Posts Tagged Heidegger’s Notion
Understanding Heidegger’s Notion of Dasein – Part 1
“There is music in the midst of desolation/ And a glory that shines upon our tears.”
Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen (1914).
Contemporary Western philosophy is divided in two main branches: continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. The former developed many movements or fields like phenomenology, hermeneutics, Marxism, existentialism, structuralism, postmodernism, etc. The latter studies mainly language, truth and logic. To the followers of analytic philosophy, philosophy ought to be restricted to the analysis of language, especially to the study of meaning. On the other hand, the most persistent feature of continental philosophy is the commitment to the questioning of foundations. Despite the vast range of themes, we can say that subject and truth are the two big themes which have dominated the contemporary philosophical discussion.
A survey of the history of continental philosophy reveals the name of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) as one of the most innovative thinkers of the 20th century. Like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Wittgenstein and Adorno, Heidegger was a critic of modern culture. Writing in the aftermath of the First World War (1914-1918), he tried to understand the intimate relationship between ourselves and world through the study of the nature of being. Heidegger believed that the entire philosophical tradition was misdirected. As Heidegger sees it, Western philosophy from Plato to modern times has been preoccupied chiefly with entities or things of the world, without seeing that the more primordial fact is the very existence of the world. In other words, the Western philosophical tradition has forgotten the “question of being”, the Seinsfrage.
George Steiner observes that the leitmotiv of Heidegger’s task was the question formulated by Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing? In that sense, Sokolowski notes that Heidegger formulates his task on classical terms and shows profound knowledge of the history of philosophy. In fact, Heidegger was a philosopher which always had an eye on the history of philosophy. His work represents a constant dialogue with historical sources. Besides, it was Heidegger’s deep conviction that Germans inherited the philosophical mission from the Greeks. Our aim in this essay is to sketch out a broad picture of Heidegger’s thought in order to deal with the account of Dasein. Read the rest of this entry »
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