1098 MARTINHEIDEGGER
of philosophers were directly influenced by Hitler’s rise to power in 1934. Husserl died as an outcast because
of his Jewish ancestry; Heidegger was an early Nazi sympathizer (though there is a great deal of debate
about his later feelings toward and involvement with the party); Sartre was a German prisoner-of-war and
together with Merleau-Ponty was later a member of the resistance; Wittgenstein volunteered as a hospital
orderly in England; and Quine, Austin, and Davidson served in the Allied war effort. ()
phenomenological method (Husserl), which “unconceals” the data of experience
by allowing these data to “show themselves,” provides the way to such an exami-
nation. Using this method to examine the self, one discovers one’s self as a
“being-in-the-world” or Dasein(“being-there”).
Daseinis different from other realities. First, “in its very Being, that Being is
an issue for it”; that is,Daseinis aware of Being. Second, the kind of Being of
which Daseinis aware is called “existence.” Human existence is not to be grasped
the way one understands the existence of rocks or planets, but in the special ways
of anticipation of, and decision for, possibilities. As the self confronts its choices,
it especially recognizes that with death, “being-in-the-world” eventually becomes
“no-longer-being-there.” This awareness of Daseinas “being-toward-death” is
filled with Angst(dread). Borrowing Kierkegaard’s analysis of dread, Heidegger
says that the self can try to avoid this Angstby losing the “I” in the “they”—that
is, by ignoring its individuality and becoming part of the crowd. But a “they”
existence is “inauthentic” and removed from Being. Instead, authentic being—
“being-toward-death”—can reveal to Daseina “freedom” that releases it from the
“Illusions of the ‘they’” and allows it to embrace Angst.
In our selection from An Introduction to Metaphysics(1953), given here in
the outstanding Gregory Fried and Richard Polt translation, Heidegger puts theCORBIS©Troops at the 1934 Nurembarg Rally. The lives of an entire generation