Martin Heidegger is without doubt the most incomprehensible German philosopher that ever lived. Nothing quite rivals the prose in his masterpiece, Being in Time, which is filled with complex compound German words like seinsvergessenheit, bodenstandigkeit, and wesensverfassung. Yet beneath the jargon, Heidegger tells us some simple, even at times homespun truths about the meaning of our lives, the sicknesses of our time, and the roots to freedom. We should bother with him.
He was born and in many ways remained a rural, provincial German who loved picking mushrooms, walking in the countryside and going to bed early. He hated television, airplanes, pop music, and processed food. At one time he'd been a supporter of Hitler, but saw the error of his ways, much of his life he spent in a hut in the woods away from modern civilization. He diagnosed modern humanity as suffering from a number of diseases of the soul.
Firstly, we have forgotten to notice we're alive. We know it in theory, of course, but we aren't day-to-day properly in touch with the sheer mystery of existence, the mystery of what Heidegger called das sein, or in English, being. It's only at a few odd moments, perhaps late at night or when we're ill and have been alone all day or are on a walk through the countryside, that we come up against the uncanny strangeness of everything. Why things exist as they, do while we are here rather than there, why the world is like it is. What we're running away from is a confrontation with the opposite of being what Haida called the nothing. The second problem is we've forgotten that all being is connected. Most of the time, our jobs and daily routines make us egoistic and focused. We treat others in nature as means and not as ends.
But occasionally, and again, walks in the country are particularly conducive to this realization. We may step outside our narrow orbit and take a more expansive view. We may sense what Heidegger termed the unity of being. Noticing, for example, that we and that lady bird on the bark and that rock and that cloud over there are all in existence right now and are fundamentally united by the basic fact of our common being. Heidegger values these moments immensely and wants us to use them as the springboard to a deeper form of generosity, an overcoming of alienation and egoism, and a more profound appreciation of the brief time that remains to us before das nichts claims us in turn.
The third problem is we forget to be free and to live for ourselves. Much about us isn't, of course, very free. We are in Heidegger's, unusual formulation, thrown into the world at the start of our lives, thrown into a particular and narrow social milieu surrounded by rigid attitudes, archaic prejudices, and practical necessities, not of our own making. The philosopher wants to help us to overcome this throwness, geworfenheit, as he put it in German, by understanding it. We need to grasp our psychological, social, and professional provincialism and then rise above it to a more universal perspective. In so doing, we'll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from uneigentlichkeit to eigentlichkeit, from inauthenticity to authenticity. We will, in essence start to live for ourselves.
And yet most of the time for Heidegger, we fail dismally at this task. We merely surrender to a socialized, superficial mode of being he called they-self as opposed to ourselves. We follow the chatter, das gerede, in German, which we hear about in the newspapers, on TV, and in the large cities that Heidegger hated to spend time in. What will help us to pull away from the they-self is an appropriately intense focus on our own upcoming death. It's only when we realize that other people cannot save us from das nichts, that we are likely to stop living for them, to stop worrying so much about what others think, and to cease giving up the lion's share of our lives and energies to impress people who never really liked us in the first place.
When in a lecture in 1961, Heidegger was asked how we should better lead our lives, he replied tersely that we should simply aim to spend more time in graveyards. It would be lying to say that Heidegger's meaning and moral is ever very clear. Nevertheless, what he tells us is intermittently fascinating, wise, and surprisingly useful. Despite the extraordinary words and language, in a sense, we know a lot of it already. We merely need reminding and emboldening to take it seriously, which the odd pro style may help us to do. We know in our hearts that it's time to overcome our geworfenheit, that we should become more conscious of das nichts day-to-day, and that we owe it to ourselves to escape the clutches of das gerede for the sake of eigentlichkeit, with a little help from that graveyard.