Martin Heidegger, the 20th-century German philosopher, produced a large body of work that intended a profound change of direction for philosophy. Such was the depth of change that he found it necessary to introduce many neologisms, often connected to idiomatic words and phrases in the German language.
Terms
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Heidegger's idea of , or disclosure (), was an attempt to make sense of how things in the world appear to human beings as part of an opening in intelligibility, as "unclosedness" or "unconcealedness". (This is Heidegger's usual reading of as , "unconcealment".)Rodney R. Coltman, The Language of Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Heidegger in Dialogue, SUNY Press, 1998, p. 38. It is closely related to the notion of world disclosure, the way in which things get their sense as part of a holistically structured, pre-interpreted background of meaning. Initially, Heidegger wanted to stand for a re-interpreted definition of truth. However, he later corrected the association of with truth.
Apophantic ()
An assertion (as opposed to a question, a doubt or a more expressive sense) is apophantic. It is a statement that covers up meaning and instead gives something present-at-hand. For instance, "The President is on vacation", and, "Salt is Sodium Chloride" are sentences that, because of their apophantic character, can easily be picked up and repeated in news and gossip by 'The They.' However, the real ready-to-hand meaning and context may be lost.
Being-in-the-world
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Being-in-the-world is Heidegger's replacement for terms such as subject, object, consciousness, and world. For him, the split of things into subject/object, as is found in the Western tradition and even in language, must be overcome, as is indicated by the root structure of Husserl and Brentano's concept of intentionality, i.e., that all consciousness is consciousness of something, that there is no consciousness, as such, cut off from an object (be it the matter of a thought or of a perception). Nor are there objects without some consciousness beholding or being involved with them.
At the most basic level of "being-in-the-world," Heidegger notes that there is always a mood (Stimmung), a mood that "assails us" in humanity's unreflecting devotion to the world. A mood comes neither from the "outside" nor from the "inside", but arises from being-in-the-world. A person may turn away from a mood but that is only to another mood, as part of facticity. Only with a mood is someone permitted to encounter things in the world. (a co-term for being-in-the-world) has an openness to the world that is constituted by the attunement of a mood or state of mind. As such, is a "thrown" "projection" (), projecting itself onto the possibilities that lie before it or may be hidden, and interpreting and understanding the world in terms of possibilities. Such projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself toward a plan that has been thought out. It is not a plan, since has, as , already projected itself. always understands itself in terms of possibilities. As projecting, the understanding of is its possibilities possibilities. One can take up the possibilities of "The They" self and merely follow along or make some more authentic understanding.See Hubert Dreyfus's monograph Being-in-the-World for a detailed discussion
Being-toward-death ()
Being-toward-death is not an orientation that brings closer to its end, in terms of clinical death, but is rather a way of being.Heidegger 1962, H.247. Being-toward-death refers to a process of growing through the world where a certain foresight guides the towards gaining an authentic perspective. It is provided by dread of death. In the analysis of time, it is revealed as a threefold condition of Being. Time, the present, and the notion of the "eternal", are modes of temporality, which is the way humanity views time. For Heidegger, it is very different from the mistaken view of time as being a linear series of past, present and future. Instead he sees it as being an ecstasy, an outside-of-itself, of futural projections (possibilities) and one's place in history as a part of one's generation. Possibilities, then, are integral to understanding of time; projects, or thrown projection in-the-world, are what absorb and direct people. Futurity, as a direction toward the future that always contains the past—the has-been—is a primary mode of 's temporality.
Death is that possibility which is the absolute impossibility of . As such, it cannot be compared to any other kind of ending or "running out" of something. For example, one's death is not an empirical event. For Heidegger, death is Daseins ownmost (it is what illuminates Dasein in its individuality), it is non-relational (nobody can take one's death away from one, or die in one's place, and we can not understand our own death through the death of other Dasein), and it is not to be outstripped. The "not-yet" of life is always already a part of Dasein: "as soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die." The threefold condition of death is thus simultaneously one's "ownmost potentiality-for-being, non-relational, and not to be out-stripped". Death is determinate in its inevitability, but an authentic Being-toward-death understands the indeterminate nature of one's own inevitable death—one never knows when or how it is going to come. However, this indeterminacy does not put death in some distant, futural "not-yet"; authentic Being-toward-death understands one's individual death as always already a part of one.Heidegger 1962, H.255.
With average, everyday (normal) discussion of death, all this is concealed. The "they-self" talks about it in a fugitive manner, passes it off as something that occurs at some time but is not yet "present-at-hand" as an actuality, and hides its character as one's ownmost possibility, presenting it as belonging to no one in particular. It becomes devalued—redefined as a neutral and mundane aspect of existence that merits no authentic consideration. "One dies" is interpreted as a fact, and comes to mean "nobody dies".Heidegger 1962, H.253-4.
On the other hand, authenticity takes Dasein out of the "They", in part by revealing its place as a part of the They. Heidegger states that Authentic being-toward-death calls Daseins individual self out of its "they-self", and frees it to re-evaluate life from the standpoint of finitude. In so doing, Dasein opens itself up for "angst", translated alternately as "dread" or as "anxiety". Angst, as opposed to fear, does not have any distinct object for its dread; it is rather anxious in the face of Being-in-the-world in general—that is, it is anxious in the face of 's own self. Angst is a shocking individuation of , when it realizes that it is not at home in the world, or when it comes face to face with its own "uncanny" (German , "not homelike"). In 's individuation, it is open to hearing the "call of conscience" (German ), which comes from 's own Self when it wants to be its Self. This Self is then open to truth, understood as unconcealment (Greek ). In this moment of vision, understands what is hidden as well as hiddenness itself, indicating Heidegger's regular uniting of opposites; in this case, truth and untruth.Heidegger 1962, H.260–74.
Being-with ()
The term "Being-with" refers to an ontological characteristic of the human being, that it is always already with others of its kind. This assertion is to be understood not as a factual statement about an individual, that they are at the moment in spatial proximity to one or more other individuals, but rather a statement about the being of every human, that in the structures of its being-in-the-world one finds an implicit reference to other humans, as one could not live without others. Humans have been called (by others, not by Heidegger) "ultrasocial"Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006, pp. 47 ff. and "obligatorily gregarious".de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 4. Heidegger, from his phenomenological perspective, calls this feature of human life "Being-with" (), and says it is essential to being human,Heidegger 1962, p. 156, H.125. classifying it as inauthentic when a person fails to recognize how much, and in what ways, someone thinks of themself, and how they habitually behave as influenced by our social surroundings. Heidegger classifies it as authentic when someone pays attention to that influence and decides independently whether to go along with it or not. Living entirely without such influence, however, is not an option in the Heideggerian view.
Care (or concern)
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A fundamental basis of being-in-the-world is, for Heidegger, not matter or spirit but care:Dasein's facticity is such that its Being-in-the-world has always dispersed itself or even split itself up into definite ways of Being-in. The multiplicity of these is indicated by the following examples: having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining....Heidegger 1962, H.56 All these ways of Being-in have concern (, care) as their kind of Being. Just as the scientist might investigate or search, and presume neutrality, it can be seen that beneath this there is the mood, the concern of the scientist to discover, to reveal new ideas or theories and to attempt to level off temporal aspects.
Clearing
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In German, the word means a clearing, as in, for example, a clearing in the woods. Since its root is the German word for light (), it is sometimes also translated as "lighting", and in Heidegger's work it refers to the necessity of a clearing in which anything at all can appear, the clearing in which some thing or idea can show itself, or be unconcealed.Heidegger 1962, H.133 Note the relation that this has to aletheia and disclosure.
Beings (), but not Being itself (), stand out as if in a clearing, or physically, as if in a space. Thus, Hubert Dreyfus writes, "things show up in the light of our understanding of being."Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. p. 163 Thus the clearing makes possible the disclosure of beings (), and also access to Dasein's own being. The clearing is not, itself, an entity that can be known directly, in the sense in which we know about the entities of the world. As Heidegger writes in On the Origin of the Work of Art:In the midst of being as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting. Thought of in reference to what is, to beings, this clearing is in a greater degree than are beings. This open center is therefore not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is, like the Nothing which we scarcely know. That which is can only be, as a being, if it stands within and stands out within what is lighted in this clearing. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.Heidegger, M. 2001, On the Origin of the Work of Art. In Poetry, language, thought. (A. Hofstadter, Trans.) (1st ed.). New York: Perennical Classics. (Original work published 1971)
Destruktion