Let's Say Hi to Heidegger
Ride this slick slide into ontological inquiry
The single-most famous chunk of Capital-P Philosophy is the definitive dictum by René Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”. With this he supposes to establish an unshakeable, undoubtable foundation for rational thought - proof of absolutely everything else, from the existence of God to the consistent existence of all other things in the world that are not me, can be derived from my own self-awareness as a rational thinker.
But what exactly am I saying when I assert that I exist? What is this “I am” part of the famous sentence doing? What can we say about existence, this strange property that I somehow have?
Taking a step back we can see that we as humans are really, really good at talking about things that exist. For example, what is a cat? It is a thing that exists that has four paws, whiskers, that meows, etc. We can imagine messing with most of these properties, e.g. by picturing a cat that doesn’t meow but instead squeaks like a mouse or barks like a dog, but we can’t imagine messing with the “thing that exists” part of the picture. “Imagine a cat that doesn’t exist” doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense!
So “thing that exists” is at the front of the line property-wise when we are describing pretty much everything we ever talk about. But how can we describe existence in and of itself? If we start with “Existence is a thing that exists…”, like we describe everything else, then we’re already at a dead end, since existence is the very thing we’re trying to explain.
If someone didn’t know what a spoon was, you could point your finger at a spoon to give them an example of what that word means. What would happen if that person then asked you to point not at the spoon itself but at the existence of the spoon?
Existence, then, seems to be the most obvious and the most elusive concept at the same time. Every-thing exists, we talk about existing things without thinking about it, we ourselves certainly seem to exist, but when asked how to define it we slip back into talking about existence-as-a-thing-that-exists. We can’t quite seem to get at existence directly, language-wise!
Since we’re stuck talking about things-that-exist - little-b ‘beings’ rather than Big-B ‘Being’ - it helps us to turn our attention to a special kind of being, namely human beings. We are beings that are somehow open to and oriented towards the Being of our being - to be a human is to wonder what it means to be a human, to write and read essays like this one!
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The above is a horribly horribly crude entrypoint into the whole line of inquiry opened up by Martin Heidegger, one of the two great philosophical geniuses of the twentieth century, someone who managed to get underneath the presuppositions of a whole bunch of philosophers before him and ask deeper questions than had ever before been possible. It’s an entrypoint because, obviously, there’s a whole hell of a lot more to it - he has a lot of really important and profound things to say about the being of human-beings, as well as the ‘stand’ that cultures take on Being given its elusive indefinability.
I feel deeply driven to share what I’ve found useful in Heidegger, so of course there’ll be more later here, hopefully - but for now I’ll say that Heidegger has helped me find a sort of theoretical peace with my own tumultuous finitude. Through him I’ve gotten an image of my humanity as a forever-unfinished project, always pulled forward into the future, condemned(?) to die with unfulfilled dreams and unfinished business. Like Descartes, he takes human inquiry itself to be a starting point, but unlike Descartes he finds human inquiry to be pointing to a wide world beyond anything that we could ever hope to effectively put into language.
When we ask “what am I?” we find the question itself to be the answer.