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>> HOPSCOTCH: MUSINGS ON LIFE AND PHILOSOPHYBY JOE HOLMES HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF "BEING" INSPIRES THOUGHT

August 7, 2008 12:15 am

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.

The question Heidegger asks is, "What is going on with the Being underneath these isolated nouns?" In other words, what is it that underlies these seemingly distinct beings that makes them possible in the first place? (As you can see, it's easy to run up against the limits of language when you start talking about this--Heidegger really was constrained by these limits in his writings.)

Think of it as the things you see--each sight is a different conglomeration of textures, colors and form. These are the small "b" beings. Being with a capital "B" is more like the light, the eye, the thing that illuminates the separate sights in the first place. Being, itself--simple existence in its original totality--is the main concern.

The way Being has been interpreted and characterized has changed with the times. In super-ancient Greece, before Socrates and Plato--and in the world view of Zen-era China and Japan--Being was considered a kind of wild force, a flowing, primordial sort of energy (and here's the tricky part--the self, too, was the same kind of force. It wasn't the solid, stable self, perceiving everything else as wild energy. The self was the energy, as well). It has since been something to be nurtured, something with some purpose to be fulfilled (the acorn turning into the tree, for instance), to labor on and create.

Nowadays, we see Being as mostly technological--the subject sees objects around it to manipulate and put to its own use, organizing everything into a "standing reserve" (Heidegger's term) of potential exploitation.

The question of Being has been a much-welcomed escape to new ways of thinking and new food for thought. And, as always, I'll keep you posted on further developments.

Joe Holmes is a student at the University of Mary Washington. Reach him at jholmes3@umw.edu.