Heidegger: Being, Time, and Care

The Question of Being

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) posed a question that, in his view, philosophy had forgotten: what does it mean to be? Not “what are things?”, but “what does it mean that they exist?” This may seem abstract, but it conceals a real problem: the modern world treats people as things, as resources, as “human capital”—and this is connected to a fundamental forgetting of the specifically human mode of being.

“Being and Time” (1927) is the main work of Heidegger’s early period. Its goal: through an analysis of human existence (Dasein—“being-there”, literally “here-being”) to approach the question of being in general.

Being-in-the-world and Readiness-to-hand

First and most important: the human being is not “a consciousness in a body in a world”, but is originally being-in-the-world. The world is not an external environment into which consciousness “falls”—the world is the horizon in which I am already always situated. I understand a hammer not theoretically (“this is an object of a certain shape and mass”), but practically—as that with which nails are hammered. The hammer is “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden): woven into my activity, into my project.

When the hammer is broken, it falls out of this practical embeddedness and becomes “present-at-hand” (vorhanden)—an object of theoretical observation. Heidegger shows: science is a secondary, derivative way of relating to the world. What is primary is the practical grasp of the world through activity and care.

Care and Temporality

The central structure of Dasein is Sorge (care). This is not psychological worry, but an ontological term: human being is always already thrown into a particular situation (the past), always projects itself forward (the future), and is always involved in the present (the current moment of engagement). The past is thrownness, the future is projection, the present is a falling into “the they” (das Man).

“The they” (das Man) is anonymous publicness: “this is how things are done”, “this is what they say”, “this is how one lives”. Most people, most of the time, live in the mode of “the they”—follow expectations, avoid authentic choice, distract themselves from the central question: who do I want to be?

Death and Authenticity

The awareness of one’s own mortality is the only path to authentic existence. Death is “the most own, not transferable to another, certain and temporally indeterminate possibility”. No one will die for me; no one can take up this possibility in my place. Anxiety (Angst) before death breaks the comfortable “falling” into “the they”—and returns me to myself.

This is not pessimism: the awareness of finitude is liberating. Precisely because everything is finite, every choice has meaning.

Heidegger and Nazism

It is impossible to ignore this: Heidegger was a member of the NSDAP and supported the Nazi regime in his rector’s address in 1933. He never made a public apology. His “Black Notebooks” (published posthumously) contain anti-Semitic passages. The discussion about how this relates to his philosophy continues. There is no answer—there is an obligation to know this when reading his texts.

Question for reflection: What does “authentic existence” mean for you? Which of your daily decisions are made by you yourself, and which are made by “the they” (expectations, norms, inertia)?