The question of Being
Heidegger charged Western metaphysics with forgetting Being by treating it as a highest being or as presence. The ontological difference separates beings from Being. He reworked Husserl's phenomenology hermeneutically to pursue it.
Dasein and being-in-the-world
Dasein, the being for whom Being is an issue, is always already in a world with things and others. Tools are first ready-to-hand and become present-at-hand objects when they break. Dasein's being is care.
Inauthenticity and death
Everyday Dasein is absorbed in "the they". Anxiety breaks this, and anticipatory resoluteness toward one's own death opens authentic existence; Dasein's meaning is temporality.
Later thought and legacy
After the "turn" he focused on the history of Being, language as "the house of Being", poetry and technology as enframing (Gestell). He influenced Sartre, Gadamer and Derrida and read Nietzsche as completing metaphysics. His 1933 Nazi membership, rectorship and the antisemitic passages in the Black Notebooks remain controversial.
References
- Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row.
- Heidegger, M. (1954/1977). The question concerning technology. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row.
- Dreyfus, H. L. (1991). Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. MIT Press.
- Wheeler, M. (2020). Martin Heidegger. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.