Hop Scotch

FOR MOST of my time studying philosophy, I had a holy trinity of influences: John Dewey and American pragmatism, Asian philosophy (mostly Zen Buddhism and Taoism) and Friedrich Nietzsche.

These three areas were where I worked, and I seldom encountered anything outside of them that could get me as psyched up or prone to excited jabbering. But lately, as was to be expected, I've been looking around for new ideas to get my fingers on and new influences to dig deeper into.

Out of the several philosophers I've been dabbling in these days, none is as enigmatic or alluring to me as Martin Heidegger. He was a bit younger than Dewey--both had their biggest output in roughly the first quarter of the 20th century--and, interestingly enough, had nothing but bad things to say about Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism (the idea that human intelligence is--and philosophy should be--centered around practical responses to problems). But that doesn't bother me much. After all, philosophy has gotten so complex for me these days that it's less a matter of who's got the right answer as it is a matter of products of history or beautiful perspectives or something like that.

Anyway, one of the most exciting things about Heidegger's philosophy is that it focuses on questions that one rarely encounters anywhere else (and which Heidegger thought were nearly completely new to the history of Western philosophy). These questions center around "Being." This may sound like a bit of metaphysical, mystical, overly obscure gobbledygook, like a question of Spirit or Life Souls or something, but it's really pretty direct.

Throughout Western history, humans have contemplated, wrote about and experimented on specific "beings"--isolated nouns that we consider distinct substances with their own separate essences and attributes. This computer is a single being, self-sufficient from other beings it interacts with. The telescope is one thing, the stars the astronomer looks at, another, but both still hold all the normal associations we have with Being in our time.