The Philosophy Book

254 MARTIN HEIDEGGER

We try to make sense of the world
by engaging with projects and tasks
that lend life a unity. Being human,
Heidegger says, means to be immersed
in the day-to-day world.

beings. When we are born, we find

ourselves in the world as if we had

been thrown here on a trajectory

we have not chosen. We simply find

that we have come to exist, in an

ongoing world that pre-existed us,

so that at our birth we are presented

with a particular historical, material,

and spiritual environment. We

attempt to make sense of this world

by engaging in various pastimes—

for example, we might learn Latin, or

attempt to find true love, or decide

to build ourselves a house. Through

these time-consuming projects we

literally project ourselves toward

different possible futures; we define

our existence. However, sometimes

we become aware that there is an

outermost limit to all our projects, a

point at which everything we plan

will come to an end, whether finished

or unfinished. This point is the

point of our death. Death, Heidegger

says, is the outermost horizon of our

being: everything we can do or see

or think takes place within this

horizon. We cannot see beyond it.

Heidegger’s technical vocabulary

is famously difficult to understand,

but this is largely because he is

attempting to explore complex

philosophical questions in a concrete

or non-abstract way; he wants to

relate to our actual experience. To

say that “the furthest horizon of our

We should raise anew

the question of the

meaning of being.

Martin Heidegger

at the question from the perspective
of those beings for whom being is
an issue. We can assume that
although cats, dogs, and toadstools
are beings, they do not wonder
about their being: they do not fret
over ontological questions; they do
not ask “what does it mean to say
that something exists?” But there
is, Heidegger points out, one being
that does wonder about these

things, and that is the human being.

In saying that we are ourselves the

entities to be analyzed, Heidegger is

saying that if we want to explore

questions of being, we have to start

with ourselves, by looking at what

it means for us to exist.

Being and time

When Heidegger asks about

the meaning of being, he is not

asking about abstract ideas, but

about something very direct and

immediate. In the opening pages of

his book, he says that the meaning

of our being must be tied up with

time; we are essentially temporal