![]() ![]() Instead of subjects and objects, Heidegger wanted to talk about “beings.” The world, he argued, is full of beings-numbers, oceans, mountains, animals-but human beings are the only ones who care about what it means to be themselves. ![]() It wasn’t religious, and it wasn’t scientific it got its arms around everything, from rocks to the soul. Heidegger had developed his own way of describing the nature of human existence. ![]() It was as if, having been trapped on the ground floor of a building, I had found an express elevator to the roof, from which I could see the stars. Then, in the course of a year, I read Heidegger’s 1927 masterwork, “Being and Time,” along with “The Essence of Truth,” a book based on a series of lectures that Heidegger gave in 1932. Everything I read succeeded only by narrowing the world, imagining it to be either a material or a spiritual place-never both. This had turned out to be an impossible subject. I was in my late twenties, and struggling with a dissertation on the nature of consciousness (what it is, where it comes from, how it fits into the material world). If I had to rate the best intellectual experiences of my life, choosing the two or three most profound-a tendentious task, but there you are-one of them would be reading Heidegger. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |