253
See also: Plato 50–55 ■ Diogenes of Sinope 66 ■ Edmund Husserl 224–25 ■ Hans-Georg Gadamer 260–61 ■
Ernst Cassirer 337 ■ Jean-Paul Sartre 268–71 ■ Hannah Arendt 272 ■ Richard Rorty 314–19
This curious story from the history
of early philosophy shows the kinds
of difficulties philosophers have
sometimes been faced with when
attempting to give abstract, general
definitions of what it is to be human.
Even without the intervention
of Diogenes, it seems clear that
describing ourselves as featherless
bipeds does not really capture much
of what it means to be human.
An insider’s perspective
It is this question—how we might
go about analyzing what it is to be
human—that concerned the
philosopher Martin Heidegger.
When Heidegger came to answer
the question, he did so in a way
THE MODERN WORLD
Philosophy has always
asked deep questions
about “Being.”We need to ask these
questions by looking at
the being for whom
Being is an issue.Us!We ourselves are
the entities to
be analyzed.that was strikingly different from
many of his predecessors. Instead
of attempting an abstract definition
that looks at human life from the
outside, he attempts to provide a
much more concrete analysis of
“being” from what could be called
an insider’s position. He says that
since we exist in the thick of
things—in the midst of life—if we
want to understand what it is to be
human, we have to do so by looking
at human life from within this life.
Heidegger was a student of
Husserl, and he followed Husserl’s
method of phenomenology. This
is a philosophical approach that
looks at phenomena—how things
appear—through examining ourThe question of existence
never gets straightened out
except through existing itself.
Martin Heideggerexperience of them. For example,
phenomenology would not look
directly at the question “what is a
human being?” but would instead
look at the question “what is it like
to be human?”The human existence
For Heidegger, this constitutes the
fundamental question of philosophy.
He was most interested in the
philosophical subject of ontology
(from the Greek word ontos,
meaning “being”), which looks at
questions about being or existence.
Examples of ontological questions
might be: “what does it mean to say
that something exists?” and “what
are the different kinds of things
that exist?” Heidegger wanted use
the question “what is it like to be
human?” as a way of answering
deeper questions about existence
in general.
In his book, Being and Time,
Heidegger claims that when other
philosophers have asked ontological
questions, they have tended to use
approaches that are too abstract
and shallow. If we want to know
what it means to say that something
exists, we need to start looking ❯❯