Martin Heidegger was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, especially influential in the field of metaphysics as well as in currents such as hermeneutics or post-structuralism. His philosophy has also been fruitful in fields such as psychiatry, sociology or religious studies.
Controversial due to his relationship with the National Socialist regime, his philosophy is marked by the question about being. In his first original contributions to philosophy (which revolve around his best-known and most important work, Being and Timepublished in 1927), this question about being is framed in an existential analysis of the human being, which is the entity in which, unlike things, this question about being arises.
Heidegger, however, conceives the human being in an essential relationship with things and the world, under the name of Dasein, its best-known concept, which also supposes a more original theory of knowledge alternative to that of scientific objectivity (although not in necessary conflict with it). What was Heidegger’s conception of the human being, radically linked to the world and knowledge of it?
Heidegger began his philosophical production in the early years of the 20th century dominated, in Germany, by neo-Kantianism and the emergence of hermeneutics. Neo-Kantianism intended, after the metaphysical abstractions of German idealism, a return to language and Kantian problems in questions of theory of knowledge He investigated, for example, the question of knowledge and truth, which for neo-Kantians occurred in pure, universal and objective categories, especially in the field of science.
Faced with this conception, Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) began to develop his phenomenology, which attempted to explain, with the will of rigorous science, how things are given to consciousness. But he does not reduce this analysis to a foundation of science, but rather deals with how things present themselves in everyday life.
For Husserl, things are not presented as a phenomenal manifestation of an unknowable thing in itself, as in the Kantians, but are intuited by consciousness as a phenomenon that shows its own essence. Issues such as truth or knowledge no longer require a foundation in mathematics or natural sciences as much as a rigorous analysis of consciousness It is this perspective that Heidegger will deepen, going beyond the limits of phenomenology itself.
Heidegger observes, in his question about being, that the categories of knowledge, which for neo-Kantians occur in a transcendental, objective and pure structure, identical for all people, actually occur in individual, existential and temporal life, that is, in the life of consciousness. How do these two apparently contradictory areas come together in consciousness?
Going deeper into Husserl’s intuition, he realized in Being and Timean existential analysis of the human being while he wonders about being. That is, an analysis of Dasein. Let’s look at it in a little more detail.
Dasein and world
According to Heidegger, the question about being has arisen throughout the history of philosophy under the prejudice of presence. That is, from Parmenides to the philosophers of the 20th century, being has been understood as something that is present in its entirety, as objective and complete. The paradigm of this way of thinking is found in the idea of God as an omnipresent being. With his existential analysis of Dasein, Heidegger aims to inaugurate a new way of understanding being and metaphysics
To begin his analysis, as we have seen, Heidegger stops asking about being from the theoretical point of view of science and moves on to an analysis of consciousness in its everyday life. He thus aims to analyze the question of being in the most general way possible, without privileging any specific way of facing reality.
What Heidegger now observes is that, compared to the conception of being as an objective presence already given, by focusing the analysis from the general point of view that he proposes in his analysis, being appears as a possibility. Contrary to what happens with things, The human being, being a Dasein, is possibility before reality It is as far as it can be. Dasein is thus, in its most fundamental form a project.
This power to be as a project also always occurs in a context of things and people. The human being does not exist in a pure and isolated form but from the first moment in which he tries to understand himself and self-determine he is already in a relationship.
It is here that we can clearly see the meaning of the word Dasein: to be or be here. It is about the human being as inserted in a context of things and people, a world, that precedes him and that conditions his existence, his transcendence of himself as a project.
Philosophy linked to meanings
The being of things is not thus being present, but rather belonging to a totality of meanings that is the world. Things signify each other and this signifying in turn depends on the projection of Dasein. That is, Dasein with its project founds the world in which individual things occur.
We see that Dasein is not a tabula rasa, but that from the first moment it tries to understand itself in its project, it already has a pre-understanding of the world provided by its context. This is the structure of the circle of understanding, or hermeneutical circle, according to which knowledge always starts from a budget about the things that guide your question. To know is to go deeper into these questions.
Therefore, being occurs in a process of knowledge that never ends and is never fully present. This in turn is the existential structure of Dasein, of the human being as a being in the world that exists in constant transcendence of itself. Dasein, being time, is always a power to be, and is never complete.
This preunderstanding is not only theoretical, but also includes an affective dispositionality. Things always appear accompanied by sensations such as joy or boredom, these affective dispositionalities being part of the knowledge process. We see here the consequences of the passage of objective knowledge through universal and objective structures to the Heideggerian point of view that bases knowledge on the temporal, existential and everyday structure of consciousness.
Cure and be for death
We remain to see two essential elements of Dasein: the cure and the possibility of death
For Heidegger, the truth of knowledge occurs in healing, which is taking responsibility for things. This means that in an existence carried out through a decided project, things will be presented in a more authentic way.
The German philosopher also assures that Dasein is a being for death. Death is, in fact, that possibility that we know for sure will come true, but that we never experience as done. While such impossibility of all possibilities allows the possibilities to be such: if we did not die, time would have no meaning, we would not have to choose between possibilities nor could we exist as a project, since it would be possible to realize all possibilities.
