ontology” because it was his aim to reveal the deepest foundations of how people understand the world.

Zoology, for example, cannot count as a fundamental ontology but only as an individual one: namely, as the logic or the doctrine of animals. Geology, likewise, is specifically the logic of the earth; biology the logic of bios (i.e. living things); sociology the logic of society etc. Each of these sciences investigates the logic of just one part of the realm of being. This is why they are individual ontologies: doctrines of just sections of being as a whole. They talk, respectively, of how animals, the earth, the biocosmos, and society are constituted and of the laws each obey. But Heidegger’s point is that all these individual ontologies proceed, in their respective inquiries into truth, from something more fundamental which has, itself, never been inquired into: namely, the very capacity of Man to inquire into and understand things. Heidegger thus analyses in his “fundamental ontology” the basic form of Man’s existence as a meaning-comprehending being who is in the world and perceives it. His interest goes beyond the individual sciences to what underlies them: the meaning of life as a whole. His main question thus runs: “what is the meaning of being?”

But if we are to ask about the meaning of being and thus of life, argues Heidegger, we must first inquire into the nature of the entity that poses this strange question. This entity is Man himself, or (to use the term by which the (self-)questioning human individual is still denoted even in English translations of Being and Time) human Dasein:

Whenever, then, we try to answer the philosophical question of the meaning of life, we cannot avoid first engaging with the question of Man or, to use Heidegger’s term, of Dasein. This is so inasmuch as Dasein is the only entity in the world that can, indeed must, pose the former question. In other words, we must engage with ourselves. Because unlike, for example, a stone, it is, for Dasein – i.e. human “being-in-the-world” – always a basic concern to give a meaning to this being. Heidegger formulates this as follows:

The term “entity” (literally, “thing that is”) is a rather technical philosophical term that needs clarification. When Heidegger says that “Dasein is an entity” he means that an existing human being is, with his feet, arms, legs, belly and head, a physical thing present in the world just like a stone is present in it. In this sense, stone and human being are both entities, “things that are”. But whereas the stone is only a “thing that is”, the human being is something more: namely, a “thing that is” for which this “is” is – as Heidegger puts it – “an issue”. Unlike the stone, the human being is concerned by his own life. One might, then, restate Heidegger’s claim: “Dasein is an entity distinguished by the fact that, in its very being, that being is an issue for it” in clearer language as: “Man is a living being for whom the life that he is living is a matter of basic concern.”

Heidegger’s starting point, then, is clear. To answer the great question as to the “meaning of being”, he first examines that understanding of what it is “to be” which is implicit in the everyday life of human beings.

It is precisely from the “everyday”, Heidegger argues, that one learns a lot about the structure and functioning of human life:

Moreover, human beings succeed, in everyday life, in giving meaning to things around them and to themselves each time they say or think that something “is”. That is to say, we human beings all have an implicit understanding of being and move through the world as “understanders”.

We say, for example, each day such things as “the bus is late”, “the weather is cold”, “my heart is not in it” or “the world is not fair”. This word “is” may appear, at first sight, to be completely harmless and unimportant. But Heidegger takes it as the starting point for a profound analysis of the whole of human life. Our everyday use of such terms as “is” and “be” reveals, argues Heidegger, something very special: namely, the fact that we are constantly interpreting the world in one way or another:

What is Heidegger telling us here? He is telling us that, on the one hand, each time we say “is”, even if it is only in such seemingly banal phrases as “the sky is blue”, “I am merry”, or “the universe is endless”, we ascribe “without further ado” a meaning or a sense to the things around us (blueness to the sky, merriness to oneself, endlessness to the universe and so on). But on the other hand, he adds, the meaning of life as a whole – or “the meaning of being” – remains at the same time “veiled in darkness”.

This means that the “everyday understanding of being” that humans possess is only a first indication or clue, a mere point of departure for the answering of the questio...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Marx in 60 Minutes
• Freud in 60 Minutes
• Sartre in 60 Minutes
• Camus in 60 Minutes
• Heidegger in 60 Minutes
• Further information
• The author
• Copyright