Heidegger: Being and Time

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Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential and enigmatic philosophers of the 20th century. This is partly due to his particularly obscure writing style and his use of verbal tricks and maneuvers that are unique to him and his project. These elements somehow determine the outcome and form of his philosophical work.

It's worth engaging with Heidegger because he was the source of many movements in 20th-century intellectual life. Existentialism, in some respects, is a sort of godchild of Heidegger. He borrows some main ideas from Kierkegaard but reformulates many of these concerns in a 20th-century idiom. This reformulation informs thinkers like Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and a variety of French and German thinkers, who will be relatively inaccessible unless you look at Heidegger first.

Heidegger himself has a very interesting background that tells us a great deal about the intellectual activity he undertakes. He starts his intellectual career as a Jesuit seminarian, which reveals much about the cast of his mind and his early intellectual habits. This background influences his later work. I may be the only person who believes this, but I may not be. Growing up as a Jesuit seminarian definitely has telling effects later in life. If you ever met any, I believe you will find this to be true.

Well, Martin Heidegger embodies this in spades. When he makes a philosophical move, it is absolute, and it attempts to go as far as a particular line of thought can take it. In addition to starting out as a seminarian, which is interesting in its own way, he wrote his doctrinal dissertation on Duns Scotus.

Now, any of you at home who have read some scholastic philosophy and know who Duns Scotus is understand how difficult, recondite, and intimidating a doctoral dissertation like that is. It indicates not only something of the cast of his mind but also the intellectual ambition of someone who feels they can cut the Gordian knot. I myself would never consider reading, much less writing, a dissertation on Duns Scotus. So, if someone is going to take on a project like that, this is a person for whom very little is intellectually intimidating.

His first and perhaps greatest work, the one that got him the most noticed, was published in 1927. It's called "Sein und Zeit," which means "Being and Time." He was a student of Husserl's, and it was published in Husserl's phenomenological yearbook, dedicated to Edmund Husserl. There is a definite student-pupil relationship and a conceptual relationship between the phenomenology of Husserl and the phenomenological existentialism that Heidegger develops.

Heidegger himself claims not to be an existentialist, but he is in a historical rather than a conceptual sense. Rather than in a philosophical sense, it's clear that he influences people like Sartre and Camus. Despite his protestations, his influence has been greatest in the philosophy of existence, as opposed to his unique and somewhat idiomatic philosophical project of developing an ontology.

Ontology goes back to the Greek term. Maybe you've seen some lectures on Plato, and you know that ontology is the science of being or the logos of being—statements about being. One of the early philosophical attempts, one of the foundational philosophical enterprises of the Greek tradition, is what Heidegger wants to revive. This is a particularly intimidating and impressive intellectual ambition, regardless of whether he achieves it or not.

He wants to go back to the science of being, to go back to being itself with a capital B. I don't know if that's a persuasive or even a possible thing in the 20th century. The fact that Heidegger thinks he can do that, that he wants to take that project seriously, is a tribute to his great intellectual ambition, regardless of how it turns out.

He thinks of himself primarily as an ontologist. This leads us to all kinds of difficulties. First of all, talking about being is like trying to bite your teeth. In other words, what can you say about being? How can we come to know being? What sort of procedure do you engage in to find out about being?

This perhaps discloses his connection to Husserl. You're not going to find out about being by investigating tables individually, chairs individually, or Christmas trees individually, or even inspecting the outside world for its regular, law-like behavior. The way you're going to find out about being is through some process of introspection.

This is one of the things that holds the continental tradition together. They tend to be more concerned with that which is inside than with that which is outside. There is a decidedly anti-scientific tendency to this, and I will come back to that problem.

What Heidegger wants to do is find out about being, and he's very familiar with Greek philosophy. In fact, he thinks that pretty much it's all been downhill since Aristotle. He believes that Christianity, the Romans, and the Enlightenment didn't contribute much to the history of thought. After Aristotle, it's all downhill. The real high point was even before Plato, in the pre-Socratics.

He wants to force us back to the original sophisticated naivete of pre-Socratic thought, which is a funny way of thinking about it. He believes we have actually decreased our understanding of ourselves and the world around us by bracketing or eliminating the problem of ontology—the problem of being—and instead investigating beings, particular elements in the world.

So, he wants to move away from that practical, concrete, tangible inquiry into something much more abstract and nebulous. Another thing to think about when we deal with Heidegger and his ontological hopes is what Plato said about being. It's an interesting thought. Plato says in the myth of the cave, when he talks about the divided line, that being is not like the other beings in the world.

When we get up into the realm of the forms, being is like light that discloses the things in the world to us, but it is not one of those things that gets disclosed. Being allows us to know about the small b beings of tables, chairs, podiums, and carpets. We all have a kind of intuitive everyday knowledge of what it means to say that the grass is green or the podium is made of wood or the cup is blue.

All those uses of the word "is" make us feel like we have an idea of what's going on there. But there's a problem. Even though we know these local and particular uses of the word "is," we don't know what being is as a whole. We don't know what being, capital B, is—what it is that holds all these little beings together.

That's because being itself is not like any of the beings that being discloses. Are you following this so far? In other words, light is not like the objects that we see in the room. It's a unique kind of thing. Here, I just mean it metaphorically because I don't know how to literally talk about this in any sensible way.

But the metaphor discloses the idea that somehow being is different from all the other stuff of our experience. Heidegger says before we bother with trivialities like this particular entity or that particular entity, what we have to do is leave all that stuff out, bracket it for now, and let's talk about what it is to be—how we know being and what being tells us about itself.

Now the question is, how are we going to do this, and what is being? In the first case, Heidegger does not want to have a conception of being that is abstract or formal. He wants to connect it to the experience of everyday life. This is the kind of Husserlian turn, or perhaps the whole continental turn.

He says to think of it from the perspective of a human being, from your perspective. Rather than constructing a set of abstractions that you will later use to tailor your experience of the world, start now with your experience and remove from your experience the things that are irrelevant—the dross—so that you get the pure gold of ontological knowledge later on.

The way in which he does this is to create a theory of what human existence is. He calls this human existence "Dasein," which doesn't translate out of German. One of the things that Heidegger does all the time is ask, "What is it like to be a human being?"

Dasein is human being in the world. It is finite, contingent, uncertain, and a collection of psychic states like worry, guilt, and anxiety. This constellation of human qualities or human entities is not like anything else in the world. It is the way in which, or the vehicle in which, the matrix in which being is disclosed to us.

In other words, you can only find out what being is from the perspective or in the way that a human being finds out about what being is, and that's by being a human being. Now, can you see how this is going to get awfully circular and strange? We're going to have whole chapters and perhaps whole volumes of being talking to itself and projecting itself into the future of being.

You're going to get a lot of what appears to be circular reasoning because we're stuck within the internality, what I call the intracosm. It's very hard to break out from the intracosm into the exorcism. This is one of the characteristic flaws, perhaps the Achilles' heel, of continental philosophy.

So, what we're going to do is investigate Dasein—investigate what it is to be a human being—and we're going to do that by being a human being. We're going to do that in an authentic way. What that means is that we have to remove our illusions and distractions by the little trivial events in the world.

Focus yourself and turn inward, and what you will find is your true self and your true being. You will move from a pre-reflective state of inauthenticity, concerned with small b beings, to an authentic state of concern with being itself.

Apparently, the only imperative, or what I can discern in Heidegger, is that the only thing left that we ought to do, that we somehow have a responsibility to do, is to authentically be—capital B—to confront the reality of human life, despite the fact that we may find it unpleasant, difficult, or trying.

It may well be that once we do that, we have moved to another level of experience and conceptualization of the world. If that turns out to be the case, then he will have contributed something to our self-knowledge. If you remember, I said that Heidegger wants to drive us back to the pre-Socratic primordial kind of state.

The Delphic oracle told Socrates and the rest of the Greeks that they must know themselves. Well, the continental project involves knowing yourself, turning inward, and finding out what it is like to be a human being.

Now, when we look at Dasein, at human existence in its contingency and finitude, we find that it has a three-fold structure. That structure is understanding, mood, and discourse.

Understanding means that we have to accept Dasein as offering us, as creating a context. In other words, to be a human being is to contextualize the world around you and to attribute meanings to it—to organize the experiences that you have into a sort of gestalt, a whole.

In order to be a human being, you have to contextualize the world. The second thing that's necessary for Dasein is mood. Here, it means something kind of unambiguous and fairly straightforward—happiness, sadness, things like that. I mean the psychic states of our moods.

Think about this for a second. Can you imagine an Anglo-American empiricist telling us that one of the really important things you have to think about in the course of philosophical development is the idea of mood? This is very foreign to that scientific approach to reality.

Whereas for Heidegger, it's a fact of life. It is perhaps one of the facts of life that we only ignore at our peril, at the peril of abstracting and making inauthentic our conception of ourselves and the world.

The third element in Dasein is the idea of discourse. Language is constitutive of Dasein. Things can only be understood when they are formulated in speech and made subject to our moods. Everyday, depersonalized language doesn't uncover Dasein; it numbs us. It makes us anesthetized to the true facts of being and causes us to be caught up with trivialities.

Do any of you know T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," where he says that it's not the hollow man but some example of inauthenticity or inauthentic men who are distracted from distraction by distraction? Isn't that a beautiful and lovely poetic line?

Well, to a great extent, that's what Heidegger is driving us towards. He's saying, "I'm calling you back to yourselves. I'm asking you not to be distracted from distraction by distraction. Do not let the little beings of the world deprive you of the big being."

May I suggest that the big being has an uncomfortably strong homology to God? Remember, he starts out as a German theologian. All right, give that some thought—or a Jesuit theologian.

This search after being, which is enigmatic and discloses itself in peculiar ways, may well be the depersonalized form of God in the 20th century.

Heidegger's stance towards being reminds me of the gospel story of the rich young man. A rich young man, who is very virtuous, comes to Jesus and says, "How do I really become good? How do I really become virtuous?" Jesus says, "Go sell all you have and follow me."

Heidegger is saying something remarkably like that. He is saying, "Go forsake all of the beings with a small b—all the trivialities of your experience—and sell all you have and follow me." Not follow Heidegger, but follow being itself. Follow authenticity. It is the only obligation left for the conscious human being in the 20th century.

This is a very closely sanded-down version of theology, I suspect.

Now, his great work, "Being and Time," is a very difficult piece of work because it wasn't all published in one whole chunk. He published it for various academic contingencies in 1927. The idea behind it is that freedom has to be earned. It's not something you get given; it's something you work towards as a response to Dasein.

You earn your freedom. You become a human being. You make yourself by your confrontation with the real facts of human existence, of Dasein.

Here are some of the parts: the first volume is the sort of hermeneutics of being. The first of the two volumes in "Being and Time" is an analysis of what we might call the unreflective state of being of a man or a woman caught up with this small b being.

That being is still distracted from distraction by distraction. The problem that he's going to raise is that we are lying to ourselves. We delude ourselves. We get caught up with little things that really don't matter to us, and then we ignore what we really are.

God knows we are offered little enough in this world of contingent finitude. Minimally, we have an obligation to ourselves to become what we can.

In this first volume, he analyzes this pre-reflective state before we actually connect or confront Dasein. It turns out that human being has three related aspects, or Dasein has a three-fold structure.

The first is facticity, in German "Geworfenheit"—to be thrown into the world. We didn't ask for this, right? No one consulted us before we were born or before we became conscious, asking us if we would like a kind of spatio-temporal world full of people, things, objects, questions, and issues. We're stuck with it.

This is not a disease; it's not a problem. It just is what it is. If you don't like it, that's tough. Deal with it.

So, facticity—the fact that we are cast into a world not of our own making—and that we busy ourselves with little irrelevant things, right? That's a given.

The second element in existence is existentiality. This idea entails appropriating the world for our own purposes. We take knowledge, we take objects, we take food, we take things of utility to us, and we manipulate them in practical ways.

This is a very pragmatic sense of how human beings interact with the world around them. The final quality of human being, particularly this pre-reflective quality, is the quality of "Verfallen."

In German, it's "Verfallen," but the best translation is probably something like there's something wrong with us. There's a sort of radical deprivation of the human condition as it starts. This is what gives Heidegger something to do.

He wants to start with this pre-reflective kind of unconscious human state and drive us towards consciousness of ourselves. He doesn't guarantee this is going to be pretty. He doesn't guarantee this is going to be easy, and it doesn't guarantee this is going to be readily intelligible.

But on the other hand, whatever it is you are engaged in that isn't that is relatively unimportant. What profiteth the man that he should gain the whole world and lose his soul? I think this has at least one foot in Christian theology.

Many of Heidegger's ideas about the honest or authentic confrontation of being are philosophical, highly abstract, Jesuit theology de-theologized or de-divinized. You hold on to the structure; you leave the content. Things are going to get very weird.

So, we have facticity, existentiality, and forfeiture. This condition of being "Verfallen," of being caught up in a web of maya, a web of illusions—the world of beings, this booming, buzzing confusion out there—is essentially not real.

Our reality is in being, capital B, not in any of these trivialities, these distractions that we're forced to confront just from being a human being. If you always live your life in this condition of being "Verfallen," in this condition of forfeiture, you have forfeited your claim to being really human.

To be human is to confront the world the way it is. It's to be a grown-up adult willing to deal with human life as it is, rather than getting distracted or sidetracked by any of the various cul-de-sacs that life might offer us.

If you think about what this leads to, the vast majority of human beings are caught up in this inauthentic mode of existence. That is the source, in the 20th century, of the thing called the mass man. Heidegger calls it "das Man," but what it means is the opposite of being an individual.

It's being a herd creature—not reflective, not thinking, not encountering the world on your own. The best he can do, perhaps in the great tradition of German Romanticism, is to force us to become individuals.

If you remember the great philosopher Kierkegaard, who is certainly one of the formative influences on Heidegger, he wanted his tombstone to say "Søren Kierkegaard" and his date of birth and date of death. Below that, he wanted it to say "that individual," which is a beautiful and profound epitaph.

Well, what Heidegger calls upon us to do is to follow Kierkegaard, but to follow him in that respect in an individual way. You confront being on your own. Become what you might possibly be. You might also deserve to be called an individual if you work really hard at it.

If you cultivate your inner life and find some authentic confrontation with things you'd rather not think about, in volume two of Heidegger's work, we find that he tries to sketch out what an authentic being would be like—how we really confront Dasein and what it will entail and what it will do for us.

In addition to that, he goes through the history of philosophy with considerable detail and in a very idiomatic way. The point of his going through the history of philosophy is to construct a philosophical history of ontology and to do a phenomenological destruction of prior conceptions of ontology.

He wants to clear the ground to erect his own new building. Essentially, he says, "I'm going to only hold on to the pre-Socratic legacy, most of Platonism, and some of Aristotle, but after Aristotle, it's all downhill. I don't want to talk about their conception of being or ontology; it's a waste of time."

We have gone down an inauthentic cul-de-sac. Human beings, almost without exception, have not been authentic since we began to separate ourselves from being. In particular, he's concerned with Nietzsche's charge that it's not even possible to talk about being anymore.

We'll talk about that a little later, but the idea is that Heidegger wants to force us back to an earlier pristine state. This sounds remarkably like going back to the Garden of Eden. I could be mistaken.

This condition of being "Verfallen" sounds to me an awful lot like sin. Since it's so universal, it strikes me as an awful lot like original sin. But I may be mistaken. Professor Heidegger tells us that it's not original sin; he explicitly says so. But I have my doubts.

We construct this phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology, and in its place, instead of looking at the world "sub specie aeternitatis," we're going to look at the world "sub specie temporalis." In other words, we're going to look at human being the way it really is, rather than from the God's-eye view.

We're going to look at it from the human being's eye view, and we're going to find that the world discloses itself and being discloses itself. That's a very peculiar matrix of things, most of which are not very pleasant.

In the first case, if you want to really confront Dasein—that's what we get from volume two—you’re going to have to get used to the idea of "amor fati" or acceptance of fate, particularly acceptance of your own death. Death anxiety, worry, and care are the main themes of Heidegger's second work.

This is the good side. Remember, this is the upside. You're better off with this rather than dwelling on all the other things that might distract you from these businesses.

In addition, conscience is going to be an important element in this second volume. In other words, in order to come to our authentic being, in order to be truly human—which apparently so few people do—we must confront death.

We must recognize that we have a conscience, and it is ineliminable. We must do what we can to sacrifice all else, to sell all we have, to follow being.

Now, death is an interesting and important problem. Unlike most philosophers, Heidegger seems to be under the impression that he has some intelligent things to say about death. My personal feeling is that although death is a fearsome reality and the kind of thing that a conscious person will inevitably come into contact with and think about, having thought about it myself, I'm not able to think of or say anything intelligent about this topic.

Perhaps you are; I apologize, but I'm not able to do that. There's not a lot you can say about death. On the other hand, Heidegger wants to talk about it as the horizon of human existence.

If any of you have read Ernest Becker's book "The Denial of Death," that's a sort of popularization of one Heideggerian problem. We all try to persuade ourselves in all the everyday activities of life that we're going to last forever.

Time goes on into an infinite horizon. Nay, that is being small b; you are lying to yourself. Nay, in fact, we all have to realize that time is not an infinite horizon.

To view time as time sub 1, time sub 2, time sub 3, time sub n going on forever—that's to view time from the perspective of God. That's also to view time from the perspective of our scientific friends.

The only difficulty is that no human life experiences time like that. We experience it in a radically different way. We experience it as the horizon of our possibilities.

So, time is here to stay. Now, can you see why he titles his book "Being and Time"? He wants to study being, and then he wants to study some essential foundational groundwork for the human experience of being.

That turns out to be the fact that we are temporal. If you think of T.S. Eliot in "The Rose Garden," time present and time past, it's surprising how Eliot is so overtly Christian and this denies its Christianity or seems to be indifferent to it.

But I think there are powerful Christian themes underlying this. Temporality—the fact that we must confront our own death—surely one of the great themes of Christianity as well—comes out as being the one imperative.

I would almost be tempted to say that this demand made upon us by conscience, because one of the important elements in volume two is that Heidegger talks about the human conscience and says, "Look, you want to be a human being? Listen to your conscience."

There is a real thing. Conscience is one of the ore facts of human life. You know what your conscience tells you to do: sell all you have and follow me. Don't get caught up with little trivialities. Do not become distracted by beings. Search out the final, the real, the ultimate being.

So, conscience forces us into authenticity. Conscience accuses us of being inauthentic and being concerned with beings. What Heidegger thinks he is here is the voice of conscience.

To no small extent, he moves from being a philosopher to being a prophet with surprising agility. When he calls you to be yourself, when he calls you to heed the voice of your own conscience, he sounds more like Jeremiah than he does Sartre. But I could be wrong here.

Now, authenticity—this confrontation of our own finitude—is the one state that would actually reduce or take us out of this pre-philosophical, not quite human state. What this discloses is a number of important issues, but one of the most important of them is the idea of guilt, care, and worry.

I would be inclined to say that, like Eliot, Heidegger thinks that the human condition is one of radical deprivation. We are not what we should be; we are not what we could be. Once we confront our own finitude, we confront the fact that we have obligations to ourselves that we can never meet.

Let's think this through. In the first case, when we confront Dasein and we find ourselves in being—capital B—not just small b, the response on the part of the conscious agent is what is in German called "Sorge," and in English, that would be called care or worry or concern.

There are at least three things about which we are concerned, and here comes the temporal element. First, we are concerned about the future, and that means that Dasein, conscious human being, projects itself into the future.

In other words, the way we experience the world is that we experience ourselves not just here and now, but we project ourselves into the future. We also project ourselves into our own past.

Projecting ourselves into our future causes angst, worry—almost a terminal frightfulness—because we must confront the fact that we come to an end, and we don't know how to avoid that. We can't avoid that.

We project ourselves into the earlier parts of our life, and an interesting fact is that we cannot avoid the experience of guilt. I would be tempted to say that guilt is the uncomfortable certainty that we are not what we could have been.

It's true, and Heidegger is right about that. Not only is he right about that, but that is an ineliminable part of being a human being. Any scientific theory that either fails to talk about this or tells us we can't talk about it is just unacceptable.

That's right. So, we project ourselves into the future, we project ourselves into the past, and we confront Dasein in the present. What we find out about ourselves when we confront our Dasein in the present is that we have a potential for freedom from being small b, which we have not completely realized.

What this means is the following: we look into our past and realize we have not been what we could have been. We look at the present and realize we are not as free and as knowledgeable about being as authentic as we could be.

We look into the future and realize that there is a definite temporal horizon. Think about this now: we see our own death coming in the future. This death, and we don't know when it will happen, extinguishes all our possibilities.

But it does not exhaust all our possibilities. In other words, between now and the time we die, there is a great variety of choices we could make, of contexts we could construct, of projects we could undertake.

The problem is that we will not undertake all of them. We will not do all these things. So that means between now and then, you've got to make some choices about what you're going to do with your life.

The problem is that you will not be able to do all the things you might wish to do or that you could do if you were an eternal being. All right?

That means you will not realize some of your possibilities, and that means you owe yourself a debt that you can never repay. That is a sort of cosmic guilt.

May I suggest this is the echo of original sin? When it gets de-theologized, it is the human condition, and we cannot escape it. If we try to escape it by truncating off reality, by adopting some sort of human or positivistic position, then don't worry about guilt.

Don't worry about the internal facts of your psyche. The result is that you concern yourself with beings. You lapse back into that pre-authentic, pre-philosophical state that Heidegger says you ignore at your peril.

If you want to be human, then get a soul. If you want to get a soul, then face the fact that there are certain ineliminable parts of your experience that you have to confront in order to be human.

There are certain questions that you have to ask in order to be human. The difficulty is that the tension of being human is that you are forced to ask some questions for which there are no answers.

You can't get around it. You must ask the question of being, even though it's not at all clear exactly what that means. It's also not at all clear what the answer is. If the answer were to come up and shake you by the hand, it's not at all clear that you would recognize it.

For a great many reasons, this is obscurity piled upon obscurity, combined with a certain obvious and honest confrontation of the realities of human life. I think this funny combination of obscurity and obvious literary or psychic truthfulness is one of the characteristic amalgams of 20th-century continental philosophy.

Now, let's look back at the question of conscience. Dasein demands that we face either we live our life facing death rather than denying it. That means that ethics kind of implodes, so that the only real obligation that we have left is that we should be authentic.

That ends up meaning that it's not so important what you do in life; it's how you do it. In other words, between now and the time you die, it's not so important what projects you undertake as it is that you should be conscious of the fact that you're not going to take all of them.

You have to decide which are better. The difficulty here is that this very easily shades off into straightaway nihilism. Heidegger, after all, became a Nazi.

Heidegger was advanced due to his political connections to National Socialism. Heidegger, whose first great published work, "Being and Time," was in Husserl's yearbook and dedicated to Husserl, but alas, Husserl was a Jew.

When Husserl was moved out of academic life starting in 1933, Heidegger publicly disassociated himself from Husserl. Heidegger ended up taking Husserl's chair at the University of Freiburg. This sounds to me like the phenomenology of careerism, but I could be wrong.

It is a particularly unhappy circumstance when philosophers—at least those who claim to have a particularly deep or profound or important insight into life—let us down in such an egregious way. There is something not only disconcerting about it but something that makes me want to put the rest of his statements in italics and be very careful about how I read them.

In some ways, if being in this pre-philosophical state of denying Dasein gets us to behave well, I would be inclined to say, "Well, I'd rather be stupid." That may just be me.

Now, in addition to confronting Dasein through the vehicle of conscience and through the vehicle of existence, the historicity of human beings is, of course, of great concern to Heidegger. We are in some particular context at some particular time, and we must always be oriented towards the future.

In particular, when we are oriented towards the future and our own demise and our own end, we have to do what Heidegger calls "thinking about nothing."

In the English translations of Heidegger, "nothing" gets a capital N, but alas, in the German language, all nouns are capitalized, so we don't have quite that way out. Thinking about nothing is one of the most trying things you can try to do.

I mean, there are long sections—I know it sounds like almost a joke—but there are long sections where we discuss our encounter with nothing. It means that nothing is not quite negation but the source of negation.

I have no clear conception of what that means and what's involved in thinking about nothing. I have tried working through it, and it runs us into all kinds of logical problems. Heidegger will say, "Well, so much the worst for you and for your logic. Confront being as it really is."

I can see why positivistic guys like Carnap and the Vienna Circle find this so trying—lush ambiguity and elaborate self-indulgence. It's one of the things that I think we would justifiably want to avoid in any philosophical construct.

Now, during the Nazi years, he produced some of his most important work. That Nazism should be hospitable to philosophy is, well, apparently the case. It's quite influential.

While it's perhaps not fair to judge a man's philosophical output by his life, it depends on how you look at philosophy. I might be inclined to say that he is influenced by the cultural chauvinism of the time.

He has some very peculiar ideas about language, apparently, and I'm not joking here. He holds the view that philosophy can only be done in German. That is not a joke.

I know that may sound funny, and I can imagine Wittgenstein in his grave turning over and over and over, saying, "Nein!" Right? No, no, no. Philosophy can be done in any language. That's not correct.

But Heidegger has what I would describe as a sort of mystical or magical view of language, which I think becomes more apparent in his late work and which makes it that much more difficult. This makes an obscure and difficult philosophy doubly difficult later on.

German is perhaps the only language philosophy could be conducted in, and maybe Greek when he's in a good kind of feel-good or generous mood. He is willing to love that perhaps philosophy could be done in Greek, but that's about it.

You have to do it in Greek. What he's trying to do in this later work is to meet Nietzsche's objections about ontology. If you remember, Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century said that our ideas about being have faded away into vapor and mist.

Heidegger, in his "Introduction to Metaphysics," says no. Actually, Nietzsche is a sort of seismograph who sees the intrinsic depravity and mistakes in the Western tradition. He sees that it leads up to this idea that we can't talk about being at all.

What he does is show us the inauthenticity of all the history of philosophy since the Greeks. All right? So, what he's going to do is drive us back beyond the Nietzschean impasse back to the pre-Socratics—an admiration that he shares with Nietzsche, of course, because Nietzsche loved the pre-Socratics as well.

In the post-war years, Heidegger's work continued to be difficult and almost impenetrable. He spent most of his time analyzing the pre-Socratics.

There's a very interesting set of essays called "Holzwege," which means "wood trails." What is interesting about "Holzwege" is that in German, "wood trails" have the idea of cul-de-sacs. In other words, you take a walk into the woods, and there are various trails, but they don't lead anywhere. They lead towards nothing; they lead towards an impasse.

He wrote a set of essays that are the logical or psychic analogues of cul-de-sacs—blind alleys would be a way of translating "Holzwege" in a sensible way. This is where we find most of his treatment of the pre-Socratics.

There's an amazing and long detailed essay on Anaximander. I mean, he's one of the Ionian physicists, and it's amazing how much mileage you can get from one line. After all, we only have one surviving line of Anaximander, and he's easily able to kick out 50, 70 pages on that.

This is the most elaborate and implausible and self-referential kind of treatment. His later work is even more difficult than the earlier work, but in many respects, it's an extrapolation from the earlier work, and it's concerned with being and these sources of being back in that pre-Socratic tradition.

In some ways, by the end of his life, the great example of a philosophical enterprise is no longer Plato's dialogues; it has become Parmenides' poem about being. I don't imagine many of you at home or many of you here have gotten around to reading Parmenides' poem about being.

Let me see if I can help you with that. What Parmenides says is that we must think and say that being is from the other way. What he means is that ontology is the first and primary and fundamental concern of human beings. All else follows from that.

Heidegger is trying to drive us back to that pre-Socratic state of innocence, and the great exemplar of that will be Parmenides—the forbidding, difficult, completely abstract founder of ontology.

Now, there are lots and lots of problems with this. It's hard to know exactly where to start, but let's take a couple of cracks at this. In the first case, Heidegger is so impenetrable that he often comes close to being self-parody when he talks about nothing and thinking about nothing.

"Nothing" knots rather than "nothing" negates. I have no clear idea of what this nothing is. I find out that it's not negation, and I find out a lot about what Heidegger's ideas are not. I often have difficulty in finding out how to attach some sensible predicate to an idea about nothing.

What can you think about nothing? What can you say about nothing? Heidegger appears to suggest you can say quite a bit, but beats me what it amounts to.

Many of Heidegger's ideas or many parts of his writings are elaborate puns and plays on words. Let me give you an example from the German. He says that our feeling with regard to our encounter with Dasein is uncanny, and in German, that's "unheimlich."

He says that this uncanny feeling of not knowing our way around in the world amounts to not feeling at home in the world. Now, in German, the word for home is "Heim." So, when we have this uncanny feeling, we feel "unheimlich," which means unhomely, which means we don't feel at home in the world.

He kind of merges the idea of uncanniness and uncertainty and anxiety and the feeling of being sort of homesick—of longing for a connection with being. Well, he kind of merges them all together in a kind of messy, mushy linguistic overlap.

We might be tempted to think that that's a big problem with Heidegger, but I might be tempted to say that that's also the source of his richness. In other words, the fact that he's more concerned, in many respects, with connotations than denotations.

The fact that he likes this messy overlap, this linguistic wordplay, these plays on words, these puns, and also he's famous for his elaborate and very implausible etymologies. When he doesn't know the actual historical source of a word, I think he usually makes it up and then provides some philosophical argument to account for why only he understands the real source of this word.

The rest of the lexicographers in the world do not. This happens all the time with the treatment of Greek. It also happens all the time with his treatment of German.

Another problem that comes up is the problem of morality, mysticism, and nihilism. Here's where I would like to take a sort of crack at the continental tradition. I'd like to offer a kind of foundational criticism.

When you start talking about interiority, when you move from the realm of public discourse about stuff out there—beings with a small b—to whatever it is you've got going on inside you, the difficulty is, first of all, that it's very hard to put words on this—to talk about this in any kind of intelligible way.

The danger here is that you end up talking to yourself, which is the opposite of the philosophical enterprise. A second problem is that nihilism is always a possibility because we might want to say almost a definition of nihilism is a speech that's indistinguishable from silence.

I've often thought that this discussion of nothing and what it does and how we encounter nothing is a very sophisticated way of not saying anything. But that may be just me.

My sense is, though, that he's trying to do the impossible linguistically too much of the time. My final difficulty with Heidegger, and I think this is the most interesting and important difficulty from my perspective, is that this nebulous collection of insights and tautologies and unintelligibilities and neologisms are a kind of transformation of theology.

In other words, it seems to me that what Heidegger's being is, what this ontological search is, is theology with the God left out. We worship ourselves, and we have obligations to ourselves instead of obligations to the deity.

Our one obligation to ourselves is to be ourselves. Okay? I mean, this comes very close not just to solipsism but to self-worship. I mean, what else is that worship? There's only me.

Solipsism is the great danger that recurs in all of these systems. Why? Because they're beginning from the inside and working out, and most of them never get out. That's the big difficulty.

Generally speaking, this tells us something about this kind of philosophy. It's had rather little influence, certainly in the Anglo-American philosophical world.

Carnap wrote a scathing treatment of some of Heidegger in which he said this is a particularly unpleasant example of what happens to metaphysics or what happens to your brain when you do metaphysics. This is the high point of unintelligible gibberish.

Carnap published a very unkind treatment of this, and you can kind of see why. Scientific guys are not going to want to hear about dread and death and stuff—tables and chairs, atoms and physics, and that kind of stuff.

Well, where has it been influential? This is worth noting in theology. Paul Tillich, the great systematic theologian, turned Heidegger into theology. Think about it. He makes his debt to Heidegger quite explicit.

Those of you who know the work of Rudolf Bultmann—demythologized Christianity—this is all Heidegger. Heidegger redux. He's back to haunt us again. They just transformed the old theological problem into Heideggerianism and then Heideggerianism into what is alleged to be a new theological problem.

May I suggest then that this enigmatic being, so central to Heidegger's thought, is in fact easily interpreted as the silence of God?