Heidegger I

Abstract

Heidegger deformalized Husserl’s phenomenology by proposing the unity of understanding, states of mind, and our abiding sense of being cast into the world and of anxious “falling.” Influenced by Kierkegaard’s angest, he defined humans as an open site in-the-world (Dasein) ever haunted by two anxieties; that of our everyday cares (Sorge) and the profound angst that opens us to the question of what we really are, and of why there is being instead of simply nothing. He thus adapted Leibniz’s metaphysical question about being in hermeneutic terms and argued that this was the path out of an exhausted, European metaphysics and toward a new thinking.