Being and Identity

The notion of being is principally related to the here and now, but it is philosophically linked to meanings human beings attach to existence. In other words, the way we behave and act in the world are not by happenstance. We are taught how to be. We are imbued with meanings and interpretations that may not predetermine our lives but certainly affect how we interpret our place and selves in the world. This undeniably influences identities, because our ignorance or awareness of being suggests something about our cultural context, which has taught us something about how we ought to conduct ourselves and what we ought to identify with. That does not mean the notion of being eschews any remnants of the past or ignores the future, but rather “being” offers reflection of one's position in the world and one's own grappling with existence. One of the foremost thinkers on the nature of being was Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger is acknowledged to be not only one of the most original philosophers of the 20th century but also one of the most controversial. His writings have had an immense impact and have been discussed widely. Although his essays have sometimes been dismissed as unintelligible and his discourse as tortuous and cumbersome, his thoughts have influenced a variety of diverse areas, such as hermeneutics, Sartrean existentialism, Derridean deconstruction, literary criticism, psychotherapy, theology, aesthetics, and even environmental studies.

Heidegger was born to a provincial Catholic family in Messkirch, in Swabia, Southern Germany, in 1889. After commencing training as a cleric—his first ambition was to be a Jesuit priest—he turned to mathematics and then to philosophy, becoming the star pupil and then the main adherent of Edmund Husserl, founder of the school known as phenomenology. Heidegger's magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (translated as Being and Time ), on which his reputation was largely based, is dedicated to Husserl, whose thinking the unfinished book drastically undercuts. The highly praised treatise was published while Heidegger was teaching at Marburg University, at a time when he had close contact with Karl Jaspers, already a well-known figure in German intellectual life, who was also concerned with questions of existence, self, and knowledge. Heidegger conceived of himself and the like-minded as philosophical revolutionaries, aiming to rejuvenate philosophy by clearing away the methodological crisis of academic abstraction of the previous generations. His work, in opposition to the preoccupation with epistemology and Kantian notions dominant at the time—and also in contrast to Husserl, the teacher to whom he was so indebted—was inspired more by the pre-Socratics, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche. For Heidegger, what had remained “unspoken” in the eagerness of many forerunners to find a pure, external vantage point, must be the most important element in unveiling what had been lost in the effort to acquire an impartial angle, free from conjecture, on human beings and their surroundings.

The friendship with Jaspers survived Heidegger's crushing review of the latter's Psychology of WorldViews, but later Heidegger's engagement with Nazism separated the two philosophers. After having finished his habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning in 1915, Heidegger extended the scope of his lectures and taught courses on Greek, medieval, and German philosophy. Using phenomenological methods, he traced back in order to explore issues on the foundation of meaning, knowledge, and thinking. In contrast to Husserl, who defended his methodology of maintaining absolute concentration on an object in order to focus on how it might become present in our mind, the protégé took the worldliness, finitude, and historicity of the human predicament into account.

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