Martin Heidegger was born September 26 of 1889 hailing from Messkirch Germany he
is regarded as one of the single most important German philosophers of all
time he is best known for the extremely influential work of being in time to
many today being in time is one of the most important pieces of
phenomenological and existential philosophy phenomenology being the
actual phenomena that we experience what we see what we taste what we smell touch
hear and feel instead of focusing or asking what we
really are it focuses on the phenomena that surrounds our lives and with
existentialism being the emphasis on individual existence and the freedom and
choice that we all experience as human individuals the core purpose of being in
time is addressing the meaning of being what is it to be what is common to all
entities that make them entities these questions are so important in the
subsequent creation of being in time is hands down one of the most important
pieces and turning points in philosophy today being in time and Heideggarian
philosophy is the backdrop of 20th century philosophy noting this and our
future videos around political theory and philosophy I'm considering this
video as one of the single most important videos I make Heidegger
approaches these huge questions through the lens of Dasein which roughly
translates in English to simply being there in order to get into being in time
we need to take a look at what Martin Heidegger is responding to and how he is
fundamentally reacting to enlightenment-era philosophy because
from the time of de cartes Locke Kant and even Hume we typically looked at the
world and human experience through the lens of subject and object the subject
being you and the object being the world in which you imposed yourself on the
importance of this is the distinction and separation of you and the world you
are two separate things under this philosophy this distinction between
subject and object is something Heidegger doubts there's something else
extremely important here as well when modern philosophers
such as Descartes wanted to explain existence they wanted to explain
themselves what Descartes ultimately did is he narrowed down his direct path
of existence and ultimately the conclusion that Descartes came to about
existence is that you can essentially strip everything away and the only thing
that provides proof of our existence is the fact that we think it's the fact
that I'm having thoughts to begin with therefore I must be something therefore
I must be something that thinks yet Heidegger notices something he notices a
flaw in this reasoning this cannot be the first proof of our existence in
order to make that abstraction in order to come up with the idea of that I think
therefore I am there has to be something before that before you think you have to
be and simply being is the very first human experience that we have this
simple being that Heidegger is talking about before thought is ultimately what
he is referring to as Dasein Dasein is an incredibly hard concept to grasp in
my opinion it has been very difficult for me but this human experience of
being before thought before anything else seems to be the very best example I
have stumbled across Heidegger wanted to completely create new words for this it
may sound like philosophers of the past we're talking about what Heidegger is
talking about with being but they really haven't so in creating new words such as
Dasein he wanted to leave all the prior philosophical baggage behind and even
more importantly with being and Dasein Heidegger refers to being more
specifically as being in the world like the fundamental rejection of subject and
object a person and the world as a separate entity he views being as
something as being hyphenated in the world this is what he's ultimately
referring to and being in time as simply being in the world because you ultimately
cant be without the world they're not two separate things the world
around you and being as yourself are completely interlinked and necessary for
one another the past modern idea of being a separate agent of the world
roaming around and navigating an external world was incorrect and
Heidegger's eyes and it missed an incredibly important part of that Dasein
that being this is why ultimately Martin Heidegger is writing this he saw the
fundamental flaws within enlightenment-era philosophy and the
tools used for their analysis Heidegger believed that the ontology of
the Enlightenment era was completely flawed from the get-go ontology being
the actual philosophical study of the nature of being becoming an existence
ontology typically deals with questions about what things exist and what can
exist because for so long people have been concerned with what existed yet
there is one critical mistake that they made and asking this question they
haven't even fundamentally contented with what existence was this is the
ultimate backdrop and reasoning for Martin heidegger's work being in time a
cynical mind may ask the question what's the point of this what's the point of
contending with being in the early 1900's we've experienced the Scientific
Revolution created robust new political systems new ways of material life for
Humanity why concern yourself necessarily with the idea of existence
the answer that Heidegger would likely give at this question is that being
presupposes everything being is the backdrop for nearly every single thing
in our lives and comes before every concept that we know in every field of
study that we know such as mathematics science physics and the like that is why
this question of being and fundamentally figuring out what being is is important
because every single thing that we could talk about every single thing that we
could analyze is an already existing thing now on to being there's all kinds
of different realms that exist for being we understand entities as things people
animals concepts but within these questions fundamentally we must
understand what it is to be human and the being that encapsulates humanity
when concerning ourselves with human epistemology epistemology being
ultimately how we understand knowledge we see that in a human context we react
and interact with things very distinctly one very distinct human phenomena
Heidegger noticed is that when we discover concepts or truth the
interlinked concepts and other truths that connect themselves to that singular
truth often become completely blurred one example of this is whenever you read
the very text that you were reading is the only real defined text the text
surrounding it becomes blurred ultimately this manifests physically in
our life as well another famous example of this is when ever you are hammering
in a nail into a board the hammer that you are using that very tool almost
disappears from your direct consciousness after hammering away for
some time you forget that the Hammers actually there
Heidegger calls this phenomena ready to hand you typically only notice the tool
or concept that is ready to hand whenever it doesn't work correctly or
breaks so say when you're hammering in the nail the complete head of the hammer
falls apart you would instantly recognize that it is in your hand at
that point when you do notice this this is what Heidegger calls present at hand
the importance of these terms and concepts present at hand and ready to hand is
that Heidegger ultimately wants to convey to us that the world is to be
discovered it isn't necessarily blank and given to us but ultimately it is
right underneath our nose to many people the mark of a great philosopher the mark
of a great academic or a teacher is someone who can explain things that
deeply and inherently we already know but haven't externally formulated at
verbally or even consciously the further conceptual importance of ready to hand
to Heidegger is something that many people often miss in his work when
enlightenment-era philosophers ask the question of what exists whenever they
partake in the ontology of the time existence to them
was essentially ready to hand they never took the fundamental steps in
discovering what existence and being really was because enlightenment air
philosophers weren't the only victims of this this ready at hand phenomena is a
very human phenomena Heidegger noticed something extremely
important as human beings living within a society we often go about our lives in
an incredibly robotic way in this roboticism comes from the very human
experience of simply blurring everything out the world is made up of concepts the
world is made up of tools and the more humans interact with those tools and
concepts the more they sort of disappear the more they almost become unimportant
we do this with definitions and language we do this with relationships my
boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with me and I didn't know what I had until it
was gone in a weird way we almost just accept this preordained essence in our
lives we accept weird roles designed from society our family and even peer
group Heidegger points out we have a tendency to live and what he calls the
everydayness the everydayness is often what separates the inauthentic human
experience and the authentic human experience one sense of self of what one
is to do with their life and how one is supposed to live where the most part is
given from the outside and an authentic experience of life
Heidegger calls this inauthenticity of life Verfallen which translates into
fallenness ultimately he is trying to elaborate on the everydayness of our
life in which Dasein's immersion of the world and our being in the world revolves
around menial traditions rituals and the social expectations that society
imprints on us but according to Heidegger there is a being in which we
escape their fallen we can almost look past the everydayness of life Heidegger
explains the how in Befindlichkeit I think I think I said that right
Befindlichkeit translates roughly into how one finds oneself our being finds itself
in a situation where one radically thrown into the world from
birth a birth in which no one really asked for this is where we get into the
existentialism of Heidegger and its philosophical relation to others such as
Jean-Paul Sartre Soren Kierkegaard and even Simone de Beauvoir Heidegger calls
this mode of understanding our being Verstehen which roughly translates to
understanding and the understanding mainly points towards the infinite
amount of possibilities that we have in our life within the finite span of time
the sign being in the world on the opposite of the finite spectrum of life
we have Das Nichts which roughly translates into nothing this is likely symbolized
as death as completely void as something at the end of the journey
Heidegger saw the realization of the finite span of time that we have as the
ultimate gateway towards authenticity and the ultimate gateway towards being
in the world because ultimately understanding time and our place within
it is ultimately understanding Dasein it's understanding our being in the
world it's right here that the notion of being in time are
brought together in essence time is the form of human life according to
Heidegger the structural moments where we contend with time mentally is what
Heidegger calls a temporal ecstasy the ahead of itself manifests as the futural
the very future the already in a world manifests the past or having been
anything that has been in the past and being alongside manifests the present
actualization of the other two moments is what ultimately creates our
conception of the present Heidegger quotes this as follows we reach out
towards the future while taking up our past thus yielding our present
activities note how the future and hence the aspect of possibility has priority
over the other two moments in essence being able to understand the future and
past being able to understand the past where at once was birth then the impending
future of death creates the ultimate understanding of the present not only
does it create the ultimate under of the present as a conception but as a
manifested reality a reality of the finite and our finite amount of time
here because it is an anxiety before the fear of nothingness
it's an anxiety in the face of death don't want to make it sound so you know too
scary but I've already said it is a democratic institution it is something
you need to deal with and again we're looking for Universal structures one of
the structures of all stories about the selves even the ones we tell ourselves
no matter how disconnected they may be they end in this rather interesting
institution death very interesting institution well he examines the mood of
anxiety then not as a mere mood that just comes to come upon you once in a
while but it is an underlying structure of what it means to be human
thus the crowd thus the inauthentic life the socially imposed norms become far
less attractive Heidegger argued this is when we become
authentic when we interact with the world and being with the understanding
of the finite we start to do things because we want to not necessarily
because we have to follow along with the norm further heidegger's understanding
of unity and the unity of being is incredibly important in a physical and
even non-physical level since being is being it is the fundamental backdrop
behind everything you the plants the animals and even concepts behind everything is
simply being and with the term throwness
as we discussed beforehand you are thrusted into the world into being this
supposes a level of unity between everything the unity of you a unity of
the world further the structure of Heideggarian philosophy and analytics show
that concepts and things cannot exist without you since existence only exists
within our perception and the reality without our perception is completely
irrelevant to our existence a good example of this as if a tree falls and
no one is around to hear it or see it and no one ever finds it did it
actually happen? Heidegger would likely respond as if that just simply didn't
matter at all and he would further respond with: it completely depends on
the perspective in which you are coming from do you hold the perspective of
a trump supporter? Do you hold the perspective of a Nazi? Or an ex-Nazi maybe a bona fide political liberal the date and time and the perspective in
which you hold the being of something changes that being and its entirety
therefore dealing with things outside our sphere of being is not very sensible
philosophy to Heidegger this is just another aspect and what time plays in
our being the implication of being in time is immense
in the world Heidegger is ultimately teaching us to become far more
vulnerable people far more vulnerable humans understanding our direct
conceptual and physical unity with everything in the world further we must
be completely aware of the infinitude of ideas the infinite number of perceptions
that may come to us throughout our finite period of time between birth and
death therefore we must occasionally check our dogmatism we should
occasionally check our biases and in doing this recognizing our unity
recognizing the infinite amount of ideas and perceptions that may come to us we
hit a place of human authenticity further Heidegger expresses that there
are ways to understand Dasein there are ways to understand being a being and
understanding being separating yourself from the mundaneness of general life and
society the day-to-dayness going to work and general responsibilities taking a walk
in the middle of nowhere taking a walk in the woods perceiving the unity and
everything around you Heidegger expresses a type of
specialness in human being and simply being a human and this specialness of
being is something we should not take for granted we should be fully aware of
our unity of our closeness to nature our closeness to other animals beings and
even the conceptual relationship with concepts understanding this
vulnerability of ourselves is what will create a more authentic human authentic
self and ultimately a more authentic life
thank you guys so much for watching this was hands down the most difficult video
I have had to make Heidegger hands down is the most difficult philosopher for me
to understand and even secondary resources on him were extremely
difficult to siphon through the world always in the mode of representing
subject but are useless I don't understand a fucking goddamn thing here
this video over being in time is an only 1 part video of a 3 part series the next
video coming up will be Heidegger's work on the question of technology which is
honestly probably my favorite work of his but you could never talk about the
question of technology without talking about being and time and his concepts
before it ultimately with this video what I wanted to do is I wanted to
create a video that no one really has been able to pull off I noticed some
videos on Heidegger are extremely analytical and they're extremely good at
explaining his logic and concepts but they ultimately fail to mention the
real-world implications that we would probably feel and then further there are
other videos talking about the real-world implications and the physical
reality of his work yet they kind of failed to mention his actual important
concepts and is important logic behind his work hopefully I was able to pull
this off but as always guys if you did enjoy the video please leave a like if
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much for watching guys and thank you for the support