Heidegger in 4 words: Everything isn't a thing

That's it really. Heidegger in 4 words. Five if you're pedantic. Everything isn't a thing. And if we think that everything is a thing then we use 'thing' language and think 'thingfully.' Rule number one of living an ontologically virtuous life is not to be thingful.

And (hypothetically) if there is reality that is not describable as a thing or things then if we use thing language we will reinforce the cover-up of all that reality.

And (hypothetically) if in fact it's the 'non-thing' reality that grounds all of what we think of as things, then we are in trouble as far as having any sort of adequate understanding of the world.

Hence Heidegger's dislike of ontotheology which makes God too a thing, reducing God to human thing-type ways of thinking and understanding.

In its attempt to know the world philosophy has covered up Being itself; it has squeezed the world into its own mould but in doing so has distorted our understanding of reality.

So, according to Heidegger, his phenomenological approach is the only way of access to the most basic levels of reality. Why? Because it offers the only means of avoiding thinking of the world as so many entities understood and dealt with in the ways that the history of Western philosophy has dictated.

Heidegger expresses it this way (in an uncharacteristically clear sentence, at least for those who have read some of his work):

Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task. (Being and Time, 1962, p.31)

Heidegger made easy for the masses

I am working on a mass-market piece on the extraordinary Martin
Heidegger. "Heidegger made easy" if such a thing is possible. The current draft was here but I've posted it elsewhere so you can now find it here.

The true and the pseudo problems of knowledge

The 'problem of knowledge' has traditionally been about the question of whether we can know anything certainly and if so how we can justify that knowledge. It is based on an inside-outside view which sees us (me: the knower) as a subject separated from the thing known which is the object of my knowledge.

Heidegger says that this subject-object separation assumes a subject which is not in the world of the objects that are known. As if one could put oneself on one side of a line and all things to be known on the other side. But this separation is just not the way the world is (our world: the world we live in and experience and cannot escape from). In Heidegger's language we are always and already in the world. We already know before we start to think of the so called problem of knowledge. But even more: we could not even dream up this wrong way of thinking about the question if we weren't already involved in knowing.

So if the 'old' problem of knowledge is a pseudo problem, the true problem according to Heidegger, is this: how do we, who cannot help being totally caught up in knowing the world, how do we disclose  the world in which we already are? (History of the Concept of Time p.162)

Mmm... I think this could be clearer.

Heidegger no realist but enjoys honey for breakfast

In Being and Time (Section 44) Martin Heidegger does not want to be identified as a realist. But he does not question the reality of the external world. And there's the issue: the reason he does not question it, is not that he is not interested in questioning it, or because he already has the answer to that question, or because it is a question that is too hard to answer. The reason that he does not ask whether the external world exists is because he thinks that is an "inappropriate formulation of the question."

So what does Heidegger mean by 'realist' if he is not one and yet he does not deny the existence of what he calls 'entities within-the-world'?

Heidegger says his view differs from every kind of realism because "realism holds that the Reality of the 'world' not only needs to be proved but also is capable of proof." Wrong on both counts says MH. He says that realism, which thinks in this way, has got the structure of of reality wrong in the first place and then with that wrong structure in mind, it asks its question. More soon...

Meanwhile, while listening to Heidegger expert, Hubert Dreyfus, (on free mp3 lectures) it was encouraging to hear him say that for 30 years he has been wrestling with Heidegger's views on realism and still isn't sure he has understood him correctly.