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All being is a “being-towards-death”,
but only humans recognize this. Our
lives are temporal, and it is only once
we realize this that we can live a
meaningful and authentic life.
being is death” is to say something
about what it is like to live a human
life, and it captures some idea of
what we are in a way that many
philosophical definitions—
“featherless biped” or “political
animal”, for example—overlook.
Living authentically
It is to Heidegger that we owe the
philosophical distinction between
authentic and inauthentic existence.
Most of the time we are wrapped
up in various ongoing projects, and
forget about death. But in seeing
our life purely in terms of the
projects in which we are engaged,
we miss a more fundamental
dimension of our existence, and to
that extent, Heidegger says, we are
existing inauthentically. When we
become aware of death as the
ultimate limit of our possibilities, we
start to reach a deeper understanding
of what it means to exist.
For example, when a good friend
dies, we may look at our own lives
and realize that the various projects
which absorb us from day to day
feel meaningless, and that there is
a deeper dimension to life that is
THE MODERN WORLD
missing. And so we may find
ourselves changing our priorities
and projecting ourselves toward
different futures.A deeper language
Heidegger’s later philosophy
continues to tackle questions of
being, but it turns away from his
earlier, exacting approach to take
a more poetic look at the same
kinds of questions. Philosophy, he
comes to suspect, simply cannot
reflect this deeply on our own
being. In order to ask questions
about human existence, we must
use the richer, deeper language of
poetry, which engages us in a way
that goes far beyond the mere
exchange of information.
Heidegger was one of the
20th century’s most influential
philosophers. His early attempt to
analyze what it means to be
human, and how one might live an
authentic life, inspired philosophers
such as Sartre, Levinas, and
Gadamer, and contributed to the
birth of existentialism. His later,
more poetic, thinking has also had
a powerful influence on ecological
philosophers, who believe it offers
a way of thinking about what it
means to be a human being
within a world under threat of
environmental destruction. ■Dying is not an event;
it is a phenomenon to be
understood existentially.
Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger
Heidegger is acknowledged to
be one of the most important
philosophers of the 20th
century. He was born in 1889
in Messkirch, Germany, and
had early aspirations to be a
priest, but after coming across
the writings of Husserl he took
up philosophy instead. He
quickly became well known as
an inspirational lecturer, and
was nicknamed “the magician
of Messkirch.” In the 1930s he
became rector of Freiburg
University and a member of
the Nazi party. The extent and
nature of his involvement with
Nazism remains controversial,
as is the question of how far
his philosophy is implicated in
the ideologies of Nazism.
Heidegger spent the last
30 years of his life traveling
and writing, exchanging ideas
with friends such as Hannah
Arendt and the physicist
Werner Heisenberg. He died
in Freiburg in 1976, aged 86.Key works1927 Being and Time
1936–53 Overcoming
Metaphyics
1955–56 The Principle
of Reason
1955–57 Identity and
Difference